Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
by Mo Yan
Translated into English by Howard Goldblatt
Arcade Publishing, New York, 2006
540 pages
1.
Authoritarian regimes--China is a prominent contemporary example--fear their writers and go to elaborate lengths to control them. Writers of literature are generally an independent lot for whom dedication to aesthetics and truth go hand in hand. The latter aspect gets them into deep trouble with a regime that only permits dedication to its truth and represses the truth by persecuting dissent. For Chinese writers who adamantly object to totalitarian control of thought there are two choices: exile or prison. It is sad to say that so many of the best Chinese writers and intellectuals have felt compelled to choose one or the other.
There is, of course, a third choice: compromise with, or even full acceptance of, a regime that does its best to crush independent thinking perceived as a threat to its power. This is generally the choice preferred by hacks. Mo Yan, who is the president of the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association; Mo Yan who refuses to condemn the criminalization and incarceration of Lin Xiabo, the well-known activist for the democratization of China who received a Nobel peace prize in 2010; Mo Yan is arguably politically tainted but is, nevertheless, no hack. He is a skilled writer; his novel, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out is well worth reading.
When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, his willingness to be in effect a part of a repressive state was like a big red ball thrown into your garden. You couldn't ignore it; you had to pick it up. Many Chinese intellectuals were either saddened or made furious by the news. A previous recipient of the Noble Prize for Literature called the decision a "catastrophe." Another prominent writer called Mo Yan a patsy.
In the year the award was given, Perry Link wrote an article for the New York Review of Books with the following title, "Does the Author Deserve the Prize?" The essay implied that the price he has paid for a lucrative writing career endorsed by tyrants--that is, being a sycophant--made him unworthy of the award. It is significant to note that whether Mo Yan is a good writer or not is not discussed.
It might be a sad fact but it is a fact: if an artist is brilliant and outshines most of his contemporaries, his moral shortcomings are relegated to his shadow. It is unproblematic and very rewarding to enter the brilliant realm of Wagner's music; the shadowy deficiencies of the man do not affect the notes. The novelist's case is admittedly somewhat--but not completely--different, since prose is a much less abstract art form than is music.
I believe that Life and Death Is Wearing Me Out proves beyond doubt that Mo Jan is a very good writer.
The novel is an epic tale of small-town life in China from 1950 until 2000. It centers on a landowner, Ximen Nao, who is executed as a class enemy as soon as the Communists come to power. He is subsequently reborn in turn as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and finally as a human, the Millennium Boy, Lan Quiansui. The reincarnated animals, now serving those who had served Ximen Nao, are involved in many lively adventures with the inhabitants of the village of Ximen. The background is the cataclysmic history of China during that period.
2.
There are many excellent novels that provide convincing portrayals of how life is or was under a totalitarian regime. Examples: Everyone Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, depicting everyday life under the Nazis; The Land of Green Plums, depicting everyday life in Communist Romania, by Herta Müller-who, by the way, is the Nobel Prize winner who thinks that the award to Mo Yan was a "catastrophe"; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, depicting life in a Soviet gulag; The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, depicting life in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, and finally, der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp (as yet untranslated into English) which depicts life in East Germany. Having read all of these, I assert without hesitation that these novels give one a better idea of how life was under those regimes than any history book.
If you are expecting a novel that accurately depicts the catastrophes of recent Chinese history, however, Yan's novel isn't the book for you. There is an important distinction between the novels I mentioned and the one I am now reviewing: all of the former were written by authors who lived through a terrible regime, and wrote their novels either in exile or after the regime in question fell. (The sole exception is Solzhenitsyn's novel which was written in the Soviet Union at a time when a depiction of Stalinist terror was no longer taboo.) The only criticisms they faced were from reviewers and readers. If Mo Yan, living in China, had given a more truthful portrait of life in China from 1950 until the present, he would either have been forced into exile or have been arrested. He made his choice. He also made the choice to write well.
The current situation in China reminds me a little of the history of racism in America. Seventy years ago racism in the United States was brutal; it has eased up since then but it is still omnipresent. There are no longer millions dying in China at the hands of a repressive regime; freedom of thought, however, remains very much unachieved. Many people are still either exiled or jailed because of their democratic beliefs. The regime allows some mentioning of "excesses" of the past as long as they remain light-years away from an honest account.
