An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature: From Hyangga to P'ansori

From Hyangga to P'ansori

Kichung Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315285153
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This work provides an introduction to some of the most important and representative genres of classical Korean literature. Coverage includes: Samguk sagi and samguk yusa as literature; Kunmong and Unyongchon; the lyricism of Koryo songs; and the literature of Chosen Dynasty Women.

1

What Is Korean Literature?

Why begin with such an obvious question? Isn’t Korean literature simply all the literature produced in Korean by Koreans? But it’s not quite as simple as that. This question, in fact, is central in determining both the boundaries and the character of classical Korean literature—that literature written in Korea from the earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century.

What makes the question a central one is the historical fact that hanmun—literally “letters of Han,” that is, Chinese characters—was the written language of practically all literate Koreans from about the beginning of Korea’s recorded history to the end of the nineteenth century.¹ For this reason most of the written literature in Korea from the earliest times through the nineteenth century was written in hanmun even though hangŭl, the Korean alphabet, had been available since the mid-1400s. How did such a situation come about? The answer to this question lies in the history of written language in Korea.

Until 1446, when King Sejong promulgated the hunmin chŏngŭm—the twenty-eight-letter phonetic alphabet uniformly referred to today as hangŭl—the Korean people had lacked an indigenous writing system that represented their spoken language. There had thus developed two entirely different language systems in Korea—native Korean for speech and Sino-Korean hanmun for writing. Because Korean and Chinese are linguistically unrelated and Chinese characters are more ideographic than phonetic, it was nearly impossible for Koreans to use Chinese characters to represent their spoken language. And yet to express themselves in writing they had to first translate their thoughts and speech into classical Chinese. Understandably, therefore, they made repeated efforts to adapt Chinese characters to the Korean language. Two examples are the hybrid writing systems hyangch’al and idu—both little more than modest efforts to add a phonetic dimension to what was basically an ideographic writing system. Neither was effective in representing Korean. The gross inadequacy of such writing systems was perhaps best summed up by King Sejong in the royal rescript of 1446 by which he promulgated the hunmin chŏngŭm:

While there is a great difference between the Korean language and Chinese, there are no proper letters that the Korean people can use in writing their language and expressing their thoughts. From the time of the Silla Dynasty a system of writing known as Idu has been used in the daily life of ordinary people as well as in government business. But it is too complicated, imperfect, and inconvenient a system for the Koreans to use freely in expressing their own ideas and thinking, because too many Chinese characters are involved in it. Koreans are in great need of their own letters with which they can write the Korean language.²

The invention of hangŭl should have marked a turning point in the history of written language in Korea. For hangŭl was a writing system so simple, convenient, and accurate that almost any Korean could master it in a matter of weeks—instead of years, as in the case of hanmun. Hangŭl made it possible, for the first time, to banish the alien writing system used in Korea for more than a thousand years. As it happened, however, the history of hangŭl from the time of its creation until the very eve of the twentieth century was one of missed opportunities.

Even during the time of King Sejong the use of hanmun among the lettered classes was too deeply entrenched to be easily displaced. The lettered classes had invested a great deal of time and energy in learning hanmun. Their literacy in that system was among the accomplishments that distinguished them from the lower classes, and it gave them cause to continue using hanmun exclusively and to oppose the dissemination of Sejong’s new phonetic alphabet. Their opposition, buttressed by the forces of tradition, could not be overcome. Even the most zealous promotion of hangŭl by the king himself could not bring about widespread acceptance and use of the new alphabet.³ Dubbed ŏnmun (“vulgar letters”) whereas hanmun was called chinsŏ (“true writing”), hangŭl was soon relegated to an inferior status. It was considered suitable for use only by women and common people and was to be shunned by the literati and others highly placed. And in fact hangŭl was used mostly by women and people of the lower classes, and for this reason it was also called amgŭl (“female letters”). This debilitating split between the spoken and written languages persisted in Korea until the eve of the twentieth century. Hanmun continued to be the principal vehicle of reading and writing for practically all literate Koreans, especially men of letters.

We can now return to the original question, “What is Korean literature?” That most of the written literature in Korea from the earliest times through the nineteenth century was composed in hanmun goes to the very heart of this question. Should these hanmun works be considered Korean literature? It is a problem utterly unlike that posed by the tiny fraction of English literature that was composed in Latin, such as John Milton’s Latin verses and Thomas More’s Utopia.

