5. The Aftermath

Dream Journeys and the Culture of Commemoration

Dead bodies as metaphors for the wounded political body of the Chosŏn state occupied a prominent place in the postwar discourse of identity in seventeenth-century Korea. The fifty-year period beginning with the Imjin War, the six-year Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, and ending with the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636–1637 was one of the most politically and socially challenging periods of Korean history. Chapters 1 and 2 have conveyed the trauma and destruction that Korea suffered from these military encounters as well as the emergent discourse of the nation that ensued.

The Manchu invasions presented the Korean court, elites, and common people with a crisis of a different type. Although the duration of the confrontation had been much shorter and the carnage less severe, the Korean capitulation in 1637 to the Manchus, whom they regarded as “barbarian,” and the subsequent Manchu conquest of China in 1644 profoundly challenged the Korean sense of cultural identity.¹ To begin with, the ascendancy of the Manchus and their demand that Korea cooperate in their bid to challenge the Ming for supremacy in China had presented an extremely agonizing dilemma to the Chosŏn state. Koreans felt not only a deep ideological and cultural bond to the Ming—whom they regarded as the leaders of Confucian civilization, membership in which was the kernel of their identity—but also felt indebted to the Ming for the military assistance that they had received during the Japanese invasions.

Indeed, the Manchu question caused profound political upheavals internally, including a coup d’état and a rebellion. King Kwanghae (r. 1608–1623), who adhered to an even-handed policy between Ming and the Manchus, was deposed and his nephew Injo enthroned by the pro-Ming faction.2 In the following year Yi Kwal (1587–1624) rebelled against the new regime and briefly occupied the capital. After pacifying the rebels, Injo’s court resisted Manchu pressure until Hong Taiji, leading an army of 100,000, invaded Korea to demand capitulation.

Besieged in Namhan Fort on a mountain near Seoul in a bitterly cold winter, with little hope for provisions, the Injo court withstood the siege as long as it could but capitulated on the forty-seventh day and was forced to perform a ritual of surrender in accordance with a protocol imposed on it. Injo and the crown prince, wearing the blue garb of commoners, bowed three times and kowtowed nine times on bare earth to Manchu leader Hong Taiji, who was resplendent in imperial symbols—clad in a golden dragon robe and seated on a throne draped with cloth embroidered in golden thread, atop a podium of nine steps. Afterward Hong Taiji departed with Korean hostages, including the crown prince, the second oldest prince, and many of the Korean officials who had been most vocally opposed to the Manchus.³ The shame of the Korean king in performing this ritual of surrender to a foreign ruler, the only such occasion recorded in Korean history, seems to have extended far beyond the person of the king to the entire political body of the Chosŏn state.

Fighting for personal survival and that of their country in the face of an alien other, Koreans had to confront many of the elements of what Anthony Smith calls “ethnies,” such as the sense of ethnicity, territoriality, and language,⁴ and an intense discourse of identity emerged. The trajectory of this discourse continuously evolved in response to the changing political and social life of Korea and to events outside, such as the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan,⁵ the Manchu conquest of China,⁶ and the resulting transformation in the topography of culture and power among the countries of East Asia.

How to characterize this discourse of identity poses a certain conceptual problem: contemporary scholarship in Korea is bifurcated. Historical scholarship stresses the impact of the Japanese invasions on the economic, military, political, and social structure;⁷ diplomatic relations with China and Japan;8 and the ideological change resulting from Manchu supremacy.⁹ Literary scholarship concentrates on postwar works that deal specifically with the war.¹⁰ Scholarship in both disciplines tends to take as a point of departure the deepening of national consciousness, but neither provides a theoretical underpinning or a systematic analysis for this position.

Commemoration and the Postwar Discursive Field

Throughout this book I have emphasized that the seventeenthcentury discourse of identity and nation is composed of many interwoven strands. Instead of analyzing each strand, my goal in this chapter is to identify the cultural grammar of the discursive field in which the postwar discourse took place. I show that a genre of fictional accounts called “dream journeys” is particularly evocative of the texture of posttraumatic memories.

The cultural grammar that provided emotional subtext and ideological structure to the discursive field is what I call the culture of commemoration. Commemorating the war dead is a universal phenomenon. Postwar discourse is where the past and the present, and the dead and the living, are conjoined. The past, which contains many tragedies, must be laid to rest in order to move forward into the future. The war dead must be properly taken care of—buried, remembered, given honors, or put into a pantheon of “national” heroes when appropriate. Mourning the dead thus functions as the fulcrum in creating “common glories in the past” and remembering “the sacrifices to which one has consented.”¹¹

The questions of who is mourned and how and which agencies are involved in the activity, however, are both culture and time specific. Depending on cultural elements such as religious and philosophical notions of life after death, funerary practices, and ideas of who deserves attention, different modes of commemorative activities are produced.¹² Commemorative activities are a revealing site of the discourse of the communal identity because they indicate the evolving changes concerning the scope and category of subjects of commemoration, the concept of the community, and the relationship between the war dead and the community.

Commemorative activities for the dead of the Imjin War began during the war, expanded in scope in the postwar years, and gradually escalated into a pervasive and long-lasting phenomenon in the subsequent centuries.13 This phenomenon, the “culture of commemoration,” was a huge and extensive enterprise involving multiple agencies in the realms of ritual, oral performance, and literary production. At one extreme the central government performed public sacrifices, conferred honors, and placed personal names of commended heroes in official histories; at the other extreme local populations nationwide, even in remote provinces, orally narrativized war heroes according to their own visions.¹⁴ Many regional and familial agencies between the central government and the local population engaged in their own modes of remembering and honoring the dead.

Confucian ideas and practices concerning the dead in Chosŏn society were conducive to producing a culture of commemoration. Although Confucian societies did not have an especially strong cult of the dead, Confucians believed that the welfare of the dead and that of the living are inextricably intertwined. With no specific conception of the length or autonomy of the afterlife of an individual, the dead attained immortality only through remembrance by the living. The popular belief in the power of the spirits of the dead—that they might bestow blessings or wreak havoc on the living—seems to have reinforced the interdependence. This idea is embodied in the importance of activities such as funerary and mourning rituals, ancestral sacrifices in the family, public sacrifices to the worthy, historical writing, and other commemorative writing. These elements constituted an ethos in which, in interaction with hugely traumatic historical events such as the Imjin War and the Manchu invasions, the culture of commemoration grew.

At the heart of commemoration are dead bodies. Dead bodies in myth and literature, as much as living bodies, are culturally produced and gendered, and they are inscribed with marks of a specific place and time. In this chapter I analyze three fictional narratives that focus on dead bodies. In interpreting the meaning of these works, I find inspiration in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, the idea that “all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup.”15 Therefore when reading these narratives one should be mindful of the intertwining matrix of forces present in them. The symbolic meaning of dead bodies in the political discourse of a particular time must be decoded in several steps. It requires an examination of specific constituents, such as what category of dead bodies is recalled, how and under what circumstances, and the genre and the media in which they are deployed. In the sections that follow, I first discuss the genre of dream journeys in which these narratives are written and then analyze the categories of dead bodies that each narrative recalls and their meanings, intertextualizing with other literary works whenever appropriate. In conclusion I assess the nature of subversion in the texts by examining the relationship between literary production and the culture of commemoration.

