Mo Yan And Wang Meng: Modernist Rhetoric And Pseudomodernist Ideology

The positioning of the xungen school should make it easier for us to explore another two such "persuasions" of aesthetic modernity in post-Mao China, namely, Mo Yan and Wang Meng. Most critics would insist that both authors have contributed to the making of the aesthetics of subjectivity, one of the prominent indexes of modernism. Wang Meng, in particular, has continually surprised his readers by pushing to an extreme his fictional narrator's rhetorical capacity to subvert his own story. But is this flamboyant subjectivity of the narrator sufficient to lure critics to endorse the writer's self-designation as a modernist?

Before exploring this question, I will first look at a seemingly more obvious specimen of "Chinese modernism," Mo Yan's The Red Sorghum Clan (Hong gaoliang jiazu ) (1986).^[149] What Mo Yan exhibits, with breathtaking hyperbole, is an orgy of sensationalism on the edge between life and death where heightened awareness lies. He is fascinated with everything that Liu Xiaobo prescribed as modern—the irrational,

the libidinous, and the flesh and blood. And nowhere can this impact of kinetic energy be better delivered than through the juxtaposition of contradictory images: the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the obscene, sins and virtue, the pure and the filthy, and the heroic and the depraved. The novel is peppered with opposites that culminate in an undifferentiated continuum of life and death. Every moment and movement toward death—here one recalls the most poignant scene in the novel, where the youthful Grandma slips in and out of consciousness as she lies dying in the sorghum field—is simultaneously an exaltation of life and desire. Each time the narrator evokes the visual plenitude of the crimson red sorghum, he pays ritualistic homage to the potent human blood that both sustains and spills the essence of life. If the quality of modernism is measured by its ability to accost death and to live on contradictions, then Mo Yan clearly meets the criterion.

Yet The Red Sorghum Clan is by no means a clear-cut case of classic modernism. Although framed in a temporal limbo somewhere between the past and the present that bears close resemblance to the root-searching literature, the novel retrogresses a step further into the mythological mode of primitive consciousness that the xungen school more often problematizes than glorifies. What greets our eyes is not merely the distinct private space of self-conscious subjecthood ("Grandma is the pioneer of the liberation of the individual"), a space that indubitably bears the trademark of modernity, but a borderless opaque territory where totemism and shamanistic magic hold absolute reign ("Red Sorghum is the totem of our Northeast Gaomi Township"). What unfolds in the novel is therefore more than just another variation of modernity's contradictory image making. The question to address is not to what end Mo Yan chooses the conflicting strategy of representation that romanticizes in turn the individual will to power and the tyrannical communal ethos, or whether he succeeds in conjuring up a continuum between the modern and the primitive modes of consciousness. The question to address is whether the courting of death and danger and the mindless release of the libido of all the licentious male and female characters are signs of modernity's beckoning or simply a contemporary retelling of primitivism's eternal triumph?

I should point out that this is not the kind of primitivism that Gauguin or Matisse would have understood as devoid of cultural roots and reduced to a metaphor for the fantastic. It takes in everything that modernity wishes to leave behind: the superstitious, feudalistic, ignominious, and irrational, as well as the legendary and visionary. How are we

going to interpret the narrator's obsessive promotion of such uncultivated forces except by attributing it to the author's fascination with the potent domination of the ultrastable presence of tradition? In The Red Sorghum Clan , brute force is the religion. The moments of domination are canonized side by side with the moments of rebellion. In this ritualistic worship of violence, the tyrant appears as alluring as the rebel. Revalorized in the aesthetics of energy, barbarism is finally indistinguishable from the modernist aesthetics of desublimation. Does Mo Yan himself know what he is celebrating—flagrant power or liberating desire? Or can he tell one from the other?

