Folk Opera
‘Sandalwood Death’ and ‘Pow!’ by Mo Yan
By IAN BURUMA
The New York Times Book Reviews, January 31, 2013
Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, has a deft way
with similes: salty, sometimes gross, usually unexpected. Comparing
women’s breasts to “ripe mangoes” is almost a cliché, but to describe
the nipples as “rising gracefully, like the captivating mouths of
hedgehogs” is arresting. Passengers disembarking from a train do so
“like beetles rolling their precious dung.” A rich meal of pork lies on a
man’s stomach, “churning and grinding like a litter of soon-to-be-born
piglets.”
Yuko Shimizu
SANDALWOOD DEATH
By Mo Yan
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
409 pp. University of Oklahoma Press. Paper, $24.95.
POW!
By Mo Yan
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
386 pp. Seagull Books. $27.50.
What gives Mo Yan’s novels their highly idiosyncratic tone is the
combination of a great literary imagination and a peasant spirit. Howard
Goldblatt’s translations catch this atmosphere brilliantly. The prose
reads well in English, without losing a distinctly Chinese feel, but it
is very far from the classical Chinese tradition. There is nothing
mandarin, or even urbane, about Mo Yan’s work. He has retained the
earthy character of rural Shandong, where he grew up in a farming
family.
Like most of his stories, both “Sandalwood Death” and “Pow!” are set in a
rustic place resembling Mo Yan’s native village in Gaomi County. Of
“Sandalwood Death,” he has written that it might be less suited to
sophisticated readers than “to hoarse voices in a public square,
surrounded by an audience of eager listeners.” In fact, it is artfully
written in the style of a local folk opera called Maoqiang, now almost
defunct. One of the main characters is an opera singer. The rhythms,
idioms and narrative techniques of Maoqiang are woven into the text in
a seamless way that only a master storyteller can pull off. The art of
telling stories is actually the main theme of both novels.
The narrator of “Pow!,” Luo Xiaotong, is a young man who has a horror of
growing up, of entering the corrupt adult world where the powerful prey
on the weak. As Mo Yan explains in his afterword, Luo is the reverse of
little Oskar in Günter Grass’s “Tin Drum,” the boy whose body stops
growing even as his mental age progresses. Luo has a child’s mind in a
grown-up body. He is the sort of wise simpleton, a kind of Chinese
Soldier Schweik, that often turns up in Mo Yan’s novels. When Luo looks
at Aunty Wild Mule, his father’s mistress, he feels “like a boy of 7 or
8,” and yet “the pounding of my heart and the stirrings of that thing
between my legs declare to me that I am that child no longer.” By
observing the adults, Luo realizes that sex can lead people into some
very dark places. And so he clings to a kind of innocence. But, as so
often happens when the strain of growing up in a corrupted world becomes
intolerable, innocence explodes in an act of extraordinary violence.
“Pow” can mean two things: It is the bang of an old Japanese Army
mortar, used by Luo to blow the adult world to smithereens; it also
means to brag, to tell stories, and even, in Beijing slang, to have sex.
Luo’s bizarre story of his childhood is told to a monk in a decaying
temple dedicated to the worship of a lecherous idol named the Horse
Spirit. Greed, lust and the abuse of power are the main features of the
world observed by Luo. The greediest, most lecherous, most powerful
figure in the story is also his benefactor, a man named Lao Lan, scion
of a landowning family, who sleeps with Luo’s mother and exploits human
greed by monopolizing the production of meat in a village dedicated to
animal slaughter.
In this fantasy world of meat-eating gluttony, there is even a Meat God
Temple and a Carnivore Festival. Lust for meat isn’t really condemned
(nor, for that matter, is sex); it’s the natural response of people who
have gone hungry for too long, a grotesque binge after a history of
famines. Mo Yan himself was born only a few years before Chairman Mao
starved China’s rural population in his monstrous Great Leap Forward.
Luo, the meat-eater, is a highly useful asset to Lao Lan’s business. He
has a limitless capacity for food. The champion of a meat-eating
contest, Luo adores meat and meat loves him back, to the point of
speaking to him in voices. He is an artist of meat-eating, the best in
China. Eating, sex and power are closely related in Luo’s fantastic
tales, as they are in other novels by Mo Yan, including “Red Sorghum,”
made into a much-praised film by Zhang Yimou, and indeed in “Sandalwood
Death,” to my mind an even better novel than “Pow!”
