MCLC: the diseased language of Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: the diseased language of Mo Yan
***********************************************************

I don't agree with Ana Sun's essay, posted below. She reminds me of
another female critic who brought out a book in 1991 or 1992. It was
widely used in US college courses on contemporary Chinese literature. That
book dismissed Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Mo Yan and everybody else who was
famous at the time. They were all misogynists, and only Can Xue, who
happens to be a women, was a great writer. At least that book took a
detailed look into the works discussed. What this article talks about at
length is politics, ideology, convictions. Not language. Maybe I'm very
ignorant, but I don't know James Woods. I do know the works of Salman
Rushdie. Not all his novels may be equally great. But Midnight's Children,
Shame and The Satanic Verses have shaped my understanding of art and
relevance in any time or place. Just like reading Bai Juyi and other
socially conscious Tang-Dynasty poets. Now Mo Yan and Yu Hua are very
different in how they sound, in their tone and rhythm, how they care about
their characters. The Mao-ti concern is a very real concern that came up
in the second half of the 1980s. Anna Sun's use of this concern is
superficial. How can she know exactly about the reading experiences of Mo
Yan and other writers who grew up in China in the 1960s and 1970s? There
was a great thirst for literature, for spiritual food.

Balzac and the Little Seamstress is a famous illustration of that thirst,
although from a male perspective. The poetic language of Mang Ke and Duo
Duo is remarkable for their creative inventions, which are sometimes not
easily accessible, if you come wit a heavy baggage of ideology, like the
critics who coined the word Menglong shi (Obscure, or Misty Poetry), and
also like Stephen Owen and Anna Sun. Bei Dao has written about the
decisive influence of Dai Wangshu on the literary underground of the 1960s
and 1970s, and thus on the Misty Poet's generation. Dai Wangshu's
translations of Lorca and others in the 1930s, and later translations that
were suppressed less than original writing was curtailed under Mao and his
often very cultured henchmen. Unfortunately, Kang Sheng and Mao himself
etc. had exactly the education Anna Sun talks about, but it didn't help
them to shape their behaviour in light of the human condition. If Stephen
Owen or Anna Sun would be able to read Yu Hua or Duo Duo, Bei Dao and
their contemporaries carefully with an open mind, they would be able to
really talk about the language of all these authors and works in detail,
instead of just repeating their own ideology ad nauseam. Mo Yan's
political behaviour may be problematic. I certainly welcome the debate
about Mo Yan's Nobel award, especially in China. There is no real debate
in China, except in some blogs where it doesn't matter. At least that's
how the powers that be want to keep it. So any big international stuff
that causes debate in China is a rare chance. On the other hand, Anna
Sun's piece mixes politics and culturalist convictions with art. For me,
it's meaningless and shallow to dismiss Salman Rushdie or Yu Hua etc. when
you care about your historic outlook more than you care about individual
works. I do prefer Yu Hua to Mo Yan in language and in politics. And I
have also mentioned Orwell lately, in a blog post on Mo Yan and the
current debate. But I have read Mo Yan's Republic of Wine in Chinese,
English and German without having to think of the kind of historical
concepts Anna Sun or Stephen Owen or Wolgang Kubin wear on their sleeves.
Howard Goldblatt's translation is powerful because he has managed to
parallel Mo Yan's language experiments in this novel in English. He
succeeds in conveying Mo Yan's rhythm and poetic inventions faithfully.
When Anna Sun reads Mo Yan in Chinese, her mind isn't open- she has to
make sure her convictions come out first. Now I've made sure my comment
comes first. Sorry.

Martin

==============================================

Source: Kenyon Review (fall 2012):
http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-fall/selections/anna-sun-6
56342/

The Diseased Language of Mo Yan
By Anna Sun

"It has often happened in history that a lofty ideal has degenerated into
crude materialism. Thus Greece gave way to Rome, and the Russian
Enlightenment has become the Russian Revolution. There is a great
difference between the two periods. Blok says somewhere: ‘We, the children
of Russia’s terrible years.’ Blok meant this in a metaphorical, figurative
sense. The children were not children, but the sons, the heirs, the
intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible but sent from above,
apocalyptic; that’s quite different. Now the metaphorical has become
literal, children are children and the terrors are terrible, there you
have the difference" (Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 1958).

