Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 2
Return to Contents»
Hard Core: Shelley Chan's "Not Uncritical" Mo Yan Thought (Part One of Three) / Jerry Xie
Keywords human nature, hypocrisy, Mo Yan, pleasure, revolution, subversion, violence
"the torture 'stirs up the hypercritical sympathy of the
spectators, and satisfies their evil aesthetic taste at the same time'" ~ Shelley Chan
"The oldest argument against socialism - that it is
contrary to human nature, is also the most popular." ~ Alex Callinicos [1]
Part One / Bourgeois Human Nature
<1> Despite its high price ($104 hardback, $55 ebook), Shelley Chan's scholarly commentary on Mo Yan in her Subversive Voice is quite an important work. It is, in its own way - from Chan's ideological position - considerably insightful for anyone seriously studying Mo's writings. In Lenin's red pedagogy of critique, her text is important because it "facilitates an understanding of the political essence of developments" in Mo's fictional world as reflected through "the arguments of . . . radical democrats" - like Chan - who sincerely contend that Moism (Mo-ism) is "subversive" (Lenin, "Learn" 60) [2]. Howard Goldblatt, in his auspicious foreword to Chan's book on "China's most popular and widely read novelist," points out that Chan's "sophisticated literary analysis reveals aspects, sometimes hidden, that go to the core of Mo Yan's literary project"; it is a work which is " not uncritical in her in-depth study" and is "the perfect complement to [our] reading of Mo Yan's novels" (Subversive, Foreword, emphasis added) [3].
<2> My interest here is in examining the ideology of this going "to the core" in Chan's reading of what she calls the "writing of violence" in Mo's post-Maoism (Chap. 3). Most critical readings aim to "go to the core" in one way or another, and most critical readings enact and produce "in-depth study." The question is what, after all, is reflected at the core of an in-depth study which, as Chan's reading of Mo seeks to do, displaces, "subverts" and jettisons dialectical materialism - the philosophy of Marxism [4] - in favor of so-called "dialectical historicism"? This "dialectical historicism" is characterized by "a vast imaginative space," an "historical space" which "'three-dimensionalize[s] a linear historical narrative and imagination . . . into a flowing, kaleidoscopic historical coordinate,'" and "the idea of history is to be treated in a broad sense" of "dialectical narrativity" (Intro., qtg. David Der-wei Wang). To this kaleidoscopic broad sense, Mo brings "his wild imagination" with a "noticeable playfulness," not for "mere exposé" but also to "display the pure pleasure in writing. . . . sometimes writing is just for the sake of writing" (Intro.). Chan's noticeably eclectic criticism also "sometimes" manages to combine Erich Fromm, Sartre, Foucault, Nietzsche, Northrop Frye, Bakhtin, Barthes, Jameson, Henry James, Lukács, Hayden White, Melanie Klein, and so on.
<3> Her in-depth study of Moist (Mo-ist) subversion is so sophisticated, however, that she completely avoids any mention, any reference, any quotation, any directly critical encounter whatsoever with any works by Marx, Engels or Lenin. But of course she can't ignore what she repeatedly calls "Maoist discourse." Chan subtly ridicules class struggle in the socialist writings of the Mao years by simply remarking that this was once considered "'revolutionary' and 'subversive'" (Chap. 3), placing these terms within scare quotes in order to challenge such designations from the vantagepoint of post-Maoism. Class struggle as "revolutionary violence," she says, was "strongly advocated and even institutionalized," which is "not surprising given the fact that Mao Zedong, too, endorsed revolutionary violence, telling his people in 1927 that 'revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay . . . . revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'" (ibid., qtg. Mao).
