“Hearing” Moism in Sandalwood Death: Mo Yan Thought as “the Spirit of Petty-Bourgeois Sentimentality and Social Fantasy”

ABSTRACT

Mo Yan’s novel Sandalwood Death was translated into English in 2013 (from the 2001 novel Tanxiang Xing) following the author’s award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, at which time the term “hallucinatory realism” was invoked to describe his fiction. The novel was quickly hailed in the South China Morning Post (January 20, 2013) as “an orgy of pain and pleasure,” an “emotional see-saw” that is “chilling, but always human.” This essay critically analyzes two major stylistic modes or narrative techniques elaborated throughout the novel: sounds or sound-effects such as the “meow” of a cat, and similarities––which I call “hypersimilarity”––in “hallucinatory” descriptions involving “as,” “as if” and “like.” Moist (Mo-ist) narrative reflects a spontaneous poststructuralist apprehension of “reality” conveyed in “hallucinatory” or “spirited” illusions, most significantly in the practice of writing that Derrida called “freeplay.” Moism (Mo-ism) operates on an ideological level in the way that Marx called, in volume I of Capital, “a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin”: the central aim, under Mo Yan’s banner of appealing to an “affinity” with the “common man,” is to demoralize and simultaneously remoralize readers as “playfully” docile, melancholic subjects of exploitation, dehumanization, hypocrisy, and cynical cleverness.

KEYWORDS:

• Mo Yan
• world literature studies
• Pied Piper
• pleasure
• affinity

Notes on contributor

Jerry Xie, JD, PhD, practiced law in North Carolina for several years before moving to China to teach in 2006. He currently teaches at a university in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. He is the editor of the anthology Legal Studies as Cultural Studies: A Reader in (Post)Modern Critical Theory (1995) and the author of the book Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak (Of Shenhe) (2013). His writings have appeared in such journals as the Legal Studies Forum, Law and Critique, Cultural Logic, Red Orange, Discourse, and College Literature. His essay, “Hard Core: Shelley Chan’s ‘Not Uncritical’ Mo Yan Thought,” is currently being published (2015–16) as a three-part series in the online journal Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

Notes

¹One journalist pointed out soon after Mo's Nobel award in 2012 that Mo “remains a member of the [Chinese] Communist Party, and the vice chairman of the party-run Writers’ Association”; a “leaked directive” from the Chinese government “shows censorship tactics towards dissidents” and an attempt to “take control of the conversation about Mo Yan,” a writer of “strange, subversive novels,” who has “already become a national hero: bookstores are running out of stock”; “one of his novellas has been added to the high-school curriculum” (Carlson 2012). According to Sabina Knight, Mo became a member of the Chinese Communist Party in 1978 (Knight 2014, 95).

²“Some comrades lack elementary political knowledge and consequently have all sorts of muddled ideas” (Mao 1967, 90).

³See my essay, “Hard Core: Shelley Chan's ‘Not Uncritical’ Mo Yan Thought,” forthcoming in the online journal Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

⁴For some generally “unheard of” expositions on the revolutionary era in China, see Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution (2008; Han's account is particularly interesting in connection with Mo's writings and talks because Han is also from Shandong Province and grew up there during the Cultural Revolution); Mobo Gao, The Battle for China's Past (2008); William Hinton, The Great Reversal (1990) and Through a Glass Darkly (2006); and Robert Weil, Is The Torch Passing? (2013).

⁵For extensive studies of the class politics of poststructuralist (anti-)theoretical discourses of desire, see Deborah Kelsh, “Desire and Class” (1998) and “The Pedagogy of Excess” (2013).

⁶ Pow! was originally published in Chinese (Sishiyi Pao) in 2003 and translated into English in 2012. The inside cover says that “through this tale . . . we can’t help but laugh. Reminiscent of the dark masters of European absurdism,” it is “a comic masterpiece,” a “bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside” in which “dual narratives merge and feather into one another” (Mo 2012a).

⁷Shi Liwei, the author/editor of the text quoted here, says that Mo's winning of the Nobel Prize in 2012 is “introducing his works to many young people in the post-90s generation.” Mo “thinks it's the universality of human nature that touched the Western readers and brought him the award.” One of Mo's Chinese supporters “credits Mo's personality for his unique writing style,” and another proclaims that “he put all his imagination in his works, and he became a superman.” As for the “realism” of Moism: “With more Chinese writers like Mo, the world could learn more about the real China. . . . Moving reflections of Chinese lives have their place in world literature” (Shi 2012; emphasis added).

