The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline.

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The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline

Xiaobin Yang

Jiuguo [ T h e republic of wine], Mo Yan’s fourth novel, which was written between 1989 and 1992, departs more significantly from his early period than does his previous novel, Shisan bu IThirteen steps1 (1989), in that all the heroic deeds in his first and widely acclaimed novel, Honggaofiang jiazu [Red sorghum:

A

family saga] (1987),’ have been deflected to serious failures and vicious jokes. T h e historical tragedy of the Anti-Japanese War (depicted in Red Sorghum), to apply Marx’s formula, recurs as another crisis of national destruction, yet in the form of farce. T h e fact that the writing

of

The Republic of

Wine

began only three months after the 1989 Tiananmen

Square Incident2 designates its historical destiny: to demonstrate the san- guinary ruins

of

national history. Nevertheless, for

Mo

Yan and all Chinese writers, it would be politically naive and ethically irresponsible to simply represent, in the strictest sense, the historical calamity without piercing into the quotidian decay of social and individual life, since such decay constitutes

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 8

the fate of the nation on the one hand and refuses any direct recognition and representation on the other. The Republic of Wine is remarkable in that it is, in the first place, a reflection on sociocultural decadence, by which Mo Yan’s stylistic decadence is defined in order to measure the ethos of the time. In other words, only

by

scrutinizing the intrinsic decadence that the whole nation both enjoys and suffers is

Mo

Yan able to capture the meaning

of

the extrinsic violence that social history imposes upon the nation itself. Further- more,

Mo

Yan examines the limitations

of

critical realism

by

maintaining the contradiction between the sociohistorical critique and the critique waged against the critical subject. T h e representational subject behind the narrative voice is no longer immune from the social evil and discursive horror with which the subject, too, has been historically possessed. I n the epilogue to another of his novels, Shicao jiaxu [The herbivorous family], Mo Yan clearly states that “while critiquing the history of the herbivorous family, readers should at the same time critique the mental history of the writer; and the latter seems more important.”3 Herein, ultimately, lies a paradox Mo Yan is painfully confronted with, and thus an aporia laid bare in his self-reflexive and self-referential narrative.

As we shall see, on the level of plot development, the plights in which the protagonist, Ding Gouer, is trapped throughout his journey incapacitate his practical attempts to eliminate evil. Ding, a failed symbol of the historical subject, cannot perform the role of rescuing society from inhumanity. Meanwhile, on the level of narration,

Mo

Yan, too, is seriously trapped in a discursive plight that muddles or obscures his critical voice and makes any simple denunciation incomprehensible. Parallel to Ding Gouer’s decadence of conduct, Mo Yan’s decadence of narration is characterized as a subjective excess that calls into question fair and accurate representation of the object. T h e excessiveness applies not only to material documentation -

such as the descriptive presentations of the community addicted to gluttony o r of people who indulge in adultery or promiscuity-but also to formal qualities, to stylistic and narrative peculiarities. Like his character Ding Gouer, whose historical function is disordered when he is involved in excessive activities, Mo Yan, the narratodauthor, is also self-problematized when his voice is implicated in excessive discourses that constantly interrupt the integrated representational subjectivity

of

his narrative.

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 9

T h e bulk of the novel describes the “special detective” Ding ( h e r ’ s journey to a town called Jiuguo (meaning the Republic of Wine) to investigate a horrible crime -the local officials (reportedly) eat human babies. T h e opening scene of mutual seduction between Ding Gouer and the female chauffeur in the truck serves as a prelude to the debauchery preva- lent throughout the novel. As soon as he arrives at the colliery where Jin Gangzuan (the major suspect of his investigation and vice chairman of the propaganda department of the party committee of Jiuguo) originally worked, Ding is driven to a feast hosted

by

Jin (as well as other officials) and compelled to drink tremendously. Not until he witnesses a dish containing a cooked, but vividly recognizable, human baby does Ding sober up: O u t of anger, he pulls out his gun and fires, but only shoots off the baby’s head. Having recovered from the shock of the shooting, Jin and the others explain that the baby is made of lotus roots, melon, pork, sausage, and the like. Strongly persuaded, Ding tries a small bite of the baby and is enraptured by its taste. Thus, he agreeably participates in the cannibals’ feast (or at least that of stylistic cannibals) and gets d r u n k as a fish. During his drunken sleep that night, a scaly boy comes in and steals his belongings, but he,

help-

lessly watching what is happening to him, is utterly incapable of stopping the pilferage.

After he has lost almost everything, Ding runs into the female chauffeur again and goes home with her. As they are making love, Ding and the chauffeur are unexpectedly caught in the act by Jin, who turns out to be the chauffeur’s husband. Humiliated, then released

by

Jin, Ding and the chauffeur visit Yu Yichi, manager of Yichi Wineshop, in order to obtain infor- mation about the killing and eating of babies in Jiuguo. But Ding soon realizes that the chauffeur is one of Yu’s numerous mistresses. D i n g becomes furious and mistreats her; but she then drives him away, and he is left wan- dering the street. H e runs into a veteran whose words and wine prod Ding to return quickly to the restaurant, where he shoots and kills the chauffeur and Yu Yichi. As a fugitive of justice, Ding, through intoxicated hallucina- tions, finally sees everyone- Jin, the chauffeur, Yu Yichi, and even himself-eat a baby at a feast on a boat. When he rushes toward the boat, he falls and drowns in a manure pit.

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 10

same time, the novel has a metanarrative frame. T h e metanarrative frame includes correspondence between the narrator/author,

Mo

Yan, who dis- cusses his writing

of

this novel, and a novice writer,

Li

Yidou, who regularly sends

Mo

Yan his own short stories, which are inserted, along with the texts of their correspondence, among the novel’s chapters. Although

Li

Yidou’s stories and the main plot are on the same level under the metanarrative frame and the stories are supposedly irrelevant to the main plot, their narrative objects-characters, circumstances, and even episodes- interfuse the two domains. T h u s the structure of the novel has been organized in an intricate way: T h e novel not only tells the stories, but also, at times, refers to

the authors’ (Mo Yan’s and

Li

Yidou’s) considerations about how the stories are told. T h e novel is not a single story narrated by Mo Yan alone, but a multistory text rewritten with the help of

Li

Yidou, whose stories overlap the main portion that is presumably narrated by Mo Yan. Furthermore, if

Li

Yidou’s stories are to be taken as mostly real accounts of his mother-in- law, his father-in-law, his wife, and his friend Yu Yichi,

Mo

Yan’s self- conscious writing of this novel not only produces a fictitious, imaginative scene, but also organizes a mixture of what did happen, what might have happened, and what will probably happen, insofar as

Li

Yidou is incessantly bringing “real life” into

Mo

Yan’s fictional production.