<4> What is remarkable here, very much in Strelnikov's sense of the word "remarkable" in Doctor Zhivago (545) [5], is just how totally alien or foreign Chan considers herself (and her readers) to be in relation to the Maoist historical and social past and its "discourses." In her not uncritical discourse, she unfolds an obscure and unexplained thesis according to which Mao was writing to "his people" more than eighty years ago, not "the" people with whom the author (or anyone else) might have some conceivably continuing relationship. In turn, "the" people of that revolutionary insurrection are also displaced into a lost past which is severed from the present. What is offered is a kind of negative nostalgia that attaches itself to the very narrative of "It's terrible!" that Mao himself - in the 1927 "Hunan Report" from which Chan quotes - clearly demystifies as the ideology of the old feudal regime which was not being "subverted" but revolutionarily eliminated and transformed. Mao writes:
In a few months the peasants have accomplished what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted, but failed, to accomplish in the forty years he devoted to the national revolution. This is a marvellous feat never before achieved, not just in forty, but in thousands of years. It's fine. It is not "terrible" at all. It is anything but "terrible." "It's terrible!" is obviously a theory for combating the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords; it is obviously a theory of the landlord class for preserving the old order of feudalism and obstructing the establishment of the new order of democracy, it is obviously a counter-revolutionary theory. No revolutionary comrade should echo this nonsense. If your revolutionary viewpoint is firmly established and if you have been to the villages and looked around, you will undoubtedly feel thrilled as never before. ("Hunan Report" 27)
<5> Chan's negative nostalgia offers an (un)happy rationalization of the present. Her viewpoint does not consider a past with a positive and historically situated value, but instead conjures up and satisfies what Marx called a class "social want" (Capital I, 336) for a past which has to be condemned in the name of "catastrophe," disaster, terror, or nightmare. History, along with the people who live through it and make it, is in Chan's mind, as Sartre put it in his analysis of Faulkner's fiction, "merely a veiled, furtive drift of events" in "a sort of surreality . . . changeless" ("Temporality" 20) - a serial, episodic stray of discontinuities. As Jameson argued in what he called the "safest [way] to grasp the concept of the postmodern" - safest because this "attempt to think the present" is situated within the dominant idealism and agnosticism of poststructuralist ideology - Chan's "cultural logic" reflects and reactivates a mode of mystification and fabrication (a "loss of historicity") which "has forgotten how to think historically" (Postmodernism ix).
<6> Chan doesn't read "his people" of the Mao era as existing, thinking and revolutionizing in a "history of all hitherto existing society [as] the history of class struggles," as in the dialectical materialist theory of Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (30) [6]. For them, the "ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force," exercising "control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to . . . . nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas . . . the ideas of its dominance" (German Ideology, emphasis added). [7]
<7> In such a conception, it is an absurdity - an "illusion," a "hallucination" of post-Maoism - to say that Mao was writing to "his people." This is because, on the contrary, he was writing to and for the people who make revolution against the system of classes throughout the epoch in which class struggle arises with the force of inevitability and necessity, "like a mighty storm," as Mao says, "like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back" ("Hunan Report" 23). What is at issue is not "his people" but the people connected in this revolutionary past, present and future. Mao himself says plainly, "Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly" (24).
<8> However, Chan wants the reader of Mo Yan Thought to see Mao confined with "his people." She has achieved "affinity" with Mo's hallucinations. This hallucinatory, vaguely "left"-sounding criticism provides cautionary rationalizations for capitalist-reading by forgetting the dialectical materialist theory of "never forget class struggle," by forgetting that "class struggle is the key link" and "everything else hinges on it" [8]. This is the safest way to grasp and "subvert" the class struggle of the people in the Mao era by "forgetting" how to think historically and, on the quiet, relegitimizing the reactionary hallucination that "his people" were merely under a terrible spell, a mass cult, a "mania of the barricades" which the postcritic has intellectually surpassed in a "furtive drift."
<9> In the same way, in her analysis of Sandalwood Death, Chan points to the professional executioner Zhao Jia's attempt "not to please the foreigners but to fulfill his own desire," how he "thoroughly enjoys the job, obtains great pleasure from it, and effectively turns the cruel torture into an art form" (Subversive, Chap. 3). She explains this as Mo's "attempt to spearhead the attack on the cannibalism amidst his own people and culture" (ibid., emphasis added). These are signs of Mo's "passion" in the portrayal of violence, she argues, "especially when he is driven by an impulse to speak for his fellow citizens and a commitment to condemn wicked behavior resulting from a cruel reality" (ibid., emphasis added). Thus Mo's "writing of violence is artistically appealing [for whom?] and powerful but simultaneously suffocating and disturbing" (ibid.). For "our pessimistic novelist," according to Chan, "violence is an external form of human evil that causes suffering and renders reality absurd at best and sinister at worst" (ibid.). And yet, this same "external" violence which is "pervasive, unavoidable, and universal . . . [it also] resides primarily within the human soul; therefore there is no end to it" (ibid., emphasis added). External and within: a blend of obscurantism as "criticism" which is, nonetheless, undoubtedly a fairly accurate and safe mirroring of Mo's passionate vision which "ponders profoundly, senses sharply . . . and writes freely" (ibid emphasis added).
<10> Chan reads this as a "more direct political critique" and "critical edge" (Concl.). And how is that? "As argued throughout this study," she says, "signs in Mo Yan's works indicate that he is gradually moving away from the role of the 'social conscience' or the 'engineer of human souls' that has traditionally been imposed on Chinese writers" (ibid.). His writing signifies a "move beyond" this wen yi zaidao - literature as "a vehicle to convey moral truth" - with an "unconstrained language and composition [which] in some cases are free from any practical function and in this respect serve the sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing" (ibid., emphasis added). Such is Chan's case for the Moist "critical edge" in the "writing of violence."
