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Every handbook on Korea notes on
the first page that Koreans are a homogeneous people. Homogeneity is obviously
seen as something rare and precious, an identifying mark that singles Korea out from
the nations of the world. Identity is a crucial concern in Korea, perhaps
inevitably so against the background of Japanese oppression in the first half
of this century. While Japan struggled
to annihilate a Korean identity separate from that of Imperial Japan, Korea struggled
to preserve a clear national identity. The result was a preoccupation with
things identified with "Koreanness" and a certain willingness to
mythologize to achieve a specific goal as evidenced by the claim to a racial
homogeneity that takes no account of Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese intrusions
in Korean bloodlines, not to speak of the gene input of Hendrik Hamel's
red-haired Dutch crew.
The supreme example of myth in action, however, is the shijo. In the 1920s,
Ch'oe Nam-son saw the inherent possibilities of the classical shijo as a
vehicle of national consciousness. With his colleagues, he created an elaborate
literary form with complex rules of rhyme, syllable and breath count. Shijo was
the "breath and soul of the people" The shijo as literary text was
born with such great success that within a generation everyone believed that
the shijo had always been thus. The situation today is so muddled that while no
one seems to really know what the shijo originally was, the schools continue to
present it in the terms invented by Ch'oe Nam-son and his colleagues. One of
the few things that can be said with absolute certainty about the classical
shijo is that it was not the "breath and soul of the people." The
kagok-ch'ang to which shijo was performed was much too complex and demanded far
too many players for the shijo to be characterized as a broadly popular form.
In addition, Chinese was the language of literature, and shijo were written in
onmun, or vulgar language.
The shijo movement is one example of a mythologizing process, which very often
carries the overt nationalistic tones, so prevalent in 20th-century Korea, that
tend to get under the skin of "sensitive" foreigners, leading to
their cries of xenophobia and exclusiveness. The drive to discover or create
the "uniquely Korean" is at the center of this process.
Take, for example, the penchant of commentators to present han, hung and mot as
exclusively Korean concepts-defining elements, in fact, of Korean identity. If
you are not Korean, they say, you cannot understand han, mot and hung. Everyone
seems to accept the basic premise unconditionally: Han, hung and mot are
exclusively Korean. The myth is complete. Non-Koreans, however, relate to all
three concepts within their own experience. Many believe that these concepts
are in fact universal in their application, with subtle regional differences.
Han and hung are Chinese-derived terms, and a discussion of these concepts goes
back to antiquity. Mot, on the other hand, is a han-gul (Korean alphabet) term
and has only been a subject of discussion in Korean academic circles since the
publication of Shin Sok-ch'o's "Motsol" in the March 1941 issue of
Munjang. Since then there has been a stream of articles by learned members of
the Korean literary establishment, such as Cho Yun-je, Chong Pyong-uk, Cho Ch'i-hun,
Lee O-young and Kim Chong-gil.
One of the factors that has bolstered the claims of the Korean commentators is
that English does not have corresponding words for han, hung and mot, a
regrettable oversight by the founding fathers of the English language, one
which tells us that Korean is more sensitive than English in these matters.
However, no one in the English-speaking world has much difficulty identifying
either with the ideas or the feelings that han, hung and mot elicit. Han is the
quintessential sense of bitter wrong that has dogged the Korean people
throughout their history. However, there is just as much han per square mile in
Ireland as there ever was in Korea: the han of a divided nation; the han of
years of cultural exploitation; the han of the widow; the han of the childless
woman; the han of the woman who sacrifices her own life to look after her aging
parents; the han of the abused daughter-in-law. Ireland even has a category of
han unknown in Korea: the han of the old bachelor who never got married either
because of a domineering mother or because of the poverty of his circumstances.
The Irish experience of han is repeated across Europe and into Russia, not to
speak of Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. In fact, wherever you have
communities that have suffered oppression over an extended period of time, you
will find some version of han. It may differ slightly from region to region,
but basically han is han.
The English language may not have a word for han, but much of the English-speaking
world knows exactly what the concept means. In fact, the short story writer
Frank O'Connor has an interesting theory that the short story thrives under
circumstances of han. He illustrates his case with examples from Russia,
England, Ireland and India, noting how England, with the largess of temper that
comes from empire, has tended to excel in the novel rather than in the short
story, whereas Russia, which has known both empire and grinding misery, is
distinguished in both the short story and the novel. Ireland and India,
archetypal han countries, have produced their best literary work in the short
story. Joyce and Beckett would probably be a little offended, but this is an
interesting theory developed with much cogency in O'Connor's acclaimed study of
the short story, "The Lonely Voice."