⁸James Patterson indicates in his introduction to the 2007 anthology, Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, that International Thriller Writers, Inc., an organization of thriller authors formed in 2004, reported combined sales of its members' books at that time as “exceeding 1,600,000,000 books” (Patterson 2007).

⁹In Goldman's Marathon Man, the famous torture scenes involving the question, “Is it safe?” occur in chapters 21 and 23. The “it” refers to Szell's fortune in diamonds stored in a safe-deposit box in a bank in New York City. As Janeway explains to Tom “Babe” Levy, “so that in case he [Szell] ever got caught, his fortune would be safe and he could use it to buy his freedom” (Goldman [1974] 2001, 215–16). This is, Janeway says, “their problem” (216). This “problem” at the core of the story provides the motive for Szell's torture of Levy. The “problem” underwriting the story articulates the fundamental contradiction between the commodification of freedom (“buy his freedom”) and the regime of private property (the contents in the “safe”).

¹⁰On this same page in Capital, Marx observes: “This subject one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can . . . model the world after its own image” (1987, 704n1).

¹¹See also Sartre's critical text from 1943, “A New Mystic: On Bataille's Inner Experience”:

It is for the mystic's apprentice that Bataille writes [just as Mo writes], for the person who, in solitude, is making his way, through laughter and world-weariness, toward his final torment. . . . He [Bataille] is on high, we are down below. He delivers us a message and it is for us to receive it if we can. (Sartre 2013a, 54)

The mystic enacts the “supreme escapism” of the writer in crisis with “his ‘sumptuous, bitter’ soul, his pathological pride, his self-disgust, his eroticism, . . . his rigorous logic that masks the incoherence of his thought.” (Sartre 2013a, 82)

¹²As mentioned, Sartre's study of William Faulkner's fiction appeared in 1939; the more polemical critique of Georges Bataille's work is from 1943.

¹³According to Sartre, Genet was also a “hallucinating” thinker. Quoting from Sartre's Saint Genet, Morton points out the following in Sartre's analysis:

Caught up in erotic manipulation, the writer [Genet] “wants to take hold of the word as an object.” The result is a rapturous writing that puts both the writer and his readers into a “‘controlled waking dream,’” a state of “hallucinated” thinking. . . . In the time of rapture, one loses conscious awareness and control to unconscious operations so that “[t]he onanist . . . loathes history and historicity.” Since temporality is but “the succession of images that” lead “to orgasm,” “[t]ime disappears in this perspective.” (Morton 2013, 69; citations omitted)

¹⁴Note Lenin on “realism” in Materialism and Empirio-criticism:

Following Engels, I use only the term materialism in this sense [“as the antithesis of idealism”], and consider it the sole correct terminology, especially since the term “realism” has been bedraggled by the positivists and the other muddleheads who oscillate between materialism and idealism. (Lenin 1970, 47; emphasis original)

In his 1873 afterword to the 2nd German Edition of Capital, Marx points out that a Saint Petersburg reviewer of the book found its method of inquiry “severely realistic,” “infinitely more realistic than all his [Marx's] fore-runners,” to which Marx eventually turns and asks, “what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?”—that is, once the “mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands” (“that mighty thinker”) has been “turned right side up” (Marx 1987, 27–29).

¹⁵John Updike noticed that Mo's “metaphors . . . are abundant and hyperactive,” a “surplus energy of figuration” (Updike 2005).

¹⁶In these samples, I have italicized the words “as if,” “as” and “like.”

¹⁷How exactly are we to explain, for example, the rather commonsensical stance at which Sartre arrives, namely, the “love” of Faulkner's art along with disbelief in its “metaphysics” (ideology)? See Teresa Ebert's “Alexandra Kollantai and Red Love,” arguing that

. . . the pursuit of pleasure as a performance of freedom is a very specific historical practice of the owning classes and is not the basis for egalitarian, sharing relations of mutual sexual pleasure and personal regard among people. The valorization of excessive stimulation, excitation and sensation as ends in themselves distorts human relations and capabilities and is a direct reflection of the alienating commodification and exploitation of human relations that arises with capitalism. (Ebert 1999)

 See Mao in his Talks at the Yenan Forum:

