The Nine Cloud Dream Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE NINE CLOUD DREAM

  KIM MAN-JUNG (1637–1692) is generally accepted as the author of The Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong), often considered the greatest classic Korean novel. He is said to have composed it in exile as a comfort to his mother. A member of the yangban (ruling class) literati, Kim Man-jung rose to become the head of the Confucian Academy. His other works include The Record of Lady Sa’s Journey South (Sassi Namjeonggi).

  HEINZ INSU FENKL is a writer, editor, translator, and folklorist. He is the author of two novels, Memories of My Ghost Brother, a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and Skull Water. He is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz. His nonfiction includes Korean Folktales, which he wrote following a Fulbright fellowship. He serves on the editorial board of Sijo: An International Journal of Poetry and Song and is a consulting editor for Words Without Borders. He is a recipient of the Global Korea Award and the Buddhist Yushim Prize for his contributions to Korean literature. His fiction and translations have been published in The New Yorker.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2019 by Heinz Insu Fenkl

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A portion of this book first appeared in different form as “The Ghost Story” in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Volume 7, 2014.

  Illustrations from The Cloud Dream of the Nine translated by James Scarth Gale (London: Daniel O’Connor, 1922). Artwork on this page comprises portions of these illustrations, assembled by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kim, Man-jung, 1637-1692, author. | Fenkl, Heinz Insu, 1960-translator, writer of introduction, writer of added commentary.

  Title: The nine cloud dream / Kim Man-jung ; translated with an introduction and notes by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

  Other titles: Kuunmong. English

  Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036733 (print) | LCCN 2018050575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705022 (E-book) | ISBN 9780143131274 | ISBN 9780143131274(paperback) | ISBN 9781524705022(ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Korean fiction--To 1900--Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PL989.415.M3 (ebook) | LCC PL989.415.M3 K813 2019 (print) | DDC 895.73/2--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036733

  Cover art: FeiFei Ruan

  Version_1

  Dedicated to Musan Cho Oh-hyun & all my teachers

  Contents

  About the Author and Translator

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction by HEINZ INSU FENKL

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Translation

  Acknowledgments

  THE NINE CLOUD DREAM

  PART I

  1. The Reincarnation of Hsing-chen

  2. The Young Scholar

  3. Meeting Ch’an-yüeh at Lo-yang

  4. A Mysterious Priestess

  5. Tryst with a Fairy and a Ghost

  6. The Boy at the Roadside

  7. The Imperial Son-in-Law

  8. Strategy and Tactics

  PART II

  9. Among the Dragon Folk

  10. Strange Dreams

  11. The Taking of Ch’iung-pei

  12. Shao-yu’s Regret

  13. Two Princesses, Two Wives

  14. The Contest of Beauties

  15. The Wine Punishment

  16. Returning to the Source

  Appendix A: Names of the Eight Women

  Appendix B: Reading Kuunmong in Chinese and Korean

  Notes

  Introduction

  The world . . . is like a passing cloud, like an imaginary wheel made by a whirling torch, like a castle of spirits, like the moon reflected in the sea, like a vision, a mirage, a dream.

  The Lankavatara Sutra

  New readers are advised that this introduction makes certain details of the plot explicit.

  The Nine Cloud Dream, or Kuunmong (九雲夢구운몽, c. 1689),1 is the most elegant of Korea’s earliest literary novels and one of the most beloved masterpieces of Korean literature. It is a fantastical romance, full of intrigue and deception, the idealized story-within-a-story of the poor son of an abandoned single mother becoming the veritable golden boy of Confucian culture. Over the course of the narrative, the main character becomes a great poet, musician, diplomat, general, and brother-in-law to an emperor; his romantic partners (wives and concubines) are said to be the eight most beautiful women in the world. But that idealized romance is framed within the story of a promising young monk who learns a profound lesson about worldly desire as he follows the Buddhist path. And so Kuunmong—with all its excellent imitations and reworkings of Chinese Tang poetry, metaphysical conundrums, thinly veiled autobiography, and court satire—also serves as a morality tale dramatizing the themes central to the worldview of a Buddhist artist-intellectual in seventeenth-century Korea. All this is found in a single work.

