MCLC: Nikil Saval on Mo Yan (3,4)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: yomi braester <yomi at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Nikil Saval on Mo Yan (3)
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Lucas Klein mentions that "the first full-length novels by Faulkner and
García Márquez to appear in Chinese translation were published in 1984."
However, limited circulation (neibu) translations had been available
earlier. I would be grateful if list members could provide information on
titles and publication dates of such neibu translations.

Yomi Braester, University of Washington

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From: Lupke, Christopher <lupke at wsu.edu>
Subject: Nikil Saval on Mo Yan (4)

Nikil's review is better than some that have come down the pike in recent
months, but I don't agree with his reading of <Big Breasts, Wide Hips>.
Like most, it totally ignores the use of language. Since it is apparent
that colleagues overlooked my review in ALTA Journal from several years
ago, I re-post it here.

Best,
Christopher Lupke

Source: Translation Review 70, 1 (2005): 70-72.

Mo Yan, Big Breasts and Wide Hips.  New York:  Arcade Publishing, 2004.
532 + xiv pages.  $24.95 cloth.
Reviewer Christopher Lupke

	The fiction writer Mo Yan (original name Guan Moye), born and raised in a
peasant family in rural Shandong Province, has emerged over a twenty-year
period of steadily producing blockbuster novels and dozens of short
stories as a literary giant of the post-Mao period in China and a
perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in literature.  Having first
achieved international acclaim for his classic work Red Sorghum, adapted
for the screen as Zhang Yimou’s breakout film of the same title, Mo Yan
developed a reputation as a writer of “seeking roots” (xun gen) literature
– literature from the 1980s that sought to re-establish the intellectual’s
traditional position of privilege as the purveyor of China’s image in
writing by peeling back the layers of ideology-laden rhetoric and
excavating China's most fundamental cultural traits – a term attributed to
Mo, Han Shaogong, Wang Anyi and a few other of his contemporaries.  The
style of his writing could perhaps be crystallized by the term “uncanny
purity.”  The subject matter is unequivocally brutal and bizarre but the
style of writing is hypnotically simple and staid.  Although the
characters in his fiction can in a certain sense be said to be heroic, the
heroism they exhibit is a far cry from the Maoist hagiography that had
dominated Chinese narrative (from mainland China) for close to half a
century.  The unusual sensuality that characterizes his depictions of
nature and bleed into the unconventional lifestyles of his characters, the
reconceptualization of peasant reality for a new audience both in China
and abroad, and the relentless pursuit of the essence of national culture
residing within the interior reaches of rural China has successfully
slammed shut the door on any prayer that establishment party intellectuals
harbored to revive the idealism of Maoist literary tenets.

	This latest translation of a Mo Yan epic by veteran translator Howard
Goldblatt represents the most recent incarnation into English of the Mo
Yan style – a vernacular described by many as “magic realism” or “magical
realism,” a mixture of the bizarre and commonplace in the manner of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Goldblatt, the preeminent translator of modern
Chinese fiction with scores of translations to his record, is not someone
who has come to Mo Yan by accident.  Mo Yan is clearly one of his favorite
writers, a writer to whom he has devoted a great deal of his energy in the
last fifteen years.  Goldblatt’s own Chinese training as well as his
literary predilections and personal leanings are ideally suited to Mo
Yan’s inimitable style.  Goldblatt is highly skilled in Chinese and widely
read in world literature of all stripes, but he is himself a person of the
senses, a liver of life with working class origins and solid training in
traditional and modern Chinese literature who possesses impeccable
linguistic skills.  Such training, experience and interests are crucial in
order to have at one’s disposal the range of lexical facility and
flexibility necessary to do justice to Mo Yan’s idiosyncratic prose.
Goldblatt’s style can be at once elegant and erudite while at the same
time visceral and almost grotesque.  Big Breasts and Wide Hips probably
posed as much of a challenge to him as any Chinese work, since through it
Mo Yan has worked to perfect his interesting hybrid of matter-of-fact
expression combined with some of the most vivid and unimaginable events to
meet the page in twentieth century Chinese fiction.

