MCLC: Sandalwood Death review

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Sandalwood Death review
***********************************************************

Source: LA Review of Books (12/21/13):
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/theater-cruelty-jiwei-xiao-mo-yans-sandal
wood-death

The Theater of Cruelty: Jiwei Xiao on Mo Yan’s 'Sandalwood Death'
by Jiwei Xiao 

DISSONANT SOUNDS inspired Nobel-prize-winning Chinese author Mo Yan’s
standout novel, Sandalwood Death (originally published in China in 2001).
The roar of trains passing through his hometown, Gaomi, and the wail of
the local opera Maoqiang (“Cat Tunes”) evoke its setting: the clash
between China and the West during the Boxer Uprising (1899-1900). Of all
of Mo Yan’s works, Sandalwood Death comes closest to being a work of
historical fiction. But what makes it a memorable literary piece has less
to do with its historical reference than its aurally imbued theater of
performance. The novel is awash in a wide range of simulated sounds:
operatic arias and choruses, a cacophony of noises from the lives of
humans and animals, and most hauntingly, the cries and groans of tortured
victims.

In 1899, Gaomi became a center of unrest. Building railways between two
North China cities and destroying irrigation systems and farmland along
the way, the Germans infuriated local villagers who banded together with
Boxer insurgents to sabotage rail tracks and launch attacks. The Germans
responded with a full-scale military campaign. This sets the scene
in Sandalwood Death, but fidelity to historical events doesn’t interest Mo
Yan as much as the characters who inhabit the fictional realm of the
novel: Sun Meiniang, a young belle whose natural feet make her
undesirable; Zhao Xiaojia, a mentally retarded butcher who luckily marries
the “big-feet” beauty only to be cuckolded; Zhao Jia, Xiaojia’s long-lost
father who retires to Gaomi after spending decades working as an imperial
executioner; Qian Ding, the Gaomi Magistrate who prevaricates in love and
politics; and finally Sun Bing, Sun Meiniang’s own absent father, a
Maoqiang-singer-turned-Boxer-leader. Each character evokes a major
operatic trait: passionate, comical, evil, vacillating, and righteous. The
drama is built on their infighting, which splits them into opposite camps
as the larger conflicts intensify. Mo Yan’s naming of the three male
protagonists — combining three of the most common Chinese family names
(Zhao, Qian, and Sun) with words taken from a set phrase indicating
anonymity (as in “jia yi bing ding”) — is not whimsical. Just as in
history, real protagonists of this novel are everymen.

Not the everymen defined by everyday experience: the novel is filled with
gruesome scenes. It reaches its climax, in full-bodied operatic mode, when
sandalwood torture — in order to inflict utmost pain and create a
spectacle of terror, the executioner uses a cured sandalwood rod to skewer
and then pin a prisoner live on a wood stake — is publicly performed. The
Germans and colluding Qing authority use this extremely cruel and unusual
punishment to terrorize local peasants into submission and forestall
future uprisings, but the victim — the aforementioned Boxer leader Sun
Bing — seizes on the spectacle as a way to strike back at his enemy. A
former lead Maoqiang performer, Sun knows how to work his audience. He
turns the platform for torture into a stage for “a grand and spectacular
performance” and a “divine altar” for martyrdom. As his splayed body rots
from the inside, Sun descends into the hellish limbo between life and
death.             

Mo Yan is not the first Chinese writer to deal with such dark themes.
Beheadings, for example, are fairly common in modern Chinese literature.
But often the gore is hardly visible. By contrast, Mo Yan brings himself
infinitesimally close to his characters, his pen piercing into the
intestinal as well as the internal. Among the five main characters,
Executioner Zhao Jia is the most enigmatic. Constantly washing his
"demonic small hands,” he reminds us of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth. The
Chinese word for “executioner,” guizi shou, literally "the cutting hand,"
makes his obsessive-compulsive deviance all the more poignant. Zhao is
able to carry out his tasks methodically and masterfully because he
dehumanizes his victims — viewing them as dead meat ready for his carving
— and also he dehumanizes himself into a “killing machine.” Yet, in a key
scene where history mingles with fiction, the writer shows another facet
of the character by penetrating deep into his mind:

"In the past, so long as he was wearing red and had chicken blood smeared
on his face, his heart was as cold as a black stone at the bottom of a
deep lake. He had the vague feeling that while he was putting someone to
death, his soul was hibernating in the fissures of the coldest, deepest
stone, and that a killing machine bereft of heat and emotion performed the
deeds. And so, when the job was over, he could wash his hands and face and
be free of any feeling that he had just killed someone. It was all a haze,
a sort of half sleep. But on this day he felt as if the hardened mask of
chicken blood had been peeled away, like the outer layer of a wall soaked
by a rainsquall. His soul squirmed in the fissures of the stone, and a
host of emotions — pity, terror, agitation, and more — seeped out like
tiny rivulets."