This last observation is based on the assumption that Jiuguo is not only the actual town that Li Yidou resides in and writes about, but also the presumably fictitious location in which

Mo

Yan’s novel takes place.

T h i s

is probably too puzzling to apprehend at first glance: H o w can it be possible to regard something as both real and unreal within the same fictional text? T h e paradox here, in essence, reveals the problematics

of

representation as such, as

I

shall elaborate on later. T h e practical answer I a m tempted to give in this particular context is that the narrative complexity

of

being both real and unreal cannot be fully understood unless we deal with the text in terms

of different levels-multistory in the original sense-in which the name

Mo Yan has different functions. O n the intratextual level, although the novel may have begun before

Mo

Yan received Li Yidou’s first letter, it seems appropriate to assume that the novel is, more or less, an echo to

Li

Yidou’s stories since there are characters and events that overlap and con- nect to each other (Yu Yichi, for example, occurs on both levels). However,

I

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 1 1 am

by

no means suggesting that it is

Li

Yidou who inspires Mo Yan’s novel because, after all, on the ultratextual level, we must admit that

1,i

Yidou is but another character created by Mo Yan, the author of the novel, who makes himself seemingly independent from Mo Yan the narrator of the main story. T h i s expedient analytical distinction between Mo Yan the author and

Mo

Yan the narrator (or the character in the novel as narrator) may well expose the secret of the novel’s intricacy, yet may also shatter its charm since the structural irony is certainly intended to show the insepara- bility of Mo Yan the narrator and Mo Yan the author. T h e predicament of

Mo Yan the narrator and that of

Mo

Yan the author mirror each other. It is only in this sense that the novel can be seen not only as an outward critique of sociopolitical reality but also as the author’s inward self-critique of subjective (un)consciousness.

Hence, while it is also, in regard to its reference to historically critical significance, a harsh criticism of the decay and violence of social existence during the present time, the novel is, formalistically and ultimately, an allegory of the development-or more exactly, of the developing obscurity or chaos-of historical consciousness, which is exposed and explored as a self- involved subject in its interrogation of the historical object. Even though the epistolary dialogue between

Li

Yidou (whose undisciplined style is both immature and maverick) and Mo Yan (who frequently criticizes Li’s stylistic unbalance and disorganization) can be regarded as an allegorical dia- logue between ego and superego, the clear levels

of

psychic structure are ultimately unrecognizable, since Mo Yan’s style itself is actually no more sober than

Li

Yidou’s and eventually, at the end of the novel, turns into an entropy of drunken ravings. Therefore, the primary parallel is between the journey of the plot and the narrative journey, each

of

which displays an alle- gory of decadent subjects who poorly serve their historical functions.

The Journey of Ding Gouer/Mo Yan: An Allegory of Decadence

In his introduction to The Republic of Wine, Chou Ying-hsiung suggests an intertextual connection between Mo Yan’s novel and Xiyou

j i

I

T h e journey to the west) as some chapters of the latter also deal with eating babies. Among the numerous links connecting the two novels, however, the structural-

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 12

thematic one seems less obvious but as important. Cannibalism, a theme shared by the two novels, as Chou has noticed, is an evil to be eradicated

by

means of a journey. In

The

Journey

to the West,

Tripitaka and his disciples are sent far away and must pass through eighty-one adversities, most of which have to d o with demonic cannibals, to fetch the Buddhist scriptures. In

The

Republic of Wine, Ding Gouer, who is dispatched to investigate a horrible crime concerning cannibalism, undergoes a number of unrelated misfor- tunes. T h e two journeys differ from each other qualitatively: T h e Buddhist quest in

The

Journey to

the West

is primarily a journey that ascends to the divine realm, with a divine goal to be attained; to the contrary, the detective mission of D i n g Gouer has to descend to the most degenerate world to reveal diabolism. In the name of justice, Ding Gouer’s journey goes through a great degree of debauchery-adultery, inebriety, and gluttony. If the adversities in

The

Journey to the West finally lead to a triumphant or at least comic ending, the carnal, dissolute pleasures depicted in

The

Republic of

Wine

are a prelude to the absurd-certainly not tragic-failure of D i n g

Gouer’s supposedly righteous mission. T h i s is the significance of D i n g Gouer’s sinking into the manure pit, in which “all the imaginable dirty things” inundate the “ideal, justice, dignity, honor, love, and all such kinds of sacred things” Ding may have had in mind.4 Indeed, Ding Gouer’s anti- or mock-heroic journey is an ironic rewriting of traditional Chinese fiction, such as

The

Journey to

the West,

in which we can at least find a naughty and pleasant hero like Monkey (Sun Wukong) who, by means of

either his own or the gods’ power, extricates everyone from various plights. In this sense, what

The

Republic of Wine narrates is a journey without a heroic, unyielding pioneer such as Monkey, and it therefore becomes a cata- chrestic retelling of an archetypal journey story. Here, catachresis lies in the fact that the missing agent of a correspondent function permanently remains blank, since Ding Gouer, in terms of his character, can well be considered a variation of

The

Journey to

the West’s

Pig (Zhu Bajie), who is easily tempted

by,

and then incurably indulges in, carnal pleasure, while at the same time being placed in the position of Monkey, who is entrusted with a mission and required to play a crucial role in reaching the goal. T h e split identity, or the rift between the actual and the nominal, is where the absurdity lies. Obvi- ously, Ding is a character who never functions as he should: His continuous

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 13 involvement with the female chauffeur makes his real intentions regarding his journey blurred o r even completely forgotten and puts him in awkward dilemmas from time to time. Moreover, his participation in the-at least perceptually/conceptually even if not factually -cannibalistic feast hosted by the suspects he is supposed to investigate decisively switches his role from that of a detective of the crime to that of an accessory to the crime.

In the final chapter of The Journey to the West, the “five saints” have accomplished their mission and are conferred with the title of Buddha, which positively signals their achievement. Ding Gouer, however, eventually becomes a victim, without a tragic halo. T h e journeys in both novels are full of temptations.

If

The Journey to the West expresses the victory of the lucid mind-with wisdom, faith, and virtue-over bewitching temptations, The

Republic of Wine presents a temporal journey through which wisdom, faith, and virtue become disordered and destroyed. In fact, Ding Gouer is so confounded that he not only loses forever his ability to disclose the true picture of the crime, but also, as a result of his own immoral behavior, is compelled to give up the task he was designated to undertake.