	Big Breasts and Wide Hips tells the story of Shangguan Jintong (whose
given name could be translated something like "golden boy"), a sometimes
endearing sometimes infuriating scion of the Shangguan clan, a male child
born as a twin with sister Yunü after seven sisters before them, but, as
with the previous seven, born illegitimately, as his ostensible real
father was infertile.  While not exactly structured in a chronological
fashion, the overall structure of the work follows a general historical
trajectory through the twentieth century.  Yet this structure is
complicated by the fact that it was radically edited and slimmed down for
translation at the suggestion of the translator.  The action of the novel
basically follows the life of the antihero protagonist Jintong with a
chapter on “origins” added explaining how his parents originally were
married.  Jintong is a malformed or more precisely not fully formed male
growing up (or at least getting older) in a world more rough and dangerous
than all of those among us except perhaps holocaust survivors, refugees
from ethnic cleansing or great disaster, and veterans of wars can fully
identify.  His life parallels the historical development of modern China
from the Boxer Rebellion (before his birth), through the War of
Resistance, the land reform movement and Great Leap Forward, the Cultural
Revolution, and finally the post-Mao period of economic reforms and market
economy.

	The story of Jintong reveals crucial information about the author Mo
Yan’s style of writing as well as the manner in which he depicts China.
The expansiveness of the narrative, which in its essence is a work of
monumental proportions and technique by a writer of great significance,
also exemplifies a serious problem in the Chinese literary world today,
that of the lack of editorial discipline among writers.  What China lacks
in the literary world is any sense of a healthy relationship with editors
who can assist authors in trimming and shaping, and by extension
improving, their literary expression.  There are two very damaging
attitudes pervasive among Chinese writers:  one, as to the size of a work,
the bigger (or longer) the better; two, suggestions that one’s work needs
editing tend to be taken as an insult and veiled hint that one’s work is
not worthy of merit.  As a result, many works that could truly be great
end up only being very good.  Masterpieces are often flawed masterpieces.
It is for this reason that Goldblatt’s interactions with the author, which
could easily have been construed as intrusive, have been essential to
producing a book that at 500 plus pages in translation is already taxing
the attention span of all but the most dedicated reader.  That Goldblatt
convinced Mo Yan to reorganize the work and dramatically shorten it saved
the novel from oblivion, in my opinion.  The author likely shares this
opinion as editions subsequent to the baggy monster originally published
in 1995 have been dramatically curtailed.  Even so, the book is still a
tome, but it is a tome one now can read with great pleasure.

	The other important broad trait of the novel is its critical attitude
toward Chinese culture.  Jintong, as much a figure of pathos as anything
else, is in a way a tool of Mo Yan’s cultural critique.  Jintong is a
mamophile, unremittingly obsessed with women’s breasts and for the milk
they produce that sustains his life.  Jintong grows up to be a man-child
never fully weaned from the human nipple (although for many pages in the
central portions of the work he drags along with him a goat from which he
receives his suckle).  What on the surface might seem to be a ridiculous
cathexis to the mother figure is in fact an allegory for the dependencies
that traditional Chinese culture fosters, for it has been a trend dating
back to Lu Xun to use such inflammatory images as cannibalism and
parasitic behavior to illustrate the ethical bankruptcy of Chinese culture
– considered feudalistic – in the face of the modern cultural prowess of
the West, characterized by individualism over relational subjectivity,
equality over rigid hierarchy, and science over superstition.  Mo Yan is
not so much an innovator in this regard as he is the latest in a line of
writers from the May Fourth through 1930s writers such as Wu Zuxiang and
including writers from Taiwan such as Bai Xianyong, Wang Wenxing, Wang
Zhenhe and Li Ang to subject China to such a rigorous critique in his
writing.  In other words, Big Breasts could be read as much as allegory
and satire as it could be read as a hyper-realistic or magical realist
account of peasant atrocity through the wars and revolutions that were
encountered in the countryside throughout the twentieth century.  Indeed,
the satire in the novel centers on the critique of the Chinese notion of
“filiality,” the duty that one perpetuate the family line by producing
sons.  This sense of duty is so absolute that Jintong’s mother (referred
to throughout as Mother), faced with the incontrovertible fact that her
husband is sterile, is forced to have sexual relations with other men in
order to produce an heir, is forced in other words to transgress on one
taboo in order to avoid another.  As the birth of daughters mounts,
however, Mother’s in-laws put increasingly greater pressure on her.  Only
the birth of the son brings her the sense of fulfillment that in
traditional China befits a deserving mother.  Ironically, this
predominantly female family of Mother and eight sisters in which Jintong
grows up is a direct result of the compulsion to beget sons.  Of course,
the father could have taken concubines, but since he is sterile that would
not have done much good either.  The ultimate irony is that in his entire
life Jintong never really develops any sort of mature relationship with a
woman and, most important for the purposes of the cultural logic of
filiality, never himself produces a son.  That Jintong never grows up, is
never properly weaned, then, is emblematic of the modern intellectual
critique in China that traditional Chinese culture is incapable of
successfully producing fully individuated subjects.

