In December 1704 in the 30th year during King Sukjong’s reign, snow fell after a long winter drought. Inspired by the snowfall, Hong Gye-young (洪啓英, 1687∼1705), under the pen name Gwansujae (觀水齋), compos ed a piece of a gasa-style poem “Huiseol (喜雪, Auspicious Snow).” This work, consisting of 322 verses, celebrates the beauty of the snowy landscape and expresses the author’s desire to transcend the fetters of illness, death, and officialdom and ultimately harmonize with the law of nature.
The key ideas of this paper, which has examined the narrative structures and the narrative strategies of “Huiseol,” are as follows. First, this study has explored the narrative structures of “Huiseol” by dividing it into public stories and personal ones according to the narrative perspectives. Thus, this paper has stated that the public stories from the first to third paragraphs were dealt with from the perspective of a public servant. The public stories include: the restoration of the seasonal order following the snowfall that occurred after the second ritual for calling snow (再次祈雪祭) in 1704 (the first main story) and the will of the king to promote the livelihood of the people and benevolent governance (活民仁政) and the restoration of the state order (the second main story). The personal stories from the first paragraph to the fifth one reflected on his ‘ailing body’ and his pursuit of absolute freedom (the main story) as well as on the renunciation of eosu ildang (魚水一堂, the ideal companionship of the king and a liege) and an emphasis on the idea that “intimacy should exist between father and son (父子有親)” as the supporting story.
Second, this article has revealed the narrative strategies of “Huiseol” by dividing it into restoring the disrupted world around the self to its proper state and the spatial and visual movement toward becoming a ‘zhiren (至人, an ideal Daoist figure).’ As a result, this article has noted that “Huiseol” concludes its public story in the thrid paragraph and its personal story in the fifth paragraph. This structure suggests that the speaker first desires the restoration of the seasonal order and national stability, and then shifts focus to his personal struggle with illness and his wish for recovery. And this article has examined how the personal stories unfold through the movement of space and the gaze. Through these movements, the speaker escapes from the fixed identity of being ‘an ailing body’ and ultimately aspires to become ‘a zhiren.’ In summary, “Huiseol,” which contains public and personal stories, expresses the author’s hope for the resolution of both his own struggles and those of the world around him, inspired by the auspicious snowfall after a prolonged winter drought. Furthermore, it has explored the vision of ‘becoming a zhiren’ by transcending the fixed identity of being a ‘sufferer’ and delving into the essence of existence. In this sense, “Huiseol” can be understood as both a illness narrative and a story of self-recovery, reflecting the author’s struggle with a chronic skin disease (changjeung, 瘡症).