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out follows unwritten Communist guidelines in this regard. A character in the book, Lan Lian, the executed and reincarnated Ximen Nao's farmhand, resists, despite increasing pressure, to stop being an independent farmer and join a collective. Lian insists that Mao Zedong permits independent farming. When Chairman Mao dies, he is as grief-stricken as the most ardent Communists. We see here an example of the Communist lie that the "excesses" came from the bottom and not from those at the top. There are many examples of glossing over disasters of the past. One of Ximen Nao's incarnations, a donkey, is killed and eaten by starving peasants. There is no mention either of the cause of the starvation or that at least 30 million peasants died during it. The disastrous bird-killing campaign is mentioned late in the book and only in passing. The equally disastrous steel campaign during which China was deforested to fuel backyard furnaces that were to transform scrap metal into steel--it did not produce usable steel--is indeed mentioned, in, however, a very superficial way. Later in the novel, a person is given the advice to contribute to rebuild a temple destroyed in the Cultural Revolution--that's the only mention of the enormous destruction of temples that were carried out during those horrible years. The ravage of Tibet, still a very taboo topic, is, of course, not even mentioned in passing. Yan's superficial, often humorous portrayal of Chinese history reminds me of Longfellow's line, "Into each life a little rain must fall." The truth is that the intermittent downpours under Chairman Mao were unimaginably severe.
Why is such a revisionist novel still worth reading?
3.
For at least three reasons: Mo Yan is a great storyteller; he is very inventive and, finally, almost never boring. (If it is true that he wrote this long novel in only 42 days, he also writes unbelievably fast and is thus an equal of Georges Simenon in this regard!) Regarding his inventiveness, thinking animals, all incarnations of Ximen Nao, occur throughout; in lesser hands, this may have become tedious, but Yan pulls this off brilliantly. Most adults sometimes look back with nostalgia at a time in their lives in which animals talked and behaved like humans--at least in storybooks. Yan captures this nostalgia without requiring the reader to suspend adult experience. Far from it. There is a wonderful scene in the first section in which human sexuality and asinine sexuality combine as Ximen Nao, now a donkey, approaches a young female donkey's behind. It was fun to feel like a kid and an id at the same time.
There are many interesting characters who are also character-types. Ximen Nao's son Ximen Jinlong, adopted by Lan Lian after Ximen Nao's execution, is a well-portrayed type that exists everywhere: all he wants is power for himself, and will change according to the times in order to hold on to it. During the time of Chairman Mao, he is a fervent Communist and browbeats his adoptive father for remaining an independent farmer, since this threatens Jinlong's position as a high-ranking member of the Communist party. Later on, he becomes a full-fledged capitalist and attempts to transform the village of Ximen into a resort! (The Chinese government, by the way, intends to transform the village in which Yan was born into a "Cultural Experience Zone.") Another character, Hong Taiyue, "a typical lowlife, the dregs of society, a beggar who went around banging on the hip bone of a bull ox," rises in the local branch of the Party due to his impeccable peasant credentials; when China adopts capitalism, however, he feels as much at home as a minnow in a mall. Desperate, he puts on a suicide vest and kills both himself and the unscrupulous Jinlong.
The last section of the novel is by far the best. Mo Yan who writes himself into the novel from the beginning, is responsible here for a new direction of the plot. He introduces the unhappily married Lan Jiefang to Pang Chunmiao, a beauty twenty years younger than himself. History, that is revisionist history, is completely forgotten as Mo Yan tells the love story and its consequences. (The affair causes a major scandal, proof that Chinese society--at least in rural areas-- has yet to permit the permissiveness of the West. There's always room for progress!) Their tragic love story is a quintessential page-turner. This section of the novel is first rate-fiction, proof beyond doubt that Mo Jan is a very talented writer.
Conclusion
Perhaps Mo Yan has written here two novels, one for China and one for the rest of us. If one knows what really happened, one can deconstruct the novel into one that confronts Chinese history with an effective use of poetic understatement. A hint of horror can effectively bring those horrors to mind than pages of accurately depicted misery. Those who have been brain-washed by state-controlled disinformation are able to view the novel as realistic historical fiction. Am I being facetious? Perhaps, perhaps not. Who knows what Mo Yan keeps to himself in order to remain the darling of the Communist Party? Time might tell. In the meantime, read this enjoyable novel with an informed and inviolate eye.
You are welcome to read past book reviews of the Baltimore Online Book Club by googling the title of the novel along with my full name, Thomas Dorsett.
1. The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
2..Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
4. A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
5. Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
Our next meeting will take place on October 14, 2015. On that date, the six members of our group will discuss the novel, Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner; I will post my review shorty therafter. You are invited to read the book and to post your comments onto the comment section of the review. I wish you pleasurable reading!
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