China's Nobel laureate, reconsidered

Mo Yan, the first Chinese resident to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (the jailed dissident Liu Xiabo was Nobeled in 2000 but moved to France), was born in 1955 to a farming couple on the dusty plains of the eastern Shandong Province. He was named Guan Moye, but his parents recommended the pen name of Mo Yan ("Don't Speak!") because, as he explained at a California forum in 2011, "At that time in China, lives were not normal, so my father and mother told me not to speak outside, that if you say what you think, you will get in trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak."

Not a very Nobel attitude. Mo was indeed criticized by Beijing for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing had barred several Chinese dissident writers. To which, Mr. Mo ambiguously responded in his Frankfurt acceptance speech, "A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions." What is the vice chairman of the Chinese Writers Association to do— but equivocate?

Beijing set a similarly ambiguous standard in 2010 when the jailed dissident Liu Xiabo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Beijing brass blocked Liu's award from the Internet, calling the Nobel a "desecration"— perverse propaganda intended to insult and destabilize the Chinese ruling party. The Chinese government even retaliated against Norway, denying visas to Norwegian dignitaries and— what really hurt— delaying shipments of Norwegian salmon so long that the fish rotted in customs.

Latin American Realist?

What a difference two years make. This year Mo's literary Nobel unleashed a national celebration— China's nationalistic Golden Times tabloid posted a "special coverage" page on its website, motivating the state-run People's Daily to exult that the prize was " a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation— but even more so, it is a new starting." Mo's style was compared with the Magic Realists of Latin America.

The plot of Mo's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) is simple, even simple-minded. Ximen Nao, the antihero of this celebration of Mao's China, is a benevolent and noble landowner in Gaomi county, Shandong. As a matter of principle, he refuses to join the local farming collective. His eventual punishment is transformation into a donkey. (Before the novel is over he has had his species shifted into pig, dog and monkey, to be rewarded finally by a return to his manhood.)

Ximen's chief antagonist, by the way, has an insatiable hunger for donkey gonads, which he ritually consumes in the evening along with his favorite drink. I presume this ballsy humor is meant to amuse the Co-op peasants.

Much ado about testes

Much (too much) plot is devoted to strategies for deballing our in-animated hero, not to forget equivalent palaver over strategies for guarding his (its) balls from extrusion. I intend to complain to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Disembodied Human Animals.

Puzzled by all this Nobel hoopla, I turned to my omniscient Wikipedia, wherein it allowed that Mo's "novel" garnered "some highly favorable reviews" but that some critics "suggested the narrative style was hard to follow."

Ahem. Hard? Metaphysically impossible to comprehend. As one of Mo's readers, I wish his parents had counseled him to assume the pseudonym, "Shut up!"

All this inscr(o)table discourse is feebly connected to the calamities that Mao engendered in China between 1948 and 2000. I say: If you ever wondered what the Long March felt like, marching through this interminable tract will convey the magnitude of the ordeal.

For those readers puzzled by the complexity of Mo Yan's "novel," a blessing is Mo Yan's Change (Seagull Books, 2010). This autobiography is much more transparent than the novel in describing the writer's rise from the obscurity of a poor farmer's son, through the People's Liberation Army, to a hard-won place at Beijing University, to his present eminence as the first resident Chinese Nobel laureate. His anxiety-ridden ploys to rise in the "classless" China are fascinating.♦


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