<11> But it is by no means clear how "in some cases" or "in this respect" Mo has moved beyond the role of "social conscience," a notion which is Chan's recoding of ideological discourse by calling it "traditional" - and thereby jettisoning ideology and the critique of ideology on behalf of bourgeois postmodernist "passion." While she aims to mark the distance between Mao's writing to "his people" and Mo's writing to "his own people" and "his fellow citizens," now culminating in the "sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure," the nagging question remains ("furtively") as to how and why the people who read Mo are somehow "free" from a "new" articulation of the same "old" bourgeois class "social conscience" that hides behind the all-out, hard core display of pleasure in violence (Ebert/Zavarzadeh, "Abu Ghraib" 99-102; Kelsh, "Excess" 138, 149-54; Ebert, "Desire" 32, 43-48; Bai, "Growing Up"; Strickland, "Infantilization" 75-78; Sartre, "New Mystic" 47-54, 76-82). As Teresa Ebert and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh argue, for example, in the context of contemporary American romance novels (Mo's writings are also always about "love"), Mo's "sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing" is "not the articulation of an autonomous imagination" but rather an articulation and "extension" of "the cultural imaginary of capital that normalizes the 'condition which requires illusions'" ("Abu Ghraib" 103, 98, 97, qtg. Marx, emphasis added). Mo Yan Thought is a fulfilling writing of "a narcosis of violence - simultaneously eroticizing it and desensitizing the reader to aggression" (102). Bai Di similarly suggests that "capitalism is very good at creating a void in people's psyche," to "teach you that the only way you feel okay is to want more" ("Growing Up"). Chan's dilemma of the "people" turns out to be an erudite mystification of class in the so-called "writing of violence." In her own word, repeatedly invoked throughout the book, it is a problem of how and why the signs and meanings of violence are "legitimized" in society and culture, how violence is encoded at the "core" of the social order of things. Chan's own (re)legitimizing reading of Mo's writing of violence is boldly spelled out in the title of her third chapter: "There Is No End to Violence."
<12> This notion of the "writing of violence" is an ideological poetics by which Chan undertakes, through a double movement, a "critical edge" celebration and normalization of Mo's storytelling as "subversively" familiar, as a mode of "controversy" which thrills, shocks and disgusts while also providing an invisible barrier against the red controversy of Marxist class struggle. Why? In her reasoning, it is because Moism has gone "beyond" - has transcended - the struggle of classes, not only for capitalistic China since the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, but worldwide. And naturally, the reader who truly "gets" Mo's hard core fiction, speeches, lectures and interviews will also get the idea that class struggle to end classes forever is just an "unrealistic" idea. As Maurice Meisner puts it in his extensive and in-depth historical study, the Dengist shift (1976-78) to the "post-Mao" era "inaugurated the wholesale deradicalization of a revolution," marking an "astonishingly rapid decline in revolutionary commitment in Chinese society," and "the fading of any real vision of a socialist and communist future" - hence the proliferation of a "profoundly anti-utopian" mood (Meisner, Deng Xiaoping Era 102). The reader who gets the core point, however, must also temporarily forget that "hallucinatory realism" is also unrealistic, but never mind about that!
<13> "Sandalwood Punishment is controversial mainly because of its intensely violent descriptions," says Chan (Chap. 3; Goldblatt's translation as Sandalwood Death had not yet been published at the time of Chan's writing). Mo's writing, which is, all at once or intermittently, artistically appealing, suffocating, powerful and disturbing, "reminds one of a Van Gogh painting" (ibid.). The "gratuitous, sensational, and even voyeuristic aspect of his violence is one of the reasons for the controversy surrounding his fictional works" (ibid.). Thus Chan proposes that Mo "might . . . be considered the Chinese Baudelaire, whose descriptions of human evil" could fill a "Chinese Les fleurs du mal" (Flowers of Evil; ibid.).
<14> Chan's "well-heeled" (Strelnikov!) and fleeting suggestion is remarkable for again reflecting (and invoking the likes of Faulkner, Marquez, Dickens, Van Gogh and others) how the bourgeouis postmodern mentality tends to discern the affiinitive likeness among the canonical family of great artists. Marx thought that artists "interpreted the world" in varying ways but were unable or unwilling to raise the consciousness to fundamentally "change it" (Essential Writings 155); and in this process of change, as Mao repeatedly insisted (and in which he included himself), to "remold" human consciousness itself (Talks 70-76, 94-95; "Dialectical Materialism"). Remembering Van Gogh paintings and Baudelaire through Mo Yan Thought is an ideological reflex of forgetting class struggle and mystifying this forgetting under the flag of "controversy" in fleshy pleasures, unconstrained desire, and the suffocating jouissance of ironicized disgust.