To those readers who insist that Mo Yan's glorification of the instinctual and the libidinous clearly heralds the dawning of modern sensibility, I cannot envision a better rejoinder than to invite them to revisit the end of the novel where the narrator suddenly speaks with hurried but deliberate tendentiousness. In a moment of intense nostalgia, he brings us back to the privileged locale of the village and the collective unconscious of the villagers. The city where he grew up is put on trial, together with all that it is associated with, a civilization condemned as artificial and enervating simply because it was allegedly nonexperiential. While debunking urban sensibility, the narrator sanctifies the "mysterious emotions" underlying the savage past, a past that he claims will emerge as "an almighty thinking weapon" with which one can grasp the unpredictable future.^[150] And who can exercise the power to evoke those mysterious emotions but the ghostly apparition of the Second Wife, whose legendary death is inseparable from the tales of animal possession and exorcism—stories that reveal tradition in its most crude and corrupt reincarnation? It is none other than this woman whose spirit is reciprocal with that of wolves, wild cats, and demons and who stands at the opposite end of the modern Grandma, who alone wields the mystical power of summoning the narrator, Grandson, from the city back to the village. One cannot help wondering why it is the reactivated memory of her scandalous death rather than that of the heroic death of Grandma, the very emblem of modernity, that emerges in the novel's concluding statement as the ultimate sign, the spiritual authority, to which Grandson has to bow in awe.

This ending exposes Mo Yan's cultural ideology more powerfully than any other episode in the novel. Mo Yan believes in the mysterious presence of tradition that promises the second coming of history. The myth of return is consummated as Grandson, the emblem of the future, answers the call of the Second Wife to go back to the mythological village

of red sorghum and to bathe, as her spirit dictates, in the mystical Mo River for three days and three nights. The bewitching and beguiling voice of the Second Wife reminds one of the Sirens in Odysseus and the baptism, the return to the womb. Time immemorial cancels out the temporal flow. Tradition provides the normativity on which an empty and frail modernity is dependent. The novel enacts, on the ideological front, the drama of tradition usurping modernity in full glory.

What I am critiquing, however, is not the mythological mode of consciousness itself, but the danger of the flattening out of such a mode into a model. One only needs to look at the xungen writer Han Shaogong's experiment with the same narrative mode in "Ba-ba-ba," a story about an idiot and the idiotic existence of his villagers, to understand how the mythological space of narration can open up a critical space that enables readers to raise the question: Is the collective suicide of the villagers at the end of the tale an act of rebellion or of sheer ignorance?^[151] What Mo Yan eventually denies us is that ever intriguing possibility to expose and examine the Janus face of mythology and tradition. Whereas the imaginary of the idiot in Han Shaogong's tale evokes the jarring mirror image of modernity, the imaginary of the red sorghum field is narcissistic—the one is self-subversive, the other, self-indulgent. Whereas Han Shaogong stirs up our irresistible impulse to question the primitivistic logic of undifferentiation, a logic that privileges the mysterious continuum of "the subject and the object," "the physical and the psychological," "being and nonbeing," "fantasies and reality," and "humans, Nature, the supernatural,"^[152] Mo Yan holds us spellbound by feeding us the sensory pleasure of the indiscriminate. Eventually, he tells us that thinking is an act of cowardice and an offense against Nature.

The case of Mo Yan teaches us that a work that is replete with imagism, appeals to irrationality, exalts the sexual organ, and experiments with unconventional means of storytelling may still fall short of delivering genuine modern sensibility. This brings us back to Wang Meng, the pioneer of the Chinese narrative mode of stream of consciousness.^[153]

To make a long story short, I join Leo Lee in concluding that, in spite of his claim to modernism, Wang Meng is first and foremost a realist writer.^[154] This would certainly alarm Wang, who dabbled in Western modernist sleight of hand with such noticeable effort and success. What gives away his realist identity is, however, not how he writes, but what he reveals despite himself even when he is formulating a modernist plot. A good case in point is his much acclaimed Yi ti qian jiao (A sneeze that charms a thousand), "the most avant-gardist piece in 1988."^[155]

The story contains the skeleton of a plot—a VIP's graceful sneezing posture and his not-so-graceful moral persona. What Wang Meng has in mind is to revoke the aura of verisimilitude and to enact playfully, right under the reader's nose, the process of fiction making and the minute details of the writer's conscious fabrication. To accomplish this task, he resorts to the most convenient solution; he turns his narrator into a professional writer like himself. Despite Wang Meng's attempt to subvert all perspectives of narration, it is this strategy that reveals the Achilles heel of an act of writing that can otherwise claim close allegiance to modernism. The problem at issue is precisely the identifiability of the intellectual and ideological perspective of the fictional narrator and the author himself—a default point of departure that realism takes for granted. Although the author strives to achieve, with great success, utter artificiality elsewhere in the tale, he simply forgets to fictionalize the narrator by making him a caricature of Wang Meng rather than the real Wang Meng himself.