A

number of ironic moments in the novel make Ding Gouer’s journey seem more and more ridiculous: When his adultery with the chauffeur is discovered by her husband, Jin Gangzuan, Ding Gouer’s role as detective and Jin Gangzuan’s role as criminal are almost interchanged; then, as Ding Gouer shoots the chauffeur and her lover, Yu Yichi, and flees, his role shifts from that of a crime hunter into that

of

a wanted criminal; finally, as he is about to catch the cannibals red-handed, Ding Gouer falls into the manure pit.

T h e disclosure of decadence in the stylistic sense and decline in the historical sense calls into question the progressive chronology that stands as the basis of the dominant idea of enlightenment. Mo Yan’s idea of decline was expressed as early as in his first novel, Red Sorghum, in which a family romance seems to conclude by reversing the Marxist agenda of social development: To compare “my grandparents,” described as ancestors with unmatchable energy and courage, with “me,” “a body immersed so long in the

filth

of urban life that a foul stench oozed from my pores,” actually proves “two separate human races.”5 T h i s reflection on degeneration in the strict sense becomes, in The Republic of Wine, a direct manifestation

of

individual and collective depravity in modern times. T h e depraved journey of

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 14 Ding Gouer suggests the impossibility of salvation by human power, which would only lead to more severe and absurd disasters.

In a parody of the hermeneutical/practical search for truth, Ding Gouer’s identity as a zhenchayuan (detective) may remind us of one of the most famous heroes in the “model drama” Zhiqu Weihushan [Taking tiger moun- tain by strategy 1-Yang Zirong-another zhenchayuan, to whom

The

KepubLzc of Wzne’s final chapter refers, not emphatically, but notably, in the middle of Mo Yan’s drunken ravings.6 Representing the Communist Party, Yang Zirong is the Savior who expels the evil forces (bandits) and brings the oppressed people emancipation. Ding Gouer, in contrast, is dispatched by

the party-controlled procuratorate to expose a horrible iniquity, falls into numerous traps, and even becomes a participant in the brutality. It seems that Ding is consciously being made in opposition to Yang Zirong when Mo Yan writes, “Someone is heading toward the morning sun, while he [ Ding1 toward the setting sun.”’

If

Yang Zirong, as his famous aria

‘‘I

Have the Morning Sun in

My

Heart”8 expresses, has great confidence in achiev- ing his goal, Ding is but a clown who, in the final scene

of

the novel, does not even have a n assured destination he wants to reach:

“He

stands list- lessly toward the setting sun, thinking for a long time, without clearly knowing what he is thinking.”” In this sense, Ding Gouer, an effete xhen-

chayuan who invalidates the symbolic ascension of history, is the negative image of the historical Savior; he is unable to bring forward progressive tem- porality and is doomed to degenerate into a darkness in which he becomes irredeemable.

In any case, the novel could have been produced as a work of critical real- ism if the journey

of

Ding Gouer were truly represented as pure corruption and the behavior of Jin Gangzuan, Yu Yichi, and the like as sheer evil.1° T h e metanarrative frame, however, avoids the identification of narrative with representation. When the process of representation itself is represented, the novel deals with not only the detective journey

of

Ding Gouer, but also the narrative journey of Mo Yan. Ultimately, it is Mo Yan’s impuis- sance in his attempt to continue the novel when he feels his character is uncontrollable.11 Then, the narrative journey turns into an essential journey that parallels and imitates Ding Gouer’s journey. In the trickiest moment,

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 15

the novel. He visits D ing Gouer’s Jiuguo, the real town, a n d participates in a feast with the real Jin Gangzuan (exactly like what D i n g Gouer does in fiction, except that n o cooked baby is offered). More significantly, M o Yan’s repetition (or imitation) of Din g Gouer’s drunkenness- in his long mono- logue, M o Yan actually realizes that he gets “ d ru n k to death in Jiuguo just like D i n g Gouer, D i n g G o u er is my shadow’’I2-ends the whole novel, draw in g the conclusion that their respective projects are equally depraved:

To be d r u n k , o r to lose the mental an d physical ability to rescue oneself o r others, is probably the sole truth achievable.

T h e novel has thus a double implication of allegory: the unrealizability of

a critical historical subject an d the unrealizability of a critical representational subject. I f D i n g plays a n unsuccessful role of historical justice, M o

Yan, similarly, challenges his o w n role as a n omnipotent representational subject w h o is supposed to exhaust the secret of reality and reveal the ultimate historical t rut h . It is in a n equivocal, o r even incomprehensible, way that the narrative conceptualizes such characters as D i n g Go u e r (whose social responsibility is as strong as his personal carnality) a n d Jin G an g z u an (whether whose conduct is depraved o r noble is finally indeterminable). Likewise, the eventual uncertainty about the actuality of the crime of eating real baby flesh demonstrates the extreme difficulty o r problem of realism: T h e limitations of the critical subject are exposed in order to question the absolute omnipotency of the representational subject. Against the narrative paradigm of modern Chinese fiction which assumes a monologic, totalistic voice-a voice that struggles to be incontestable in its offering of a seamless picture of the narrative object- M o Yan’s narrative dismantles the unified superficies of such a voice by divulging the disjunctions and discrepancies of his narrative.

Dipsomania, Polyphagia, and Cannibalism

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of

barbarism. -Walter Benjamin

Mo Yan’s self-reflexive problematization of the narrative subject, however, does not dispense with sociocultural critique. H is narrative is a self-critique

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 16 that consists in the cultural critique, insofar as the narrator is involved in the same sociocultural background as his own narrative. In the novel, socio- cultural critique focuses on decadent lifestyle, in which wine is the major medium.

As the title suggests, wine seems to serve as a dynamic spirit for the development of the characters as well as of the narrative. In the realm of wine, or the Republic of Wine, wine plays a decisive role in social life. Nevertheless, the social function of wine is paradoxical. Mo Yan seems to be clearly aware of this fact, as he says in a letter to

Li

Yidou: “ T h e relationship between human beings and wine includes almost all the contradictions as well as the contradictory aspects in the process of the existence and development of

mankind.”’3 O n the one hand, wine is able to draw people, by way of intoxication, out of real, normal, rational life and bring them into the fantastic, aberrant, irrational domain. In Red Sorghum, Mo Yan manifested the eman- cipatory dimension of intoxication. Wine is consumed as a source of courage to enable the drinker to break social fetters or to fight against foreign invaders. Intoxication triggers the primary desire that expels the repressive domination of civilization. O n the other hand, temporary insanity through intoxication can also bring about loss of self-consciousness, enabling the drinker to be totally manipulated by exterior- ostensibly natural, but essentially human or social- forces. Intoxication in The Republic of Wine can hardly be read as an active, autonomous behavior; it is, rather, a passive, heteronomous behavior that signals the deprivation of self-consciousness. Thus, in contrast to Yu Zhan’ao (“my grandpa”) in Red Sorghum, Ding ( h e r and Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine are victims of wine. T h o u g h reluctantly, they join the dipsomaniac community in which both social order and individual integrity are dissolved. After being intoxicated at Jin Crangzuan’s feast, Ding Gouer, as an allegorically degenerative descendent of Yu Zhan’ao, loses his integrative personal identity: T h e narrative oscil- lates between first person and third person because Ding cannot control his physical parts with his consciousness.’4 Wine as a source of pleasure or gal- lantry turns into a source of moral decadence or historical decline.