Dream Journeys and Subversion

The three narratives are written in a genre known as mongyurok (records of dream journeys). Two narratives, Talch’ŏn mongyurok (Dream journey to Talch’ŏn) by Yun Kyesŏn (1577–1604)¹⁶ and P’isaeng mongyurok (Master P’i’s dream journey),¹⁷ are about dead bodies left by the Imjin War. The third, Kangdo mongyurok (Dream journey to Kanghwa Island), is about the Manchu invasions. Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn is believed to have been written in 1600. The other two are transmitted anonymously and hence their dates are unknown. The emotional rawness of these tales and their intertextuality with other works seem to indicate that they were written soon after the war with which each narrative deals. Both tales about the Imjin War recall dead male bodies, while the tale about the Manchu invasions summons dead female bodies. Although dead bodies were discussed extensively in historical texts during and after the wars, of the known fictional treatments, tales of dream journeys represent them most vividly.

In appearance dream journeys closely resemble chŏn’gi (more commonly known by their Chinese counterpart, chuanqi, often rendered as “strange tales”), but the relative lack of fictionality expressed by a proclivity toward historical events and personages has led scholars to place these narratives into a separate genre distinct from, although closely associated to, chŏn’gi.18 There are about a dozen extant dream journeys.¹⁹ Early dream journeys seem to date from the fifteenth century, which makes them contemporaneous with Kim Sisŭp’s (1435–1493) Kumo sinhwa (New tales of the golden turtle), the earliest extant collection of chŏn’gi in Korea.

Dream journeys are stories written in classical Chinese by elite males for the same audience. In terms of subject matter, linguistic space, as well as the gender and class of both producers and consumers of the genre, they fall within the boundaries of well-established traditions. Yet the nontraditional way in which the three dream journeys deploy the familiar dream trope sets them apart. In Korean literature, just as in Chinese literature,²⁰ dream motifs have occupied a prominent place in many genres. Works centering on dreams range from stories included in Kim Sisŭp’s New Tales of the Golden Turtle to Kim Manjung’s (1637–1692) Kuunmong (A nine-cloud dream), one of the earlier vernacular novels,²¹ and many works influenced by A Nine-Cloud Dream. In these texts the dream is connected to either a Daoist or a Buddhist space, and, as Judith Zeitlin says of Chinese literature, the dream trope is often used to evoke the indistinctiveness and ambiguity between reality and dream.²²

Dream journeys in time of war, however, display different properties. In general, dream journeys can be divided into two groups, based on the mode of narration, marked by the relationship between the dreamer and the dreamed. In the first group, the dreamer-narrator is the observer of the scene unfolding in front of him, and center stage is given to the dead characters whom the dreamer-narrator encounters. In the second, the dreamer-narrator is either a protagonist or a major participant in the unfolding drama, and the dream sequence focuses on the dreamer’s interiority, which is transformed through the experience.²³ All three dream journeys of war are told by a dreamer-observer, and it is this mode of narration that sets these texts apart from the usual preference for a dreamer-protagonist in the established genre. Of previous dream journeys, only one was in the dreamer-observer mode.24 The explosion of stories adopting the dreamer-observer mode in the aftermath of the Imjin War and the Manchu invasions thus amounts to an emergence, if not the invention, of a new genre.²⁵ This phenomenon requires explanation, since there is a conspicuous disjunction between the subject matter and the generic form. In these postwar tales, social and political issues become articulated, unlike in earlier dream narratives that focused on the dreamer’s interiority.

The device of alternating between the real and the fantastic in these dream narratives offers an opportunity to present dead bodies in two modes: as they are—rotting bodies—and as they are being imagined—dead persons who retain subjectivity. This transformation from silent bodies to speaking ghosts provides a satisfying subject for the reader’s imagining. In the beginning of each of the three narratives, the dreamer-observer arrives at a deserted field where he comes upon piles of discarded and unburied bodies, parts of them eaten by wild beasts and predatory birds. In discussing the representation of the authentic in modern China, Prasenjit Duara remarks that the most effective symbols of authenticity are passive ones without agency,²⁶ which seems to apply to seventeenth-century postwar Korea as well. One cannot imagine more authentic symbols of the victimhood of war than these unburied bodies. These fragmented bodies constitute a stark imagery embodying the atrocities of war but also a sharp indictment of the survivors’ neglect of the dead.

The pathos of these anonymous bodies is magnified when they are imagined as individual ghosts with emotion. The dead speaking in their own voices, using an existing or invented genre, is a common literary occurrence, especially in the aftermath of particularly devastating wars. Noting the preponderance of supernatural or ghost characters in postwar Japanese plays, David Goodman explains that ghost characters had disappeared from drama during the Meiji period, when Japan was eager to modernize, but they returned in abundance after World War II because of the national psychic need to deal with atom-bomb victims.²⁷ Similarly, dream journeys seem to have been adapted to create a space for the dead to speak directly of their unrequited grievances. In this sense the device is reminiscent of shamanic ritual, in which suppressed grievances of the dead are heard through the medium of the shaman, and the fear or guilt of the living is sublimated.28

Beyond their strategic suitability for the appeasement of the war dead, the generic properties of dream journeys require further articulation. Can we define them generically, and, if so, can we evaluate whether their common properties are deployed as integral constituents of the narrative to render specific meaning? As a genre these stories defy easy categorization either by traditional Korean definitions or by Western theories of dream literature. I have already mentioned that dream journeys are placed in an ambiguous relationship to chŏn’gi in the development of narratives in Korea. An attempt to place them in a scheme accessible to Western categorization also brings difficulties. If we apply Tzvetan Todorov’s definition, the way in which these narratives straddle the marvelous and the uncanny seems to place them in the “fantastic.”²⁹ Nonetheless, Todorov places the fantastic in opposition to the real and insists that the reader ultimately must make a clear-cut generic distinction.³⁰

Zeitlin points out that in Chinese dream literature the fantastic and the real seem to converge.³¹ In most dream literature produced in Korea, this also seems to apply. In war narratives of dream journeys, however, the center of gravity tilts more toward the real, and the fantastic is used as an alternative space in which social and political issues are reenacted. The two spaces, the real and the fantastic, are clearly demarcated, as they appear sequentially but never simultaneously. In all three narratives the dreamer-observer’s entry into dreamland takes place in a neutral zone, temporally and spatially, between the living and the dead: on a journey, the observer arrives at a lonely field with piles of dead bodies and later dreams of them on a bright moonlit night.³²

The moment of entry into the dream space is usually marked by a sudden strange noise that breaks an eerie quiet. P’adamja of the Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn notes that “without warning, a great angry loud wind swirled around. Ominous and dreadful air filled the field, which was quickly covered with complete darkness. Then he saw at a distance a group of men carrying torches marching toward where he was. There were many of them and they created pandemonium.”33 The Buddhist monk Ch’ŏngho of the Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island hears “a faint noise which sounded like singing, or laughing, or crying. It was indeed singing, laughing, and crying, and all came from a group of women.”³⁴ The moment of the dreamers’ exits is clearly marked by their realization that they have just dreamed. Thus, although the dreamer travels between the real and the fantastic, he returns to the real.