Here Mo Yan’s layering of Zhao’s disturbed feelings creates an intricate
tableau of mind; it invites us to see the character’s "human" side. Even
though it does not really arouse sympathy, the author avoids simplifying
Vileness.

Mo Yan also tries to convey a subtle irony through the character. In an
audience with Empress Dowager Cixi, the most powerful person in China at
the time, Zhao pitches ideas to support people in his profession,
including a pension system for all state executioners. Meanwhile, Cixi
uses “zhuangyuan,” a title reserved for first-class champions in the
Palace Imperial Examination, to compliment Zhao on his skills. Yet, little
does our eminent martial “zhuangyuan” know that Cixi already has plans
underway to abolish such cruel corporeal punishments as beheading and
slow-slicing, which would soon render his profession obsolete.

He is spared that bitter disappointment. In the final showdown, Zhao is
stabbed to death by Sun Meiniang, who tries to save her lover, Magistrate
Qian; the latter, in an attempt to kill Zhao Jia, accidentally kills Xiao
Jia. Defying the order from his superior, Qian also terminates the
lingering life of Sun Bing before the scheduled time. The novel ends with
large puddles of gore on and off the stage of “the Ascension Platform.”
Yet, the death of a headsman undone by his unredeemable acts seems
anti-climactic. This very sane, sadistic, and soulless executioner
compares unfavorably with thoseinsane ones roaming the shadowy margins of
Chinese and world literature: Warrior Yang Jinbiao, for example, in a
brilliant short story by Shen Congwen (one of China’s most important
modern writers, albeit little known in the West), “The New and the Old,”
or the Executioner in Kafka’s novella, “In the Penal Colony.” While Shen’s
lyricism lends great poetry to his executioner character as he falls
through the crack of historical changes, Kafka’s horrific allegory,
written on the eve of World War I, foresees the carnage and irrationality
latent in the machine era. If Mo Yan’s narrative power puts him on a par
with these two great earlier writers, his melodramatic plotting weakens
the force of his cruel character. The dark power emitted from Zhao Jia’s
cutting hands fizzles as he hardens into an overzealous executor. His
total submission to power and his full embrace of his instrumentality can
be written off as traits befitting an evil, eccentric character. In the
end, his death, which looks like a triumph of justice, seems too easy a
solution and too predictable an ending.

Still, one suspects that perhaps this is not all there is. When Magistrate
Qian appears on the chaotic scene of confrontation between Chinese rebels
and German soldiers, he entreats the Germans not to open fire on Sun
Bing’s fellow performers and followers:

"Do not consider the actions onstage to be a provocation, and do not
confuse them with the anti-German army led by Sun Bing, even though his
men also painted their faces and dressed in stage costumes. You are
witnessing pure theatrics, performed by a troupe of actors, and while it
may appear manic, it is a common feature of the Maoqiang repertoire, and
the actors are merely following long-established traditions. [Italics
added.]"

By pleading the case of a harmless “performance,” is Qian here speaking
for the writer too? If so, this is bitter irony, since the Magistrate can
do nothing but stand by and witness the inevitable slaughter.

It is well known that the author’s nom de plume, “Mo Yan” (Don’t speak),
originated in his awareness of his querulousness. But the fictional
character he feels closest to, Black Kid in his breakout short story "The
Transparent Carrot" (1985), remains mute or determinedly silent
throughout. Faced with the pitfalls of speaking too much or not speaking
at all, Mo Yan ultimately takes the middle path: storytelling. In
Sandalwood Death, he has chosen to raise the aesthetic and the rhetorical
above all else. He plays with narrative chronology. Flashbacks and
fast-forwards are used profusely, disrupting the linear sense of narrative
progress. In one segment, the story moves acrobatically backward as if a
film were played in the rewind mode frame by frame. He also gives each of
his five major characters his or her own aria. The polyphonic storytelling
demonstrates Mo Yan’s fascination with the sonic dimension of the world —
an interest first revealed in Black Kid, his inarticulate hero who yet
shows a preternatural sensitivity to sounds.