Hung is the excitement generated by the apprehension of beauty. It can be
triggered by almost anything - sunrise, sunset, wine, music, dance, poetry, a
companion, a painting, an insight into life, a fish biting. Yi Hwang
(1501-1570) of the Chaoson Dynasty (1392-1910), or Yi T'oegye as he is better
known by his pen name, tells us that hung is the feeling produced by vernacular
songs, meaning Koryo Dynasty (918-1392) kayo Shijo is full of hung, the hung of
spring, of love, of wine, of music, of fishing:
I nodded off; I lost my fishing pole.
I danced a set I lost my raincape.
White gull, laugh not at an old mans folly.
Ten li of peach blossoms
are in blossom; I am filled with
the joy of spring.
Hung, however, is not an exclusively Korean feeling. Anyone who ever took a
fishing rod in hand and felt the nibble of a fish knows it; anyone who enjoys
music knows it. It is what Wordsworth felt in his golden moments of insight
into truth in nature; what Thomas Hardy felt in that moment of intensity he
experienced driving up the hill on the way to Castle Boterel; what William
Carlos Williams felt when he looked at his famous red wheelbarrow. In rhythmic
terms, its most characteristic movement in Korea begins in the shoulders,
whereas in Ireland it begins in the feet. Anyone who has seen a farmers' band
perform will know the shoulder movement and the buzz of excitement that goes
with it; anyone familiar with Irish music will know the characteristic tap of
the foot and the excitement that comes with jigs and reels. The rhythm and
movement of a farmers' band is quintessentially Korean, the tap of the jig and
reel are quintessentially Gaelic, but what is felt in the heart in both cases
is universal.
Kim Chong-gil tells us in "The Darling Buds of May" that mot is a
phonetically corrupted form of mat (taste) and that the word first occurred as
late as the second half of the 19th century. He tells how Professor Kim
Hung-gyu found the phrase matto morugo in a p'ansori version of the classical
Korean novel Hungbujon, believed to be written in the latter half of the 19th
century. This phrase means "without knowing taste," but in context it
is used in the sense of "unwittingly" or "carelessly," the
present-day version of which is motto morugo. This may be one of the most
recent cases in which the word mat was also used in the sense of mot. The word
motchige, the adverbial form of mot, occurs in a shijo by An Min-yong in his
collection Kumok ch'ongbu, edited in the 1870s. Thus, Professor Kim believes
that the word mot began to be used in the second half of the 19th century,
together with words like motchaeng-i and motchida.
One obvious problem with mot as a defining concept of Korean sensibility is
explaining how one can hang an entire aesthetic on a single han-gul word, used
only since the latter half of the 19th century, when the whole world knows that
han-gul was not held in very high repute in intellectual Korea until the surge
of nationalism at the end of the enlightenment period. In fact, the word
"han-gul" itself was not coined until the 20th-century. Onmun (vulgar
writing), an obviously deleterious expression, was the term in common use. Mot
is a popular rather than a scholarly term. Very difficult to define, it reflects
the perception of beauty, refinement, taste, elegance, and so on, in people and
things. A man of mot is a gentleman in the fullest sense of the word-the
complete, best-rounded human specimen. He is refined, urbane, charming,
attractive in appearance, maybe even sexy, with overtones of being a dandy and
a swinger. Mot is both inward and outward, but inward mot reflects the real
essence of mot. The man of mot is inwardly untrammeled; he has broken from the
constraints of the merely conventional he has reserves of emotional largess; he
holds himself open to aesthetic experience; he tastes of life's experience to
the fullest. Mot is more in the heart than in the senses; more outward looking
in love to others than inward looking in preoccupation with the self: more platonic
than sexual. It is found more consistently among our forefathers than among our
contemporaries. All this is universal. Wherever people have concerned
themselves with beauty, whether in nature, art or the spirit, there has always
been mot What is different is the attitude that individuals, cultural groups
and nations have toward beauty.
The discussion of mot, then, rightfully begins with a discussion of attitudes
toward "the beautiful" because, although mot and "the
beautiful" are by no means synonymous, they are so closely related that
overlap is inevitable. Chong Pyong-uk, a prominent scholar of the last
generation, notes that when Koreans look at a rose, they do not see an array of
individual petals, each subtly distinct from the others, each totally distinct
from every petal of every rose that ever existed They are not interested in the
physical makeup of the individual flower. They see a rose that is the essence
of every rose; they see a symbol of the universal. Beauty as it appears to the
eye takes a back seat to beauty as it appears to the heart.