In one way, however, dream journeys seem to share the properties of the fantastic. Rosemary Jackson discusses the subversive function of fantasy literature.³⁵ These narratives utilize this function. The question that they raise about the mound of dead bodies is not merely whether the living have the physical capacity to bury them. The question is a more profound and pointed one: Are the living good enough, in a transcendental, cosmic sense, to offer burial to the dead? Will the dead accept the burial offered to them? Confucian mortuary and funerary practices specify an elaborate set of rules governing who can bury and mourn whom according to a calibrated scale of kin affinity.³⁶

What is called into question in these narratives is not consanguineous or relational tightness but the moral fitness of the living and the agency responsible. The question of the (un)buriability of dead bodies is thus a subversive one; it brings to the fore questions with profoundly moral and political implications.

What these tales place under scrutiny is the hegemonic order, represented in two ways: the Confucian cultural order and the political order of the Chosŏn state / patriarchy, although sometimes the two converge as the established order. In them a question is raised over whether the Confucian order, as a religious or philosophical system, is able to cope with the enormity of postwar trauma. An even more pointed question is the restorability of the moral legitimacy of the Chosŏn state. The dream journeys present as a given the degraded state of the political body, which is represented by the dead bodies that are evoked as they are at the moments of their deaths. In the scene in which P’adamja encounters the dead in Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn, he watches, hiding in terror behind a tree, a long line of people bearing torches marching toward him: “Some had no head, some no right or left arm, some were missing a right or left leg. Some had the middle part of their body but no legs, some had legs but no torso, some had bellies swollen so badly that they could hardly walk, appearing to have drowned. All of them had disheveled hair that covered their faces, and their arms and legs bled profusely.”37

The female ghosts in Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island appear to the monk Ch’ŏngho in a similar manner: one had a yard-long rope dangling from a strangled neck, one had a huge knife stuck in her back, one bled profusely from a sharp object, one had a completely shattered head, and another had a belly swollen from swallowed water.³⁸ Can the political body be cleansed of contamination and regain its moral fiber? Can it be made whole? This will be possible only if these frightening apparitions of the dead can be buried and laid to rest. Thus the (un)buriability of these different groups of dead bodies in these narratives becomes the signifier for hope or despair.

Battle-Unconsummated Bodies

Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn contemplates the war dead who died on the battlefield and consists of two parts. The first part discusses anonymous soldiers who died in the infamous battle by the Talch’ŏn River in Ch’ungju city. Upon hearing of the invasion by the Japanese army, the Korean court had appointed the civil official Sin Ip (1546–1592) as military commander of Ch’ungch’ŏng Province and expressed the hope that he would guard Ch’ungju city and prevent the Japanese Army from marching northward. As recounted in chapter 1, the Korean Army, hastily gathered and inexperienced in the art of war after two hundred years of uninterrupted peace, could offer no resistance to the well-trained and well-equipped Japanese vanguard of seven thousand led by the warrior-general Konishi Yukinaga. The defeat of the Korean Army was swift and total: the entire unit was decimated, and every soldier met a miserable death, including Sin Ip, who took his own life. The Japanese capture of this last defense post for the capital only two weeks after they had landed in the port city of Pusan sent the Korean court fleeing to the northern border.³⁹ This battle, which displayed the inadequacy of the Korean Army, became a signifier of Korea’s humiliation, and Sin Ip became a synonym for the incompetent official.

The question that the narrative raises is how—or whether one is able—to console those soldiers sacrificed in battle. Two issues are involved here. The first is the manner of their death. As soldiers they were prepared to die in battle. They met their deaths, however, with no opportunity to fight. Due to the ineffectual strategies of their commander, their deaths seem to have been in vain, the cause of lasting regret and unending shame. This sentiment is articulated very early. When the ghosts first appear, they sing in chorus: “When we were alive, we were not used properly; what are we now that we are dead? It is our parents who gave us birth; who was it that killed us? Indebted to our sovereign who nurtured us, we do not begrudge the country our dying. Our regret is our commander who spoke too easily and left us in this terrible plight.”40

The second issue is the anonymity of these soldiers. Is there some way to offer remembrance to these faceless, nameless soldiers? The way in which P’adamja’s role is imagined in the endeavor to valorize their lives is interesting. His distinguishing attribute is his ability to write movingly. The ghosts tell him how moved they had been by the poems that he had written and recited for them on the occasion of his passage through this former battlefield a few months previously. The craftsmanship, the beauty, and the emotional power of the poems were such that they could “make even ghosts weep.”⁴¹ Then they request that he listen to their tales of woe and transmit them to the world. What is evoked is a connective power of language that transcends the barrier between the living and the dead: since they were moved by his poems, the living will be moved by his rendering of their fates. P’adamja is chosen as a messenger because he possesses the power of affective language based on his ability to traverse the space between written and spoken language. Hence language is conceived in the form of writing but imagined as spoken word. The poems that he wrote were composed and then vocalized. He is supposed to render into writing the spoken words of these ghosts.

Soon an inquest of Sin Ip ensues. A number of soldiers who died at Talch’ŏn, one by one, come forward to accuse Sin of irresponsibility and bad judgment and to express their bitterness at dying without even the chance of a good fight. Sin’s humbled ghost offers an abject apology. He then states that momentous events such as defeats in battle cannot be attributed solely to human error. The Talch’ŏn defeat should be seen ultimately as Heaven’s will—there is no use blaming anyone for it. Sin’s trial concludes with a statement by a third party to the effect that, since Sin’s misconduct has been acknowledged and since the ultimate outcome of the event depended on fate, no further discussion is in order. This pronouncement is rooted in the concept of a separation between the realm of fate and the realm of human endeavor. That Sin was in error is not in dispute. At the same time, the pronouncement also acknowledges the rationality of his explanation, thus freeing him from total responsibility for the deaths of so many soldiers.42 This separation also makes it easier for the ghosts to accept their inglorious deaths. It acknowledges their bitterness, yet it also reminds them of a cosmic force at work, something beyond human control. Nothing but this vague philosophical view is offered to these soldiers, thus leaving them unburied.

In the second part, the narrative moves from anonymous soldiers’ lamentations to famous war heroes’ presentations of their own lives and deaths. No sooner does the inquest of Sin Ip end than a commotion announces the arrival of twenty-seven historical personages who died somewhere else during the war. Unlike anonymous soldiers who march on foot, these ghosts arrive by various modes of transportation, such as cart and ship, indicative of their status when alive. Indeed, their manner of arrival is reminiscent of Daoist immortals coming to the Kunlun Mountain to attend the celebration hosted by the Queen Mother of the West every three thousand years when the peaches of immortality ripen.⁴³ They take their seats in accordance with their presumed hierarchical status. The identities of these persons are hinted at in the dream but revealed only after P’adamja awakens. This assemblage is seated in two files. In the most honored position, at the head of the file on the right, is Admiral Yi Sunsin (1545–1598), hero of the Imjin War. Ko Kyŏngmyŏng (1533–1592), the leader of the volunteer army, is next at the head of the file on the left.44 The Buddhist monk Yŏnggyu (d. 1592), a militia general, takes the lowest seat, the last on the right-hand file. P’adamja is invited to take the lower seat. Then, beginning from the lowest and moving to the higher end, except the monk general, who speaks last, each of the twenty-seven narrates his life and death and composes a poem.

This long section is devoted to the question of how to assess meaning in life and death. This question is probed from several angles and pursued through constant shifts of perspective, not only from the perspective of one ghost or another, which is explicit, but also from that of the speaker (dead) and the reader (living). Individuals’ narratives offer a forum in which the dead speak directly to the living and are thus empowered to present their own cases. This direct appeal is constructed in full awareness that the living can rescue the dead from being objectified as war victims and endow them with subjectivity and hence meaning.

