The Tale of the Rabbit#2- Commentary
What did you think when you read the scene where the turtle introduces himself before the dragon king? The turtle says, “My ancestors ate the flesh of the loyal ministers Qu Yuan and Wu Zixu. Their spirits filled my belly, and so I too am a loyal subject.” To modern eyes, it sounds like absurd sophistry, but to audiences in Joseon, this scene was not mere nonsense. It was a savage joke aimed at the bloodline-centered ideology that dominated society at the time.
To understand the structure of that joke, it helps to know something about the status system of the period. As one example, let us think about ilcheon jeokcheon (一賤則賤), one of the systems by which the nobi class was reproduced.
Ilcheon jeokcheon was a terrifying law under which a child became a slave if even one parent was a slave.
From the late Goryeo period through the era of Mongol interference, the population declined and labor became desperately needed. For the ruling class, slaves were assets. That is why this mechanism, which increased the number of slaves as quickly as possible, was preserved into the early Joseon period.
The turtle’s logic is an extreme extension of this bloodline determinism. “Even if our blood was never mixed, I ate their flesh, so my very root is loyal!” This claim acts as a mirror held up to Joseon ideology, mocking its obsession with lineage and blood.
But by the late Joseon period, when The Tale of the Rabbit was widely enjoyed, this once-solid logic of bloodline was beginning to crack under the pressure of cost-benefit calculation. That turning point was the implementation of the nobi jongmo-beop (奴婢從母法), the law that made a child follow the status of the mother.
The more slaves there were, the fewer commoners there were to pay taxes. There were also fewer people available for military service, which weakened national defense. Slaves did not pay taxes. For the sake of governing the state, King Yeongjo pushed through a law declaring that if the mother was a commoner, the child would also be a commoner.
Here a paradox emerges. This was an age in which yesterday’s slave could become today’s commoner, and purchased genealogies, called gongmyeongcheop, were everywhere. Audiences had already experienced for themselves that bloodline was something mutable, something that could be changed at any time by the needs of the state or by money.
Against that historical background, how would the turtle’s desperate flattery have looked? The world was already being reorganized according to cost-benefit calculation and practical ability, yet the turtle was still enthusiastically imitating the logic of the old order, saying, in effect, “My ancestors ate such-and-such, and therefore I am this kind of being.” To the audience, he must have looked like stupidity in its purest form.
The turtle tries to show loyalty by perfectly internalizing the logic of the system, but the audience already knows that the system itself is a fiction, and so this becomes a moment that gives them a sense of intellectual superiority as they laugh at him.
That audience is an essential element of pansori. It is not simply that the singer performs and the audience shouts interjections like “Eolssigu!” or “Good!” The singer reads the audience’s reactions and adjusts the speed and depth of the story in real time. The fact that the original text inserts explanations such as “Zhuge Liang was the legendary military strategist of Shu during China’s Three Kingdoms period, and he is used as a symbol of exceptional wisdom and strategy” is evidence of that. The laughter that burst out in the turtle’s scene, too, could only fully resonate on the basis of a shared historical sensibility among the people gathered there that day, namely, the felt unreality of bloodline logic.
Now let us think about the next episode, the scene in which they somehow produce a perfectly accurate picture of a rabbit they have never seen. The turtle has decided to obtain the rabbit’s liver, so he must go look for a rabbit. But there is a problem: no one in the underwater palace has ever seen a rabbit. An abalone offers information by appealing to an entirely groundless theory of reincarnation, saying, “In my previous life, I was a pheasant.” He then passes along what he claims to remember to a mermaid who is a painter. The mermaid, having understood the result of that language as best she can, forms an image or concept of it in her mind and transfers it into a painting. Strangely enough, the rabbit in the picture is exactly what a real rabbit looks like.
This process is, so to speak, a total mess. There are far too many points at which error might arise. First, the claim “I was a pheasant in a previous life” is not the kind of experience universally shared by all subjects of perception. So regardless of what result it may eventually produce, it functions first as an assumption that everyone agrees not to question. Next, the abalone passes his inner image on to the mermaid. The possible error here is that even if he really had seen a rabbit because he truly was a pheasant in a past life, he might still have described it poorly and conveyed it incorrectly. And even if everything had worked properly up to that point, the mermaid might have lacked the interpretive ability to reconstruct in language the representation that existed in the abalone’s mind, and so might have misunderstood him. Even if, by some very small chance, she understood the abalone’s language correctly, her painting skills might still have been so poor that what emerged was something not at all rabbit-like. And yet after all those assumptions piled on top of assumptions piled on top of assumptions, what comes out in the end is, somehow, a real rabbit picture.
When we think about something, we can divide our thinking into function and principle. From the perspective of principle, attention is focused on correct reasoning and legitimacy. Truth ought to be derived through a transparent and proper process. Seen from that perspective, the abalone’s claim about having been a pheasant in a past life is suspicious information, lacking evidence and impossible to verify. From that point of view, the picture ought to be a fundamentally defective result from the very start.
But the work brazenly presents us with an accurate picture of a rabbit. For some people, what matters is whether it actually works. It is not their main concern whether the abalone really was a pheasant or whether the mermaid understood him properly. In the end, if the turtle takes that picture up onto land and the real rabbit and the picture match, then that entire ridiculous process is justified as a successful black box.