This explains why one does not readily find the kind of poem in Korean that
Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, wrote in English. When Hopkins saw a blade
of grass, he felt compelled to define its essence, to see how it differed from
every other blade of grass, to marvel at its uniqueness, and to refer the
mystery of its existence back to the glory of God. A Korean poet is interested
in the moral aspect of things. He sees his rose as symbolic of a spiritual
reality embodied in nature. The beauty of the rose is a healing beauty, the
contemplation of which relieves humankind of the accumulated burdens of
everyday life. Hopkins put his blade of grass under microscopic scrutiny. The
Korean poet universalizes his blade of grass.
Something quite extraordinary happened to Korean poetry at the beginning of the
Choson Dynasty, something that is crucial in terms of understanding the way
Koreans approach beauty. Simply stated, passion left Korean poetry. Take, for
example, the opening stanza of the Koryo kayo "Spring Pervades the
Pavilion":
I make a bed of bamboo leaves;
I spread them on the ice.
Though my love and
I should freeze unto death,
slowly, slowly, pass this night
in love's enduring gentleness.
There is nothing like this in Choson poetry, not at least until the kisaeng
(professional female entertainer) poet Hwang Chin-i. Several hundred years had
intervened before Chin-i wrote her celebrated shijo:
I'll cut a piece from the waist
of this interminable eleventh moon night,
and wind it in coils beneath these bedcovers,
warm and fragrant as the spring breeze,
coil by coil to unwind it the night my lover returns.
This is kisaeng poetry free from the constraints that circumscribed most
yangban (aristocrat) poetry. When Ho Kyun (1569-1618) compiled the poems of his
sister, Ho Nansolhon (1563-1589), some of the best poems were put into a
supplement because they were regarded as risque. "To My Love Reading in
His Study," which suffered the indignity of relegation to the supplement,
would not shock many people today, but its sentiments were considered daring
for a Choson yangban woman:
Under the eaves the sparrows
fly the angle in pairs;
falling leaves plop on my silk robe.
I see from the bridal as far as
the eye can see: I'm sick at heart,
for all is green but
my Kangnam love does not return.
Passion would not be tolerated; great literati such as Toegye regarded it as
vulgar. In T. S. Eliot's terms, Choson society experienced a sort of
dissociation of sensibility; passion left Korean poetry and did not return
until the 18th century, when the new breed of chung-in (professional middle
class) poets came to the fore, who, with much less to lose, were perhaps less
intimidated by Confucian standards than their yangban brothers. When passion
left Korean poetry, the moral aspects became dominant, and the need for a
"physical" poetry disappeared. Yi Kyu-bo, a Koryo poet, describes the
experience of drinking tea in physical terms:
With a pot of tea I try
an experiment in taste;
it's like frozen snow going down my throat.
He pinpoints the joy of the board game paduk:
The pleasure is in the dinking of the stones.
He watches a rat coming out of his hole and examines the rat's hesitance before
continuing with the moral meditation that is the essence of the poem:
Why be a rat, head stretched
out of the bole,
unable to decide on direction.
These images focus on the physical; they come with a fresh immediacy, leaping
off the page. Coming to Koryo poetry after reading Chinese Sung Dynasty poetry,
one is struck by the fact that the Koryo tradition is much less physical than
the Sung tradition. Nevertheless the physical is still there. In Choson poetry,
the physical is very rare; the central emphasis is moral.
The tradition of poetry in Korea continues to be moral and conceptual
"Looking for the Cow," vintage Zen, is one of Han Yong-un's best
poems:
I haven't lost a cow;
it's silly to look for it.
Were I to find it,
would the finders keepers rule apply?
Better not look;
that way I won't lose it again.
"Looking for the Cow" was the name of Han Yong-un's house on
Inwangsan Mountain. It faced away from the Japanese governor-general's
residence so that the poet-monk would not have to face the indignity of Korea's
loss of sovereignty every day. People who like Zen poetry will love this poem,
but the poetic manner it demonstrates is pure abstraction.
"Blue Sky," written by Kim Su-yong in the 1960s, shows one of Korea's
foremost modernist poets still favoring the abstract. The stench of blood is
the only physical factor here. In fact, in the context the phrase takes on an
extraordinary power:
What the poet said about envying
the freedom of the skylark
in its mastery of the blue sky
needs qualification.