For anyone following the development of Chinese fiction in the past thirty
years, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in literature to Mo Yan in October
2012 wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Mo Yan is a prolific writer who is
a household name in China; his novels sell hundreds of thousands of
copies. Several have been adopted for film, including Red Sorghum in 1987,
the debut feature of the director Zhang Yimou \, which won the top award
at the Berlin Film Festival and introduced the artistic visions of both
Zhang and Mo Yan to a global audience. Politically, Mo Yan is clearly a
writer with a strong social conscience, although he has not been a
dissident; he is unafraid to satirize contemporary Chinese reality in his
novels, and he is wryly conscious of the game of political negotiation he
has to play with the state, sometimes setting his stinging stories not in
the socialist China but in the pre-revolutionary past. Internationally Mo
Yan has been a major figure representing Chinese literary fiction on the
world stage since the 1990s, heralded at symposia and book fairs in both
North America and Europe as a writer with great artistic integrity and
authenticity. Indeed, it seems almost a given that, if the Nobel Prize
were to be given to a Chinese writer, after it was awarded in 2000 rather
contentiously to Gao Xingjian , a dissident writer living in Paris and a
naturalized French citizen, Mo Yan would be a perfect candidate. One may
ask: Why the discontent?

The citation of the award reads as follows: "The Nobel Prize in Literature
2012 was awarded to Mo Yan who with hallucinatory realism merges folk
tales, history and the contemporary." A longer citation reads: "Through a
mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan
has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings
of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a
departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition."

The "hallucinatory realism" mentioned in the citation is a phrase that
brings to mind James Wood’s brilliant coinage of "hysterical realism,"
referring to the works of Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo,
David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and their fellow maximizing novelists.
As Wood says, "Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but
magical realism’s next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence.
This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have
been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every
page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs" (The Guardian, October
5, 2001).

Is "hallucinatory realism" the next, improved step of "hysterical
realism"? The Latin root of "hallucination" refers to "a wandering of the
mind," and hallucinations are often described as dreamlike sensory
experiences that have no relation to reality, which exists only in the
imagination. It is reality heightened and transformed. Instead of an
aimless velocity found in hysterical realism, here we expect a natural
lavish flow of impressions, an extravagant and reckless expansion of the
literary imagination. One imagines that the language of such hallucinatory
realism must be fluid, colorful, affecting; it might even be
extraordinarily so.

The kind of reality Mo Yan depicts in his impressive oeuvre might indeed
be "hallucinatory reality." The characters in his novels engage in
struggles with war, hunger, desire, and nature; it deals with brutal
aggression, sexual obsession, and a general permeation of both physical
and symbolic violence in Chinese rural life. But unlike the great
novelists who grapple with the harsher side of the human condition –
Dickens, Hardy, and Faulkner, for example – Mo Yan’s work lacks something
important which these authors have, although it is seldom spoken of:
aesthetic conviction. The aesthetic power of these authors is the torch
that illuminates for us the dark and painful truth of humanity. The effect
of Mo Yan’s work is not illumination through skilled and controlled
exploitation, but disorientation and frustration due to his lack of
coherent aesthetic consideration. There is no light shining on the chaotic
reality of Mo Yan’s hallucinatory world.

The discontent lies in Mo Yan’s language. Open any page, and one is
treated to a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd
socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation. It is broken, profane,
appalling, and artificial; it is shockingly banal. The language of Mo Yan
is repetitive, predictable, coarse, and mostly devoid of aesthetic value.
The English translations of Mo Yan’s novels, especially by the excellent
Howard Goldblatt, are in fact superior to the original in their aesthetic
unity and sureness. The blurb for The Republic of Wine from Washington
Post says: "Goldblatt’s translation renders Mo Yan’s shimmering poetry and
brutal realism as work akin to that of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn." But in
fact, only the "brutal realism" is Mo Yan’s; the "shimmering poetry" comes
from a brilliant translator’s work.

Mo Yan’s language is disconnected from the long history of China’s
literary past, which goes back to the time of The Book of Songs, a
collection of poetry that took shape in the seventh century BCE,
contemporary with the creation of the Iliad. It is a tradition that has
produced an immense amount of extraordinary writing over two thousand
years, including the poetry of Li Po of the eighth century, the poems and
essays of Su Shi of the eleventh century, the drama of Tang Xianzu of the
sixteenth century, and a work still beloved by readers today, the
one-hundred-and-twenty-chapter novel of Cao Xueqin, the splendid Dream of
the Red Chamber t of the eighteenth century. Mo Yan’s writing bears little
or no resemblance to the rich and complex language that grows out of this
illustrious tradition.