This section begins with a personal view. Each of the twenty-seven ghosts fought the invading army in the way required of his particular station in life, and as they encompass the whole spectrum of Korean upper-class society, their actions illustrate a variety of modes of courage and integrity imaginable in that society. They display to the reader twenty-seven different ways of facing crises. These are demonstrated by militia leaders such as Ko Kyŏngmyŏng, one of the first private scholars who recruited a volunteer army and whose two sons (present in the lower seats) also died in the same cause; Kim Simin (1554–1592), the magistrate of Chinju, who directed the famous battle of Chinju in which he, leading a small army, was able to mount a successful defense against the attack of an enemy army of much greater size but died by a bullet; Song Sanghyŏn (1551–1592), the magistrate of Tongnae, who valiantly resisted the Japanese until the end and whose dignified demeanor in death so moved the Japanese that they gave him a generous funeral; Kim Yŏn’gwang (1524–1592), who, as a scholar untrained in military arts, offered resistance by refusing to flee and by guarding his home and his books and was captured and killed; and Kim Yŏmul (1548–1592), who, released from prison and ordered to assist Sin Ip, jumped into river along with Sin when the Korean Army suffered an irreversible defeat.

The self-assessments of the lives and deaths of these ghosts also vary widely, but they are constructed on two axes of duty and fate. Ko Kyŏngmyŏng believes that, since he has done his duty, he can accept his fate without regret; his two sons believe that, although they did what they could, they did not accomplish their objective and so are deeply regretful. Kim Ch’ŏnil (1537–1593), another leader of a volunteer army, believes that his failure to accomplish his objective was not for lack of plans and strategies, which he had, but because Heaven did not come to his aid. Cho Hŏn (1544–1592), yet another leader of a volunteer army, attributes his defeat to his underestimation of enemy strength and is deeply ashamed of the humiliation that he has inflicted on his country. A few, including Sim Tae (1546–1592), Kim Yŏn’gwang, and Kim Yŏmul, profess gratitude for the opportunity to express their devotion to their country by dying with integrity.

The story then moves on to consider the question of the military and social implications of individual action. One might be privileged to construct a narrative of one’s own life, but what about the consequences of one’s action on others and on society? Because many prominent persons in responsible positions were seen as having failed to discharge their duties effectively, this question must have loomed large in the postwar period. Sin Ip is a case in point. He is included in the assemblage of twenty-seven men. Despite his presumed error, he is not denied the opportunity to present his own version of what happened—that he had enjoyed great fame, but his one great error at the Talch’ŏn River has earned him lasting ignominy and existence as a lonely ghost. This statement is immediately countered by Yu Kungnyang (d. 1592): heroes do not begrudge their dying, but they do regret dying in vain, and Sin’s misguided strategy caused thousands to die in vain. The question raised is whether these contradictory evaluations can be reconciled and, if so, how.

Sin Ip’s intentions here are juxtaposed to his social responsibility. Sin’s remorse, established in the inquest into his role in the earlier portion of the story, is also considered. In Confucian Korea, in judging one’s “criminal” actions, intentions and remorse, on the one hand, and the social consequences of one’s acts, on the other, constitute elements of equal weight. In assessing Sin, another perspective is introduced: individual accountability in the context of irresistible historical force. A dream journey with the same title as Yun Kyesŏn’s but by Hwang Chungyun (1577–1648), for example, also contemplates Sin’s defeat but attributes it mainly to the deficiencies of the military system of the Chosŏn government. Questions involving Sin’s defeat ultimately become questions about the Korean Army during the war. Why had it been so ineffectual? Why had it suffered so many defeats and casualties? The ambivalent manner in which Yun’s dream journey treats Sin may have been an attempt to consider the complexities involved in judging great events. This qualification, however, is not applied to all failed warriors. The story unqualifiedly condemns Wŏn Kyun (d. 1597), who has emerged in history as the antithesis to Yi Sunsin, a symbol of corrupt opportunism as opposed to the latter’s selfless heroism. The begrudging forgiveness of Sin may have been grounded in a sense of the futility of holding him responsible. Sin, too, is dead. He cannot save the others from their present state of neglect and oblivion.

This question gives rise to the third issue. Can these warriors acquire meaning for their sacrifice and, if so, how, and who can confer it? A recurring refrain is individual valor in the face of insurmountable obstacles. These ghosts are presented as having fought to the death, undeterred by the bleakest of circumstances. Achieved in the absence of government support, their valor seems particularly poignant. As much as individuals are portrayed as heroic, the government is depicted as deficient. Not only did it fail to provide necessary provisions, it even obstructed individual warriors. This failure is exemplified by the way the government treated Admiral Yi Sunsin. His heroic career is well known: his construction of iron turtle ships, his superior defense strategy, the slander by his rivals, his subsequent imprisonment and replacement by Wŏn Kyun, the complete destruction of the Korean Navy under Wŏn and Yi’s resumption of the admiralship, the final battle at Noryang Strait during the retreat of the Japanese Army, and Yi’s death by a bullet, kept secret from his troops until the conclusion of the battle. Some of the elements of this hagiography may have been supplied later, but Yi’s ghost narrates almost the same tale. What is conspicuous is the way in which Yi’s life is presented—all his achievements are attributed to his prescience; all the impediments, including his demotion and the destruction of the entire fleet, are attributed to the shortsightedness of the government.

These considerations culminate in an obvious question: if the state was unable to protect these warriors when they were alive, can it console them in death? An urgent need to render meaning to the dead is summed up in the concluding lines of Admiral Yi Sunsin’s poem: “A soldier died before the battle ended / Can the warrior’s tears be dried?”45 Perhaps they should seek redemption elsewhere. The possibility of an alternative redemption, however, is flatly denied. That the ghost who speaks last is a Buddhist monk induces the reader to anticipate a Buddhist solution, but monk Yŏnggyu’s speech is used for the opposite effect. He does not deny his religion but justifies his life by a patriotic cause. He declares that he was extremely fortunate to have been able to use his Buddhist self to fight for his country, to earn glorious death in battle, and to prove wrong the common myth that monks have no sovereign. He then refutes the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. His poem concludes: “Oh, people! Speak not of reincarnation / Imprisoned in the netherworld, I am unable to release the bitterness.” Hope for a Buddhist salvation is shattered. Admiral Yi Sunsin commends him: “This monk truly endorses us!”⁴⁶

Having come full circle, the story concludes: ultimately the state must confer meaning on war heroes by honoring and commemorating them. It confirms the Confucian worldview that individuals acquire immortality through historical remembrance and that the state is the most authoritative agency for this task. Once this role of the state is affirmed, its deficiency in military planning and government affairs takes on a different meaning. The criticism is not a condemnation of the state but a wish for a stronger and more competent one. This desire is underscored in the parting messages of the dead to the dreamer: the country should shore up two components, the civil and the military, in order to prosper. While civil culture brings brilliance, military prowess protects the country from invasions. The Chosŏn state should not neglect the affairs of national security any longer. The urgent need for reform and strengthening of the military must have been a major component in postwar discourse. Hwang Chungyun’s Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn also stresses the same message. In this sense the dead are dual signifiers: they are reminders of past negligence by the state but also its protective guardians. The dreamer also brings dual messages to the living: the state should remember the war dead, and in so doing it should remember the importance of national security to protect the living.

