BOOK REVIEWS

Mo Yan, Le Pays de l’alcool (The Republic of Wine: A Novel)

Sex and food are two favoured vices among the privileged classes, particularly in China: in those times when poverty was still everywhere, officials could be seen draining glasses of maotai at tables loaded with food. With the prosperity of the reform years such scenes, where yuppies strut about with their mobile telephones and their mistresses, have become commonplace. But in China, gluttony is accompanied by notorious refinements—of which the example most frequently quoted is the dish of monkey’s brains; other variations are given by Zhang Xianliang in his recent essay on China((1). Homo sinicus has extended this kind of cruelty to his fellow creatures readily; and we have seen how Chinese writers, from Zheng Yi to Yu Hua, have in recent years reflected and written on the subject of cannibalism. In Mo Yan’s novel it is donkeys, their hooves torn from their legs to provide a tasty dish, and live children who are the victims of this feeding frenzy.

Did Inspector Ding Gou’er, the book’s “hero”, really find a small boy braised in red sauce being set before him, or was it just fantasy? The reference to Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman is obvious, and is explicitly acknowledged by the author (p. 78). But the influence of this great writer is felt well beyond that single quotation. The baroque elements and the re-examination of mythology in this book recall the Lu Xun of the Contes anciens à notre manière (Old Tales Retold). The little boys served on a tray are a transposition of the ginseng fruits that appear in Chapter 24 of The Journey to the West((2), and the little monster covered in scales seems straight out of the palace of the dragon-king.

Here, as in Lu Xun, cannibalism takes on a symbolic meaning: the unbearable image of little children being cooked is used to condemn the “greedy and corrupt officials with their fat bellies” (p. 77). Yet, Mo Yan refuses to share—or perhaps is pretending to reject—the mood of seriousness with which Lu Xun presented his criticisms of society. In The Republic of Wine, the nightmare turns to Grand Guignol? and the parable becomes the mockery of a parable (unless the mockery itself is being mocked!): mockery taken to extremes, which, as the narrative progresses, draws us into an unrestrained frenzy, and lends extra justification to the title of this book “written in a state of drunkenness” (p. 208); mockery also in the literary device that brings Mo Yan in person into the fiction, indirectly at first, in an exchange of letters with a novice writer asking his opinion about the cruel stories he writes, and then directly in the final chapter.

This correspondence with the young writer Li Yidou might be another hint of Mo’s unconscious imitation of Lu Xun, until recent times the unchallenged master. Above all, it enables the novelist to scoff at the literary ideals still present in China today—the so-called “serious literature” that is modelled on the work of Gorky and Lu Xun, and that claims “to blend revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism” (p. 205)—and, through irony, to defend the intemperate writing style (his own) that is called “magical realism” or, to use a still more fanciful term, “cruel realism” (p. 77), even “diabolical realism” (p. 126). When Li Yidou expresses the wish for his work to be published in the review National Literature, the symbol of official recognition, Mo Yan rebuffs him, saying that his narrative was like “donkey tripe” (p. 229), a clear allusion to the negative image that his own work among the critics. But, while his attack on writers “with excessive imagination” such as Li Yidou (p. 265) is only a bluff, designed to mock the enemy, there are moments too when Mo Yan turns the irony against himself, especially in the final chapter where he goes so far as to caricature himself, even physically, describing himself as a creature “eaten up with complexes” (p. 434).

The passages of mockery and self-mockery are among the best in the book: Mo Yan reveals himself here to be a master of diversion, employing within the least likely contexts stock expressions (“rooks spreading their wings, a hundred flowers blooming”, p. 202; “Rick Hunter, holding hands with his closest comrade-in-arms”, p. 260), well-known slogans (“the old in the service of the new, foreign things in the service of China, that derives from monkeys in the service of man”, p. 409), even literary expressions (“a liquor capable of sending fishes to the bottom and bringing wild birds down to earth”, p. 408). Yet, they do not succeed in giving lightness to the whole. Indeed, while the book is a challenge to realism, reality is all the more strongly imposed by it, in its most concrete, most organic form (that of bodies digesting, excreting or regurgitating), like something sticky that will not dissolve, even in laughter.

The Republic of Wine does not seem to me to have attained the sublime, whatever the publishers may say. While monstrousness, cruelty or eroticism may indeed verge upon greatness, in literature as in cinema (consider the films of Fellini or Oshima), Mo Yan’s writing seems to me on the contrary to miss (or avoid) that artistic transfiguration, confining itself, like Jia Pingwa’s last books, to the level of sordidness and vulgarity: the narrative is punctuated with belching and vomiting, while adjectives like “foetid” and “sickening” are among the most commonly employed words right through the book, inspiring a feeling of disgust. Although the effect was probably not the publisher’s intention, even the smell of the paper contributes to this pervasive sense of disgust. Do Mo Yan and writers of his generation so distrust the sham of literature, its pretensions, its phoney grandiloquence, that they prefer to stay at the excremental level, in the gutter? The author’s sensitivity, though undeniable, cannot be expressed in scatology of such an aggressive kind; This sensitivity shows through only at rare moments, such as the brief childhood memory related on page 431, “[…] the days of my youth, when I scampered about after cows and sheep, and tamed birds, have become a slice of history that I can never recover”. Moreover, the enormous and pervasive presence of the writer in the first person, along with the now somewhat conventional theme of the novel within a novel, complicated by impromptu switches from “he” to “I”, can at times leave the reader baffled.

The Republic of Wine is certainly a lavish and bizarre creation, and is unlikely to leave readers unaffected. But reading it raises concerns: what, for example, remains of literature when it turns away from beauty, emotion, lightness, despair, grandeur, and all at the same time? The literature of cruelty in this way becomes a literature of nausea, and nothing more than a jarring experiment; it is the author confronting his own disgust and, ultimately, literature encountering its own decomposition.

Translated from French original by Philip Liddell