  SEOPO KIM MAN-JUNG AND HIS TIMES

  Both Korean and Western scholars are in general agreement that Kim Man-jung 김만중, 金萬重 (1637–1692), also known by his penname Seopo (서포, 西浦, meaning “Western Shore,” “West Bank,” or “Western Port”), is the author of Kuunmong. This is based primarily on Kim Tae-jun’s seminal 1933 work History of Korean Fiction (趙鮮小說史 Choson soseolsa) and the reminiscence of Kim’s grandnephew Yi Jae (1680–1746) in A Record of Three Government Agencies (三官记 Samgwan-gi).2 Kim himself never claimed authorship, but the Korean literati of his time not only wrote fictional works like Kuunmong anonymously, but also customarily disavowed authorship of such “low” works both out of modesty and from fear of sullying their reputations.

  Kim was well-known and well regarded in his time. He was a yangban (a member of the ruling class) related to eminent scholars; he was also an intellectual and political figure of some note in the court of King Sukjong, the nineteenth king of the Joseon dynasty. Like Shao-yu, the protagonist of Kuunmong, he became a government minister after getting the highest score on the national civil service examination. The general consensus in the Korean scholarly community is that Kim, a dutiful son whose father died before his birth,3 wrote Kuunmong during his exile in order to comfort his mother, a highly educated and accomplished woman who had raised him and his brother by herself. The story of Kim composing the whole of Kuunmong in a single night is typical of literary folklore (Lao Tzu, for example, is said to have composed all of the Tao Te Ching in one night); but in Kim’s case, the story may, in fact, be an associative conflation with the story of his mother, who borrowed the Chinese classics she was too poor to buy for her sons’ education and hand-copied them overnight before she had to return them the next day.

  Kim lived during the latter part of the Joseon dynasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1897. Joseon’s political and social structures were modeled after Confucian China of the Tang dynasty (618–907). The carefully defined Neo-Confucian ideals governing th
e “Five Relationships”—ruler to subject, father to son, husband to wife, elder to younger, and friend to friend (all of which privilege men, and which are significantly dramatized and problematized in Kuunmong)—were seen as the key to social and political harmony. Meanwhile, Buddhism, which had been a defining characteristic of Korea during the earlier golden age of the Unified Silla (668–935), had begun to wane during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392) and was actively suppressed in favor of the social control offered by Neo-Confucianism. During this period, Korean women had gravitated toward Buddhism and made up much of its infrastructure, a fact implicitly invoked by Kuunmong’s strong representation of women. Taoism, which had long existed in harmony with Korea’s indigenous shamanic religious tradition, was recognized by this time primarily in its more philosophical and intellectual form—centering on texts like the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, and the writings of Zhuangzi—while its tantric and alchemical practices were largely relegated to the folk culture of superstition and magic.4

  Kuunmong is generally dated by scholars at 1689, but its literary provenance has been much debated, particularly in recent years. At one time it was believed that Kuunmong was the first major work of Korean literature composed in the native hangul alphabet. However, the current consensus, after the discovery of an eighteenth-century Chinese edition, is that it was composed in Chinese, which was the language of literature and government in seventeenth-century Korea in much the same way Latin was used in Europe for many centuries. It is important to remember that before Korea had its own alphabet, all writing was done in Chinese characters or a combination of Chinese with indigenously developed phonetic scripts that were rather unwieldy. In the mid-fifteenth century during the reign of King Sejong the Great—a golden age for art, science, and culture—hangul was developed in order to encourage literacy among the general population. It was so well designed that the common saying is that “a smart man can learn it before the end of the day and even an idiot can learn it in ten days.” Ironically, though it quickly took root in the popular culture, hangul’s very efficiency was its initial downfall in literary and official circles. The Korean literati felt it demeaning to write in such an easy script, and it is said that, at the time, Chinese characters were called jinseo (true letters) while hangul was known as amgeul (women’s script) or ahaetgeul (children’s script). It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, during the Japanese colonial era, that literary writing in hangul was revived on a large scale as an issue of national pride and identity. Kuunmong, it is now generally agreed, was originally composed in Chinese and later reprinted in hangul to make it more accessible.5