Upon waking, P’adamja performs a commemorative act. He offers a sacrifice to the dead, accompanied by a eulogy in which each of the twenty-seven men is valorized. It begins with a paean to royal virtue that is so sagacious that it produced twenty-seven scholars who fought the “barbarians,” so that, “though their physical bodies perished, their names shall remain forever.” The ceremony concludes with a lamentation to Heaven: “Why have you sent them to the world and why did you take them back so soon?”47 Through this ritual, these neglected ghosts are transformed into historical heroes etched in national memory, the ultimate honor and the only immortality available to Confucians. That P’adamja, the dreamer and the officiant of the sacrifice, is a royal official signifies that these twenty-seven people who fought separately have been together subsumed into a pantheon of national heroes. Thus a literary war memorial has been constructed for these twenty-seven warriors.

How are we to interpret the two contradictory solutions offered in this text: the construction of a virtual war memorial to the famous warriors versus the vague philosophical commemorations offered to the anonymous dead whose unrequited state is only made more vivid by the contrast to the definitive solution offered to the famous? It may help to compare these fictional solutions with the way in which the state handled these issues in its commemorative activities. The Chosŏn government began to perform official sacrifices to the war dead in the summer of 1593. On September 2, 1593, the Ministry of Rites requested and received royal approval that a sacrifice be performed for those who died defending Chinju city and that the eulogy be dedicated not only to the six who were identified but also to all of the dead whose identities could not be easily verified.48 Eventually an altar, Chŏngch’ungdan, was constructed by the Ch’oksŏk River in Chinju, at which the state offered sacrifices twice a year, spring and autumn, to all those who died in battle during the Imjin War. The central government sent incense and a eulogy on each occasion.⁴⁹ The date of the construction of the altar is unknown, but the sacrifices continued until 1908, when they were discontinued by a royal edict.⁵⁰

One may view the construction of the literary war memorial in this text as a parallel activity converging with that of the state. When these twenty-seven people assume their historical identities in the story, they are presented as the people whom the dreamer has always admired. The story thus does not attempt to conceal the author’s sleight of hand, nor does it contest the list compiled by the state. Although the list is incomplete and excludes some names, all twenty-seven have come down in history as war heroes. Extensive commemorative activities to them were performed by both public and private agencies.

In the treatment of anonymous soldiers, however, the narrative diverges from the actions of the state. Rather than paralleling the state in offering sacrifices to them, it leaves them unburied. This problematizes the issue concerning anonymous soldiers. To my knowledge, before this story was written, the fate of anonymous soldiers had rarely received prominent attention in Korea. This, however, is not unique to Korea. Historically the death of anonymous soldiers, perhaps with the exception of ancient Greece, had been glossed over in most cultures. Two issues are involved in this: class and the problem of individual identity of the soldiers. Both these issues have been resolved in many countries through changing notions of the relationship of the citizen to the state and the technology and practice of individuating the army, but they were resolved only over long periods of time.

We, of course, know of the inscription of individual names on the famous Vietnam Memorial. Only in 1868, however, with the establishment of the cemetery at Gettysburg in which bodies of soldiers were transferred from random, mass graves into individual graves in a collective cemetery, did the first “national” cemetery that recognized the war dead individually appear in the United States. Likewise, only in 1927, when Britain erected at Ypres a memorial arch on which are inscribed the names of each of the dead and the missing at the battle fought there during World War I, were individual names remembered.51 Thomas Laqueur terms this the beginning of the new era of remembrance—“the era of the common soldier’s name or its selfconscious and sacralized oblivion.”⁵²

The seventeenth-century Korean narrative addresses the contradiction between remembrance and anonymity. Perhaps we should view this as belonging to a liminal space between the author’s recognition and his inconclusive search for resolution. The most striking image from the story, however, is that of the long line of anonymous soldiers, each maimed and bleeding, marching on foot under torchlight, the image rendered more powerful and pathetic as they remain unburied.

Anonymous Civilian Bodies

The (un)buriability of the anonymous dead is again the subject of Master P’i’s Dream Journey, but this time the bodies are those of unclaimed civilian war casualties left in the path of the invasion. Supposedly, if implicitly, the bodies of anonymous soldiers were in the domain of the state, but civilian dead belonged to their families. When discarded dead bodies are imagined as members of a family, their anonymity takes on a greater poignancy. They signify the total breakdown of order, the failure of that fundamental requirement of civilized life—that the living should tend to their own dead. Despite the fact that a proper burial for loved ones was a central concern in Confucian Korea, the realities of war, in which so many died far from home in unknown places, did not allow the luxury of fulfilling this duty. Master P’i’s Dream Journey explores alternative systems of thought beyond the hegemonic order for ways to cope with this most basic disruption. It attempts to overcome the anonymity of the dead by imagining them as individuals and to conceptualize the meaning of death in such a manner as to permit the living to find closure.

The opening of Master P’i’s Dream Journey is similar to the opening of Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn. A private scholar, P’i Tal, who is fond of traveling, arrives at a lonely field somewhere in Kyŏngsang Province at twilight and finds moss-covered bodies, partly eaten by vultures, strewn as far as the horizon. Moved by this sight, he composes a poem. A monk appears and informs him of the horrors and atrocities that the people of the region suffered at the hands of the Japanese invaders. He tells P’i that, of thousands upon thousands of dead bodies lying there, only one was claimed and buried: a Master Yi, after ten years of neglect, came from the capital and, after making desultory inquiries concerning the circumstances of his father’s death, selected a body and gave it a generous funeral. The monk, who remains anonymous, plays the role of a Greek chorus exposing the horrors of the war and venality of humanity. He intimates that Master Yi chose the wrong body and that he buried his “father” for ulterior motives. This burial, the only burial in all those years, merely accentuates the terrible state of disorder. P’i then crosses a hill and, in a lonely village, finds lodging. As soon as he falls asleep, he is inducted into the dream world.

In the dream space this self-same burial is transformed into a site on which mounds of anonymous bodies are individuated and resolutions for the forgotten dead are sought. Rather than numerous ghosts, Master P’i’s Dream Journey concentrates on one case. Like the Unknown Soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery to represent all unknown soldiers who died in World War I,53 this one, a random although specific example, represents all the anonymous dead. In this case, Yi Kuksin, the son, indeed chose the body of someone other than his father. The dream takes the form of an inquest over which P’i presides. It is a dispute between the ghost of the father and that of the person who received burial, and it is resolved in several stages. The first stage concerns who has the prior claim. Yi Hŏn, the father, acting as plaintiff, states his case. His lonely ghost, suffering from rain and wind, waited for a long time to be claimed by one of his three sons. His oldest son, Kuksin, has passed the examination and has attained a high official post. Fearing the criticism of others, he decided to give his father a proper burial, but he chose the body of Kim Kŏmson, a petty clerk, instead. Although the son learned of his error, fearful that he might be held in ridicule, he refused to attempt another burial.

