Korean Storytelling

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

Im Kwon Taek’s 2000 film, Chunhyang, is as much a storytelling masterpiece as the Korean pansori tradition from which it comes. The film, which tells the canonical “Tale of Chunhyang,” one of the five great pansori narratives, is about the love between teenagers Sung Chunhyang, the daughter of a famous Namwon (in North Cholla Province) kisaeng and Yi Mongryong, scholar son of the provincial governor. Under Choson dynasty legal codes, Chunhyang inherits the status of her mother as a kisaeng. In Choson Korea, kisaeng was a slippery status best likened to that of the Japanese geisha. These women were not common prostitutes, but rather, highly educated, artistically talented entertainers whose involvement in sexual trade is less central to their role (though just as central to their degraded treatment and social status) than was the high-class entertainment they provided. In Im’s visually spectacular montage of beautiful scenery and flora from mountainous southern Korea and rich textures and colors of both civil-service yangban (Choson Korea’s educated, landowning elite) and provincial life, the fledgling, secret love between Chunhyang and Yi Mongryong is tested by his father’s new appointment to the royal court and by Yi’s duties in Seoul, which force him to keep the class-transgressing marriage a secret in order not to jeopardize his civil-service prospects and which take him away from Chunhyang for years while he studies for the royal Confucian civil-service examination. While Yi studies and eventually passes (with highest marks) the civil-service examination (based on his ability to integrate Chinese classics of history, literature, and philosophy, as well as appropriate calligraphy and cadence, in answering a moral question posed by the court), the new governor of Namwon, a corrupt and lecherous man named Byun Hakdo (whose name is invoked as a pronoun for authoritarian types in modern Korean), tortures and sets about to kill Chunhyang for refusing to entertain him. For weeks, Chunhyang is beaten almost to death by Byun’s corrupt cronies, and is scheduled to be executed at Byun’s birthdal bacchanal with the governors of local provinces. Her “crime” results from a hitch in the stifling Choson legal codes, which technically make her a kisaeng automatically, and which compel her to serve government officials in this capacity. But Chuhyang argues that she is married (though as not to jeopardize Yi, she cannot provide proof) and that Byun’s advances are equally criminal. As pansori was developed as an art form by numerous local “schools” and edited, transcribed, and distributed by scholars like the famous Sin Chaeho in the nineteenth century, five of the most famous regional tales were matched with Confucian values in order to popularize the folk art form among Confucian literati. “The Tale of Chunhyang” survives as the tale of chastity, and Chunhyang’s resolve to remain faithful to her “one love” is a blood oath. However, back in Seoul, Yi is appointed Royal Ethics Inspector and sent to investigate Confucian governance in the provinces. Before he reaches Namwon, he wants to make sure that Chunhyang has remained faithful, and when he asks a leading question to a group of peasants, he is nearly killed by the farmers driven to murderous rage by the injustice of Chunhyang’s fate. After visiting Chunhyang and her mother dressed as a peasant to test their faithfulness to him (rather than his status – though the amount of tests in the story is overbearing) he sets up a secret intervention for Byun’s birthday party the next day. Again, Yi visits Byun as a poor yangban demanding his place at the party and is ridiculed by Byun and the local governors. This is exactly the sort of corruption and ethical breaches that Yi is to investigate. Yi flashes the royal medallion, and all the governors, cronies, and yangban in attendance are arrested (and beaten as they attempt to flee). Yi then plays a joke on Chunhyang by pretending to be Byun, and after the joke goes sour, the two are reunited. The film’s racier scenes consist of two or so minutes of the naked backs (but not backsides) of Yi and Chunhyang as they chase one another around the bedroom, so showing the film in the classroom in its entirety is not possible. But the rest of the film is a great story and a beautiful way to introduce students in middle and high school to pansori.
Im’s use of pansori as a storytelling device for the film, however, makes Chunhyang and his earlier Seopyeonje truly special films. Weaving live pansori performance footage in with the story reminds the audience of the heritage and emotional power of the tale. Pansori goes back to the 18th century, and evolved from shaman rituals to become a unique folk art form in Korea. The spectacular vocal storytelling, accompanied by complex drumming in a one or two person performance, is significant because it was one of few the uniquely Korean literary forms in a literary culture dominated by Chinese language, writings, and thought for over one thousand years. The conscious process of hybridizing and popularizing pansori by progressive yangban like Sin Chaeho and others through the nineteenth century reflected social and cultural shifts away from China in Korea at the time, and is fascinating and important in the story of modernizing Korean literature. Plus, it is a beautiful art form.
For more information on pansori, you can read Peter H. Lee’s literary histories of Korea, as well as Park Chan Eun’s “P’ansori, the Ancient Art of Storytelling” in Margaret Read Macdonald’s Traditional Storytelling Today.

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