This oversight could very well subvert what Wang Meng sets out to do in the first place. His narrator goes about the usual business of vitiating the boundary between the real and the unreal and with an ironic grimace forbids us to take anything seriously, his own narrative voice above all, but what we actually encounter is not a fictional narrator who jokes around insincerely, but a real author making genuine confessions about what he thinks of magical realism, the xungen literature's trendy slogan of "marching toward the world," modernist sensibility, China's new wave cinema, and most importantly of all, realism itself.

No literary school escapes our narrator's biting sarcasm. Not even the term "modern" is immune to his metacritical spirit. His wisecracks are often double-edged, for his targets are multiple. He is at his best when, by debunking three new wave film productions ("Yellow Earth," "Red Sorghum," and "Old Well"), cinematic modernism par excellence, he succeeds in poking fun at the root-searching consciousness at the same time. Is there anything left to be redeemed if nothing is sacred anymore?

For such a pious writer as Wang Meng, the altar is of course never left completely empty. From the very beginning, the self-designated modernist author finds himself caught in the awkward position of having to defend realist sensibility, even in a piece of fiction, as a tantalizing remnant of the day. The awkwardness intensifies as the tale unfolds. Whenever the subject of realism comes up, the narrator is self-conscious of his complicitous coexistence with Wang Meng himself. The ensuing rhetor-

ical dodges and double talks to which the narrator resorts in delivering his metacommentaries on realism constitute the most theatrical moments of "A Sneeze That Charms a Thousand." These are the moments when the narrator senses, all of a sudden, the urgency of speaking in restraint and with measured calculation, even though he has given himself away with total abandon to the mockery of every other literary persuasion. There is obviously more at stake when the narrator faces the task of performing the pundit's routine practice of wisecracking about realism. The truth is, he simply does not have the heart to do it. What appears before us is a flustered narrator who forgets the rules of his own game: Everything he says is to be taken with a grain of salt, his opinions about realism without exception. Why can he not serve us the same hearty fare of a belittled realism as he did a feast of parody on the tricks and knacks of modernist techniques?

The fictional constraint underlying the tale, that he make a jest of every literary convention in turn, is the only means that could force our narrator to taunt realism. And yet his discomfort at having to create the semblance of gibing at the school of "art for life's sake" produces no cracks and good teases, but only quibbles and lapses. We read now and then a sentence buried in the superfluous trappings of adverbial modifiers that continuously qualifies what he has to say ("I was even speculating in suspicion whether realism is truly a bit out of vogue"), or a straightforward confession ("What I, the narrator, am experimenting with is a kind of a realism with an umbrella structure"), a rhetorical question ("Is traditional realism endowed with a kind of irresistible appeal?"), or a seemingly equivocal statement: "Making light of 'form' often amounts to making light of 'content.' But even the assertion that form is form, and form is everything, does not necessarily entail that content should be expelled. Is life, God, and love a form of existence, or is it its true content?"^[156]

One hardly needs to recapitulate that at this particular juncture it is content rather than form—realism's aesthetics in a nutshell—that wins the narrator's oblique endorsement. A passage like the foregoing is already revealing enough for us to confirm what I have suggested, that Wang Meng's residual loyalty to realism is not to be underestimated. And yet a still more uninhibited confession about his realist persona is found in a longer passage in which the author-narrator deliberates, with a seriousness out of character with his usual joking self, the value of consciousness versus the unconscious.

Will power and reason dominate. Yet they also regulate and balance every individual. Will power and reason could be turned into tools of oppression, giving rise to various forms of hypocrisy and perversion. However, will power and reason could also be made into a provision, a kind of illumination, an intelligent and joyful guidance, fair and sensible, full of wisdom, which produces varied fruits of beauty and goodness. Therefore, as I face the fathomless undercurrents lying beneath the human consciousness, the turbulent, contending, and incomprehensible flow that has lost its light forever or perhaps just temporarily, a vista as bottomless as the dark canyon one looks down at from the mountain top, I feel terrified and dizzy, as if I would fall into its abyss at any time. I cannot bring myself to a face-to-face encounter with this deep unconscious that is burning, contending, and saturated with desires of the self, which cannot but produce jealousy, terror, ferocity, and entanglement."^[157]

In weighing reason against the irrational, in pitting consciousness against the unconscious, the narrator divulges a deep-seated conviction to which die-hard realists alone subscribe: disorder should be shunned as a plague. If the unconscious, the energy field of modernism, where desire traverses in repelling, ominous, and dangerous forms, is greeted with such horror and repulsion by the author-narrator, one cannot help thinking twice about the terms of his self-identification as a modernist.

