Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 2
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Hard Core: A Review of Shelley Chan's "Not Uncritical" Mo Yan Thought (Part Two of Three) / Jerry Leonard
This is the second installment in a three-part series. Part One appeared in Reconstruction 15.2.
Part Two: Xu Wei (虚伪), or Hypercritical Sham
<31> Under Mo Yan's Pen, as Chan says repeatedly (2011: chaps. 1, 3), "torture has become simply a profession and cruelty is juxtaposed with and even transformed into an art of the aesthetic domain-a completely new reading experience for contemporary Chinese readers" (chap. 3). She acknowledges that this aestheticization of violence and torture came under fire in China following the publication of Sandalwood Death. Xie Youshun, for example, criticized Mo for glamorizing "'eccentric behavior,'" a "'gloomy psyche,'" and for indulging in ultraviolent descriptions to serve as "'mere enjoyment for the writer'" (ibid., qtg. Xie). Now, however, instead of "problematizing" the Moist aesthetic of violence, Chan immediately changes the subject to point out the marketability (commodification) of the novel, as if this in any way addresses the critical intellectual issues raised by Xie's direct engagement with Mo's writing.
<32> Xie Youshun was making "accusations." Such "accusations," says Chan, "have not prevented the book from selling well in the market" (chap. 3), referring then to sales of 80,000 volumes by 2003, and by Mo's own estimate including pirated copies, the number should really be three to five times this amount. Still, Mo "said he did not know why the book sold so well" (ibid.). Here again then the "human nature" rationale is used further to divert attention away from Xie's criticisms. According to Mo, says Chan, the "depiction of torture in Sandalwood Punishment is not meant to flaunt violence, … but rather to display the dark side of human nature and reveal a culture of cruelty that exists not only in history but also in modern reality and even in human minds." We saw this earlier, of course. She goes on to say, nonetheless, that Mo's "propensity to take pleasure in cruelty is nevertheless undeniably visible in this novel" and "falls into the realm of pure enjoyment … enjoyment of writing for the author is to take delight in writing about violence as well as in the imagination of violence." In this "subversive" defense, Chan deals shocking blows to Xie's mere accusations. How? By confirming them.
<33> It is taken as a "fact" here that Mo "seems to enjoy the cruelty he invents," which "demonstrates a kind of gratuitous, sensational, and even voyeuristic tendency" (chap. 3). This is a "fact" (it also "seems" to be true), but we see that just a few sentences earlier Xie was making "accusations." Even if we accept Chan's age-old "problematic" of human nature, how and why exactly is this writerly delight in the imagination of violence supposed to constitute a "critical" position for contemporary readers and other writers, scholars and teachers? Resolution can found in "hypercritical" sensibility.
<34> Chan's theory on this essential point, just as in the broader appeal to a supra-class "human nature," reflects the viewpoint that Mao called "immobilism" and "equilibrium" within an "eternally unchanging" structure of social relations and psychic responses ("Dialectical Materialism," Chap. II, Part 6; "Contradiction" 312-313, 332-37). It is a legitimizing reading of Mo's fictional world of violent "thrills" in the sensational infusion of pain and pleasure. In Marx's terms, Chan interprets (and also translates) the Moist "propensity" for enjoyable violence in such a way that the writer and the readers come to occupy hierarchical positions in a symbolic "common weal" (Capital I, 686-93) of law and order, "the discipline necessary for the wage system" (688). The author becomes the agent of the state, and readers become semi-passive onlookers. According to Chan, "[j]ust as writing is in fact a process of execution for the writer, reading may be regarded as an experience of spectatorship for the reader, who may undergo what the novelist's spectators do: the torture 'stirs up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators, and satisfies their evil aesthetic taste at the same time'" ( Subversive, Chap. 3, my emphasis).
