In Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Changguk

Chapter six

150 ChaPTeR SIx Stories and Themes what Is Ch’anggŭk about? In surveying the history of ch’anggŭk, I have been as much concerned with the discourses that have constructed that history as I have with the formation process of ch’anggŭk’s repertory and performance conventions. Because the question of ch’anggŭk’s traditionality has been so much bound up with particular views of its origins and history, historical discourses have been as crucial as the form and content of ch’anggŭk to the search for Korean traditional opera. I now turn from a diachronic to a synchronic approach, examining how the search is carried on through the performance practices of (more or less) contemporary ch’anggŭk as I observed them during the period of my research from 1995 to 2008. In so doing, I shift the emphasis from interpreting discourses about ch’anggŭk to interpreting ch’anggŭk itself as a discourse. The notion that a genre is or includes a discourse is probably in sufficiently wide circulation by now that it need not be argued from first principles here. In the context of film studies, for instance, Rick Altman has presented a powerful argument that genres are “ideological constructs masquerading as neutral categories,” that they “must no longer be considered solely as impersonal agents of narrative organization, but as discursive acts” (1989, 5). By making a film according to the conventions of an established genre (the argument goes), Hollywood signals to its audience that the film is to be interpreted in relation to a particular semiotic code and set of “intertexts ” (other films of the same genre), thus narrowing the range of meanings that might be found in it. In other words, a genre performs the discursive function of “disambiguation,” helping the producer of the discourse to control how it will be interpreted. If the same story is presented in two different genres (as with David Lean’s 1948 drama Oliver Twist and Carol Reed’s 1968 musical Oliver!), it is likely to be interpreted differently, because each genre tends to favor certain meanings and exclude others. (Consider, for instance, our reaction to the villain Fagin in the two films.) Not every film is considered a “genre film” in the way that, say, a western or a musical usually is; and similarly in live theater, it can be argued that Stories and Themes 151 ch’anggŭk productions, for all their unsettled performance conventions and ephemeral repertory, are more “generic” in Altman’s sense than some other forms of drama. An experienced audience member attending a random performance of the NCCK without first having found out what story was to be performed would have a better idea of what to expect (even if it turned out to be a story from outside the p’ansori repertory) than someone making the same experiment with the National Drama Company of Korea. This, I will argue, is because contemporary ch’anggŭk, despite its instability in other respects, remains quite consistent at the level of discourse: its generic identity gives consistent signals as to how it is to be interpreted and tends to favor similar kinds of meanings for different ch’anggŭk productions. In this chapter I aim to uncover some of these signals and meanings by analyzing the stories and themes of the ch’anggŭk repertory and the significance of their presentation in ch’anggŭk form. The question “What is ch’anggŭk about?” is thus to be answered at two distinct levels. At the surface level, it can be answered by summarizing the plots of ch’anggŭk operas: for instance, the Ch’unhyang story is about a woman who remains faithful to her absent husband in the face of brutal pressure to serve another man. Without answering the question at this surface level, we cannot attempt any other kind of answer, and for that reason, this chapter does include a number of synopses. By itself, however, a surface-level answer is merely a description: it does not explain anything. If we would like to know why certain types of subjects tend to appear regularly in ch’anggŭk operas or how these consistent subjects help constitute ch’anggŭk as a genre, we must try to answer the question at a deeper level. I call this level “deeper” because it requires the inference of elements that cannot be observed on the “surface” of a ch’anggŭk...