<15> Baudelaire's ideal subject is very clearly identified, at the end of his preface to The Flowers of Evil, as the hypocrite, an idea and ideal which Chan updates and relegitimizes through her elevation of the "hypercritical" reader/writer as a "sympathetic" metaspectator of pluralistic violence. For Baudelaire, already struck by an emptied religiosity in the face of urban alienation, "It is the Devil who pulls the strings that move us!" (Flowers 3). Of course he doesn't really believe that the Devil is ultimately to blame; the artist on the avant-garde edge is driven only to mirror the symptoms. "We steal . . . a clandestine pleasure/Which we squeeze hard like an old orange" (3). Baudelaire bears witness to "his people," to borrow Chan's phrase, "[p]acked tight and swarming like a million maggots," for whom a "crowd of Demons carouse in our brains" (3). The great artist paints the "banal canvas of our pitiful fate," where "our soul, alas, is not bold enough" (3).
<16> But how, then, would one make the soul (subjectivity) bold enough? Baudelaire sees that "among the jackals, panthers, bitches,/Monkeys, scorpions, vultures, serpents,/The monsters squealing, yelling, grunting, crawling/In the infamous menagerie of our vices" (3) - among all these, "[t]here is one uglier, more wicked and more foul than all!" who "would gladly make the earth a shambles" (4). This uglier one, he boldly proclaims, "is boredom! . . . . You know him, reader, this delicate monster,/ - Hypocrite reader - my twin - my brother!" (4). To be "bold enough," for Baudelaire, is to become the self-knowing subject of the "hypocrite reader" who is the twin, the likeness, and the brother of the great artist himself, and nothing more than this. Baudelaire's "beyond," if there is one, is a perpetual becoming of internal "self"-recognition.
<17> Knowingly hypocritical reading/writing is, as Sartre argued, a slick display of "dandyism, the cult of artificiality" of the "distressed soul" whose aims and ends shift according to the playful discipline of volupté, a flowing pleasure of sensation, satisfaction and sensual delights: now the uglier one stresses "'the whole of my religion (travestied),'" but now again "'say the opposite'" and play up "'a work of pure art, monkey tricks, juggling, and . . . lying like a trooper'" (Baudelaire 159, 82, 48, qtg. Baudelaire). Avant-garde boldness stands enthralled by its own hypocrisy yet not moving behond the horizon of bourgeois hypocrisy. Why? For Baudelaire, like Mo and perhaps for Chan, bourgeois hypocrisy marks the interpretive living end of history, society and culture themselves, an untranscendable and untransformable yet infinitely reinterpretable limit of what Marx called "bourgeois right," the juridical expression and justification for the material foundation of hypocrisy in exploitative and alienated social relations, in "unpaid labor," in systematic, legalized robbery (Marx, Capital I, Chaps. XXIV-XXVII: "what really takes place is" that "property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others" [547]). Baudelaire knew this hypocrisy - and confronted it face to face when his writings were suppressed and he himself was dragged into court - but he explained away its sins by recourse to the metaphysics of an always "certain ambivalence" which "identifies Evil with Nature" and where the "'natural' is synonymous with legitimate and just" (Sartre, Baudelaire 102).
<18> Thus it appears legitimate that with this "taste for death and decadence," the writer of hypocritical ultra-interpretivism occupies the strangely privileged place of "a parasite on a class [the bourgeoisie, the ruling class] which [is] itself parasitic" (138), or exploitative. And the "creation of a work of art" - as if "cultivating pure thought and pure art" - "inside bourgeois society [is] equivalent to providing a service" (145). The "creative act . . . is emptied of its substance and assumes the form of an act which is strictly gratuitous . . . and even absurd . . . transformed into mystification" (145). This is Sartre's relentlessly demystifying reading of Baudelaire from the left [9]. By contrast, in order for Chan to find subversivity in Moism by way of Baudelairean hypocriticalism, she is compelled to remystify the "twins" through a reading from the middle, or what amounts to the same thing, from the standpoint that Lenin referred to as "radical democracy" which "has been corrupted by the ideologists of capital" (Lenin, "Learn" 61).
<19> Writing violence from the "core" of the middling class view, Chan's "historical" understanding of contemporary China is obscurely reflected in the idea she borrows from none other than Robert B. Reich: so-called post-Mao China is essentially a "capitalist-communist" society characterized by "uncontrollable human desire" (Subversive, Chap. 3). China is a "system that is both capitalist and communist (i.e., a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government)" (Chap. 4, emphasis added). Her otherwise eclectic reading of Mo ignores the writings of Maurice Meisner (e.g., The Deng Xiaoping Era, 1996), William Hinton (e.g., The Great Reversal, 1990), and Robert Weil (e.g., Red Cat, White Cat, 1996). "Capitalist-communism" is the syncretic combination of opposites, a "frothy" substitute for critical thought lacking any interest in understanding "communism" in terms of class struggle. Consequently, the most convenient way out of "binary" thinking and "the ultraleftist trend of thought that led to the ten-year Cultural Revolution" (Chap. 2), is to muddle capitalism and communism together in a "kaleidoscopic" mixture of history "in a broad sense."