<35> She is quoting here from her translation of a passage from Chapter 9 ("Masterpiece") of Sandalwood Death, a very long paragraph in which the narrator informs us of the executioner Zhao Jia's thoughts. (Based on the original Chinese version of the novel, however, she says that these are Zhao's own words, not the narrator's; nonetheless, it is quite clear in Goldblatt's translation that all of Book Two, including chapters five through thirteen, is told from the viewpoint of the quasi-omniscient narrator.) In the symbolic common weal of "writing about torture," Chan argues that Mo's storytelling is "tantamount to carrying out the executions himself, and the writer himself has become the executioner on a metaphorical level," whereas readers "undergo" the "experience of spectatorship" (Chap. 3) just like the fictional spectatorial masses. In other words, the writer-as-executioner serves the state, and the readers-as-spectators watch.
<36> It is significant here that Chan explicitly identifies ("merges") Mo the writer with the professional executioner Zhao Jia. In Zhao's words from Chapter 2 ("Zhao Jia's Ravings"), he regards executioners as "gods, not humans," as "the law of the land" (Sandalwood 38), as "no longer a person, but . . . the sacred and somber symbol of the Law" (41), as "conductors producing exquisite music" (44). And yet a professional executioner is also adept at "being clever by acting dumb" (47). He views the masses as "law-abiding citizens" (47), and he "looks down on all people, in the same way that you look down on pigs and dogs" (34). Still, according to Chan, Mo is a leading "subversive voice."
<37> It is the very ludicrousness of this argument on behalf of the Moist "subversive voice" that makes Chan's reading of Moism a classically rejuvenated (and rejuvenilized) case of poststructuralist thought in the guise of high "scandal" and sensuously deviant play. Mo is portrayed as the "subversive" voice of the Law which subverts itself - the Law "itself" hand in hand with the Moist "historical narrative" or "dialectical narrativity" of it (Subversive, Intro.)-by spectacularizing itself and "deconstructing itself" (Mo's thought is that "I'm not myself" [12]) through the hypocriticism of hypocrisy.
<38> In the provocative world literature of Dostoevsky's The Possessed (The Devils), however, we find a very contemptuous reflection of Moist juvenilism and spectacularity through the narrator's critique of "the great writer" Karmazinov (a characterization of Ivan Turgenev), whose "rather long and verbose" writing is subtly cultivated "solely with the object of self-display" (Possessed 82) [13]. Karmazinov is one of "these talented gentlemen of the middling sort who are sometimes in their lifetime accepted almost as geniuses" (Possessed 81, emphasis added). Of Karmazinov's tales "written with an immense affectation" (81), Dostoevsky's narrator cuts through its pretense:
One seemed to read between the lines: "Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. … Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me . . . . here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look . . . isn't that interesting?" (82, emphasis added)
<39> "The cunning fellow" Karmazinov "got all that could be got out of the circumstance" (83). Is it not curiously hypocritical in the extreme that in Chan's expensive book she justifies her theory of Moist sensationalist violence by pointing to its "market" value, about which Mo pretends not to know why? He knows and doesn't know why because the ideological problem of why is what threatens to lay bare the class essence of marketability itself in the capitalistic "free market" of ideas, where the narratives which satisfy the "social want" of the middling bourgeoisie are, as Dostoevsky puts it, "interesting" and therefore marketable. Mo appears interestingly dumbfounded here because, as Marx said of Herr Karl Heinzen, he "knows nothing of philosophy" but instead is an unconscious literary colossus of "sound common sense," which means that "[w]hat he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say" (Marx, "Moralising").
<40> Chan wants "evidence" and "proof" to bolster the relegitimation of the old human nature claim. She explains, "Turning both the writer and the reader" (now "both" are equal) "into participants in the cruel punishment is treating them as evidence of the evil features of human nature - proof that a thirst for violence does reside within the human soul" (Subversive, Chap. 3, emphasis added). In Mo's "cultural criticism"-what she means is the naturalization of "culture" masquerading as "criticism"-since the writer "includes himself in the criticism," this is "implying that no one will be able to escape"; and the author "also sometimes unconsciously provides himself as an example of the evil inherent in human nature."