Decadence does not simply connote social evil, but contains the human desire for pleasure.

Mo

Yan’s social critique aims at not only the crime, but also the enjoyment, particularly in this novel,

of

what can be called gastron-

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 17 omy, in which drinking, especially collective drinking, plays a significant role. As part of the cultural legacy of Chinese tradition, gastronomy in

The

Republic of Wine becomes the allegorical epitome of the cultural decadence of contemporary China. Chinese gastronomy becomes the love of excessive food consumption, which entraps Ding Gouer in an awkward situation: At Jin Gangzuan’s feast, for example, extraordinary flavor makes him unable to reject the attraction of the baby flesh and draws him into drunkenness, during which his clothes are stripped off and his belongings are stolen. Along this line, the novel can be regarded as a stylistically excessive expose -a theme I shall return to later-of the excessiveness of desire, which is the essence of decadence.

Adultery, like Chinese gastronomy (which is synonymous to gluttony here), can

be

characterized as excessive. In this novel, Ding Gouer, a married man, has a love affair with the female chauffeur, Jin Gangzhuan’s wife, who also flirts with other men. It is this love affair that brings Ding to ridiculous circumstances: H e is caught by Jin Gangzuan while making love with Jin*s wife and is then chased

by

the police after killing Jin’s wife and her lover Yu

Yichi out of envy. (Just as sarcastically, Yu Yichi, the midget, “President of the City Association of Individual Owners, Provincial Model Worker, General Manager of Yichi Wineshop, probationary member of the Chinese Commu- nist Party, has had sexual relations with twenty-nine

of

jiuguo’s beauties,”15 of whom the chauffeur is the ninth.) In fact, sexual excess here is not only characterized by adultery, but even by their way of making love. From the very beginning, Ding and the chauffeur’s mutual seduction is far from romantic, but full of vehemence, o r even savagery. T h e chauffeur’s response to Ding’s request for a kiss is that she “suddenly flushed scarlet and roared with a loud voice as

if

wrangling: ‘Let me give you a fucking kiss!’ *’I() Later, in her own home, the naked chauffeur conquers Ding by applying a “ground- sweeping kick” from Chinese martial arts to make him “fall backward on the carpet with his hands and legs in the air” and then “leaped onto his belly, snatched his ears with her hands, and rammed him with her buttocks up

and down.”l7 Here, excessive lust is defined not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively: It is inverted as something not sensuous but rather repulsive.

By

the same token, the stunning effect of the novel does not come merely from the descriptions of excessive indulgence in sex and eating. From adul-

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 18 tery, violence and atrocity arise: Ding Gouer commits a crime of passion as the logical outcome of a promiscuous romance. And it is from gastronomy that scatology and cannibalism are derived. In this sense, scatology and cannibalism are the most ironic variations of the excessiveness of gastronomy. Gas-

tronomy must also be defined, not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, as abnormal eating, including eating animals’ genitals or human flesh. Thus,

if

Sun Long-ji’s observation of the “oral proclivity’’ and “anal proclivity”

of

Chinese culture-by which he means the indulgence in eating and the shameless exhibition of

bodily

or, metaphorically, mental filthlx- is germane to the society in The Republic of Wine,

Mo

Yan seems to suggest that the anal proclivity is but an organic part of the oral proclivity. T h e novel presents, via

Li Yidou’s description, a “whole-donkey feast’’ in Yichi Wineshop that contains a dish beautifully called “Dragon and Phoenix Displaying Prosperity” (longfiengchengxiang), in fact the genitals of a male and a female donkey. Obvi-

ously,

Mo

Yan is clearly aware of the risque, reprobate, brazen pith within the gloriously packaged culture -“gastronomic” culture in particular here.

Certainly the most shocking theme in The Republic of Wine is cannibalism, described in scenes such as eating babies at a feast, selling babies to a food research center, and teaching in a classroom how to cook a human baby’s flesh. In The Republic of Wine, cannibalism is a sign of a surplus of food rather than of a lack of food. Cannibalism is practiced neither at a time of famine nor even out of an impulse to feast on the flesh of foes but simply for gustatory pleasure or excitement. At the same time, gastronomy is claimed to have a morally oriented import, just as it is conventionally concealed under the social order and moral limit. In many instances in his Analects- in the chapter “Village-Communities” [Xiangdang], for instance -CConfu- cius strongly propounds the correlation between the quality of food-making/ consumption and the propriety of social conduct. T h i s theme recurs in a parodic variation in

Li

Yidou’s “Donkey Street”:

Why does man have a mouth? Just for eating and drinking! It’s necessary to let people who come to our Jiuguo eat well and drink well. Let them achieve something out of eating, bring about delight out of eating, and get into habit of eating. Let them achieve something out of drinking, bring about delight out of drinking, and get into habit of drinking. Let

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 19 them understand that eating and d r i n k i n g are not only for preserving life, but, through the movement of eating and drinking, for experiencing the true taste of life, for realizing the philosophy

of

life. Let them know that eating and drinking are not only a process of biological movement, but also that of spiritual edification, of aesthetic appreciation.’”

It is this ostentatious cultural facade that

The

Republic of Wine intends to ironize and, in this case, unmask. In the novel, the city Jiuguo is in perfect order while it is also a perfectly perverse community. T h e horrible fact is that, according to

Li

Yidou’s account, babies are willfully conceived anti procreated only in order to be sold to the Culinary College as meat. I t is truly astounding as we see, in

Li

Yidou’s “The Meaty Baby,” the traditional order of small-scale production being developed to an evil climax. Even maternal love degenerates into care about the price of a baby’s meat: When Xiaobao (a baby for sale) cries for his father’s beating and hot water, his mother becomes anxious only because beating and hot water would mar his skin and decrease the price he would fetch. Here, the peasant class that makes a living out of selling babies as meat really serves as the mass basis for the whole cannibalistic society. This scene is highly allegorical: Cannibalism cannot be imputed to only the few people with political power, who perform visible vice; rather, it should be recognized that every cultural agent is an accomplice to this social malady.