Indulging our appetites for food and sex is one way of asserting our
individual freedom. Perfecting an art, even of meat-eating, is another.
The two artists in “Sandalwood Death” are Sun Bing, an opera singer, and
Zhao Jia, his executioner, whose son is married to Sun Bing’s daughter.
Zhao is a master at his trade, a genius at administering the slow death
by a thousand cuts, the greatest artist of the sandalwood death, able
to keep his victim alive for five days while spliced on a sandalwood
stake.
Sun Bing has been sentenced to this agonizing death because he dared to
attack German soldiers involved in crushing the Boxer Rebellion in 1901.
A heroic local patriot, Sun Bing hates these arrogant foreigners for
strutting about his native region, building a railway line that will
change its ways forever. Like many tales of peasant rebellion, Mo Yan’s
reworking of the Boxers’ war with the foreign devils is deeply
anti-modern. Loyalty to tradition is part of Mo Yan’s peasant spirit,
yet he is not sentimental about the past.
Maoqiang opera is the symbol of Chinese tradition in the novel. But so
is the art of inflicting cruel punishments “beyond the imagination of
any European.” Chinese executions could be seen, in the words of one of
the narrators of “Sandalwood Death,” as stage performances “acted out by
the executioner and his victim.” At the end of the novel, the two types
of theater come together when Sun Bing sings his last aria while
spitted on the wooden stake. His fellow actors defy the German soldiers
and their treacherous Chinese helpers by performing an opera on the
execution ground to honor their dying master. The theater troupe is
mowed down by foreign bullets. Sun Bing dies, stabbed in the chest by a
compassionate Chinese official who can no longer stand to witness his
suffering. In the last words of the novel: “The opera . . . has ended. .
. . ”
In sum: Without art, myths, stories, imagination, life isn’t worth
living. And that brings us to Mo Yan’s politics. He has been widely
criticized for not being more politically outspoken. Salman Rushdie
called him “a patsy of the regime.” According to Mo Yan’s fellow Nobel
laureate Herta Müller, awarding him the literature prize was “a
catastrophe.”
Mo Yan is certainly no dissident. He might even be accused of cowardice.
He could have used his prestige to speak up more forcefully for Liu
Xiaobo, the brave literary critic who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010
while imprisoned for advocating democracy in China. Defending
censorship, as Mo Yan did in Stockholm, was also an odd, not to say
craven, act for a writer who sets such store on the freedom to tell
stories.
Indeed, he refuses to speak out almost as a matter of principle. He has
said that his pen name, Mo Yan, meaning “Don’t Speak,” was chosen
because his parents warned him not to say things that might cause
trouble. “I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology,” he writes in
the afterword to “Pow!,” “especially when I’m writing.”
Mo Yan does in fact have some strong views. The targets of his satirical
barbs are clear: the gross materialism of contemporary China, the
venality of government officials, the abuses of political power, the
abject opportunism of Chinese collaborators with foreign invaders. But
these are rather easy marks. Party leaders are forever denouncing
corruption and materialism. It is also a tenet of Communist propaganda
that only the party can protect China against foreign depredations.
Perhaps Mo Yan really is in tune with the current Communist regime.
Perhaps he simply wants to play it safe. But the political perspective
of his fiction is also a reflection of his peasant spirit. To a
villager, all politics are strictly local, especially in China, with its
vast distances. The capital is far away. National politics aren’t the
peasant’s concern. What counts is food on the table, fertility, sex and
staying out of trouble, if necessary by appeasing the powerful, be they
local or foreign.
This narrow perspective has its advantages. By concentrating on human
appetites, including the darkest ones, Mo Yan can dig deeper than
political commentary. And like the strolling players of old, the jesters
and the public-square storytellers he so admires, Mo Yan is able to
give a surprisingly accurate impression of his country. Distorted, to be
sure, but sharply truthful, too. In this sense, his work fits into a
distinguished tradition of fantasists in authoritarian societies:
alongside Mikhail Bulgakov or the Czech master, Bohumil Hrabal.
To demand that Mo Yan also be a political dissident is not only what the
Dutch describe as “trying to pluck feathers from a frog.” It’s also
unfair. A novelist should be judged on literary merit, not on his or her
politics, a principle the Nobel committee hasn’t always lived up to.
This time, I think it has. It would be nice if Mo Yan were more
courageous, but he has given us some great stories. And that should be
enough.