<41> Where then is the "evidence" and "proof"? Well, of course, for the "also sometimes unconsciously" hypocritical critic of hypercritical sympathy, the evidence is "treated" as evidence in the hallucinatory fiction itself, as well as in the writerly disguises of Mo himself, who "includes himself," who "provides himself," and who is also sometimes not himself. What did Dostoevsky read between the lines? …Mo is "me"! Look at "me"! " I am interesting!" We heard earlier, however, that the great writer is not always himself ("I'm not myself."). As Chan proffers into evidence, he is also "sometimes unconsciously" giving a rendition of himself as an example of something else - something very much like a delighted false prophet of eternal damnation. In any case, the "proof" of this cultural criticism is that "I" is "me" and also "you," because "no one will be able to escape … the evil inherent in human nature." Now we know that no one is safe. This over-awed gloom, doom and pessimism, however, is still "cultural criticism" in the grand hypercritical style.
<42> The hypercritical salvo is set out again-a second time-in Chan's more expansive translation of the passage where she discovers it, but translated with just a slight difference, almost as if the hallucinatory text itself were "also sometimes unconsciously" giving evidence of its hypocritically "evil" nature. From Chapter 9 of the novel, here in part are "Zhao Jia's words" (Subversive, Chap. 3), as Chan asserts, not the words of the narrator:
Fortunately, my master did a wonderful job, and the woman was very cooperative. It [the torture and execution] was actually a joint performance of the executioner and the condemned. During the process of performance, the condemned . . . had better howl in a moderate volume and a distinct rhythm. This way it [now torture, execution, performance and howls] could stir up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators, and satisfy their evil aesthetic taste at the same time. …people got so excited by their wicked interest…. My master said those who watched and enjoyed the performance were more fierce and malicious than we executioners. (Subversive, Chap. 3, Chan's trans. of Tanxiang xing [which she cites as page 240 of " Sandlewood Punishment"], my emphasis)
<43> Remember that Goldblatt read Chan's book, the proof of which lies in the indisputable fact that he wrote the foreword to it. But Goldblatt scrupulously "treats" the evidence in a remarkably different manner, to such a degree that it seems to the reader who "spectates" on the whateverism of what might be going on, that here again we find Moist storytelling in a suspended state of "inner falsity," as Lenin put it ("Tolstoy" 353). Looking at the same passage in Goldblatt's translation of the novel, "hypercritical" sympathy is not to be found (it has "disappeared"), but instead "sham" sympathy-that is, sympathetic "inner falsity," fake sympathy. Here we find the narrator speaking of what Zhao Jia thought or knew:
He [Zhao's shifu or master] did a fine job that day, with the cooperation of the woman herself. Seen from one angle, it was . . . a stage performance, acted out by the executioner and his victim. Such performances were spoiled if the criminal overdid the screaming part; but a total lack of sounds was just as bad. The ideal was just the right number of rhythmic wails, producing sham expressions of sympathy among the observers while satisfying their evil aestheticism…. All people, he said, are two-faced beasts…. The appetite for evil is stimulated in anyone who willingly watches the spectacle of a beautiful woman being dismembered one cut at a time…. The people who flock to such exhibitions, Shifu said, are far more malicious than those of us who wield the knife. (Sandalwood 188, my emphasis)
<44> Chan's discovery of the Mo Yan Thought of "hypercritical sympathy" - if this is to be taken as a "concept" at all, which she employs on two separate occasions - is left unexplained. This resplendently manufactured finding of the "hypercritical" is essentially an empty signifier of hallucinatory "criticism" - or as Engels contemptuously says of Herr Dühring, a "free creation and imagination . . . . in the grand style! . . . . and outside of this [it] would probably be described as slovenly" (Anti-Dühring 144-45). Let us "go to the core" with Chan's rewriting of the text under the cover of translation.