In his Nobel acceptance speech, Mo Yan claimed that Sandalwood Deathmarked
the first time he visualized himself as a professional storyteller in a
public square. The tripartite novel’s titles, “Head of the Phoenix
(fengtou),” “Belly of the Pig (zhudu),” and “Tail of the Leopard”
(baowei), are actually metaphors for good storytelling methods: a
compelling beginning, a substantial middle, and a swift and powerful
ending. But the three sections do not cohere into one unified plot. In
terms of content, many scenes are meant for (modern) private reading
rather than (traditional) communal hearing. What most significantly marks
Sandalwood Death as a stylized “performance,” rather than an earnest
imitation of traditional storytelling, is the author’s refusal to offer
any moral message. Characters are steeped in moral ambiguities. They also
display a different facet of themselves depending on which story is then
in play.

Idiosyncratic as it is, Sandalwood Death is perhaps not that singular. Mo
Yan embraces the same two imperatives other contemporary popular
historical fiction writers espouse: namely, to mine the historical past
for interesting subjects and materials, and to use the effects of
fictional verisimilitude to bring history closer to readers today. Mo
Yan’s attempt at creating realistic effects, most prominently demonstrated
in his torture scenes, has the double function of making the historical
strange and familiar at the same time. Whereas scenes of cruelty seem
grotesquely peculiar, his focus on intricate workings of body and mind
allow readers with little to no knowledge of Chinese history a hook to
grasp the story. In the numerous scenes where Mo Yan emulates a
traditional storyteller, the author executes his craft in a fashion
similar to  his headsman's "thousand cuts": the same aplomb, the same
penchant for dramatic flourishes, and the same microscopic attention to
detail.

The line between the storyteller and the executor is further blurred in a
chapter where the executioner becomes a storyteller in turn, miming a
legendary vocal performer. The epitaph written in Zhao’s voice — “The
finest play ever staged cannot compete with the spectacle of a public
slicing” — may sound like Mo Yan’s gallows humor, but it condemns the
executioner’s depraved performative impulse. One can also discern the
author’s critique of “performance” in the character of Sun Bing, the
charismatic yet irresponsible, courageous yet egomaniac hero. In the eyes
of the only intellectual in the novel, Magistrate Qian, Sun is not a real
leader but a trickster — he knows how to ply magic tricks and recruit
followers, yet is essentially clueless about his enemy and the
consequences of his action. Qian sees through the mighty charade behind
the Boxer leader’s performance early on and calls his bluff about his
allegedly tempered “iron body” that’s “impervious to bullets, resistant to
water and fire.” Kicking over the incense altar, Qian cries, “how can you
continue to beguile and bewitch your followers when rivers of your men’s
blood already flow across the fortification?”

Imagine this line being used by Mo Yan’s critics, who mushroomed after his
Nobel win: how could you continue to practice your literary tricks to
“beguile and bewitch” while your fellow countrymen and fellow writers are
suffering injustices at the hands of the Chinese government? Yet most of
these critics were too busy lambasting him to read his tomes line by line.
They did not see an author alert to both the empowerment and perils of
performance, and by implication, the treacherousness of writing as a form
of public performance.

In Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan strives for a high aesthetic effect by
modeling his work on conventional repertoire and melodrama — sometimes at
the sacrifice of strong characters, plot, and moral insights. In lesser
hands, the novel might have turned out like a shadow puppet show:
paper-thin characters, tethered to strings, tumble and rumble
rambunctiously on stage, all the dazzling fighting and rhapsodic singing
the work of one multi-talented and multi-voiced puppeteer. Yet, if it does
not amount to a fiction of great historical realism or even a refined
piece of narrative art, the novel is remarkable in its engrossing details,
subtle irony, and multitudinous perspectives and voices. Mo Yan’s
appropriation of folk opera and traditional storytelling devices also
invigorate his narrative with a unique liveliness. At its most compelling
moments, the words that he hurls at us with such velocity and ferocity
take on a shocking power that makes violence in history seem more
intelligible and indelible. The foregrounding of the performative and
rhetorical also allows him to break away from the kind of Chinese
narrative mode that has so often been pushed into the grinding grooves of
history and politics. The fictional — the sound of Maoqiang — is given a
larger role to play, so much so that it upstages the historical —the
sound of trains. For all these reasons, one may regard the novel as a
daring experiment rather than dissimulative and retro.