Mo Yan Thought: Six Critiques of Hallucinatory Realism (Literary and Cultural Theory) 9783631731086, 9783631735671, 9783631735657, 9783631735664, 3631731086

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Literar y and Cultural Theor y

Jerry Xie

Mo Yan Thought Six Critiques of Hallucinatory Realism

This book analyzes Mo Yan’s writings as well as other scholarly interpretations of his writings. When Mo Yan from China was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the term “hallucinatory realism” was invented to describe his storytelling as a “merging” of folk tales, history, and the contemporary. The author stakes out a Marxist approach to theorizing the class ideology that underwrites what Mo Yan says he “knows” of the “nebulous terrain” where one supposedly experiences moments of “transcending” or going “beyond” class and politics in literary sensibility. “A very impressive and significant study with in-depth quality. (…) [T]he author exposes the fact that far from telling stories of ‘human nature’ that transcends politics and ideology, Mo Yan’s hallucinating realism is the politics of de-politicization and de-revolution.” Professor Mobo Gao, University of Adelaide, Australia “This is an outstanding work of Marxist reflection, deftly employing dialectical materialist analysis both to critique and reinterpret Mo Yan’s controversial fictive creations known as hallucinatory realism. (…) This book deserves praise for its courage and commitment to furthering Marxist scholarship.” Professor Peter McLaren, Chapman University, USA

Jerry Xie received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He teaches English and critical theory at Lanzhou Jiaotong University in northwestern China.

Mo Yan Thought

LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORY General Editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga

VOLUME 51

Jerry Xie

Mo Yan Thought Six Critiques of Hallucinatory Realism

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Xie, Jerry, 1963- author. Title: Mo Yan thought : six critiques of hallucinatory realism / Jerry Xie. Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, 2017. | Series: Literary and cultural theory ; Vol. 51 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038556| ISBN 9783631731086 | ISBN 9783631735671 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Mo, Yan, 1955---Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PL2886.O1684 Z98 2017 | DDC 895.13/52--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038556 ISSN 1434-0313 ISBN 978-3-631-73108-6 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-73565-7 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-73566-4 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-73567-1 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b11876 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2017 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

“A very impressive and significant study with in-depth quality. Comrade Mo Yan is a controversial Nobel Prize winner because he writes from within the system and because, to some at least, he does not directly nor openly dissent from a communist-led, repressive government. By taking on the critics who frame Mo Yan in poststructuralist and deconstructionist conceptualizations, and by analyzing Mo Yan Thought in texts, the author exposes the fact that far from telling stories of ‘human nature’ that transcends politics and ideology, Mo Yan’s hallucinating realism is the politics of de-politicization and de-revolution. Both Mo Yan and his commentators either hide or avoid the class nature of society, literature and consciousness.” —Mobo Gao, author of The Battle for China’s Past: Mao & the Cultural Revolution “This is an outstanding work of Marxist reflection, deftly employing dialectical materialist analysis both to critique and reinterpret Mo Yan’s controversial fictive creations known as hallucinatory realism. The author succeeds in setting out a skillful, persuasive and grounded challenge to Mo Yan’s poststructuralist critics who read his work as a playfully ironic transcendence of ideology and class politics. Written with verve, in a prose that is graceful and stirring, this is a pathfinding study of Mo’s ‘storytelling’ that transforms the boundaries of accusation and acquittal and, in so doing, makes Mo’s work more graspable to readers while at the same time developing a renewal of Marxist literary critique. This book deserves praise for its courage and commitment to furthering Marxist scholarship.” —Peter McLaren, author of Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution

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Table of Contents Preface: The Nebulous Attitude......................................................................11 Part One: Boundaries 1. Go to the Core … but “to Change It”...................................................19 2. Taking Mo Yan “in Context” by Strategy...........................................59 Part Two: Surfaces 3. In Search of the Theoretical Meaning of Leaf Reading “in Context”...................................................................89 4. Cages and Class Struggle........................................................................ 155 Part Three: Stories 5. “Hearing” the Moist Spirit of Sandalwood Death....................... 177 6. Pow! as an Ideological Work................................................................. 213 Postface: The Class Attitude.......................................................................... 255 Bibliography......................................................................................................... 257 Index of Names.................................................................................................... 279 7

The distinguishing characteristic of Marxist philosophy—i.e., dialectical materialism—is its effort to explain clearly the class nature of all social consciousness (including philosophy). It publicly declares a resolute struggle between its own proletarian nature and the idealist philosophy of the propertied class. —Mao Zedong† I know what real courage is, and I understand true compassion. I know that nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person … So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous … terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence. Prattling on and on about my own work must be annoying … . —Mo Yan†† Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing … Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. —V.I. Lenin†††