Anyone who ever soared for freedom
will know
what the skylark sees
that inspires its song;
how the stench of blood
is mixed in freedom;
why revolution is lonely;
why revolution has to be lonely.
Read any account of a Korean poem in a representative anthology; listen to any
student appreciation of a poem. The material invariably is presented in
abstract, conceptual terms. There is no escaping the terminology: It is
modernist, abstract, intellectualist; it recurs line after line. Essays and
poetry appreciation are invariably moral in tone; the physical is rarely given
central focus.
The conceptual essence of the Korean approach to nature is enforced in our own
time by Lee O-young's idea of point of view in traditional Korean art
Perspective is a Western technique. Korean poets, he tells us (using Sowol's
famous poem "Mountain Flowers" to illustrate his theme), see all
points of view at once. It is as if, he says, the poet were riding in a
helicopter; he is untrammeled by the purely physical restrictions of the
Western point of view. This idea may not stand up to critical scrutiny, but it
is at the least a very unusual conception and shows the continuing Korean
preoccupation with the conceptual aspects of things.
Commentators try to give some historical depth to the concept of mot by linking
it with the Korean-Chinese term p'ungryu, but the link is rather tenuous.
Shilla (57 B.C.-A.D. 935) p'ungryu is a version of Chinese fengliu, which,
according to Kim Chong-gil, originally meant "social morale" but came
to mean "carefree, detached lifestyle"; it was associated with
poetry, wine, the lute and female entertainers. Fengliu reached its full
development during the Tang Dynasty and subsequently found its way into Korea
as p'ungryu and into Japan as miyabi.
So Chong-ju explains the p'ungryu concept in a poem entitled "P'ungryu
Discrimination":
The Shilla poet, Ch'oe Ch'iwon, said that p'ungryu as first understood in this
country was a fine amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Ch'oe Nam-son,
who passed away some years ago, claimed that the old Korean term pu-ru, meaning
the light of heaven, was matched to the Chinese characters p'ung and ryu (wind
and flow).
P'ungryu, then, is a concept with strong religious overtones; it is the light
of heaven in a person's inner being. However, in the practice of p'ungryu that
is, in the life of the p'ungryugaek (aesthete)-there are always strong
overtones of music, poetry, wine, and kisaeng. It is a notable aspect of the So
Chong-ju poem that whereas the elucidation of the principle is religious and
spiritual, the practical illustration is from the kisaeng world. The poem
continues:
In considering these two explications, imagine, if you will, old p'ungryu
melodies twanging perforce from the strings of kayagum played in secluded rooms
in the back lanes of the night by old kisaeng whose hearts are filled with all
regret: something comes to you, as if from home, across the shimmering haze of
the centuries. Especially if you think these thoughts while gently stroking a
fine old Choson white or a Koryo green.
Notice also how So Chong-ju mixes the notion of kisaeng han with the notion of
artistic fineness. In The Darling Buds of May, Professor Kim says that Alan
Heyman, a specialist in Korean music and dance, is wrong to think that mot
occurs from the interaction of hung and han. Mot, Professor Kim points out, is
rather the Janus face of hung. He says that Heyman was probably reflecting
something learned through his long association with Korean music and the dance.
Many of the great exemplars of mot in history have also been great exemplars of
han. Nongye, for example, a kisaeng who threw herself off a cliff in the arms
of a Japanese general, pulling him with her, and Hwang Chin-i, the celebrated
16th-century kisaeng, have always stood as symbols of han as well as mot. It is
interesting that So Chong-ju goes straight to kisaeng han to illustrate his
idea of mot. All of this goes to show how much mythmaking there is in these
exclusive, identity-defining concepts.
The progression from Tang fengliu to Shilla p'ungryu seems relatively clear,
although it is not quite clear where the Shilla religious connotations of
p'ungryu come from. The problem occurs in getting from Shilla p'ungryu to
modern mot. There is no linguistic link. The argument is developed by means of
historical examples on the presumption that p'ungryu and mot emanate from the
same national heart. And since p'ungryu in its original form is Chinese, it
cannot be an exclusive definer of Korean sensibility. The archetypal Korean man
of p'ungryu mot is the old Shilla gentieman who scaled the cliff to cut azaleas
for Lady Suro. As So Chong-ju tells the story in "The Old Man's Flower
Song," the old man plucks the azaleas for the lady against the backdrop of
the inadequacies of her husband and retinue, against the failure of the light
of heaven to shine in their emotional response:
The woman rode
with her horseman husband and company.