<20> With Chan, hypocritical reading undergoes a hallucinatory costume-change into "hypercritical" reading, which she derives from her own translation of a passage from Sandalwood Death. Before examining this, the affirmative and uncritical reading of Moism merits discussion. This reading is established as the, appreciative, uncritical reading of Moism in such a way that the enduring, eternally (un)satisfying tale of "human nature" is established as the underlying explanatory rationalization for all the ills of humanity, particularly hypocrisy and "violence" in all possible forms. Despite her own indication of Mo's belief that "'it is the environment that makes people cruel and merciless'" (Chap. 2, qtg. her trans. of Mo, my emphasis), Chan holds that Mo has a "consistent interest in exposing the hypocrisy of human beings who, he believes, are no more civilized than animals," which makes him a "satirist" of "human absurdities" (Chap. 4).
<21> Mo reveals ("exposes" readers to) the "ugliness of human nature" (Chap. 4) and the "dark side of human nature" (Chaps. 3, 4, Concl.). And this "antipathy toward human nature applies to all people regardless of their social or class status" (Chap. 4). By now we may safely forget what Chan reports Mo said about "the environment that makes people" (do "people" with "human nature" also make the environment?). Yet the critical scholar still insists that Mo's "superior writing skills" serve a "cultural criticism" - not natural criticism? - which reveals "a culture of cruelty that exists not only in history but also in modern reality and even in human minds" (Chap. 3, emphasis added). In history, in modern reality ("regardless" of social class), and even - the horror! - in human minds, which are no more civilized than the minds of animals. But this is cultural criticism, and "more direct political critique" as well.
<22> One way out for this cultural criticism turns out to be the "hypercritical" road, which is itself absurdly similar to Nietzsche's epistemological agnosticism of the "will" (inherited from Schopenhauer) to knowing that "truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are" (Nietzsche, "Truth" 47) [10]. And even this "knowing" as cynical certainty is itself known to be hypocritical. If all truths "are" illusions ("this is what they are"), and if this is what we have forgotten (this is also an illusion), the essential task is the eternally illusory remembering of this illusory, magical, unreal quality of all truths. Yet this is also the quasi-illusory foundation of idealistic agnosticism for which truths are equated with illusions; the contradiction of truth and illusion is playfully "overcome" by combining and fusing them. The theory itself is hypocritical, but since it knows and accepts its hypocrisy as an ever-emptying "core," nothing can be more (un)happily satisfying than this endless vacillation, turning and (re)spinning of remembering what was forgotten and forgetting again what was remembered. It is a kind of utopian dystopia of "radical liberal" bourgeois pluralism which is, as William Hinton writes in Shenfan, "the rotten feudal and bourgeois concept of humanism (the essence of which is the denial of class struggle)" (179).
<23> One may critically point out that in this agnostic theory there is no conception of a class politics of truth according to which "truths" become fixed and determined as dominant - and later are contested and displaced; however, from the viewpoint of agnosticism, such a class politics of knowing is supposed to acknowledge its own illusory status as "equal" in the Olympian levelling of all illusory claims to truth. If it appears to be "true" that a class of owners fattens itself by taking unpaid labor from a class of unfree workers, this is not ultimately because of the fundamental, existing reality of the class contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited - which can be changed through real historical and social struggle; rather, it is because of an epistemological error that has been forgotten. There is really no class structure existing outside of consciousness, which is reflected by consciousness, but instead the class structure is a "truth-effect" in an endless series of effects of "metaphysical" human yearning. The fact that a worker yearns each month to pay the rent or the mortgage, while a capitalist yearns for another luxury car, another house, a farm in the countryside to "get away from it all," or a vacation in the tropics - these are also questions of "metaphysics" and epistemology, but not reflections in human consciousness of the real class struggle over metaphysics and epistemology.
<24> While Chan eruditely panders to the cliché that Mo's fictional world gets "beyond" (post) the political knowledge of class conflict, and forgets any critical engagement with any of the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, she doesn't forget to stress that "Mo Yan writes historical fiction that is consonant with 'Nietzsche's insistence . . . that the "historical" is an aesthetic creation whose truth is dramatic rather than objective'" ( Subversive, Chap. 1, qtg. Paul Jay). This is "challenging," says Chan, to the "progressive conception of history" and the "revolutionary history . . . of the Maoist monologue . . . filled with class struggle and collectivism" (ibid.). Moist "historical fiction," by contrast, "is full of desire and imagination, . . . the élan vital of individuals" as "history under Mo Yan's pen" (ibid.). Likewise, when finding the "hypercritical" dimension in Moism, she remembers that Foucault's analytic of the disciplinary spectacle is also "consonant"; that is, Foucault's Nietzscheanism is "apt" and "applies" very well (Chap. 3).