	Much also has been made of Mo Yan’s “experimental” use of language.
There is no question that his mixture of a soothing, idyllic style with
violent and incredible imagery is distinctive.  Big Breasts is narrated
primarily with a mixture of first person (in the voice of Jintong) and a
roving third person point of view which can insinuate itself into the
perspective of other characters from time to time.  In addition, many very
strange things, such as the appearance of supernatural characters (bird
people, fox people, animals that talk, and so on) do occur in his works,
including this one.  Nevertheless, I would suggest that his writing is not
as radical as many have argued, which is not to say it is not creative and
unique.  While the structure of the narrative could be described at points
as style indirect libre, it is far less challenging than that of James
Joyce or even William Faulkner.  This may in part be due to the times:  as
readers, we have grown accustomed to such flourishes some eighty to ninety
years after their initial heyday.  It is important to bear in mind that Mo
Yan himself views his own style as a form of realism.  The frequent
comparisons to magical realism notwithstanding, Mo Yan’s work does bear
some resemblances to an author as creative, dynamic and prolific as
Faulkner.  Over the years of reading Mo Yan’s dissections of the quite
real peasant community that Northern Gaomi Township is, in Shandong, one
is at times reminded of the fictional yet no less palpable rural stage of
Faulkner:  Yoknapatawpha County, supposedly somewhere in the bayou country
of Mississippi.  Mo Yan etches the visual scheme of rivers and sorghum
fields not with a loving nostalgia of a lost childhood home but with a
dispassionate, near-serene tone.  The geography that he lays out for the
reader makes it unnecessary for one to visit the location.  It both is
unique, mapped in exquisite detail, and yet typifying (perhaps archetypal)
of all peasant existence in China.  There is some similarity with the
world that Faulkner portrays, for within the cultural ticks and
peculiarities of local life in the south lie the trials and betrayals that
this titan of American literature would suggest epitomize the human
condition writ large.  Faulkner’s exploration of interior consciousness,
mirrored in his alchemizing of the English sentence into something only
rivaled by Joyce, is different from the intellectual peregrinations and
syntactic structures of Mo Yan.  This might be because, unlike Modernists
such as Faulkner who see the human condition as a prison of interior
consciousness, Mo Yan sees the imprisonment of his characters as just the
reverse – a banishment from individual subjectivity and full-blown
self-reflection.

	I therefore believe there is something more visibly radical in the
structure of Faulkner's prose when compared to that of Mo Yan.  Another,
perhaps seemingly controversial, affinity is that between Mo Yan and
Dickens.  Admittedly, Mo Yan does not write of the urban landscape in the
way Dickens has established London as the hallmark of his discursive
geography.  There is still an interesting parallel with the way that in
Big Breasts the dizzying cast of characters is at least made manageable by
the fact that each of the major characters returns at a subsequent stage
of the novel (some repeatedly) and is dealt with in one fashion or
another.  As Mo Yan's characters make their reentry into Big Breasts and
re-acquaintance with the protagonist, one is reminded of such characters
in David Copperfield as Uriah Heap or Mr. Micawber, who may at any time
lurk behind the next corner with proclamations that their luck is now
finally about to improve.  The recycling of the characters is an absolute
imperative if this demanding text is not to totally slip into an
unfathomable chaos.  It provides a sort of scaffolding for the reader and
a gauge for the development of the story.  What Mo Yan’s works contain, in
contrast to Dickens, is the utter violence and viciousness that was part
and parcel of Chinese history for most of the twentieth century.  This
subject matter may be somewhat repellent to the Western reader; however,
it is necessary that it is written this way and important that we
acknowledge it.  This was the reality of China in modern times.  Would
anyone suggest we would not read of the Jewish holocaust in Europe because
it was too violent or that it exceeds in gruesomeness the limits of our
imagination or our stomachs?  It may seem unimaginable, but it did occur.
The Chinese historical experience from the Taiping Rebellion through the
Cultural Revolution was as violent as that in any nation, and it demands
depiction in literature.  The remarkable quality of this Chinese author is
the way, much as in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, he chooses as his
protagonists characters in their youth who do not have the benefit of
perspective, characters for whom the call to describe things in a sober
and placid manner, as if this were the way things should be because they
have never experienced anything else, seems perfectly natural.  This is
why the utterly bare and occasionally somnolent tone of the narrative at
odds with the spectacular circumstances that it depicts is the trademark
of Mo Yan the writer.