Mo Yan’s language is striking indeed, but it is striking because it is
diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious renunciation of China’s
cultural past at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Mo Yan’s writing is in fact a product of the aesthetic ideologies of
Socialist China. As Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the leader of the Chinese
Communist Party from 1934 until his death, famously said in his seminal
speech "The Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art" in 1942, a few years
before the Party founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949:
"Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian
revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole
revolutionary machine." As a result, Mao demanded writers in the socialist
regime write for the masses: "China’s revolutionary writers and artists,
writers and artists of promise, must go among the masses; they must for a
long period of time unreservedly and whole-heartedly go among the masses
of workers, peasants and soldiers, go into the heat of the struggle. Only
then can they proceed to creative work." Not any kind of creative work,
but work that serves the "proletarian revolutionary cause."

As a result, a new literary language was invented. It was meant to
represent the true voice of workers, peasants and soldiers, the nominal
leaders of the new country. But in reality, instead of becoming the
"owners of the new republic," ordinary people were about to face the most
horrendous suffering imaginable, through both the three-year Great Famine
that swept most of the country (1958-1961) and the chaos and violence of
the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). And the new literary language
promoted by the socialist cultural bureaucracy – pedestrian, crude,
hyperbolic, affected, full of clichéd political phrases – was about to
become the source of an ailment that affected generations of Chinese
writers.

There were writers who escaped the fate of the infection of the disease.
Like the Silver Age poets and writers of the Soviet Union, such as Blok,
Pasternak, Akhmatova, and Tsvetaeva, who all came of age before the
Russian Revolution, the Chinese writers who kept their artistic voices
were the ones who were old enough to have had an artistic education before
the invention of this new literary language. Writers of this generation
include Shen Congwen, Wang Zengqi, Lao She, Bing Xin, Qian Zhongshu, Fu
Lei, and Eileen Chang, all deeply immersed in the Chinese classical
tradition through their early education. (And many had a cosmopolitan
education abroad as well: before returning to China to pursue their
intellectual careers, Qian studied at Oxford; Fu studied at University of
Paris; and Bing Xin received a degree from Wellesley.) Eileen Chang
(1920-1995), arguably the greatest short story writer of twentieth-century
China, produced her finest work when she was still in her 20s in
Japanese-occupied Shanghai. She tried to follow the approved new language
after the revolution in 1949, occasionally attending meetings organized by
the Party to reeducate "bourgeois writers," but realized that her writing
was never going to be accepted by the new regime; it was still too complex
and with too much depth. She left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1953, never to
return.

Mo Yan, on the other hand, was a child of the revolution. Born in 1955,
only six years younger than the People’s Republic, Mo Yan grew up in a
poverty-stricken village in Shandong Province, the geographical location
of the imagined Gaomi County of his novels. He stopped attending school at
age 11, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and became a factory
worker at age 18. As a way of escaping the destitution of rural life, he
enlisted in the army in 1976, which changed his life. Mo Yan started
writing fiction while he was still a soldier, receiving a fiction award
from the Literature of the Liberation Army magazine in 1984. In the same
year he went to the Military Art Academy, a central training institution
of writers and artists for the military. His first major publication was
Red Sorghum in 1985, published in People’s Literature, the leading
state-run literary magazine. It was an overnight sensation. Red Sorghum
won a national best novella award and was made into an internationally
known film the next year, launching the careers of the director Zhang
Yimou as well as the lead actress Gong Li. Since then Mo Yan has been a
celebrated writer who has published over a dozen novels, and received
every major national literary award in China.

Mo Yan writes about the deep-rooted aggression and bravery of peasants
against Japanese soldiers; he extols the violent vitality of men in both
war and sex. These are the men who drink riotously, love passionately, and
fight single-mindedly. In most of his novels, there is a strong Dionysian
spirit, a blunt and unrelenting masculinity that serves as a stark
contrast to the usual tame and sexually repressed heroes of the
proletarian literature of previous generations. In a 2003 interview, Mo
Yan expressed his view on the successes of Red Sorghum: "Why did a novel
about the Sino-Japanese war have such a great impact on society? I think
my novel expressed a shared mentality of Chinese people at the time, after
a long period of repression of personal freedom. Red Sorghum represents
the liberation of individual spirits: daring to speak, daring to think,
daring to act." It represents a new articulation of the Chinese national
spirit, a cry for the liberation of libido.