<45> In both instances where Chan invokes Mo's literary doctrine of spectatorial hypercriticism, by quoting her translation of the 2001 Chinese text (Tanxiang xing, or "Sandlewood Punishment," at page 240), in which torture is portrayed as a "joint performance" that "could stir up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators," she also provides excerpts of the original Chinese passage. In these Chinese texts, the word xū wěi appears, which is 虚伪. Xu wei is very clearly understood in Chinese as meaning falseness, hypocritical, a sham, or artificiality. Xu alone can mean emptiness, void, or in vain; and wei alone can mean fake, false, or bogus. Xu wei has nothing to do with "hypercritical." The prefix "hyper-" itself can be expressed as chao ji or ji chao and also can mean "super-" or "ultra-"; but this is in no way interchangeable or even vaguely equivalent to xu wei.
<46> Chan hangs her hypercritical theory on a phony translation in which we are supposed to recognize a deep "cultural criticism" and "subversive" meaningfulness in "hypercritical sympathy." What is this hypercritical sympathy? … A sympathy - for whom? for what? - which is "too" critical, excessively critical, frivolously critical, superfluously critical, trivially critical, superficially critical, or "sympathetically" supercritical as a "compassionate" gesture of Godly acceptance of "human nature"? As Lenin bluntly asks in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, "can you make anything of this, reader?" (323, a "great discovery!" [14]) But it is Chan in her "especially true" reading of Mo's novel (he says it is "easy to understand" [Sandalwood 407]) who propounds the Moist doctrine that "reading may be regarded as an experience of spectatorship for the reader" ( Subversive, Chap. 3). Undoubtedly this is "especially true" for someone who elaborates "criticism" in an especially false, sham, obscurantist manner in order to confuse hypocritical consciousness with "hypercritical" sympathy. Goldblatt has declared, nonetheless, that Chan's exposition is a work of "sophisticated literary analysis," "not uncritical" in her "objectivity and balanced approach [that] do justice both to her subject and to literary scholarship," and hence "the perfect complement to [our] reading of Mo Yan's novels" (Subversive, Foreword).
<47> The case on behalf of hypercriticism is at once frivolous and ideologically unconscious. It is based on Chan's "right" to appeal to an obscurely playful and ludicrous (mis)translation of Mo in order to relegitimize the liberal pluralistic symbolic sovereignty of "freeplay" in the hazy guise of eternal eclecticism. As Marx puts it, Chan "sometimes" doesn't say what she means and doesn't mean what she says. In American legal discourse, this amounts to a kind of hazy, showy mixture of making a claim while failing to state any claim upon which any "relief" could possibly be granted (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12b6), and in response to which there appears to be no intelligible answer. In other words, the assertion of hypercritical sympathy as a spectatorial "post" of reading in "cultural criticism" is simultaneously a claim on reality and a vacuous failure to make any claim on reality, because the "real" has become hallucinatory and "hyper" in its essential, eternal unknowability. There is no "relief" from this (un)claimability exactly in the sense that "There Is No End to Violence." And so, by a sort of medieval fiat ("let it be done"), social justice is "subverted" at the core in the name of "human nature."
<48> Justice, in Chan's translatorial reading and rewriting of Mo, is just "human nature" playfully and tragically repeating itself in what Foucault suggestively forecasted in the original preface to the History of Madness (now retranslated) as a "lyricism of protestation" at "degree zero" (xxvii), a "caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason" (xxviii) at "the doors of time, of a tragic structure" (xxix), the "immobile structures of the tragic" (xxx) to be heard in "a dull sound from beneath history … wrapped up in itself, with a lump in its throat. …[t]he charred root of meaning" (xxxi-xxxii). Chan does not say this, but this is what she means because this is the core of "affinity with the common man" (Sandalwood 407) in the Moist spontaneous worldview of bourgeois metaphysics. She is under no obligation to state this in so many words because, as Marx says, this is the "sound common sense" ("Moralising") of bourgeois moralizing criticism, now reflected in the ludic postmodern neo-morality of tragicomic sense and, of course, cynical "sympathy" in spin overdrive.