  THE NOVEL

  In its Korean literary and historical context, Kuunmong is one of the seminal works of Korean prose fiction, along with Kim Si-seup’s mid-fifteenth-century work New Stories from Mount Geumo (Geumo Shinhwa, 금오신화; 金鰲新話) and Heo Gyun’s The Story of Hong Gildong (Hong Gildong jeon, 홍길동전; 洪吉童傳), which dates to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.6 If Hong Gildong jeon is like the Korean Robin Hood, Kuunmong, in its status and impact throughout the years, more closely parallels Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Buddhist and Taoist themes in Kuunmong played out in Korean literary and intellectual culture in much the same way Dante’s confrontation of political and religious themes resonated throughout Europe. Both works involve the journey of the central character into another reality, in which he learns valuable moral, ethical, and religious lessons. Both works are also deeply personal and laden with satirical agendas partially stemming from each writer’s political exile.

  The basic plot of Kuunmong is an edifying fantasy: for violating his vows and doubting his vocation, a promising young Buddhist monk named Hsing-chen (“Original Nature”) is made to experience an incarnation as Shao-yu (“Small Visitor” or “Brief Resider”), the most ideal of men, his life full of fabulous intellectual, diplomatic, martial, and sensual accomplishments. It is an ironic punishment that plays out like an incarnation-within-an-incarnation, and as the narrative develops, we are slowly and subtly introduced to a world of layered illusions. Shao-yu’s view of things is constantly obstructed or occluded by intervening elements, sometimes as subtle as a willow branch; there are minor dream sequences within a greater dream; and there are numerous disguises, deceptions, and misperceptions that play with the idea of compromised and multilayered reality. When Hsing-chen’s old master, Liu-kuan (“Six Perceptions”), finally enters the illusory world of Shao-yu—now growing old himself—he causes Shao-yu to remember a dream of himself as Hsing-chen the monk. Liu-kuan accompanies him out of his dream and back to “reality,” and in the end the monk wakes up as Hsing-chen back on his meditation mat, to learn that reality and dream are interpenetrating phenomena and are ultimately indistinguishable. He has experienced an entire lifetime in a moment.

  Kuunmong addresses this theme of reality and dream in such a way that it poignantly critiques the moral and ethical misconduct of the controversial king Sukjong, who took the throne at age thirteen and ruled from 1674 to 1720.King Sukjong’s reign was characterized by intense factional disputes and sudden turns of the political tide due to his amorous, fickle, and shrewdly manipulative nature. His name, Sukjong, 肅宗, which he took as ruler, was the name of the Tang emperor who reigned from 756 to 762, and the Chinese characters can be read as “purge factions.” The life of Shao-yu parallels and inverts that of Kim in ways too numerous to be merely coincidental, and Shao-yu’s relationship with the emperor seems to be a nostalgic and wishful reminiscence of Kim’s once-advisory role to the much younger Sukjong. Kim Man-jung was a member of the Western faction, which was dominant early in Sukjong’s rule but lost favor during a controversy regarding the proper period of mourning to follow the death of the king’s first wife, Queen Insun. When the Southern faction gained control in 1674, Kim was exiled, and it wasn’t until five years later, just before a Southern faction member was executed for treason, that Kim was able to return to court. In 1687 Kim was exiled again, this time to Seokcheon for protesting the king’s treatment of a scholar official, but was allowed to return a year later. Then, in 1689, Kim was involved in protesting Sukjong’s dismissal of his second wife, Queen Inhyeon. Sukjong was so in love with his consort Lady Jang (said to be the most beautiful woman in the whole of the Joseon dynasty) that he made her his queen and her one-year-old son the crown prince. For siding with Queen Inhyeon, who was the daughter of a Western faction member, Kim was exiled yet again, this time to the remote island of Namhae, where he is likely to have written both Kuunmong and his other major work, The Record of Lady Xie’s Journey South, shortly before his death.7