And yet, no matter how remarkable the stories are, they are still written
in a language deeply rooted in the revolutionary literary dogma first
articulated by Mao in 1942. In fact, Mo Yan participated in the
hand-copying of Mao’s "Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art" for the volume
One Hundred Writers’ and Artists’ Hand-Copied Commemorative Edition of the
Yan’an Talks, published in 2012 ("Chairman Mao, in their Own Hand," The
New York Times, June 6, 2012). Some critics have viewed it as Mo Yan’s
political commitment to the Party, but it may be closer to the truth to
see it as his genuine attachment. The kind of writing Mao endorsed in his
speech had been Mo Yan’s education in literature.

When Mo Yan speaks of the experience of hunger in his childhood, it is
indeed powerful: it is the hunger of the body as well as the hunger of the
spirit. During Mo Yan’s formative years, which were the years of the Great
Famine and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he not only had to
endure long stretches of wrenching physical hunger, but also a deeper
hunger for nourishment of the soul. All he had access to were the novels
of the "Seventeen Years," social realist work written between 1949 and
1966 that bore a strong influence of Mao’s political aesthetic doctrine.
The teenager Mo Yan took in these books only a hungry soul would,
devouring each page in his mother’s dimly lighted rural kitchen, reading
aloud to his beloved illiterate mother and sister when they begged him to
share his treasure. In these novels, what left a strong impression on him
were not the political stories about class conflicts and struggles, but
the moving love stories of revolutionary heroes.

Even so, this is not enough to truly nourish the soul. No matter how
deeply Mo Yan appreciated the novels at the time, he did not know that he
had been denied access to the true legacy of Chinese literature: the
splendid poetry and essays of the Tang and Song dynasties; the great
novels of the Ming and Qing Dynasties; not to mention the canonical
Confucian texts such as the Analects and Mencius that had long been the
backbone of early education in imperial China, from the private academy of
aristocratic families to the schoolrooms of rural village children.

No matter how sincere a critic Mo Yan might be of the current social and
political regime, especially in his later novels such as The Garlic
Ballads and The Republic of Wine, with his uncompromising critique of the
ills of corruption under communist rule, his language is a language that
survived the Cultural Revolution, when the state deliberately administered
a radical break with China’s literary past. Mo Yan’s prose is an example
of a prevailing disease that has been plaguing writers who came of age in
what can be called the era of "Mao-ti," a particular language and
sensibility of writing promoted by Mao in the beginning of the revolution.
The burden of this heritage can be seen not only in Mo Yan’s work, but
also in the work of many other esteemed literary writers today, such as Yu
Hua and Su Tong. In fact, it can be seen even in the work of political
dissident writers who live and write outside of China, such as the
novelist Ma Jian (see my review "Mao-ti" in the London Review of Books).
This is perhaps the ultimate tragedy of the fate of contemporary Chinese
writers: too many of them can no longer speak truth to power in a language
free of the scars of the revolution itself.

Today writers who have sought to purge their language of Mao-ti often do
so through forging a real connection with China’s literary past, including
the long tradition of vernacular writing; many have been inspired by early
twentieth century masters such as Wang Zengqi, Shen Congwen, and Qian
Zhongshu. For instance, women writers such as Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan
have attempted to reconnect with the rich cosmopolitan past of the city of
Shanghai through a more refined literary voice. There are also writers
such as A Cheng, Jia Pingwa, and Wang Shuo who pay close attention to the
everyday colloquial speech of ordinary people. (In recent years Wang Shuo
has become a popular commercial writer, no longer producing serious
literary work.) They are reflexive artists who have strenuously fought the
slavish use of a diseased language, either developing something new
through a dialogue with tradition, or making use of Mao-ti in a poignantly
ironical manner.