Then Kim Kŏmson, with his long, flowing beard, enters and defends himself. Basing his defense on karmic theory, he says that he had been Yi Kuksin’s father in a previous life and that this was why Heaven let Yi Kuksin choose his body. He advises Yi Hŏn to give up his claim and to seek the help of his other sons. P’i sides with Yi Hŏn, declaring that, since Yi fathered and raised his son in this world, it was a terrible mistake to bury someone else. At this point the inquest becomes a debate between Confucian and Buddhist views that is resolved with the triumph of Confucianism. The main function of the Confucian-Buddhist debate, however, does not seem to establish a superior doctrine but to introduce the notion that there are multiple views and that each is relative. In other words, it seems to be saying that if one happens to bury someone other than one’s parent by mistake—a terrible thing for all involved in the context of Confucian society—then perhaps there was some cosmic reason for this.

In the second stage another notion is introduced: that the appearance of fortune and misfortune is deceptive. This emerges through the revelation of Yi Kuksin’s corrupt nature. Both Kim Kŏmson and Yi Hŏn agree that Yi Kuksin is evil. In due course he will commit a crime for which his entire family, including his dead relatives, will be punished. Their bodies will be exhumed and dismembered. Thus Kim Kŏmson’s fortune and Yi Hŏn’s misfortune are not what they appear to be. Indeed, both of them conclude that it is better to remain unclaimed than to be buried by someone like Yi Kuksin. Buried or not, neither wishes to have accepted the offer of burial, and in this sense the story implies their unburiability.

What is the meaning of their unburiability? Does the story suggest that human beings are too venal to offer burial to their own kin? Does Yi Kuksin’s extreme evil represent the condition of humanity?54 The psychological focus of the story does not seem to be the exposure of human weakness but rather the liberation of the dead from the living. This notion is suggested by P’i Tal, whose given name, Tal, means “the one who has attained the Way.” P’i says that after death, nothing really matters. Thus there is nothing wrong with being left in the wilderness, nor is there any real advantage in being properly buried. This consoles Yi Hŏn, but it also comforts Kim Kŏmson for his anticipated dismemberment. The problem of unburiability is resolved by the irrelevance of burial. As the dead are liberated, by extension, the living too are liberated from their guilt. This resolution is redolent of the essentially Daoist concept of the relativeness of views. Moreover the Confucian patriarchy, represented here by a son’s symbolic need to bury and mourn his father, is also rendered irrelevant. Is this, then, a dissent from Confucian order?

Master P’i’s Dream Journey differs in many ways from Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn. The latter views the war in terms of military victory and loss and seeks to define the relationship between the state and its subjects. The former, on the other hand, conceives of war in terms of disruption and destruction of ordinary lives. It recognizes lives lost by confronting the enormity of individual tragedies. It mourns the ordinary by refusing to accept anonymity and massification and by individuating ordinary victims. The main focus of the story is a search for a way to accept the unacceptable and so to heal the wounds of war. In representing Daoist worldviews that were available in the eclectic religious Chosŏn culture of the time, the story seems to affirm that healing is possible, even if the process is long and arduous.

Unburiable Female Bodies

Confucian patriarchy and the Chosŏn state come squarely under attack in Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island. While the Imjin War affected almost all Koreans, those who suffered most during the Manchu invasions were the members of the ruling elite. When news of the approaching Manchu Army reached Korea, the royal court divided into two parties, which took refuge in separate locations. The king’s party went to Namhan Fort while the crown prince’s went to Kanghwa Island. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, Kanghwa Island had been a haven for resisting the invading Mongols, but the seventeenthcentury Manchu Army landed on it with ease. In principle, people believed that capture by or surrender to the “barbarian” enemy was a fate worse than death. Although this applied to men as well as women, when Kanghwa Island fell in early 1637, it was mostly women, especially elite women wishing to avoid physical violation, who took their own lives. The Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island is about these women.

In this story, the dreamer, Ch’ŏngho, is a Sŏn monk. Unlike P’adamja and P’i Tal, who happened to come upon fields with mounds of unburied bodies, he has gone to Kanghwa Island specifically to bury the bodies strewn about. In contrast to Confucian literati whose medium of connection to the world of the dead is their poems, Ch’ŏngho enters it through compassion. In his dream fourteen women of all ages appear—a courtesan and thirteen aristocratic women, two related to the royal family. In a similar manner to the hero warriors of the Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn, the story consists mainly of fourteen individual narrations of lives and the circumstances of deaths. All are proud that they rose courageously to the challenge of defending their honor. This conviction is summed up by the final speaker, the courtesan: “Heaven is moved and people are overwhelmed by the nobility of integrity and the beauty of faithfulness. Though we died, we still live on. How can we regret it!”55

Their pride is juxtaposed against stinging criticism of the male establishment: high officials who were in charge of the central government and the defense of Kanghwa Island, and male members of these women’s families. These officials are named by historical aliases, but the identities of the women and their male relatives are only hinted at and not revealed either in the dream or after Ch’ŏngho awakes. One by one these women expose the cowardice, corruption, and hypocrisy of the officials and of their own husbands, sons, fathers, and fathersin-law. Some fled disguised as servants, and some surrendered without fighting. In one instance a son had urged his mother to take her life long before the island fell, so that the family would receive a red gate from the government and he could receive the privileges due to the son of an exemplary woman.⁵⁶ One woman laments that although she kept her honor, because of her husband’s miserable failure to perform any of his public duties despite his exalted post she received from the Great King of Underworld the verdict of eternal damnation with no hope of ever being reincarnated as a human.⁵⁷

The leitmotif of these women’s narrations is that the members of the male establishment, high officials as well as their relatives, deserted the country at its crucial moment of need to preserve their own lives, thus committing the crime of disloyalty (pulch’ung). The courtesan again contrasts female integrity to male cowardice: “Among ten thousand men there is not one who can be said to be a loyal minister who preserved his integrity. Virtue and faithfulness can be found only in the women who died to preserve them.”58 This provokes loud lamentations from the other women. Just as the monk Yŏnggyu, an outsider, has the final word in Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn, the person making this statement is an outsider, a lowly courtesan. Yŏnggyu, however, affirms the Confucian order, while the courtesan exposes the bankruptcy of the patriarchy.

This utter distrust of the Confucian male is illustrated by the fact that a Sŏn monk rather than a literatus is chosen as the dreamer. Ch’ŏngho’s role, however, is limited to that of custodian of female honor. In the dream he merely witnesses the female soliloquies. P’adamja and P’i Tal communicate with the dead and bear messages from them, but Ch’ŏngho has no interaction with them. After he awakens, the story ends abruptly. There is no mention of burying or commemorating these women. Unlike the other dreamers, he can neither mediate between the living and the dead nor offer meaningful supplication. He can only bear witness to the tragedies of the women. They remain unburied, drenched in blood, bloated with water.

What is notable is that not only is the Confucian patriarchy indicted, but this is also done through unburiable female bodies. Duara points out that in the discourse of modernity in Asia, women’s bodies are often employed as representations of authenticity in support of national patriarchy. He cites as examples historical models of self-sacrificing, frugal women as symbols of economic growth in Meiji Japan and raped women as symbols of the defiled purity of the nation in the discourse of wartime China.⁵⁹ The bodies of these seventeenthcentury Korean women are also evoked as representations of authenticity in that they possess virtue and purity, but, contrary to those of Japanese or Chinese women, they underscore the bankruptcy of patriarchy. That is, the patriarchy has collapsed because, of the two axes of gendered virtue that buttress it—the loyalty (ch’ung) of men and the faithfulness (yŏl) of women—one has given way. In this most political of dream narratives, women are profoundly disturbed at men’s desertions of their places, but the gender barrier prohibits them from appropriating the virtue abandoned by men. These women cannot expand their female faithfulness to include male loyalty.