Interestingly enough, the figures in this underwater palace have never seen a rabbit even once. Since not a single one of them has actually seen a rabbit, there is no one who can judge whether the picture is correct or incorrect. Everyone is simply believing what they want to believe. What gives this scene its flavor is the irony layered on top of that ridiculous collective certainty: the picture really does turn out to be right.
At this point, I would like to introduce a passage that sharply reveals the thought of Park Ji-won, one of the important Silhak thinkers of Joseon.
“When Heaven created human beings, it made them into four kinds, and among them the seonbi is the most noble. The seonbi is also called a yangban, and there is nothing more profitable than that. He does not farm, does not trade, and if he merely skims through a few books, at best he passes the higher civil service examination, and at worst he is guaranteed at least the rank of jinsa. ... First he drags over the neighbor’s cow and makes it plow his field, then he drags over the villagers and makes them weed it. Who would dare look down on me? And if anyone should do so, even if I were to pour lye into his nose, seize him by his topknot, swing him around, and slap his face, he would not dare resent me.”
From Park Ji-won, Yangbanjeon
This ferocious satire of Park Ji-won shares much with the episodes in The Tale of the Rabbit.
In truth, the original purpose of Neo-Confucianism was not bad at all. It was meant to build an elaborate system through which one could achieve moral completion by cultivating oneself and then govern the world peacefully on the basis of that moral character. To value orthodoxy and correct principle was a powerful tool for maintaining social order.
But over time, this system was corrupted. As with the yangban Park Ji-won describes, all that remained was the representational shell of the “scholar,” while the substance disappeared, leaving only strained logic and violence for the sake of preserving privilege. The attitude that says, “Because I am a yangban, my word is law,” calls to mind the abalone’s logic when he says, “Because I was a pheasant in a past life, my memory is therefore the rabbit.”
In a situation where Neo-Confucianism had collapsed into suffocating verbal wrangling and empty argument, Silhak emerged with tremendous momentum.
Silhak thinkers say this: “No matter how noble the process pretends to be, what use is it if it starves the people and sickens the country?” This scene from The Tale of the Rabbit shows exactly that point through satire and humor in a way that even people without extensive formal education could grasp. The abalone’s information is absurd, and the mermaid’s understanding is doubtful, but the “rabbit picture” they produce nonetheless becomes the only practical tool capable of curing the king’s illness.
In the end, this picture mocks the old logic of an earlier age, the logic that clung to stale pretense and “poured lye into people’s noses,” and shows how “true knowledge is that which helps the world, even if its origin is lowly.”
English-speaking viewers may have found the scene where the turtle meets the pond turtle somewhat contrived. But Korea has a distinctive way of confirming identity. Koreans do not simply ask for a surname when they first meet. They ask, “Which Kim clan are you from?” referring to one’s bon-gwan, or “Which branch and which generation of the lineage are you from?” Bloodline in Korea is a vast network that begins with an ancestral founder from hundreds of years ago and spreads across the country. People may forget about this network in everyday life, but the moment they confirm that they share the same root in a strange place, a powerful feeling of “we-ness” can suddenly erupt. In the past, a family that lost out in a power struggle might be sent into exile, or one branch might settle elsewhere when life grew difficult. Even so, when they meet again, they still know enough to identify the place from which that branch came, the address, so to speak, by which they can confirm it.
The work places these two scenes side by side in a very clever way. In one, bloodline is used instrumentally, as in, “My ancestors ate the flesh of loyal ministers, and therefore I too am loyal.” In the other, that very same bloodline causes someone to open his heart and offer help to a total stranger. The work places the two together and leaves the judgment to the audience.
The work seems to show, through the gathering of the animals in the mountain, how a failing system actually operates. The purpose of the gathering is to solve a crisis, but what actually happens is that they decide who should sit in the highest seat, confirm who possesses how much dignity and face, and identify the internal victims whose resources can be taken away. The tiger, who bears the responsibility of protecting the members of the group, outwardly adopts a fair and principled stance, but in the face of the new violence represented by human beings and firearms, he cannot produce any real solution. The work reveals how ridiculous authority becomes once it has lost all practical effectiveness.
The passage in which the raccoon dog condemns the hunting dogs is also interesting. The hunting dogs have the same outward form as beasts, yet they have been incorporated into the order of human beings and now pursue their own kind. And yet the animals fear the hunters themselves while pouring out their anger only on the hunters’ tools, the dogs. This shows the tragedy of people at the bottom coming to hate one another because they cannot solve the real problem.
The fox who appears here is, so to speak, a false pragmatist. He steps forward as though he is going to solve the crisis, but what his action actually amounts to is nothing more than squeezing the blood out of the weak in order to fill the belly of the strong. It is not pragmatism at all, but brutal extraction carried out in the name of solving a shared crisis.
The bear alone speaks to the heart of the matter, but he changes nothing, and instead only earns the fox’s resentment. Saying what is right in a public forum and actually moving the order of things are completely different matters. The bear is a being with morality but without strategy.
What the turtle does in this exhibition of collective incompetence is, on the contrary, rather clever. He lies flat, says nothing, and watches how the system actually works. Then, when he approaches the rabbit, he does not address him as he really is, but first wraps him in the kind of social representation he would like to hear.
Was the turtle’s strategy the right one? How will the rabbit respond in the next part?