"...those flowers are so beautiful, I wish I..."
She seemed to speak to the flowers, to the company, to the air.
Thus the wife,
angled slightly on her horse.
The husband, fool that he was,
made no response,
while the company reacted as if
her words
had rolled from their ears.
The old man, passing by,
utterly unconnected
cocked his ears
and acceded to her request.
The essence of the old man's p'ungryu heart is defined in three lines:
His was the heart of a flower that laughs when it sees a flower, the heart of
the unencumbered.
The old man is transcendent: He breaks through the mold of convention, he
knocks down the walls of inhibition, he shows himself to be a man of great
emotional largess. He scorns the social norms that govern age, subservient
wives and boorish husbands; he is oblivious to everything except an ideal
beauty. The situation has a special emotional complexity in that Lady Suro,
whom the old man recognizes as a "flower," is herself a lady of
p'ungryu, not just physically beautiful but also aesthetically beautiful. What
is at stake here is a spiritual quality, an opening of the heart to emotional
response that enables a man to transcend life while experiencing life's full
intensity. This is not an exclusively Korean emotion. People everywhere will
identify with this quality.
Ch'oyong is also considered a quintessential example of a man with the light of
heaven in his heart:
I revel all night long
in the moonlit capital,
come home and discover
four legs in my bed!
Two are mine;
whose are the other two?
Legs once mine, now purloined!
What am I to do?
The commentators traditionally have taken the intruder in Ch'oyong's bed as an
evil spirit, a metaphor for smallpox. They praise the nobility and equanimity
of Ch'oyong's response in the face of personal calamity. This kind of
equanimity wears hard with Western readers despite 2,000 years of the Christian
tradition of turning the other cheek. Of course it wears hard in the Korean
tradition too, but the commentators explain it by insisting that we are dealing
here with smallpox and not adultery. It is a neat trick for getting around a difficult
corner, but not very convincing.
It is interesting that the present generation of Korean university students
have problems with traditional interpretations of Ch'oyong's response. No
matter how hard you try to make the case that Ch'oyong breaks through the mold
of the conventional response, just as much as the old man and Lady Suro,
somehow it is not the same. The average Western reader would prefer to make a
case for Princess Sonhwa in that very early hyangga, "Song of
Mauung." She certainly qualifies, if breaking the mold of convention is
the criterion. Note the irony of the title: The song is Mattung's, not
Sonhwa's!
Princess Sonhwa
had marriage on her mind
the night she stole into Mattung's room
and took him in her arms.
There are dozens of figures in history who are used to illustrate the Korean
idea of p'ungryu-mot. Some that come directly to mind are Chong Mong-ju, full
of wine and back to front on his horse as he goes to face the assassin's club:
Myongwol the Monk piping down the lady in the moon; Admiral Yi Sun-shin
strapped in death to the mast of his ship, continuing to lead his men even
after he has expired; Prime Minister Yu Kwan cupping the rain in his umbrella
hands; Hwang Chin-i catching the fleas in her dress before she would sing at
the Governor of Naju's feast; Nongye taking the Japanese general in her arms
down the cliff to his (and her) death; Shimch'ong giving up her life so that
her father might see; Kim Tong-in marching down Ulchiro in morning coat,
striped trousers, silk hat and carnation; and So Chong-ju himself, perhaps the
last of the old generation of motchaeng-i, whose mot transcends the pettiness
of the establishment, which may in the end cost him a Nobel Prize.
Mot is universal. What distinguishes Korean mot from mot elsewhere in the world
is the Korean attitude to beauty. The Korean artist, as I have noted, looks to
moral rather than physical beauty; his concern is with the universal rather
than the particular. The approach is conceptual, the enlphasis is moral. The
Korean approach is neither better nor worse than any other approach. There is
plenty of precedent for it, particularly in the tradition of poetry practiced
in 20th-century eastern Europe. One thinks immediately of Czeslaw Milosz and
the influence of his work on contemporary poetic practice.
The implications of the conceptual approach to beauty are very wide ranging. In
practical terms, the conceptual approach focuses on ideals rather than on
realities. We feel the effects of this during every day of our lives. Koreans
look at the facade and dream great dreams. When things go wrong, there is a
great outpouring of moral outrage; blame is apportioned; myths of
responsibility are created. The mythmaker resigns, the angry waters subside and
everyone holds their collective breath until the process begins again. Who
would have thought that the roots of a national attitude would be buried so
deeply in the perception of beauty?.
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