<25> As we see in the notion of reading Mo's "frothy" combinationalism of opposites and the "going beyond" [11] class and politics in literary creation, Chan's reading of hypocritical "hypercriticism" is scaffolded upon a repeated appeal to the poststructuralist dogma that "binaries" are intellectually, politically and aesthetically unsatisfying for the true heirs of avant-garde narration. "On the one hand," Chan argues, Mo "attempts to demoralize, so to speak, the moralized history" (Chap. 1) - that is, the "moral" of Maoist (Marxist, Leninist) revolutionary struggle for classless society. Nevertheless Mo "tries to problematize history itself by subverting the binary opposition between good and evil" (ibid., emphasis added). In this "demoralizing" spirit, she asserts, the "characterization of the individuals in Mo Yan's novels is true to life, full of mixed qualities and human complexities" (ibid., emphasis added). Complexity is just fine, but this demoralizing is at the same time a remoralizing of the bourgeois "human" with little if any class qualities ("regardless"); and thus, this demoralizing is also a form of preaching on behalf of readers with no class consciousness, "so to speak," who imagine themselves as "true to life" amidst the complexities of capitalist society and culture.
<26> Complexity, in other words, is meaningless if it isn't dialectically decomplexified by a simplifying force of thinking (reading and writing) that grasps the complex flux of phenomena on an other level of understanding. But Chan presents this incessant movement of dialectics in thought in such a way that "complexity" and "mixed qualities" are apolitical and non-ideological ends in themselves, "true to life" for bourgeois speculation on the hypocritical blurring of "good" and "evil" devoid of class analysis. Through the back door, then, the dreaded binary opposition reasserts itself unconsciously as "good" is complexity and "evil" is simplicity. Nietzsche himself, not to mention Lenin, would laugh out loud at the deformed philistinism and unphilosophical emptiness of this cynical cashing in on the skepticism of "goods" and "evils."
<27> Chan's reading of Mo is "true to life" not only for the person with little or no understanding of dialectics as "unity of opposites" and "interpenetration of opposites," but more importantly for the person who doesn't know how to use and actually develop thought dialectically in order to produce rigorous critique for revolutionizing theory and practice. While preaching complexity, her analytical appreciations become simple-minded and even forget that "true" to life necessitates something false to life, and that the "mixed" quality ("froth") necessitates a separation or an unmixing of qualities. The very idea of "subverting" binarity is ludicrous without the thought and practice of oppositionality, because the political meaning of subversion is precisely to oppose and undermine one force with another.
<28> Chan's bourgeois poststructuralist theory of "binaries" is epistemologically idealist and agnostic, and hence the Moist subversion of binaries is also aimed at (re)moralizing a quietist, meditative, indeterminate idealist consciousness which anxiously and indefinitely postpones the necessity of collective class struggle to destroy capitalism and thereby eliminate the material foundation of classes themselves. "Creating a binary opposition between the rich and the poor is certainly necessary for the theory of class struggle," says Chan, cunningly followed by mouthing the simplistic rhetoric created by Mo himself for one of his own characters: "exactly as Lu Liren claims: you are either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary and there is no middle ground" (Chap. 3). We are here supposed to believe that the theory of class struggle, with its "binary" oppositionality, is "exactly" like this, just as Mo the subversive voice tells us it is through Lu Liren in Big Breasts and Wide Hips. The complexity of the critic's ideology could hardly be more simplistic, and rhetorically effective at that, for here we are treated to Mo's own reflection of the theory of class struggle as a doctrinaire "absurdity." The move is equivalent to calling a hostile witness to testify as an unbiased expert. Yet Chan in fact believes that the theory of class struggle is "exactly" like this.
<29> The idealism of this mouthing of theory is suggested in the notion that the theory of class struggle (i.e., Marxism) is guilty of "creating" the deadly binary of rich and poor. But the theory does not "create" the binary; it reflects the objective truth and reality of this "binary" as it exists in class society. This is materialist dialectics. Only an idealist would say "exactly" that a theory is "creating" what is "certainly necessary." Theory is, of course, a creative force in the sense that it is a human work of critical consciousness. But this does not mean that theory "creates" the world all by itself. Binarity is certainly necessary in revolutionary class theory, not because binaries are "created" out of thin air, but because they reflect the material realities of the world and its "certainly necessary" human and dehumanized social relations, its truths and its falsities, its good and its evil, and all the murky vacillations of the "middle ground."