T h e homogeneity between gastronomy and cannibalism is satanically presented in Li Yidou’s story “A Culinary Class,” in which “my mother-in- law,” a professor at the Culinary College, teaches how to butcher human babies for cooking. T h e rational, orderly form of the class seems to embody both the great didactic tradition in Chinese culture and the scientific pattern of modern civilization. T h e content of the class, however, serves inhumanity: It is for the sake of gastronomy that modern scientific methods are used for barbarian sacrifice. At this point, the tension between civilization and barbarism may disappear, as we clearly see that gastronomy, in the name of science and civilization, is itself affinitive to cannibalism, which is supposedly attributed only to barbarism. Decadence can thus be categorized not only as an excess of desire, but also as a necessary inversion of desire that may be viewed as a corollary of the excessiveness of civilization, despite the

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 20

fact that civilization is developed presumably to serve human desire.

If

the development of civilization becomes nothing but the excess or intemper- ance of civilization, barbarism is shown as both a consummation and a parody of civilization. In any case, Mo Yan does not accuse the potential malady in the collective mind as a pure and determinable malignancy; rather, he displays the perverse scene within the category of delight and pleasure, as contained in gastronomy.

An analysis of the gastronomic theme in

The Republic of Wine

would be incomplete without referring to the same or related themes implied in other post-Mao literary works prior to the appearance of this novel, as well as in traditional Chinese fiction. From this point of view, it may be useful to take a look at the different attitudes toward eating-manifest or potential- in

The Republic

of

Wine

and the works of the early and mid-r98os, such as L u

Wenfu’s “Meishijia” [ T h e gourmet] (1983), Ah Cheng’s “Qiwang” [ T h e chess king], and

Liu

Heng’s “Gouri de liangshi” [Dog shit food] (1986). Eat- ing, as suggested

by Ah

Cheng in “ T h e Chess King,” should at best be regarded as the most natural human behavior, which conforms to a person’s original mind, and thus something in resistance to political exaction and oppression. Ah Cheng’s noncultural approach to eating is culturally derived from the spirit of Chan (Zen) Buddhism and Daoism, which could be served as an analgesic tablet to alleviate the reflective pain from the Cultural Revolution. O n the other hand, in

“Dog

Shit Food,” Liu H e n g expresses a desire for food in an era of poverty or famine. Again, food is symbolically treated as a cultural object, presently void yet eager to be filled and accomplished, inherent in the collective mind. In both cases, gastronomic culture is dealt with in a negative way but functions toward a positive potential: In “ T h e Chess King,” a refutation of gastronomic culture, i.e., the most primi- tive and natural way of eating, is described as a transcendental mode of life; in “Dog Shit Food,” on the other hand, food destitution, as the antithesis

of

gastronomy, is realistically delineated and symbolically treated as the central problem of Chinese civilization, a problem to be negated

by

the act of writing (if not by social practice).

T h e most pertinent of the three works mentioned above is “ T h e Gour- met,” L u Wenfu’s novella published in the beginning

of

1983. It represents the affirmative and optimistic perspective of culture that permeated China

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 21 in the early 1980s. In this novella, Lu carefully-in almost a strained manner- insinuates the cultural significance of Chinese gastronomy by

describing the various experiences of a “gourmet,” Z h u Ziye, throughout the history of the People’s Republic in order to sketch out a diagram of cultural rises and falls parallel to different sociopolitical periods.

To

a large extent, Zhu Ziye is not only a cultural sign who represents the magnificent Chinese oral stage, but also a barometer of political weather that gauges the happiness or sorrow of the common people-which is boiled down to the pleasure or lack of palate satisfaction. History and gustatory pleasure are oddly correlated here in order to proffer the hope for an ideal society full of, or even ruled by, gourmets,

if

not gluttons. Apparently the social critique in

this work, which could have penetrated more profoundly into the (in)significance of pure eating in political agitation, ultimately gives way to cultural essentialism, which leads to euphoria in the retention

of

national, collective pleasure. The Republic

of

Wine, as we have seen, is intended to interrupt this euphoria

by

inserting an exceedingly cacophonous tone into the enjoyable cultural melody. It is a warning against the cultural optimism, flourishing since the mid-r98os, that forgets the dissonance within the cultural entity as a real historical formation rather than as an abstract phenom- enon of either spirituality or sensuality.

T h e fictional exhibition of Chinese gastronomic culture can probably be traced back to jin ping mei [Gold vase plum] and Honglou meng [Dream of the red chamber], encyclopedic novels containing abundant scenes of feasts and parties, as well as countless references to excessive eating. These descriptions can be compared to the “whole-donkey feast” in The Kepublic of Wine, whose kinship to Gold Vase Plum and Dream

of

the Red Chamber lies in the fact that in all three novels the scenes of spree are not represented as isolated spectaculars, but are arranged as foreshadows, at various levels, of structural decline. Indeed, The Republic

of

Wine has a divergent intensity that swerves the carnivalesque orgy into a carnivorouslcannibalistic farce. Gold Vase Plum and Dream

of

the Red Chamber d o not g o as far in insinuat- ing the fall from gastronomy into cannibalism as does The Journey to the West, in which gastronomic cannibalism is a haunting theme-while the purpose of immortality is contained in the concept of gastronomy-as Chou Ying-hsiung remarks. It is then legitimate for

Li

Yidou to categorize

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 22 some of his own stories as “cruel realism” or “demonic realism,” since they d o have a close connection with the “cruel” and “demonic” characteristics

of

The Journey to the West. In The Journey to the West, Tripitaka’s flesh is from time to time on the verge of being eaten by demons because it is both deli- cious and immortalizing, and so is that of children. T h e reference to the eating of children is of greater significance here because of its relevance to The Republic

of

Wine. The Journey to the West (chapters

77-78)

repeatedly mentioned that eating the flesh of children, or the hearts and livers of children, would greatly enhance longevity, which is, from the nutritious aspect, an important part of Chinese gastronomy.

Both The Republic

of

Wine and The journey to the West can be read as his- tories against cannibalism, as can another magnum opus standing between the two, namely, L u Xun’s “Kuangren riji” [Diary of a madman

I.