Let us consider a few examples that illustrate the scope of the problem. If we assume that the recorded history of Korea goes back about two thousand years, then the period before the invention of the Korean alphabet—that is, from the earliest times to 1446—amounts to about 1,500 years. From this first 1,500 years of recorded Korean history only about four dozen works written in vernacular Korean survive: twenty-five Shilla poems called hyangga and another two dozen or so Koryŏ poems called Koryŏ kayo. In contrast, the same period has yielded thousands of works in hanmun, both prose and poetry. One individual alone, Yi Kyubo (1168–1241), a scholar-statesman of the Koryŏ period, left an estimated 1,500 hanmun poems, not to mention many hanmun prose works.⁴ More hangŭl works survive from the period between 1446 and the late nineteenth century—that is, the end of the premodern period—but still the ratio of hangŭl and hanmun works is heavily in favor of the latter. The reason, as I have mentioned, has to do with the historical fact that even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, practically all literate men kept on writing in hanmun because it continued to be the only proper writing system for men of education and importance.

Given an opportunity to write in Korean, however, some men and many women did so, composing both poetry and prose. The most important of these hangŭl works were shijo. The single most important Korean poetic form, the shijo probably originated in the fourteenth century during the late Koryŏ period, before the invention of the Korean alphabet. Sung and declaimed, and at first transmitted orally, it was written down after hangŭl became available. The kasa, a longer and open-ended hangŭl poetic form, probably originated in the mid-fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century it was established among both men and women. Much of the popular prose fiction was also composed in hangŭl, since it was written mostly for a female readership. The most significant work of epistolary literature, Hanjungnok, by Lady Hong, for instance, was composed in hangŭl, possibly because it was originally a series of letters to her family. And toward the end of the premodern period popular works of oral literature such as p’ansori tales were written down in hangŭl as their literary status increased.

But the most gifted and best educated men of the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), such as Kim Shi-sŭp, Chŏng Yag-yong, and Pak Chiwŏn, had all written exclusively in hanmun. So for the most part had Hŏ Kyun (1569–1618), an important poet-scholar-statesman, and his sister Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. Although much of Hŏ Kyun’s literary legacy was lost or destroyed after his execution for treason, over 1,500 hanmun poems⁵ and numerous hanmun prose works have survived, compared with the single hangŭl prose tale, Hong Kiltong chŏn, attributed to him. Most of the important histories, travel journals, and diaries written by men were likewise composed in hanmun.

Should this enormous body of literature written in hanmun be considered Korean literature? The answer to this question determines not only the age but also the volume and character of classical Korean literature. For example, if we were to define Korean literature as literature that has survived in vernacular Korean, either orally or in writing, we would be limiting Korean literature before 1446—the year hangŭl was promulgated—to only the handful of vernacular poems surviving from the Shilla and Koryŏ periods, along with an oral literature of indeterminate age. We would in effect be excluding practically all of the literature written in Korea before 1446, and also much of the literature written between that year and the end of the nineteenth century. More important, we would be excluding not only the works of many gifted Chosŏn writers but also such central works of early Korean history, myth, and legend as the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa. We would also have to exclude the oldest recorded version of the Tangun myth—the foundation myth of the Korean people—as well as the foundation myths of the Three Kingdoms and the Kaya state.

During the terrible years from 1910 to 1945 when Japan occupied Korea, Koreans felt a strong need to recover and reassert their own national and cultural roots and identity as a way of resisting the Japanese effort to destroy everything culturally Korean. An important part of this movement was a systematic, reinvigorated study during the 1920s of the Korean language and Korean literature.⁶ A number of Korean scholars and writers dedicated themselves to this task despite harsh persecution by the Japanese authorities. These scholars and writers aimed to recover or rediscover what they believed was unmistakably Korean both in language and literature; in the process they hoped to remove what they considered foreign, as impurities are removed from precious metal. They tried, therefore, to separate what they believed was Korean literature from what they believed was not. They asked, for instance, “How could anything not written in the language of the Korean people be considered Korean literature?” Hence, Korean literature had to consist only of those works written (or orally transmitted) in the Korean language. They concluded, therefore, that literature written in hanmun could not be included. In 1929, for example, Yi Kwang-su, one of the most important literary figures of that period, argued that “Korean literature is that literature written in the Korean language” only, and that nothing else could be called Korean literature.⁷ Many others felt the same way.