However, much of their writing is not widely known in the West. It is
worth noting that many superb Chinese writers’ work does not read well in
translation. (Although there are certainly exceptions: David Hawkes’
magnificent translation of Dream of the Red Chamber is both a faithful
translation and a masterpiece of English prose.) Take the example of
Eileen Chang, whose exquisite language and deep literary sensibility is
sui generis in contemporary literature; both C. T. Hsia and David Der-wei
Wang, two leading scholars of modern Chinese literature, consider her to
be one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Chang’s
prose is so unique and complex that she has been compared to Henry James,
another writer of iridescent intensity. Yet no matter how good the
translator might be, since much of Chang’s power resides in her subtle and
masterly use of the Chinese language, it is very difficult to convey it
through translation. Indeed, the most popular work by Chinese writers in
English translation today is often the kind of work that has broad
strokes, vivid characters, and dramatic plots, such as Mo Yan’s novels. It
also helps when the books have clear social or political messages, such as
in the case of dissident writing. This is a phenomenon that has been noted
by the literary scholar Stephen Owen, who made the controversial claim as
early as 1990 that certain contemporary Chinese poetry is written in
easily translatable language, instead of seeking mastery in original
Chinese.

It is worth noticing that there is now another alternative to Mao-ti
literature in China. Today’s up-and-coming literary writers, especially
writers in their 20s and 30s, did not grow up with the kind of social
realist literature that greatly influenced Mo Yan and his generation,
which essentially faded after 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
For this younger cohort of writers, their education took place in the
1980s and the 1990s, when China experienced an unprecedented period of
economic growth. Although Chinese classical texts have gradually returned
to early education in recent years, and there is ever increasing interest
among intellectuals in classical Chinese art, philosophy, and literature,
the main cultural influences of most young Chinese writers today are
primarily a mixture of Chinese, East Asian, and American popular cultures.
Capitalist market economy has now become their destiny, and commercialism
and cutthroat competition their only reality. They tend to write in a mode
of what might be called "flippant realism," with a detached irony and a
hint of nihilism as their hallmark. This is a new world for Chinese
literary writers, for they have to compete with popular commercial fiction
in an open market. Indeed, popular fiction today represents most of the
best-selling novels one finds in bookstores in China; they deal not with
the weighty issues of history, war, or politics, but business maneuvers,
romantic intrigues, and semi-erotic fantasies. These are novels that share
a kinship with the works of John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and even E. L.
James, and they have no pretention of being good literature.

But shouldn’t a good story line, strong characters, and serious social and
political convictions be enough for a work of art – the kind of novels Mo
Yan produces – to be good? Why does language matter in literary art? In
"Politics and the English Language" (1946), Orwell warns us: "But if
thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." It is
important to be aware of the ways language carries moral implications, for
a diseased language can make it difficult for people to think with
precision and truthfulness. And it spreads almost against our will: "A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should
and do know better." "A debased language" is convenient, and it allows us
to think wantonly, without conscious efforts to achieve moral clarity.

For writers like Eileen Chang, Cao Xueqin and Henry James, moral
conviction is always connected with aesthetic conviction. In Cao’s
eighteenth century world of the Dream of the Red Chamber, the ones who
appreciate the beauty of poetry, of art, and of nature are necessarily the
ones who recognize the essential humanity of others. Yet this is not
equating aestheticism with moral clarity; far from it. In The Portrait of
a Lady, James makes a brilliant case of the moral corruption of Osmond, a
much-admired aesthete; yet as we dive deeper into the novel and observe
the dissolution of Osmond’s façade through the exquisitely weaved
narrative, we realize that Osmond is not the one with true aesthetic
conviction. He poses rather than loves; his taste in art is vulgar and
superficial rather than authentic and deep. He is a man of gestures, and
his aesthetic void echoes his moral emptiness.

The highest calling of the writer is to be moral without being moralistic,
and to write with an aesthetic sensibility that is constitutive of his or
her moral commitment. Mo Yan and his generation of writers, who came of
age during the Cultural Revolution, have done their best to fulfill their
calling. Today’s China is full of new promises; its economic power is
placing it in the center of our global world, and its social and cultural
developments will have an immense impact on our new century. China is
ready for great novels about its recent history and growth, works by
writers with a profound moral imagination as well as an extraordinary
literary voice. Such a writer will have drunk from the purer streams of
China’s literary past, a long river that has never ceased flowing, not
even under the most unpropitious conditions. Such a writer will have the
strength to take on the turmoil of the past sixty years, and to write
about the sorrow and beauty of our shared human condition with an
illuminating, transfiguring aesthetic conviction.