Man and Beast: Mo Yan’s Details and Politics

ABSTRACT

Focusing on slaughter scenes, this article studies the aesthetics and politics of details in Mo Yan’s novels. It argues that the Chinese Nobel Laureate’s detailing of violence, especially violence against animals, became a crucial part of his literary observation and moral critique of the excess and injustice that emerged in China’s modern pursuit of wealth and power. Mo Yan’s sensuous approach to the subject, however, is non-moralistic and non-anthropocentric. In emphasizing the “flesh” that diminishes the difference between men and animals, and in accommodating the perceptual-ethical ambiguities associated with details, his writing deviates from the humanist tradition of modern Chinese literature. Depicting the body – human or animal – that suffers from hunger and violence through minutest visual and aural details became Mo Yan’s peculiar way of “soul searching.” The flayed animal carcass and violated human flesh reveal what is not there, the spirit that has been annihilated and obliterated together with the body. No less important, the author’s very early grasp of the connection between decimated animals and the disturbed ecological environment – driven by human avarice and intensified by China’s fast-growing economy – is prescient.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In his NYRB piece, “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?,” sinologist Perry Link points out that Mo Yan is one of the many Chinese writers who “stay unambiguously inside, making larger or smaller accommodations to official guidelines even as they publicly preserve the fiction that they are doing no such thing.” Pankaj Mishra, however, criticizes the double standard of Salman Rushdie and other Western critics in The Guardian: “Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause Before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship.” Also see “Mo Yan Stirs Controversy with Support for President Xi,” posted on January 12, 2015 on China Digital Times: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/01/mo-yan-stirs-controversy-support-president-xi/.

2. One of the new controversies revolved around an online news article published on July 5, 2021, by Toutiao (Headlines), a Chinese news aggregator: “Mo Yan de wenti buke rongren” (Mo Yan’s problems cannot be tolerated any more). It was deleted the next day but stayed long enough to cause a stir. The news echoed and magnified the criticisms that were disseminated online by Mo Yan’s nationalistic critics and their web followers, accusing him of exposing the darker side of China, catering to Western tastes and influence, and smearing the national image of the country.

3. For more about Mo Yan’s life and literary career, see Shelley Chan’s study of Mo Yan, A Subversive Voice in China.

4. Ironically, this moniker gave his critics a chance to mock his refusal to take a political position in public and mischaracterize him as a timid writer who did lots of self-censorship on his own work. See Duran and Huang, “Introduction” in Mo Yan in Context.

5. One of the most consequential events in Mo Yan’s literary career also had something to do with film. In 1986, Mo Yan published Red Sorghum Clan, a quasi-historical family saga set in the era of the anti-Japanese war. Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation of the novel won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. Mo Yan’s fame reached overseas. In 1989 Howard Goldblatt came across a Taiwanese edition of this novel and decided to translate it into English. Their collaboration led to Goldblatt’s translation of almost all Mo Yan’s major novels, which, together with translations in many other languages, contributed tremendously to the writer’s winning of the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature.

6. Mo Yan’s translator agrees with Updike. In 2014, Goldblatt suggested that contemporary Chinese writers, including Mo Yan, have suffered from a “lack of discipline in composition,” and the reason their works have been poorly received in the West is that they are flawed, poorly edited, and could not measure up to some “international literary standard.” See Goldblatt 99. Some sinologists also complained about Mo Yan’s lack of stylistic refinement. See Wolfgang Kubin, ”Gao Xingjian yu Mo Yan.'’

7. See my discussion of the novel of details in Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature.

8. The titles of Mo Yan’s translated stories and novels are followed by two release dates: the first is for the original Chinese version and the second the English translation.

9. Mo Yan talks about the influence of Faulkner and other Western writers in various essays. See Yong er'duo yuedu 152–3.

10. For more on the virus spillover, see David Quammen, the author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, Norton, 2012, and his various op-ed pieces for New York Times.

11. In The Open: Man and Animal, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben cites German biologist Jakob von Uexküll: “Too often, he [Uexküll] affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist (40).

12. Mo Yan writes about the maiming, torturing, and killing of human beings too. The theater of violence becomes especially intense in Sandalwood Death, a quasi-historical novel set in the Boxer Uprising (1899–1900). The sandalwood death punishment of a rebel performer is excruciatingly slow and detailed.

13. For more on violence in Mo Yan’s work, see Chapter 3 of Chan’s book A Subversive Voice in China.

14. For more discussion about the novel’s hybridization of Chinese traditional novelistic style and Western influences, see He Chengzhou 81–82.

15. See Chen Sihe, Dangdai xiaoshuo yuedu wuzhong, 129.

16. For more discussion on Life and Death, see Xudong Zhang’s interview with Mo Yan in Women shidai de duihua, 124–221.

17. Also see Sabina Knight, “The Realpolitik of Mo Yan’s Fiction,” 98.

18. See an article published by Smithsonian Magazine: “Will China’s Growing Appetite for Meat Undermine Its Efforts to Fight Climate Change?” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/will-chinas-growing-appetite-for-meat-undermind-its-efforts-to-fight-climate-change-180969789/. Accessed 10 November 2022.

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Jiwei Xiao

Jiwei Xiao is Professor of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures (Chinese) at Fairfield University. She is a scholar of comparative literature and Chinese cinema. Her publications have appeared in New Left Review, New York Review of Books, LARB, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, MCLC, and Journal of Contemporary China. Her first book, Telling Details: Chinese Fiction, World Literature, was published by Routledge in 2022.