In The Journey to the West, it is Monkey’s task to “save the children” and prevent his master from being eaten

by

various demons and monsters. In The Republic of Wine, however, neither Ding Gouer nor Li Yidou is able to rescue society from cannibalism. Although

Li

Yidou is conscious of his “The Meaty Baby” being another version of “Diary of a Madman” in a new age, he cannot help having an abnormal love affair with his mother-in-law, a young-looking and attractive-a benefit of her having gained more nutrition because of her gastronomidcannibalistic privilege -professor at the Culinary College who invents the special culinary arts for baby meat and thus is one of the prime culprits in the cannibal community. Ding Gouer, seeing the baby on the feast table, is rationally reluctant but sensually tempted: After being told that it is not a real boy, “he picks u p a piece from the a r m , closes his eyes, and puts it into his mouth.

Oh,

my god. T h e taste buds on his tongue hail together; the biting muscle of his cheek twitches; then a little hand stretches out of his throat and takes away that piece.””)Different from L u Xun’s Madman, who is haunted by the paranoid fear of being eaten, Ding Gouer encounters the cannibalistic community with an inconsistent, schizophrenic attitude. He is, after all, neither a n adversary against nor a victim of that community, but a participant in it.

Even The Journey to the West has ironic moments throughout its narrative development.?’

The

most notable fact is that the heroic Monkey’s own power, always limited, is largely dependent on the succor of Bodhisattva,

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 23 who eventually extinguishes the cannibalistic evils and salvages the people from jeopardy. In “Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun can hardly see the possi-

bility of escaping from the menace: His Madman becomes a permanent antagonist against a devouring society and gives out an echoless appeal for salvation. T h e Madman, since his birth, has been consistently read as a rep- resentative of the time who denounces cannibalistic society. Fu Sinian, in a 1919 review of “Diary of a Madman,” proposed that “the madman be our teacher” and that “we bring the children to head, following the madman, toward brightness,”22 This teleological scenario is most likely what I,u Xun intends to offer, since he, in the preface to Nahan [Call to arms], explicitly indicates that his writing serves those who do not want anything pessimistic, let alone cynical. Yet a cynical reading of his Madman is not impossible. Especially in regard to his ambivalent attitude toward writing as enlightenment, expressed in the same preface, it may well

be

Lu Xun’s equivocal unconscious that undermines his intentional message. T h e most intriguing question is that of why the discourse of modernity has to be uttered through insanity, which is essentially incompatible with the claimed rationality of that discourse.

If

the realistic representation of the Madman’s psychology is to be read as the record of a real paranoid, as the preface suggests, representation and paranoia are equated as unlimited desire to totalize and concep- tualize. Since paranoia indicates not only totalization but fallacy of totalization as well, the Madman’s fear of being eaten can be seen as a psychic illusion or a paranoid misinterpretation that problematizes the steady outward accusation pronounced by the Madman (or by Lu Xun, as he has hitherto been interpreted).’3

Being aware of a n ultimate predicament of the project

of

modernity that attempts to totalize cannibalistic social history,

Mo

Yan abandons any teleological perspective and does not impute cannibalism to threatening from outside. Ding Gouer’s or

Li

Yidou’s easy inclination to be absorbed by the cannibalistic community implies that the most severe danger is not tangible barbarism, but rather the inaccessibility or unrecognizability of barbarism and the ignorance of the potentiality for barbarism in oneself. In other words, can- nibalism, or any other collective or social barbarism, should be first of all traced individually and inwardly, in a self-deconstructive way. In The Kepub- lic of Wine, obviously, the attempt to eliminate cannibalism turns out to lead

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 24 to participation in cannibalism. Lu Xun’s Madman feels guilty for his possible participation in eating his sister and thus unyieldingly calls for resistance against the society that has deceived him, whereas Ding Gouer is completely ignorant of his sin throughout his journey until right before he clownishly falls into the manure pit, when he is about to lose his chance to “save the children” forever, and “sees lots of familiar faces, one of which is even the very image of his own,”24 from around the table of the cannibalistic feast on the boat. This ironic fact is sufficient to indicate the invalidity of searching for the criminals outwardly. As the preliminary quotation of the novel- from Ding Gouer’s epitaph-says: “In this chaotic and corrupt

age, my brothers, d o not bring our own brothers to trial.”z5 Therefore, it can be inferred, the one who may be brought to trial is oneself, as one of the cannibals in a fraternal community.

An equally remarkable passage is found in

Li

Yidou’s short piece “An Infant Prodigy,” in which an elf becomes the leader of an infant rebellion against the cannibals. T h e scene may be read allegorically as a depiction of

the finally crushed student movement- the elf even appeals by staging a hunger strike26-or of any historical event that is categorized as revolution or resistance. Nevertheless, the elf is not described as a historical hero. Instead, he is another tyrant who forcefully and artfully establishes his patriarchal position among the infants and then forbids his subjects to speak whenever he speaks, a true ruffian who does barbarian things such as biting the ear off a subject who does not obey him or, even more brutally, digging out the eyeballs of adult enemies (members of the cannibalistic community) with his fingers. Again, astonishingly, Mo Yan reveals not only the barbarism of the antagonists of barbarism (Ding Gouer as a detective, Li Yidou as a critical writer), but also the barbarism of the victims of barbarism (the elf

and his infant subjects, Yuanbao and his wife). Self-trial, o r self-reflection, becomes the ultimate illation of the novel, since, as the self-referential structure suggests, no one can evade responsibility for a cannibalistic society: When you count the convicts, you must find that there is always an extra one, which is yourself- just as in the image Ding Gouer identifies before his death.

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 25 Discursive Plethora

In this novel, Mo Yan provides a kaleidoscopic scenery of degenerate language in which w e can discern that “r an d o m talk, balderdash, jokes, an d digressions from various branches are actually more readable than the main t runk of t h e story.’’Z7 In accordance with the behavioral dissipation in t h e novel, the discursive plethora of narrative is probably mo re noticeable. In this regard, the stylistic decadence serves as the decisive factor that forms the deconstructive power of the rhetoric.