Most Korean scholars and writers today regard such a definition of Korean literature as too limited. At the time, however, it was a perfectly legitimate and understandable response to the attempt by a colonial power to obliterate all that was Korean. But such a narrow definition of Korean literature ignores two essential historical facts: first, hanmun was the most widely used writing system in Korea until the end of the nineteenth century; second, Koreans who read and wrote in hanmun included not only the literati but most literate Koreans, men as well as women. Excluding hanmun works would therefore mean excluding the literature written by most of the literate segment of premodern Korean society. Therefore, a way had to be found to include these works in the body of Korean literature. Such considerations prompted a modified definition of Korean literature: hanmun works would constitute a secondary body of Korean literature, while those works written or transmitted in vernacular Korean would compose the primary body of Korean literature.

Still another approach was proposed by Chang Tŏk-sun of Seoul National University. He argued that we should accept unconditionally all literature written in Korea before 1446 as part of Korean literature, whether it was composed in hanmun or in a hybrid writing system such as hyangch’al. As for hanmun works written after 1446, Professor Chang proposed to include them only if they possessed “the spirit of Korean thoughts and sentiments.”⁸ Obviously, the difficulty with such an approach is the impossibility of defining to everyone’s satisfaction “the spirit of Korean thoughts and sentiments.” Compounding the difficulty is the historical fact that the promulgation of the Korean alphabet in 1446 did not appreciably lessen the use of hanmun by the literati and the ruling classes.

Hanmun, though devised by the Chinese, was adopted by Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese as their literary language, just as it had been the literary language of the Chinese. It could therefore be argued that hanmun developed into a common literary and written language of the East Asian peoples. Furthermore, in appropriating Chinese characters, each of these peoples adapted them to the needs of their own language. Thus, for example, though Chinese characters are identical whether written by Chinese, Koreans, or Japanese, each people pronounced them in their own way and read them with grammatical markers from their own language. And in the case of Koreans, while many wrote in impeccable classical Chinese style, others such as Iryŏn and Pak Chi-wŏn introduced Korean words, phrases, and syntax into their hanmun prose. Thus, hanmun could be considered the earliest of the Korean literary styles, rather than a strictly alien writing system.⁹

Since the mid-1960s the scholarly consensus in Korea has shifted toward accepting all hanmun works as part of Korean literature; in other words, accepting hanmun simply as one of the writing systems used to record Korean literature. This emerging consensus sees classical Korean literature recorded in three writing systems—hangŭl, hanmun, and the hybrid idu and hyangch’al—all equally Korean and reflecting the changing needs and conditions of Korean society over the centuries. Additionally, in recent years the task of translating hanmun works into hangŭl has flourished and the study of hanmun itself has been revitalized, especially among younger scholars.

Another part of Korean literature that has increasingly become the focus of scholarly interest has been oral literature. In Korea too, before there was written literature there was oral literature, that is, the literature of spoken Korean. And out of this oral literature came the first written Korean literature, composed in hanmun or one of the hybrid writing systems. In recent years Korean oral literature has been vigorously researched, and today it is studied not only as the literature of ordinary people but also as the most important source of all premodern Korean literary forms, whether hyangga, Koryŏ kayo, shijo, or kasa. Indeed, classical Korean literature has been called an offspring of oral and hanmun literature.¹⁰ Thus, oral literature—the study of which had been neglected in the past—has now taken its rightful place in the canon of classical Korean literature.

Notes

1. Although the first use of Chinese characters in Korea cannot be dated precisely, it is generally agreed that their use was fairly widespread by the fourth or fifth century A.D.

2. Lee ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. What Is Korean Literature?
• 2. The Mystery and Loveliness of the Hyangga
• 3. The Incomparable Lyricism of Koryŏ Songs
• 4. Notes on the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa
• 5. Notes on Shijo
• 6. The Literature of Chosŏn Dynasty Women
• 7. Hŏ Kyun: Hong Kiltong chŏn and the Hanmun Lives
• 8. Kuun mong and “Unyong chŏn”
• 9. The Literature of Shirhak: Yŏnam, Pak Chi-wŏn
• 10. Notes on P’ansori
• 11. Toward Modern Korean Literature
• Works Cited
• Index