Making the marginal figures literary protagonists: Writing as the most effective social critique in the hands of Bak Jiwon

Abstract

Bak Jiwon is best known as a leader in the “practical studies” (Silhak) movement in 18th century Korea which advocated for the careful application of modern science and technology to contemporary issues and a more systematic understanding of the outside world. Bak played a critical role in raising awareness about the outside world within a rather insular Korea. Yet much of his most profound writing can be found, not in his academic treatises, but rather in a series of ten short stories he wrote in literary Chinese which offer a counterpoint to the concrete discussion of policy and technology that makes up most of work. It is in his literary writings, his novels, that Bak most clearly articulates his concern for the lives of ordinary people and describes in depth the lives, and the concerns, of beggars, illiterate farmers, street performers and lower-ranking widows. These stories make visible the ordinary, tragic and at times comic experiences of quotidian life and offer some of the most vivid writing on Korea in the 18th century to be found anywhere. The paper argues that Bak Jiwon employed this approach of writing in the most abstruse literary Chinese about the lives of ordinary people as a tool for making the experience of ordinary people visible to intellectuals of his age. His writings offered the possibility that the educated would see the world of ordinary citizens, and even the wretched poor that carried on beyond the walls of their homes. As such, these novels were a significant experiment for the late eighteenth century, and a hint of the growing concern with a realist portrayal of institutions and human experience in the Silhak movement. This development in literature was a critical first sprout of a new awareness of the potential of literature in the late Joseon period which adumbrated the rise of realism in the twentieth century as part of a broad reevaluation of the Korean tradition.