The cases of Mo Yan and Wang Meng indicate only too well that modernist sensibility is as much an issue about the ideological content of modern consciousness as a well-pronounced formal revolution against the technical conventions of realism. Yet although I challenge the conventional wisdom that salutes those two authors as champions of "Chinese modernism," there is no denying that Mo Yan and Wang Meng represent two distinct streams that crisscross the vast territory of China's aesthetic modernity. Acknowledging these two writers' complicitous relationship with primitivism and realism respectively should help us understand that the dawning of aesthetic modernity in Deng's China does not necessarily result in its radical discontinuity from all the previously sanctioned literary conventions. Only naive advocates of a global development model and an ill-informed Western public would confuse the arrival of modernization in China with its "necessary" break from and revolt against all earlier political (socialist), literary (realist), and cultural (Confucianist) traditions. Just as the neo-Confucian revival constitutes an integral part of China's social modernity, so has realism, perhaps even a little dose of romanticism, become part and parcel of the now passé Chinese aesthetic modernity.

Modernism's career in China was doomed to be short-lived from the very beginning. It would not bloom fully until thirty years later in Tai-

wan.^[158] The ripples of aesthetic modernity in 1930s' Shanghai predictably disappeared into the tidal waves of revolutionary politics. Two leading neo-impressionists, Liu Na'ou and Mu Shiying, died young as victims of political assassination.^[159] Dai Wangshu passed away in the early 1950s. Shi Zhecun returned to the realist camp as early as the 1940s. Qian Zhongshu and Shen Congwen gave up creative writing for academic research after 1949. Zhu Guangqian, the most progressive modernist theorist, floundered in each political campaign. And modern poets such as Feng Zhi and Bian Zhilin channeled their creative energy to the introduction and translation of foreign literature, ironically, that of classical works in particular.^[160] Modernism's first revolt against realism failed wretchedly.

In the 1980s, the reentry of modernism in Deng's China aroused more expectations and promised a golden harvest whose fruits were to be delivered to both the indigenous and Western market. Marching side by side with social modernity, it reappeared as a historical necessity challenging the legitimacy of realism. Its victory, an all consuming one for as long as it lasted (between 1984 and 1986), demarcates one of the great watersheds in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. But just as social modernity could promote an aesthetic modernism to suit its own agenda, it could also halt it when aesthetic rationality gained a momentum of its own beyond the reach of instrumental reason. Liu Suola's defiant brand of Yuppie xiandai pai and the xungen literature's critique of modernity proved in the end too unruly to be reintegrated into the coherent configuration of a purposive rationality that rewards only radical discontinuity and the notion of compulsive progress. Both the philosophy of root-searching and Liu Suola's incrimination of modernity's alienating persona taste too subtle and bitter to the palate of a populace that craves delectable feasts. It seems predictable that as China marches into the 1990s, the fever for social modernity will rage on with redoubled incentive, leaving behind all that in the semantic property of modern consciousness is self-critical of the epoch's obsession with the progress syndrome and rational structure, namely crisis consciousness, rebellious consciousness, reified consciousness, mood of contradiction, ennui, and antihumanist sentiments.

Any ethos that contradicts the telos of modern history in China—whether it was spelled out as the agenda of national survival during the May Fourth period or as the logic of Development in the Deng Xiaoping era—courts its own demise. The quick ebb and flow of aesthetic modernity demonstrates once more that the dangerous pattern of

boom and bust that has left unfinished many historical projects—a curious variation of the loosening-and-crush political culture of Mao's China—is a heritage of a revolutionary past that dies hard. Perhaps it is high time that the Chinese learn how to better appreciate the concept of sublation. Take our interpretation of modernity: although modernity's inception means canceling the past on the one hand, on the other it signifies the preservation and elevation of tradition in the dialectic process as a partial element in a synthesis. Seen in this light, the debate about pseudomodernism should not be so quickly usurped by, but recontained instead within, the current discussion of "Chinese postmodernism." Just as tradition is conceived as the prehistory of modernity, so is the unfinished project of aesthetic modernity the past of a postmodern present. Although the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century promises no serious comeback of aesthetic modernism, a more profound understanding of the Chinese postmodern culture in the 1990s would have to reckon with an aesthetic modernity that rehearsed postmodernity's penchant for heterogeneity by making one hundred flowers bloom without passing down a single homogeneous manifesto.