Hence, the crucial issue here becomes the decadence

of

discourse. T h e dish called “ Dra go n a nd Phoenix Displaying Prosperity,” again, not only indicates the scatological content within the gastronomic culture, b u t also reveals the ironic essence of traditional symbolic discourse. T h i s is absolutely not what Li Yidou calls “transforming the great ugliness into the great beauty”-“dragon a nd phoenix as the solemn totem of our nation, the symbol of supreme loftiness, supreme sanctity a n d supreme beauty”2X- but, on the contrary, extracting the great ugliness o u t

of

the great beauty. He re , Li Yidou’s misapplication of the idiom qing xhu nun shu-meaning

“too numerous to list or record,’’ but referring only to inexpiable crimes or sins- to indicate the lavish connotations of the dragon-phoenix symbollo is notable since it somehow divulges the secret of the symbolic discourse. N o t far from slips of the tongue o r slips of the pen, the novice writer’s misuse of the idiom can also be regarded as being unconsciously purposed to imply the flagitious significance of the symbolic discourse. T h e n the derogatory idiom an d the splendid symbol, both originally discursive, mutually level their discursiveness in the clashing moment. Fo r M o Yan the author, in any case, this kind of language deterioration is ventured to suggest disbelief and rejection of the dominance of seemingly rational discourse, despite the fact that he himself may not be able to utterly flee from it after all. We can notice, in most of the novel, that the prevalence of discourse, particularly Maoist discourse, becomes so excessive that it can never convey the sense of its self-assumed object. In

Li

Yidou’s story “Alcohol,” for instance, the description of the young Jin Gangzuan (who becomes the leading cannibal in the ensuing chapters) is full of idiomatic cliches an d incongruous eulogies that display the dissipated rubbish of discursive language:

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positions 6 : 1 Spring 1998 26

Every mountain, every river, every grass, every tree awakes o u r venera- tion for Vice-Minister Jin-what a cordial emotion it is. T h i n k about it, it is from this barren a n d shabby village that a wine star rose slowly to shine on the Republic of Wine, a star whose radiance would dazzle o u r eyes and make o u r eyes brim with tears, o u r hearts surge like waves.

A

ragged cradle was also a cradle, nothing could replace it.

To

estimate according to the current situation, Vice-Minister Jin’s future would be unlimited..

. .

When miseries and joys, loves and dreams in his childhood

. . .

long windedly and free flowingly welled u p in his mind, what mental attitude did he have? H o w was his pace? H o w was his countenance?

Did he move his left foot or right foot first when walking? In what position was his left hand when he was moving his right foot? W h a t odor was in his mouth, and how was his blood pressure? T h e speed of his heartbeat? Did he show his teeth or not when he was smiling? Did his forehead wrinkle when he was crying? T h e portrayable things are too many, and the words in my belly are too few.”’

Obviously, such a text of ostensible parody decays Maoist discourse by its overabundant nonsense consisting in presumed seriousness. By the same token, the lyricized narrative must highly problematic if something horrid is secretly o r patently going on simultaneously. The office building of the cannibals, for example, is located in a paradisiac garden in which there are “sunflowers all facing the sun” (a typical cliche expression) and “special, sweet and intoxicant odor of birch”;31 even the meaty baby market is situ- ated in an environment with a fountain, pond, and chirping birds, in which Jin Yuanbao, who is going to sell his baby, feels “as if stepping into the ely- sium, my every cell is shivering with happiness.”3’ After the baby is sold at a special rate, Jin Yuanbo “becomes extremely excited and tears almost rush out

of

his eyes.”<3 T h e descriptive mode here is typically discursive: It is one that should only be found in highly emotionally ideological narrative, such as when one is meeting Chairman Mao or receiving assistance from the party. Overstatement is thus unveiled as the essential function of Maoist discourse. When such a strongly discursive style is implanted into a completely different context, however, its consistent power is seriously deteriorated. Therefore, as it occurs against the background of cannibalism, Maoist dis-

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Yang I The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 27

If,

according to Marx, the surplus value

of

commodities reveals the ironic digression of labor from genuine, creative production, then the surplus value of discourse suggests the ironic diversion of language from truth. Overstatement is a rhetorical device that characterizes the surplus value of discourse. O n the whole, this novel is a ceaselessly hyperplastic narrative which produces and reproduces numerous ungraspable discursive elements that can never fit the objective reality the novel is presumed to represent. O n the other hand, it is discursive reality that

Mo

Yan is tackling: T h e limitless proliferation of discourse is manifested as the formative basis of the decline of history.

A sensitive seizure of the decline of history can be found in the novel as sensibility to the decline of discourse, that is, the decadence of discourse, the fever or proliferation caused by the lethal virus of discourse. When the grandiose feature

of

Maoist discourse has degenerated into high-toned nonsense, into barbarous mendacity, it becomes at one and the same time too feeble and too outrageous: It is too feeble because it does not have the true power to grasp objective reality; it is too outrageous because it has the ideological superiority to impose upon or attract its receptors.

T h e most perplexing fact in the novel is that it is never clear whether the baby that Jin Gangzuan and D i n g Gouer eat together at the feast is an actual human baby or an imitation one, Here,

Mo

Yan touches upon the most profound problem of writing: the difficulty or impossibility of representation. When a feast

of

affirmatively real baby is not shown to us, the simple representation of the crime is shifted to the representation of the unrepresentability of the crime. T h i s is an intentional flaw that Jean- Francois Lyotard would call “bad form,” which “denies itself the solace

of

good forms,””4 a necessary inconsistency, which can never be developed to a higher phase, which can never be simply negated, eliminated, or prohib- ited in order to easily reach a positively flawless realm. T h e r e is a permanent danger, therefore, in believing that reality can be totally represented and evil can be shunned away. It is quite obvious in the novel that discourse is superficially in opposition to the activity

of

cannibalism, while a t the same time it can only, in the final analysis, pervert or falsify the crime. O n the one hand, it claims its justice against cannibalism-as Jin Gangzuan alleges with the party’s tenetj5-in order to perform the crime; on the

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 28 other hand, it does attempt to contain cannibalism into its own domain- as

Li

Yidou’s mother-in-law expounds in her culinary class.36 In fact, as far as discourse is concerned, this inconsistency is consistent throughout the whole novel and throughout the history of twentieth-century China. As

long as discourse has a privileged mechanism of concealment and displace- ment, historical truth is consistently inconsistent because it can never be realistically or representationally revealed within such a n organized discursive system. T h e n narrative has to turn back to itself: to demonstrate its own discursiveness and, above all, its own failure to recognize the truth within discourse.