<49> This 12(b)(6) affectation of so-called hypercritical sympathy, however, is critically intelligible and answerable from the philosophical standpoint of dialectical materialism. Situated along the ideological fissures of international literary studies, Chan's post-translational discovery of hypercriticism approaches and enacts what Teresa Ebert calls "hypercynicism," which is a "legitimization of transnational capitalism" over and against "international class solidarity" by means of "the cultivation, both in philosophical and popular culture discourses, of cynical consciousness, which diffuses class consciousness with a wry smile as a mark of its strategic cunning and tactical savviness" (Cultural Critique, Chap. 7).
<50> Hypercynicism, in Ebert's materialist theory, is demystified as the impotent, epistemologically docile performances of the "Left friend" who is "the other of class consciousness" (Chap. 7). For the hypercynical critic, the historical struggle for class consciousness has been branded with the timeless "lack" and "gap"-fulness of insatiable and multi-reversible desires unleashed by the (un)happy consciousness of fetishized skepticism: an elevated skepticism as an ironically knowing absoluteness, a kind of subtle dictatorship in the mannerism of Chan's "also sometimes unconsciously" fake subjectivity and subjection under the alibi of "human nature." Ebert argues that to the hypercynical subject, the dissonant resolution of all social contradictions involves an elaborate embrace of cynicism and an "enjoyment" of metacynical symptomatic motions in an ongoing and never-ending "cynical interpretation of a cynical interpretation" which "is not demystification of the class interests that 'lurk in ambush' in all representations . . . but a stripping away of the fantasies that cover up the lack in the subject" (ibid., qtg. Marx/Engels, emphasis added). This serves to justify a mode of "cultural criticism" (as Chan believes very uncynically with a high moral bravado) that purports to bring the subject "back to a recognition of its founding lack" (ibid.).
<51> Such a "founding lack" appears in the "hypercritical" incarnation in Chan's faithful reading and unfaithful translation of Mo, in the form of the wandering evil of all "human nature"-that is, Mo's "common man." Cynical reason, Ebert says, sustains a reactionary "critique" of "class as a metaphysical fiction without any objective grounding" because, in the (hyper)cynical view, "the objective itself is considered to be a fiction of the will to truth" (Chap. 7). Mo Yan Thought, in the shape of hallucinatory realism, or in Chan's hypercritical sympathy, "plays" with and resolves the dilemma of the "will to truth" by appealing to the idealistic, eclectic safe-haven of hyped agnosticism in which truths are fictitious and fictions pass for truths.
<52> Updating and rejuvenating classical poststructuralist doctrines, it is not surprising that Chan finds affinity with Foucault in her reading of the "writing of violence" in Moism. Her bookish, uncritical adoption of Foucault offers the pluralistic, panoptical rationale of "power/knowledge" relations and "self"-relations. "Power/knowledge" in Foucault's sense-a concept which Chan doesn't even mention - has little if anything to do with class analysis in the Marxist sense of the class politics of knowledge, as Marx and Engels clearly put it in The German Ideology as well as theManifesto: the theory of the "Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas" linked with the practice of revolutionary class struggle to end exploitation and transform the "human nature" that personifies and relegitimizes the structural contradictions of the international capitalist system.
<53> It is precisely in Chan's hypercritical sympathy - which is a re-encryption of Mo's "affinity" in a variant tone - with the brooding (un)happiness of Moist human nature, that she truthfully and indeed correctly reveals Mo's reactionary jettisonism of the Marxist revolutionary world outlook. What this bourgeois humanist testimony on behalf of human nature "does not know," as Marx argued in his 1847 polemical "answer" to Proudhon, is that "all history is but a continuous transformation of human nature" (Poverty of Philosophy, Chap. 2.3, 67). Hypercritical sympathy and affinity with the "common man" do not know this because these artifices and edifications of absolute skepticism and speculativity are themselves hypocritical at the core. At their core is an obscured, mystified, hallucinated reflection of the "damn unique" bourgeois writer as manager and technician of crisis, as the "unique" [15] reconciler of contradictions, the real roots of which grow out of the social nature of capitalism grounded in the systemic "inner falsity" of objective lack which is extracted from the working class in the processes of exploitation.