Mao Zedong, “Dialectical Materialism—Notes of Lectures,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Chap. I. †† Mo Yan, “Storytellers: Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (7 Dec. 2012), p. 8. ††† V.I. Lenin, “L.N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 332. †

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Preface: The Nebulous Attitude Mo Yan Thought: Six Critiques of Hallucinatory Realism is an oppositional theorizing contribution to the emerging field of scholarship concerning the writings of Mo Yan (Guan Moye, born February 2, 1955), the now internationally famous author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 and who hails from the now equally famous Gaomi County in Shandong Province, China. According to the official Nobel proclamations in 2012, Mo’s writings are “damn unique”—a “unique insight into a unique world in a quite unique manner”1— and are described as “hallucinatory realism,” meaning, among other things (as this book endeavors to demonstrate), that his stories “[merge] folk tales, history and the contemporary.”2 In Mo’s own words, his storytelling reflects his “more profound understanding of life” and “true compassion” in the knowledge that a “nebulous terrain exists in the hearts and minds of every person, terrain that cannot be adequately characterized in simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad, and this vast territory is where a writer gives free rein to his talent” so as to “correctly and vividly [describe] this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain” and, in the end, “inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.”3 For Mo, “[k]nowing what resides in [his] heart is possible only by reading [his] works with care.”4 From his profoundly compassionate heart, he claims to have been “deeply influenced by traditional concepts of morality,” such as “[t]reating people with kindness and sincerity,” and as he has “[grown] older and gained a greater understanding of human beings, [his] attitude [has] gradually softened” so as to “‘roar no more,’” to “‘no longer favor waves,’” and to “‘have the capacity to tolerate filth and mire.’”5 Given such an “attitude,” which Mo himself regards as approaching an “ideal,”6 it is certainly not without justification that Shelley Chan, in her book 1 Peter Englund quoted in Johan Ahlander, “China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel for ‘Hallucinatory Realism,’” Chicago Tribune (11 Oct. 2012). 2 Nobelprize.org, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012—Press Release,” Nobelprize.org (11 Oct. 2012). 3 Mo Yan, “Storytellers: Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (7 Dec. 2012), p. 8, emphasis added. 4 Mo Yan, “Mo Yan—Biographical,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (2012). 5 Mo, “Mo Yan,” quoting from his play, Our Jing Ke. 6 Mo, “Mo Yan.”

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A Subversive Voice in China, summarizes his “greater understanding” as that of “our pessimistic novelist.”7 More ideologically telling, however, is how strikingly Mo’s ideal attitude resembles the standpoint of the “Wise Old Man” in Mao’s famous speech of 1945, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” in which the “wise” old man considers it “silly” and “quite impossible”8 to think, much less act collectively, to change the world, as Mao puts it, by “rais[ing] the political consciousness of the vanguard” and “arous[ing] the political consciousness of the entire people.”9 Throughout the six essays presented here, I engage and challenge the class ideology—the class politics of knowledge and consciousness—underlying the thought in/or “narratives” of what I call “Mo Yan Thought” in its hallucinatory realist nebulosities. These investigations take “reading” seriously as a social practice of theorizing and (re)articulating the class politics of knowledge. Philosophically, I follow, apply, and attempt to develop what Lenin called “the path of Marxian theory”10 which is the revolutionary theory “known as Marxism” that “grows out of the sum total of the revolutionary experience and the revolutionary thinking of all countries of the world.”11 In this book I also closely examine the emerging body of interpretations of Mo’s writing and thought and what I call “Moism” (Mo-ism) or the “Moist” (Moist) worldview. My reading practice is, as in contemporary Chinese pedagogies of literature and language, simultaneously “intensive” and “extensive.” This means that while I carefully study and reflect on the complicated, “unique” complexities and idiosyncrasies of Mo’s thinking and storytelling (and other interpretations of it), I also relate and (re)connect such texts to broader and deeper currents in history, society, politics, and intellectual contestation. My aim is to develop a critical, class-conscious (re)understanding of Mo’s ideological narratives and “hallucinatory realism” more generally considered. This is, I believe, especially interesting and significant with Moist narratives insofar as

7 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Chap. 3. 8 Mao Zedong, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 272. 9 Mao, “Foolish Old Man,” p. 271. 10 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 130, Lenin’s emphasis. 11 V.I. Lenin, “The Voice of an Honest French Socialist,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 354, Lenin’s emphasis.