T h i s is what metanarrative means. And this is also why metanarrative must be understood as antinarrative, or self-disruptive narrative, since it is a narrative conscious of its own limit, its own difficulty, rather than its omnipotence, of representation. When reality is incommensurable, i.e., unable to be grasped in the discursive norm, it is only the incommensurability that can remind us of the permanent danger in reality. T h e ultimate danger lies in the incapability of dealing with reality, because the gap

between reality and the desire to embrace it is blocked

by

discourse. In this idea of incommensurability lies Lyotard’s concept

of

the sublime as an odd mixture

of

pleasure and pain: It is from the painful element-the consciousness of unrepresentability, the destiny of misrepresentation- that we can get a sense of pleasure. As a matter of fact, this novel is at the same time horrible and comical, as Chou Ying-hsiung remarks at the very end of his introduction to the novel, “terrible, enjoyable.”37 T h e pleasure is derived from the downfall, the invalidity, or the collapse of discourse, which, while still torturing our consciousness, is also caught fragmented in self-consciousness. In his elucidation of the sublime, Lyotard stresses its

dif-

ference from sublimation: Sublimation still tends to evade the irreconcil- ability between reality and consciousness, and therefore contains a nostalgic utopia. Here lies the distinction between Red Sorghum and The Kepublic of

Wine. In Red Sorghum, the unpresentable is what Lyotard calls “the missing contents**:’s Even the barbarous or the savage could be turned into something tragic and thus positive. In The Republic

of Wine,

the real atrocity becomes something perpetually ungraspable: It is always recognized as something discursive, and so discursive that everyone, in the name of its

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 29 grandiosity, is compelled, or more exactly, attracted to participate in the brutal history without the ability to extricate himself from it.

Hence, to

Mo

Yan, an outward critique of objective social history is fea- sible only when there is an inward critique of the narrative subject in the first place, i.e., a self-critique or self-problematization, or a subjective self- consciousness of the limitation of the objective critique. T h e critical discourse of narration in

The Republic

of

Wine,

as

I

have analyzed, is exposed as implicated in the same historical crisis and not exempt from critical scrutiny. That is to say, the narration of the novel does not occupy a superior position, but opens up its own inadequacy and difficulty in discursive excess or narrative irony. T h e narrative subject in The

Republic of

Wine,

like the hero

of

the novel, does not claim an omniscient power that totalizes history. Thus, the paradigmatic mode

of

absolute representation in modern Chinese fiction is called into question: Representation, in

Mo

Yan’s relentless irony, is shown at the same time as problematics of representation. Nevertheless,

Mo Yan’s conception of the problematics of representation does not lead to an absolute cancellation of representation but to an expose of apertures in the process

of

representation, and thus implies not an epistemological nihilism but a historical subject that is simultaneously aware

of

its own pit- falls, or a transcendental subject that is paradoxically aware

of

the impasse of transcendence.

Notes

I Zhang Yimou’s film Hongguoliang IRed sorghuml, which was adapted from thc novel and won the 1987 Chnnes Award, has popularized the novel to a great extent.

2 See Mo Yan,jiuguo lThe republic of wine] (Taipei: Hongfan shudian, 1992), 424.

3 M o Yan, Shicuojiazu [The herbivorous family] (Reijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1993). yjj. 4 M o Yan, Jiuguo, 383.

5 Mo Yan, Red Sorghum: A Family Saga, trans. Howard (;oldblatt (New York: Viking, 1993),

6 Mo Yan, Jiuguo, 414.

7 Ibid,38o.

8 Shanghai jingjutuan Zhiyu Weihushan juzu, Zhiyu Wezhushan [Taking tiger mountain by

9 M o Yan, Jiuguo, 380. 356-357-

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positions 6: 1 Spring 1998 30 I 0 I 1 12 I -3 ‘4 ‘5 I 0 ‘7 I8 ‘9 20 2 1 22 23 24 25 26 27

In (:hinese communist literature, one of the earliest prototypes of the corrupted cadre is Chen Xiaoyuan in Zhao Shuli’s “Li Youcai banhua” [The rhymes of Li Youcai]. Represented a s being corrupted by those whom he is suppose to discipline, (:hen Xiaoyuan is clearly crit- icized both by the positive characters in the story and by the narrator.

Mo Yan, Jiuguo, 299. I bid., 4 I 6. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 202.

Sun Longji [Sun Lung-keel, Zhongguo wenhua de “shencengjiegou” [ T h e “deep structure” of

<:hinese culture] (Hong Kong: Yishan Chubanshe, 1983), 81 -93.

Mo Yan, jiuguo, I 70.

Ibid., r o o .

See Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterpieces ofthe Ming Novel (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1987), 183-276, 504-512.

Fu Sinian, “Yiduan fenghua” [ A few mad words], Xinchao [ N e w wave] 1:4 (April 1919): 687. T h e representational mechanism of “Diary of a Madman,” as a matter of fact, does suggest the nontruth of the Madman’s narrative, which the canonical reading tends to ignore. For example, the “seven or eight others who discussed me in a whisper” and “were afraid of my seeing them” (Lu Xun, Selecfed Works, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang [ Heijing: For- eign Languages Press, 1g8o], vol. I , 40) are indeed furtively talking about the madness of the

Madman, but he interprets their behavior as preparing for murder; likewise, when the doc- t o r says “To be eaten at once!” (ibid., 44), he is most likely referring to taking medicine, but the narrator, again, interprets the words as a message about eating himself; the narratot‘s sus- picion of the Zhaos’ dog as an “accomplice” is all the more unreliable. T h e examples are too many to enumerate. T h e canonized reading of the text, therefore, is perfectly reversible: In “Iliary o f a Madman,’’ it is more than obvious that all the Madman-narrator’s interpretations

of the external occurrences are paranoid misinterpretations, and the whole narrative can well be uncovered as full of misrepresentations. Such an apparent fact, however, has hitherto escaped critical and scholarly observations of the story.

M o Yan, jiuguo, 382.

Ibid., i.

Ibid., 126. Later on, significantly, Li Yidou describes the elfs reappearance, in Yichi Wineshop, as an usher in a uniform with “smirky, silly eyes” (ibid., 177- 178) instead of with

his previously “chilly,” “schemer’s eyes” (ibid., I 15). T h e elf, therefore, seems t o be the one who allegorizes the historical transformation from the political age to the economic age. David Der-Wei Wang [ Wang Dewei], “Chihelasa jian qiguan-ping Mo Yan tie jiuguo”

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Yang

I

The Republic of Wine: An Extravaganza of Decline 31 28 29 30 3’ 32 33 3 4 35 36 37 38

[Seeing miracles in eating, drinking, urinating, and defecating: on Mo Yan’s The Republic <f Wine], Zhongshi wanbao [China times (evening edition)], 3 January 1993.

Mo Yan,jiuguo, 192. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 36-37. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 89.

Jean-FranGois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. ( k o f f r e y Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota I’ress, 1984). XI. Mo Yan, Jiuguo, 94.

Ibid., 268-269.

C h o u Ying-hsiung, “Jiuguo de xushi” [Falsehood and truth of the republic of winel, in Mo Yan, Jiuguo, xi.