In Pakssi chŏn (The Tale of Madam Pak), a vernacular story of anonymous authorship written in Korean script and probably dating from the same period, a different solution is offered. Madam Pak, married to Yi Sibaek (1592–1660), a historical personage, crosses the gender boundary. Unlike her husband, who is an ordinary person, she possesses superhuman talent in political acumen and military strategy. She guides her husband in his career at each point. During the Manchu invasions she steps into the male role and helps the royal court weather many crises, all the while playing the role of a virtuous wife. The king confers on Madam Pak the honorary title Ch’ungnyŏl Puin, or “Lady of Loyalty and Faithfulness.”60 This contradicts the historical record. Ch’ungnyŏl is a posthumous title that the Chosŏn state conferred on meritorious men but never women.⁶¹ In this vernacular narrative the living female body is made to represent publicly both male and female virtue. Patriarchy is upheld and the woman nominally stays within it, but as she appropriates male virtue and occupies male space, the male is erased.

In contrast, the gendered division of virtue in Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island leaves the male space intact. Unlike Yi Sibaek, who lives under the administration of his wife in public life, men remain empowered as they retain a monopoly of political space and the virtue associated with it. In this sense, even the disintegration of patriarchy affirms rather than negates male power. It implies that, although men caused its disintegration, men can cause it to recover. One may interpret the use of mutilated female bodies as a clarion call to men. In discussing the role of raped women in the historiography of the 1857 Indian Mutiny against the British, Jenny Sharpe points out that the trope of sexually brutalized English women was used to campaign for the British counterinsurgency and subsequently to justify violence used against mutineers.⁶² Could it be that, in the Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island, the trope of wounded female bodies is used for a similar end: to arouse Korean men into vengeful rage and shame that they have failed to protect their women?

In fact the sharp yet mournful tone of the criticism seems to be more like self-accusation than the reproach of others. True, dead female bodies and living male bodies are dichotomous signifiers: faithfulness and courage versus disloyalty and cowardice, respectively. Also true, the criticism of men is spoken by female voices. The assumption of a female voice by the male authors, however, as in the famous kasa poem “Hymn of Constancy” (Samiin kok) by Chŏng Ch’ŏl (1536–1593),63 was not an uncommon device in Korean literature, especially in political allegory. What the female narrators articulate in this story is purely political, conceived of and expressed in male language: the male failure to protect the country.

Unlike dead bodies in Master P’i’s Dream Journey, whose unburiability breaks the mutual dependence between the dead and the living, the unburiability of these female bodies underscores male responsibility. Their deaths were caused by men’s desertion of virtue; these bodies remain unburied until men resume virtue. These women attain a kind of immortality as stern guardians of conscience. As one woman proclaims, they are dead but they live on; on the contrary, although men live, they are dead. Left in their disheveled, untidy rage, these women wait for their men to awaken to virtue so that they can be laid to rest.

Literary Production and the Hegemonic Order

Literary production in the private sector such as these dream journeys was a major component of the postwar discourse of identity in seventeenth-century Korea. Shaping and being shaped by the construction and evolution of the culture of commemoration, literary production maintained complex relationships with other constituencies, particularly the state. It shared the power of writing with the state and competed with it for audience and influence. As Mark Edward Lewis points out, writing derives its power not merely from the fact that it is able to connect the moment of its inscription to a reader across great distances in time and space but also because the voice within the texts retains potency to command the reader’s attention.64

The Chosŏn state, with its bureaucratic apparatuses, was by far the most active producer of written texts and public pronouncements. From the postwar period, however, literary production in the private sector expanded greatly in both quantity and variety. Personal memoirs of war experiences, histories of war years, and commemorative biographies of war heroes poured out. People began writing prose fiction in vernacular Korean, and poetry and prose fiction in both languages (literary Chinese and vernacular Korean) explored new genres and reshaped the old. Literary culture was no longer the exclusive domain of the upper-class yangban male. New groups of people, men of humble social status, began to assume roles of cultural arbiters, while women emerged as major, although by no means sole, contributors to written culture in Korean.⁶⁵ The readership of fiction and other similarly noncanonical genres also increased.⁶⁶

The increased literary production in the private sector can also be, in part, attributed to a relatively benign government policy. Although the government did have a public position on “correct” texts—and the texts under discussion here were beyond the pale by its standards—and although there were occasional instances of state intrusion into “private” writing, by and large the state refrained from exercising censorship.⁶⁷

The relationship between the various groups of producers and consumers in this multilayered diglossic literary culture seems to have been quite complex. One cannot assume that readership was clearly demarcated by genres and languages. Queen Insŏn’s (1618–1674) letters to her married daughters, for instance, show that they were borrowing one another’s copies of works of fiction, including Shuihuzhuan (Water margin), novels that were usually regarded as being popular among male readers.⁶⁸ Although these novels presumably were versions translated into Korean, this borrowing was an example of the crossing of gender boundaries between reader and product. Within acceptable boundaries, works seem to have circulated widely. Yun Kyesŏn’s Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn, for example, is included in its entirety in the Miscellaneous Record, which includes a wide variety of documents pertaining to the war. Both were written in classical Chinese by private male scholars.

Of various strands of literary production in the private sector, fiction in classical Chinese displayed a particular penchant. It frequently dealt with political issues; certain genres, such as fantasy or satire, took up issues subversive to the dominant order. The state deployed the power of language to perpetuate its vision of the ideal state. In commemorative activities, for example, the state used writing, whether in recorded texts or performance, to conceal the weakness and to proclaim the glory of the state. In the fictional space of fantasy literature, the language highlights what is hidden and problematizes what is glossed over. In the three dream journeys, unburiable bodies are used to represent metaphorically the deficiencies in the hegemonic order.

How to interpret the nature of subversion in these texts, however, presents problems. Each story uses a different category of unburiable body to raise different questions. Can all be interpreted in the frame of hegemony and antihegemony? Master P’i’s Dream Journey, for example, evaluates the Confucian order as a religious or philosophical system. In proposing the unburiability of civilian dead bodies, the story denies the possibility of finding solutions for victims of the Imjin War within the Confucian order and searches for a resolution in alternative systems. One should remember, however, that postwar discourse was conducted in a culture in which several religious or philosophical systems coexisted, if in hierarchy, and many people commonly subscribed to a certain mixture of these systems.69

Jackson articulates a relationship between literary fantasy and the hegemonic order: while the fantastic reveals what is hidden and repressed in culture, “since excursion into disorder can only begin from a base within the dominant cultural order, literary fantasy is a telling index of the limits of that order.”⁷⁰ Because alternative religious systems belonged to the order, although they occupied less prestigious positions in Korean society,⁷¹ it does not seem appropriate to use the dichotomy between hegemony (Confucian order) and antihegemony (other religious systems) to trace the anguish expressed in these narratives. Rather than challenging the Confucian order, Master P’i’s Dream Journey exposes its incompleteness. In this sense, it seems to be more suitable to use as an interpretive frame Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical distinction between the thetic (propositions [theses] that are supposed to be real and rational) and the nonthetic (unreal).72 What the narrative conveys is more nonthetic than antihegemonic in that what is desired is that which is absent in the Confucian order rather than a refutation of what is present within.