  The plot of Kuunmong, when it is considered in light of the scandalous reign of King Sukjong, reads as an idealized remedy for all of the negative machinations in the Joseon court, particularly regarding the consequences of romantic relationships and the relationships among high court women, official wives, and concubines. Sukjong’s relationship with his queen mother was hostile, and his wives and concubines were constantly involved in intrigues that are still fodder for historical soap operas today. Sukjong’s senior concubine, Jang, was the living historical embodiment of the Korean stereotype of the seductive and conniving beauty.8 By comparison, the queen, the princess, the wives, and the concubines in Kim’s novel all dearly love and go out of their way for each other, practically outdoing one another in their humility and deference to the others’ wishes. The treachery and deceptions that caused exiles and executions in Sukjong’s court are replaced, in Kuunmong, by romantic stratagems and practical jokes without dire consequence.

  KUUNMONG AND ITS INFLUENCES

  Kuunmong, on its surface, is a historical fantasy novel set in ninth-century Tang China—a kind of fantasy golden age evoked by Korean literature of the Joseon era, much as writers in English today look back on the literature of Elizabethan times—and in addition to being originally written in Chinese, it emulates and alludes to Chinese Tang dynasty works so gracefu
lly that Chinese scholars themselves have praised its merits.

  As a result, Kuunmong needs to be considered in light of Chinese as well as Korean literature. In a Chinese context, Kuunmong fits into the genre of quanqi (“strange tales”) that young Confucian scholars would sometimes write as part of their civil examinations to entertain their elder examiners (and perhaps thus earn a higher score). It also refers back to famous dream stories of the Tang period, most prominently “The Record Within a Pillow” (枕中記, c. 719) by Shen Jiji (also known as Li Mi) and “The Governor of Nanke” (南柯太守伝, c. 794) by Li Gongzuo.9 In both of these stories the protagonist temporarily enters a dream world before eventually returning to reality, the dream episode involving marriage to a beautiful woman of royal family, attainment of a high-ranking position, military exploits, and ultimate dissatisfaction with material success. Kim Man-jung would certainly have known these works, though they are more tragic and lack Kuunmong’s structural and linguistic elegance—suggesting he might have set out to remedy those qualities of the older works.

  Kuunmong brims with allusions to Chinese literary texts in a way characteristic of Joseon-era Korean literary works, which idealized and emulated Chinese literary culture. Both the narrator and the characters make constant allusions to Chinese literature and history. The way in which allusions abound even in casual descriptions of landscape suggests the underlying consciousness of an outsider mimicking a tradition—perhaps even overcompensating to show off his knowledge. That, in itself, is not unusual, but what is truly astonishing is the degree to which the allusions are interwoven into the narrative and serve to convey the novel’s underlying Buddhist themes in an especially subtle and powerful way. Korean literary culture, for the upper classes in the Joseon era, was characterized by a syncretic interweaving of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian themes, but Kim’s use of allusions is uniquely resonant with ideas central to Buddhism: the illusory nature of the world (maya 麽也), the idea of the interpenetration of phenomena (tongdal 通達), and “essence-function” (che-yong 體用).10 These are ideas one finds especially significant and enduring in Korean Buddhism after Weonhyo and Jinul,11 two great monks of the earlier Silla dynasty, Korea’s golden age of Buddhism. During Kim Man-jung’s time, Confucianism was the state ideology and Buddhism was actively suppressed, and so to write a novel in which an elaborate Confucian pipe dream gives way to dissatisfaction that is remedied by Buddhism would also have been an overt act of resistance and criticism, especially from a writer in exile for rebuking the king.