<30> For Chan, Mo "problematizes" (Chap. 3) this kind of binary opposition which he himself spins up for the satisfaction of his "middle ground" standpoint. This problematizing means that Moism "leads to the pondering of issues on more profound levels, taking into consideration political and human complexities" (ibid.). Once again, the "human complexities," now with concerned scholastic "pondering" on "profound levels." To "problematize" a theory and a practice should mean that one looks deeper into it. Merely to invoke "pondering" and "human complexity" is in fact superficial and artificial if the underlying drift of the argument is simply to return to the vacuous post-historicism of "human nature." Chan's problematizing reading of Moism reaches its highest and ultimate expression with the theory of the "hypercritical." We now need to look deeper into this demoralizing moral at the heart of Mo's resplendent storytelling. . . .
(To be continued. Parts Two and Three will appear in forthcoming issues of Reconstruction.)
Notes
[1] The first epigraph is from Shelley Chan's 2011 book, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan (Chap. 3, qtg. Mo's novel Sandalwood Death). The second epigraph is from Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (65). Price: $8 paperback in 1992, $10 ebook in 2014. "In short," Lenin writes in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, "you pay your money and take your choice. 'Experience' embraces both the materialist and the idealist line in philosophy and sanctifies the muddling of them" (135).
[2] "Learn from your enemies, comrade workers," says Lenin. "Call to mind the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, which speaks of the transformation of the proletariat into a class in keeping with the growth not only of its unity, but also of its political consciousness" ("Learn" 60).
[3] In Goldblatt's view, however, "Scholarship is not advocacy, of course, at least it should not be." Most of the discussion here concerns Chan's Chap. 3, "There Is No End to Violence"; all references are to the chapters of her book in the Kindle Edition.
[4] See Lenin's Preface to the 2nd Edition of Materialism: "I hope that ... [the book] will prove useful as an aid to an acquaintance with the philosophy of Marxism, dialectical materialism" (9).
[5] See Antipov Strelnikov speaking to Yuri Zhivago in Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago: "'There was the world of .... [f]ilth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama's boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!'" (Part 14, 545, emphasis added) "'But why am I saying all this to you? For you it's a clanging cymbal, empty sounds'" (547).
[6] In the Manifesto, what Marx and Engels call the reactionary "feudal Socialism" - the fake "socialism" of the dying feudal aristocracy in a "literary battle" against "modern bourgeois society" - arose as "half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future ... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history" (60-61, emphasis added). "In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated.... they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their form of society" (61, emphasis added).
[7] This core theory is from Vol. I, Part I, Sec. B, "The Illusion of the Epoch," subsection on "Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas," in The German Ideology. The "materialist conception of history," Marx and Engels say, "has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category," e.g., "hallucinatory realism," "but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into 'self-consciousness' or transformation into 'apparitions,' 'spectres,' 'fancies,' etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history ... and all other types of theory.... It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances" (subsection on "Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History").
[8] These core principles are widely credited to Mao's speeches and talks during the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee Conference of the Chinese Communist Party, Aug. and Sept., 1962, held at Beidaihe, Hebei Province. See William Hinton, Shenfan: "The slogan raised by Mao at Peitaiho was, 'Never forget class struggle'" (313). "'The most profound lesson ... is that at no time must we forget class struggle, forget the dictatorship of the proletariat'" (314, qtg. Mao). "'The present struggle is one to reeducate people. It is to reorganize the revolutionary class forces for waging a sharp tit-for-tat struggle against the capitalist and feudal forces which are brazenly attacking us, in order to crush their counterrevolutionary arrogance and ferocity and to transform the overwhelming majority of the persons involved into new people'" (315, qtg. Mao). Part IX of Hinton's Shenfan, the final part of the book, is itself entitled "Never Forget Class Struggle," including Chap. 82, "The Devil Take the Commonweal." See also Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism (196, 204). The "theory of a new bureaucratic class, with interests fundamentally opposed to the interests of the masses," writes Meisner, "is a matter now beyond the pale of acceptable political discussion.... the radical deemphasis on class struggle serves to obscure the social contradictions generated by the post-revolutionary order itself" (231). See also "Never Forget the Class Struggle" (Peking Review, 1966); "Criticism of 'Taking the Three Directives as the Key Link'" (Peking Review, 1976); and Fang Kang, "Capitalist-Roaders Are the Bourgeoisie Inside the Party" (Peking Review, 1976).
[9] Sartre's Baudelaire was originally published in French in 1947. Even in 1944, however, in "Existentialism: A Clarification," Sartre was attempting to align his theory of existentialism with "the conception of man found in Marx" (88) and "class struggle" (90). He opposes "an eternally established nature" (88), i.e., "human nature" as a declassed bourgeois abstraction, and he strenuously contests the "claptrap" and "stupidity" which confused his philosophy with a "quietism of anguish," as if he had tried to "cultivate a refined despair" which "likes to poke about in muck and is much readier to show men's wickedness and baseness than their higher feelings" (86-87). For Sartre these are modes of hypocrisy; the critical reader may well notice that they are quite accurate depictions of Mo's so-called hallucinatory realism.