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Mo himself has stated clearly—with the usual “playful” air of vacillating self-consciousness, as in the pen name “Mo Yan” itself, which means “don’t speak”12—that he has “always taken pride in [his] lack of ideology, especially when … writing,”13 and that “great” works can and should be “beyond class and politics.”14 The question that arises, of course, is why Mo, who has been a member of the Chinese Communist Party since 1978 (after Mao’s death in 1976, quickly followed by the criminalization of the so-called “Gang of Four”), employs these ideas in his “narratives,” whether in the fictive works themselves or in his role as a public intellectual in China and other countries. Do his narratives “succeed” in carrying through on these notions—or do they contradict his claims to ideological “lack” and post-class, post-political “beyondness” with the aid of “traditional concepts of morality”? Is it really possible to “lack” ideology and be “beyond class and politics”? Are these “nebulous” ideas themselves articulations of postideological and post-theoretical “ideological forms,”15 as Marx argues, in which the “lack” is the empty symptomatic-effect of mystified and obscured class narratives, the unsaid sociocultural function of which is to (re)legitimize “nebulous” subject positions for capitalism’s “nebulous terrain” of worldwide preeminence? By exploring and trying to clarify questions such as these, this work aims to engage careful and critical readers and help to enable them to grasp (“realize”) the bourgeois class character and structure of Mo Yan Thought’s wily and obsessive “attractions”: the “strange” fascinations that Mo himself rather obviously considers to be the main attractions and signatures of “great” storytelling in his writing and thinking. While appealing to the “nebulous terrain” of all humanity, it should perhaps not be too surprising that Mo Yan Thought aspires to be an “other” way of sensing and thinking. And indeed, as I argue, it is: in its class essence, it is the “storytelling” in endlessly speculative “semblances,”16 as Marx

12 Jim Leach and Mo Yan, “Conversations: The Real Mo Yan,” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2011). 13 Mo Yan, “Afterword: Narration Is Everything,” in Mo Yan, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 386. 14 Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei, “Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life,” China Daily (7 Dec. 2012). 15 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 162. 16 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works (Lexington, KY: First Rate Publishers, 2015), p. 625.

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and Engels put it in The Holy Family, of the bourgeois other of the revolutionary Marxist world outlook. These critiques are interventions which place “beyond class and politics” under critical intellectual pressure and instead—in oppositionality—bring class struggle back into reading, as Mao argued in 1962: “at no time must we forget class struggle.”17 As a project in critique—a sustained inquiry into the enabling historical conditions and effects of discourses and institutional, sociocultural practices18— I will conclude this brief preface by pointing once more to Lenin’s radical revolutionary thinking on the role of theory, which this book also follows, since critique is one of the modes of the articulation of theory: The world’s greatest movement for liberation of the oppressed class, the most revolutionary class in history, is impossible without a revolutionary theory. That theory cannot be thought up. It grows out of the sum total of the revolutionary experience and the revolutionary thinking of all countries in the world. Such a theory has developed since the second half of the nineteenth century. It is known as Marxism. One cannot be a socialist, a revolutionary … without participating, in the measure of one’s powers, in developing and applying that theory, and without waging a ruthless struggle today …19

Five of the texts included here have received considerable intellectual support from a number of critical, contemporary, internationally-oriented journals. I thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint materials previously published. Chapter 1 is a partially revised version of my article, “Hard Core: Shelley Chan’s ‘Not Uncritical’ Mo Yan Thought,” published in a three-part series in the journal Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (2015–2016, Vol.  15, No.  2; Vol.  16, No.  2; and Vol.  16, No.  3; http://reconstruction.eserver.org/ Issues/152/Xie.shtml).

17 Mao Zedong quoted in William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 314. 18 See Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture after (Post)structuralism (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1994); and Bob Nowlan, “Radical Political Praxis within the Late Capitalist Academy,” Red Orange: a Marxist Journal of Theory, Politics, and the Everyday, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1996), pp. 289–326. 19 Lenin, “The Voice,” p. 354, Lenin’s emphasis.

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Chapter 2 is a partially revised version of my article, “Taking Mo Yan in Context by Strategy: Yes, Grist for the Mill!,” published in the journal Textual Practice (January 2017; doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1268199). Chapter 4 is a partially revised version of my article, “Cages and Class Struggle: A Leninist Inquiry into the Caricature of Marxism in Fenggang Yang’s ‘Soul Searching,’” published in the journal Critical Sociology (August 2016; doi: 10.1177/0896920516654556). Chapter 5 is a partially revised version of my article, “‘Hearing’ Moism in Sandalwood Death: Mo Yan Thought as ‘the Spirit of Petty-Bourgeois Sentimentality and Social Fantasy,’” published in the journal International Critical Thought (May 2016, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 267–292; doi: 10.1080/21598282.2016.1172324). Chapter 6 is a partially revised version of my article, “The Ideological Work of ‘Swings Between Reality and Illusion’: Contribution to a Marxist Critique of Mo Yan’s Pow!,” published in the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China (forthcoming 2017). A note on references: The footnotes throughout this book do not provide Internet-based web-addresses because such information clutters the pages; therefore, the reader may find complete bibliographical references, including web-addresses, in the Bibliography at the end.

