The Story of Hong Gildong

"Yes. I’m recommending this, and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s translation of The Nine Cloud Dream , not only because these are the two most famous classic novels from the Joseon Dynasty, but also because they are two completely different types – and I had to write a whole book arguing this. Through most of the Joseon Dynasty, which was over 500 years, the literacy rate was very low, well below 10%. It was really exclusive to the yangban aristocracy, and some secondary-class people, non-aristocratic elites. For the vast majority of people who were peasants and artisans and merchants, there was no need for it. So all the literature that we get from the Joseon dynasty was written by the yangban aristocracy – including my next choice, The Nine Cloud Dream. They have a very specific way of writing. They revere Chinese literature, and in terms of literary style and format, they are imitating them, although I would argue that you can find unique elements as well. But then something really interesting happened in the 18th century, which in Korea was a very special time period: a time of prolonged peace and prosperity, for a number of reasons, one of which is that there were two surprisingly good, able and caring kings. So what we see, especially in the second half of the 18th century, is a rather surprising level of social mobility, especially among the upper section of the commoners. All of a sudden they had leisure time, and were able to teach themselves and their children how to read and write. For the first time in Korean history, you got commoners writing novels for commoner readership in the native phonetic script, rather than Chinese characters. To me, this is fascinating. My main training as a historian was in Europe, and a very similar thing was going on in 18th-century England, which created the modern realist novel – the expansion of the middle class and commerce and so on. All of a sudden people like Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding could actually make a living just by writing fiction . The literature written by commoners is very different from the kind of fiction that was written by the aristocracy – less didactic, not as moralistic, and way more sensationalist. If you were a yangban writer, you did not write literature for profit, because there were just not enough literate people for you to be able to make money. You wrote poetry, you wrote fiction, you wrote history and you wrote philosophical essays for reputation, to demonstrate your prowess as a literary man. But these novels written by commoners were definitely for profit, and as a result, they can be much more salacious and sensationalist – and from a modern perspective, way more fun. Yes. So, The Story of Hong Gildong … it’s based on a real bandit who caused a lot of trouble in the kingdom. According to royal records, he was captured in the year 1500. We don’t know what happened after that, and there’s a lot of reason to suppose that he was really a pretty bad guy who caused a lot of damage, but by the time we get to the 19th century and this anonymous writer decided to write a story about him… I kind of hate doing this, but the easiest way to explain the novel is that he becomes the Korean Robin Hood. He’s a righteous bandit who keeps humiliating authority figures like the police, and even tricks the king a couple of times. It’s not exactly a radical subversive work. But I really do believe that there’s an element of catharsis for the commoner writer and commoner readers, reading about this guy causing chaos in the kingdom and repeatedly beating authority figures. As I said, it’s not that radical, because at the end Hong Gildong becomes a king of his own kingdom. A lot of Koreans who have never read this novel think that he’s some kind of proto-socialist communist rebel, but he’s not. That tells me that they never actually read the book."