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One of the most energetic writers in contemporary China, Mo Yan has been at the
centre of some of the most significant literary events of his time. The meanings
of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature are diverse, and the full picture is still
emerging. However, there is no doubt about the literary creativity and merits of
Mo Yan’s works. While it is impossible to separate politics from arts and
literature, the Nobel committee’s decision to award the literature prize to a
non-Western writer who does not fit traditional Western definitions of dissident
writers is most welcome and timely.
Mo Yan’s writings are energised by several inter-connected themes and styles,
ranging from magic realism to black humour, and from epic historical novel to
bawdy fable. His comic visions are sometimes neglected in the English-speaking
world thanks to his better-known historical novels such as Honggaoliang Jiazu
(The Red Sorghum, 1987; film version by Zhang Yimou) that chronicles a sober
history of pain. Set against a rich stream of powerful and unpredictable
stories, Guan Moye’s pen name, Mo Yan, signalling a vow to ‘abstain from
speech’, contains a healthy dose of humour. This claim to silence, or an
author’s abstinence from speech, may be seen as a gesture of self-mockery or
self-praise, but it is also a critical tool in Mo Yan’s works that boldly
re-imagine political history and the history of sexuality. It is a tool to speak
the unspeakable, and humour commits the invisible to writing. The silence of the
writer Mo Yan creates a unique space for the articulate character Mo Yan, a
regular in his novels such as The Republic of Wine. More importantly, his works
have reinvigorated the neglected tradition of literary humour in modern China
with comic yet sympathetic portrayals of individuals in a fragmented world of
post-socialist marketisation. Both underprivileged individuals and bureaucrats
alike find themselves in comic and sometimes absurd situations.
Mo Yan has blended the bawdy and humorous modes to construct counter narratives
to the grand narrative of the nation-state. The Republic of Wine, a parody of
Chinese food culture written in the reinvented genres of detective and
epistolary novels, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), use a similar
strategy to create a sense of comic absurdity. Toward the end of The Republic of
Wine, on his way to Liquorland on the invitation of Li Yidou, a doctoral student
in ‘liquor studies at the Brewer’s College’ there, the character Mo Yan
reminisces that: When I was leaving Beijing my bus passed through Tiananmen
Square, where … Sun Yat-Sen (commonly referred to as the father of the Republic
of China, founded in 1911), who stood in the square, and Mao Zedong (leader of
the People’s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in
1976), who hangs from the wall of the Forbidden City, were exchanging silent
messages past the five-star flag hanging from a brand-new flagpole.
This is but one of numerous examples of Mo Yan’s subtle and humorous readings of
China’s political culture and figures. At the same time, his sympathetic and
passionate pleas for the characters being ridiculed preclude any sense of
superiority derived from historical hindsight (as in “we now know better”).
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out parodies official narratives about the history
of the People’s Republic of China from 1950 to 2000 through the metaphorical
framework of the Buddhist idea of the six paths of reincarnation. XimenNao, a
landlord executed for his ‘bourgeois sins’, goes through a series of
reincarnation as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and eventually a human
child.
In another episode, Mao Zedong, who has just passed away, sits on a ‘solemn and
bleak’ moon (a reversal of Mao as the crimson sun in communist iconography)
while two pigs, Piglet Sixteen (Ximen) with his girlfriend Little Flower on his
back, follow him ardently:
We wanted to get closer to the moon so we could see Mao Zedong’s face with even
greater clarity. But the moon moved with us, the distance remaining constant no
matter how hard I paddled. … Schools of red carp, white eels, black-capped
soft-shelled turtles, fly up to the moon, an expression of romanticism; but
before they reach their goal, the pull of gravity brings them back (to become)
meals for waiting foxes and wild boars.
Piglet Sixteen’s playfulness and facetiousness should not be confused with
frivolity. Mo Yan’s characters remain intimately connected to personal and
national histories, and they are often caught uncomfortably between different
modes of existence.
The citation for the Nobel Prize highlights the fantastical realism as Mo Yan’s
primary contribution to world literature, rather than his political stance.
Predisposed toward the political values of literature, China watchers in the
West often do not have patience for or interest in the artistic merits of
China’s literary output and soft power. Mo Yan’s 2012 and Gao Xingjian’s 2000
Nobel Prizes are the first step towards a more balanced view of Asia beyond
political headlines.
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