<54> Has Mo not sought this principle of accommodation and frothy equilibrium in the police figure of Magistrate Qian in Sandalwood Death? Has Chan not sought this same equilibrium in "no end to violence," "evil human nature," and "hypercritical sympathy"? Here is Magistrate Qian: "My mind [is] a tangle of confusing thoughts. . . . Not knowing what to do, I vacillate, I hesitate . . . . I lack the faith and allegiance to die for a righteous cause . . . . I am a cringing coward, a weakling given to making concessions. . . . torn between opposing wills. Caution is my watchword; my appearance is but a deceptive mask. . . . bereft of a heroic spirit . . . . Benumb yourself" (Sandalwood 369-70, emphasis added). This is the hypocritical betweenism of Sandalwood Death and the sham "subversion" of a "law superior to liberty itself." This "subversion" is itself the mystification that Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism calls "cavilling" (84, 86), a "professorial rigmarole" to "now and again bombard the reader (in order to stun him)" (80) with "pure subjective idealism" (79), with the "world is our sensation" (80), with "literary methods" lavishly arrayed in "such an incredible hotchpotch" (72) of "the purest and most dreary scholasticism" (80). Lenin reads Mo Yan Thought and Chan, and Chan reading Moism, one hundred years before they appear in (post)postmodern incarnations-because Lenin was a revolutionary Marxist reader of "critical idealism" and speculative pettifoggery. With Lenin, reading is red study in theoretical practice.
Section Three will appear in a forthcoming issue of Reconstruction.
Notes
[12] See Mo, "'It's as if I am under a social microscope'" in China Daily: "I would feel uncomfortable about some harsh criticism at one point, but later I would find something reasonable in it. Now it's as if I am under a social microscope. I'm not myself, but an observer. And that guy under the microscope is not myself, but a writer named Mo Yan."
[13] I am referring here to Chap. III of The Possessed, "The Sins of Others."
[14] See also in Lenin's Materialism: "It is astonishing that there are people who can take seriously a philosopher who advances such arguments!" (62) "The sophistry of this theory is so manifest that it is embarrassing to analyse it. . . . exactly as though I were to endeavour to prove the existence of hell by the argument that if I 'mentally projected' myself thither as an observer I could observe hell. . . . philosophical obscurantism, the carrying of subjective idealism to absurdity" (64).
[15] See "Chinese Writer Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize" in The Irish Times, qtg. Peter Englund of the Swedish Academy: "He [Mo] has such a damn unique way of writing."
Works Cited
Chan, Shelley W. A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan. Foreword by Howard Goldblatt. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011.
"Chinese Writer Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize." The Irish Times October 11, 2012.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed (The Devils). Trans. Constance Garnett, Lexington, KY: EZ Reads, 2009.
Ebert, Teresa L. The Task of Cultural Critique, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Engels, Frederick. Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring). Trans. Emile Burns. Ed. C. P. Dutt. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. History of Madness. Trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. Ed. J. Khalfa, New York, NY: Routledge, 2006.
Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. Vol. 14. Collected Works. Trans. Abraham Fineberg. Ed. Clemens Dutt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970.
---. "Tolstoy and the Proletarian Struggle." In Collected Works. Vol. 16. Trans. and Ed. Clemens Dutt. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. Pp. 353-354.
Mao Tse-tung. "Dialectical Materialism." In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI; orig. pub. 1938; at http://www.marxists.org.
---. "On Contradiction." In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967. Pp. 311-347; at http://www.marx2mao.com.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987.
---. "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen." In Marx/Engels Collected Works. Vol. 6; at www.marxists.org.
---. The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon. Trans. Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955; at http://www.marxists.org.
---, and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. Samuel Moore. Ed. F. Engels. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1970; at http://www.marx2mao.com.
Mo Yan. "'It's as If I Am Under a Social Microscope': Mo." China Daily.
---. Sandalwood Death. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
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