[10] This core principle of epistemological agnosticism is also commonly translated as: "Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusion." Walter Kaufmann points out that "Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure" (Basic Writings xix, emphasis added). Compare Nietzsche's infinitely in-"adequate" theory of knowledge (truths = illusions) with Lenin's dialectical materialist theory of knowledge in Materialism, where he writes, e.g., that "by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies" (130, Lenin's emphasis).
[11] See James Kidd's review of Sandalwood Death in the South China Morning Post as an "Orgy of Pain and Pleasure": "The tone ... is a frothy combination of opposites." See Diao Ying et al. in China Daily: "The key to producing a great piece of work, he [Mo] said, is whether a writer can go beyond class and politics, and be compassionate, even with people who level criticism at you behind your back." See Mo's afterword to the 2012 novel Pow! (published in Chinese in 2003): "In that muddy stream of language, the story is the conveyor of language and a byproduct of it. What about ideology? About that I have nothing to say. I've always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I'm writing" ("Narration is Everything" 386).
Works Cited
Bai Di. "Interview with Bai Di: Growing Up in Revolutionary China," Revolution, No. 161, Apr. 12, 2009, at http://www.revcom.us/.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen: Selected Poems, trans. Wallace Fowlie, Dover Publications: Mineola, 2010.
Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, Bookmarks: London, 1987.
Chan, Shelley W. A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt, Cambria Press: Amherst, NY, 2011, Kindle Ed.
"Criticism of 'Taking the Three Directives as the Key Link,'" Peking Review, Vol. 19, No. 14, Apr. 2, 1976, 6-8.
Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei. "Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life," China Daily, Dec. 7, 2012.
Ebert, Teresa L. "Left of Desire," Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, Vol. 3, No. 1, Fall 1999, at http://clogic.eserver.org/.
-- and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh. "Abu Ghraib and Class Erotics," in Ebert/Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture, Paradigm Publishers: Boulder, 2008, 96-103.
Fang Kang. "Capitalist-Roaders Are the Bourgeoisie Inside the Party," Peking Review, Vol. 19, No. 25, June 18, 1976, 7-10, 24.
Hinton, William. Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village, Vintage Books: NY, 1984.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke Univ. Press: Durham, 1991/2001.
Kelsh, Deborah P. "The Pedagogy of Excess," Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, 2013, 137-56, at http://clogic.eserver.org/.
Kidd, James. "Mo Yan's Boxer Rebellion Novel an Orgy of Pain and Pleasure," South China Morning Post, Jan. 20, 2013.
Lenin, V.I. "Learn From the Enemy," in Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 10, trans./ed. Andrew Rothstein, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1978, 60-61.
-- Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, (book) from Vol. 14 of Lenin's Collected Works, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt, Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1970.
Mao Tse-tung (Zedong). "Dialectical Materialism," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI; orig. pub. 1938; at http://www.marxists.org/.
-- "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I, Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1967 (1927), 23-59.
-- Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III, Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1967 (1942), 69-98.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, International Publishers: NY, 1987.
-- Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, Frederic L. Bender, Ed., 2nd Ed., Westview Press: Boulder, 1986.
-- and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology, Vol. I, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, trans. Clemens Dutt, eds. Vladimir Brushlinski et al., Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1969, at http://www.marxists.org.
-- and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels, Foreign Languages Press: Peking, 1970, at http://www.marx2mao.
Meisner, Maurice. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994, Hill and Wang: NY, 1996.
-- Marxism, Maoism and Utopianism: Eight Essays, Univ. of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1982.
Mo Yan. "Afterword: Narration Is Everything," in Mo Yan, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt, Seagull Books: London, 2012, 385-86; orig. pub. 2003 in Chinese as Sishiyi pao.
-- Sandalwood Death, trans. Howard Goldblatt, Univ. of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2013; orig. pub. 2001 in Chinese as Tanxiang xing.
"Never Forget the Class Struggle," Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 20, May 13, 1966, 40-42.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans./ed. Walter Kaufmann, Modern Library: NY, 2000.
-- "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," excerpted in The Portable Nietzsche, trans./ed. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Book: NY, 1977 (1873), 42-47.
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Books: NY, 2010.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. "A New Mystic: On Bataille's Inner Experience," in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, New York Review Books: NY, 2013, 47-82.
-- Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell, New Directions: NY, 1950.
-- "Existentialism: A Clarification," in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live, 86-91.
-- "On The Sound and the Fury: Temporality in Faulkner," in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live, 17-25.
Strickland, Ronald. "Never Grow Old, Never Grow Up: Postmodernity and the Infantilization of American Culture," in Elena Crestianicov, Ed., Sailing Uncharted Waters, Univ. of Moldova Press: Chisinau, 2009, 71-79.
Return to Top»