Anyone who considers himself a revolutionary Marxist writer, and especially any writer who is a member of the Communist Party, must have a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. At present, however, some comrades are lacking in the basic concepts of Marxism. For instance, it is a basic Marxist concept that being determines consciousness, that the objective realities of class struggle . . . determine our thoughts and feelings. But some of our comrades turn this upside down and maintain that everything ought to start from “love.” Now as for love, in a class society there can be only class love; but these comrades are seeking a love transcending classes, love in the abstract and also freedom in the abstract, truth in the abstract, human nature in the abstract, etc. This shows that they have been very deeply influenced by the bourgeoisie. (Mao 1967, 73–74; emphasis added)

There is absolutely no such thing in the world as love or hatred without reason or cause. As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes. All the ruling classes of the past were fond of advocating it, and so were many so-called sages and wise men, but nobody has ever really practised it, because it is impossible in class society. There will be genuine love of humanity—after classes are eliminated all over the world. (Mao 1967, 90–91)

¹⁸ Taking a “fresh look” at AC/DC's Powerage album in 2003, a commentator in the magazine Stylus writes that it

. . . creates the perfect soundtrack to Bon's jaded journey into the dead of night. . . . The black heart of the album, “Sin City,” is not only the strongest song in the entire AC/DC catalogue, but continues with Bon's wet dream of romanticized wealth and excess. . . . We know Bon won’t win in “Sin City” and if he does, it will only be for a fleeting moment, before the devil collects his head. (Faust 2003)

¹⁹“According to Ye Xiaozhou, a public relations officer from e-commerce provider China Dangdang, more than 10,000 of Mo's books were sold within 24 hours and they’ve ordered the last stocks from publishers” (Xu 2012). See Liu Wei, “Mo Pens Nobel Success Story”: “Some writers and critics attacked Mo on his perspectives”—the horror!—“rather than talent”; however, “Paper Republic's [Eric] Abrahamsen appreciates Mo's poise between literary and analytic aspirations best. . . . ‘I think Mo Yan has kept the balance’” (Liu 2012; emphasis added).

²⁰“On the one hand,” Lenin writes, Tolstoy offers

. . . the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the “Tolstoyan,” i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: “I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection . . .” On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, “resist not evil” with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i.e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism. (Lenin 1963, 205)

 See also Lenin, “L. N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement”:

Tolstoy's criticism is marked by such emotional power, such passion, convincingness, freshness, sincerity and fearlessness in striving to “go to the roots,” to find the real cause of the afflictions of the masses, just because this criticism really expresses a sharp change in the ideas of millions of peasants . . . mirror[ing] their sentiments so faithfully that he imported their naivete into his own doctrine, their alienation from political life, their mysticism, their desire to keep aloof from the world, “non-resistance to evil,” their impotent imprecations against capitalism and the “power of money.” The protest of millions of peasants and their desperation—these were combined in Tolstoy's doctrine. . . . Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. (Lenin 1977b, 332; emphasis added)

²¹ The exact duration (“temporality”) of Sun Bing's execution is itself an entangled mystery. Meiniang (quoting herself, as Mo often quotes “himself”) says that Sun Bing is to be forced to “linger impaled between life and death for five days, until the rail line between Qingdao and Gaomi is completed” (Mo 2013b, 305). Xiaojia describes the beginning of the execution at page 361, but no date is given. Excellency Yuan Shikai tells Zhao Jia that he “must not allow him [Sun Bing] to die . . . until the ceremony to commemorate the completion of the rail line on the twenty-second” (371). Nightfall after the first day of the execution is on the “fifteenth day of the eighth month” (373). On the eighteenth day, however, Magistrate Qian says that Excellency Yuan has commanded that Sun Bing “must remain alive until the twentieth [not the twenty-second] of this month” (380).

²²Derrida's “general writing” is a “subtle theosophical talk” of “affinity” as “the world emerg[ing] in the form of assemblages of signifiers of remembrance and traveling affects” (Ebert 2009, Coda, chap. 8).

²³“A real anarchy of the mind, the regime of stupidity itself, has set in” (Marx 1986, 41, Letter to Arnold Ruge). “Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all times is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: relentless criticism of all existing conditions” (41; emphasis original). “Our slogan, therefore, must be: Reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself. . . . It will be evident that there is not a big blank between the past and the future, but rather that it is a matter of realizing the thoughts of the past” (43–44; emphasis original).

²⁴“[T]hese bourgeois economists instinctively saw, and rightly so,” says Marx, “that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus-value,” with Mill “clumsily repeating the wretched evasions” which he “confounds” (1987, 483).