Can we apply the Sartrean scheme to interpret the narratives’ positions on the state / patriarchy? Through the two wars the Chosŏn state suffered a terrible erosion of its moral authority. Because the Chosŏn state managed to survive for almost another three hundred years, unlike the political regimes in Japan and China, which were replaced in the seventeenth century, the impact of the wars on the Chosŏn state has hardly been examined. During the Japanese invasions people saw the state as having failed to protect the land and the people. In the first month of the first Japanese invasion, as Sŏnjo and his entourage fled north, they encountered angry mobs and left a trail of towns falling into complete disorder and chaos. Symbols of the royal house also suffered; the severest instance of this was the burning of the Yi Royal Ancestral Temple by the Japanese Army soon after it entered the capital city.⁷³

Sŏnjo suffered an additional humiliation when Chinese generals accused him of disloyalty to the Ming court, after which he had to await their verdict.⁷⁴ Haunted by the example of the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 713–756), who had to abdicate the throne to his son after the An Lushan Rebellion,⁷⁵ King Sŏnjo repeatedly declared his wish to abdicate to his son during his stay in the North and after he returned to Seoul. “I am seriously ill . . . no one in my condition has ever stayed on the throne,” he declared at one point.⁷⁶ Although he stayed, he must have felt compelled to atone publicly. When he returned to Seoul after an absence of eighteen months, he took up residence in a temporary palace outside the city wall.⁷⁷ At the time it looked as though he was staying at a temporary palace because his main palace had been destroyed, but he continued to reside there until he died fifteen years later.

The diminution of the authority of the Chosŏn court that was brought on by the Japanese invasions paled in comparison to what happened to it when it surrendered to the Manchus in 1637. The humiliation inscribed on the royal body of Injo seemed to envelop the whole political body of the Chosŏn state. When the Ming fell in 1644—which Koreans saw as the beginning of “barbarian” domination of the center of civilization—Koreans found a new mission for Korea as the last bastion of Confucian civilization and a new role for the Chosŏn state as its guardian. Despite the Korean hostility and contempt for the “barbarian” Qing, the Chosŏn state was forced to render regular diplomatic rituals that recognized the Qing as its superior. Thus the shame of surrender was endlessly reenacted, never to be forgotten.78 It continued to be a point of deep anguish for the educated population, and it seems to have contributed to the sense of alienation that a large number of intellectuals felt toward the state, as well as to the fragmentation within the scholar community.

The unburiable bodies in Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn and Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island—anonymous soldiers and women who died by their own hands to keep their honor—imagined at their moments of death represent the scarred political body of the Chosŏn state and the bankrupt patriarchy. These two groups of dead were among those included in public commemoration. They were either sacrificed to or given honors. Seeking to fulfill its role as the agency that appeased communal sorrows and thus to repair its scarred image, the state vigorously engaged in these activities. In insisting on the unburiability of these dead, the dream narratives contest the resolution adopted by the state. Presumably composed in different postwar periods, the two narratives embody different “contemporary structures of feeling.”⁷⁹ The unburiable bodies of the anonymous soldiers signify a search for a resolution that remains elusive and thus indicative of a Sartrean sense of the nonthetic. The unburiability of mutilated female bodies underscores a much more urgent crisis of identity. Nevertheless, the criticism directed at the state and the patriarchy seems to have been embedded in an acute sense of humiliation and self-reproach that was pervasive among the male elite after the Korean capitulation to the Manchus.

Unburiable dead bodies are sites of revelation not only of the way in which the postwar discourse of the Imjin War and that of the Manchu invasions differ but also, after the Manchu invasions, of the way in which the two discourses interacted, especially the way in which images of the Imjin War were transformed. The choice of the monk Ch’ŏngho as the dreamer in Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island illustrates how a historical event from one era acquires a different signification in another in the evolving discourse of identity. Ch’ŏngho is a nom de plume of Hyujŏng (1520–1604), the eminent monk who led the monk soldiers during the Imjin War.80 Although he was a principal Buddhist intellectual leader noted as the proponent of the synthetic vision of Buddhism,⁸¹ he is immortalized for his role in defending the country in a time of crisis despite the fact that, as a monk, he was not obliged to fight.⁸² Hyujŏng’s disciple Yujŏng (1544–1610), who fought as effectively as his teacher, had twice conferred with the Japanese general Katō Kiyomasa during the war,⁸³ went to Japan in 1604 as a special royal envoy to negotiate with the newly established Tokugawa shogunate for the repatriation of Korean prisoners of war and brought back 3,500 with him.⁸⁴ By the time of the Manchu invasions Hyujŏng was long since dead, and thus the presence of Ch’ŏngho, who is among the few identified by name in the narrative, is not historically accurate. Nevertheless, it seems to express a wistful longing for the legendary Hyujŏng and perhaps Yujŏng, who successfully fought to defend the country and capably attended to the postwar tasks.

The post-Imjin stories only tentatively suggest the possibility of healing and express ambivalence toward the hegemonic order. In the period after the Manchu invasions, the Imjin War, which ended with no compromise to the integrity of the Chosŏn state, came to be crowned with a nostalgic halo of victory, and the Imjin War heroes seemed to glow with invincibility. Interestingly enough, in narratives written after the Manchu invasions, an Imjin hero outside the hegemonic order such as Ch’ŏngho became the metaphor for nonthetic desires. In this sense Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island, the narrative among the three dream journeys most critical of the state, also expresses a nonthetic rather than antihegemonic sentiment in that it evokes unreal wishes and elusive hopes.

Beyond their specific historical significations, each type of dead body, especially an unburiable body, viewed in terms of the poetics of literary works, expresses a humbling sense of inadequacy that the living feel toward the war dead. This seems to echo Abraham Lincoln’s words: “But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”85 In full cognizance of a similar limit, these tales attempt to immortalize the dead in remembrance or to release them to oblivion. This is done in a culture in which language is imagined as having magical power.

What is distinctive in these narratives is that, however they choose to treat their dead, either with remembrance or oblivion, they refuse to consign the anonymous dead to a collectivity and are determined to treat the unnamed as individuals just as the named are treated. In this sense the true poetics of these tales is their construction of an “imaginary memory,” which Wolfgang Iser saw as “essential to the aesthetic attitude; it is no mere passive registration of events, but [it] actively selects impressions and transforms them.”⁸⁶ In this fictional space they “preserve” and “adapt to the requirements of the imagining, remembering individual.” In constructing an imaginary memory and in imagining the dead, named as well as nameless, as individuals, these narratives create their own autonomous commemoration. Perhaps in this function, literary production in the private sector was most powerfully subversive of the state.

In an attempt to individuate the anonymous dead as well as to mourn and preserve their memory, these narratives, especially Dream Journey to Talch’ŏn and Dream Journey to Kanghwa Island, place the dead in a context we may rightly call “national”: they become the emblems of “a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion” and the embodiment of moral consciousness, which, by the strength of their sacrifices, “demand the abdication of the individual to the advantage of the community.”⁸⁷ The memories of their suffering, on the other hand, unify all of those who remember them, and the living’s grieving becomes “national memories.” In this way the culture of commemoration that began in the sixteenth century, be it state-sponsored or privately initiated, ultimately serves to perpetuate the discourse of the nation unto the modern era, long after the war dead in the Imjin War and the Manchu invasions were laid to rest.