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Part One: Boundaries

1.  Go to the Core … but “to Change It” [T]he torture “stirs up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators, and satisfies their evil aesthetic taste at the same time.” —Shelley Chan1 The oldest argument against socialism—that it is contrary to human nature, is also the most popular. —Alex Callinicos2

Bourgeois Human Nature For a high price ($104 hardback, $55 ebook), Shelley Chan’s scholarly commentary on Mo Yan in her Subversive Voice is quite an important work. It is, in its own way—from Chan’s ideological position—considerably insightful for anyone seriously studying Mo’s writings. In Lenin’s red pedagogy of critique, her text is important because it “facilitates an understanding of the political essence of developments” in Mo’s fictional world as reflected through “the arguments of … radical democrats”3—like Chan—who sincerely contend that Moism is “subversive.” Howard Goldblatt, in his auspicious foreword to Chan’s book on “China’s most popular and widely read novelist,” points out that Chan’s “sophisticated literary analysis reveals aspects, sometimes hidden, that go to the core of Mo Yan’s literary project”; it is a work which is “not uncritical in her in-depth study” and is “the perfect complement to [our] reading of Mo Yan’s novels.”4

1 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Chap. 3, quoting Mo’s novel Sandalwood Death. 2 Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks, 1987), p. 65. 3 V.I. Lenin, “Learn From the Enemy,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), p. 60. “Learn from your enemies,” Lenin argues, is to “[c]all to mind the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, which speaks of the transformation of the proletariat into a class in keeping with the growth not only of its unity, but also of its political consciousness” (p. 60, Lenin’s emphasis). 4 Howard Goldblatt, “Foreword,” in Chan, Subversive Voice, emphasis added. Goldblatt further points out, however, that in his view, “[s]cholarship is not advocacy, of course, at least it should not be.”

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This chapter examines the ideology of this going “to the core” in Chan’s reading of what she calls the “writing of violence”5 in Mo’s post-Maoism. Most critical readings aim to “go to the core” in one way or another, and most critical readings enact and produce “in-depth study.” The question is what, after all, is reflected at the core of an in-depth study which, as Chan’s reading of Mo seeks to do, displaces, “subverts” and jettisons dialectical materialism—the philosophy of Marxism6—in favor of so-called “dialectical historicism”? This “dialectical historicism” is characterized by “a vast imaginative space,” an “historical space” which “‘threedimensionalize[s] a linear historical narrative and imagination … into a flowing, kaleidoscopic historical coordinate,’” and “the idea of history is to be treated in a broad sense” of “dialectical narrativity.”7 To this kaleidoscopic broad sense, Mo brings “his wild imagination” with a “noticeable playfulness,” not for “mere exposé” but also to “display the pure pleasure in writing,” since “sometimes writing is just for the sake of writing.”8 Chan’s noticeably eclectic criticism also “sometimes” manages to combine Erich Fromm, Sartre, Foucault, Nietzsche, Northrop Frye, Bakhtin, Barthes, Jameson, Henry James, Lukács, Hayden White, Melanie Klein, and so on. Her in-depth study of Moist subversion is so sophisticated, however, that she completely avoids any mention, any reference, any quotation, any directly critical encounter whatsoever with any works by Marx, Engels or Lenin. But of course Chan can’t ignore what she repeatedly calls “Maoist discourse.” Chan subtly ridicules class struggle in the socialist writings of the Mao years by simply remarking that this was once considered “‘revolutionary’ and ‘subversive,’”9 placing these terms within scare quotes in order to challenge such designations from the vantagepoint of post-Maoism. Class struggle as “revolutionary violence,” she says, was “strongly advocated and even institutionalized,” which is “not surprising given the fact that Mao Zedong, too, endorsed revolutionary violence, telling his people in 1927 that ‘revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay … [R]evolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.’”10 5 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 6 See Lenin’s preface to Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 9: “I hope that … [the book] will prove useful as an aid to an acquaintance with the philosophy of Marxism, dialectical materialism.” 7 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro., quoting David Der-wei Wang. 8 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro. 9 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 10 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, quoting Mao, emphasis added.

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What is remarkable here, very much in Strelnikov’s sense of the word “remarkable”11 in Doctor Zhivago, is just how totally alien or foreign Chan considers herself (and her readers) to be in relation to the Maoist historical and social past and its “discourses.” In her not uncritical discourse, she unfolds an obscure and unexplained thesis according to which Mao was writing to “his people” more than eighty years ago, not “the” people with whom the author (or anyone else) might have some conceivably continuing relationship. In turn, “the” people of that revolutionary insurrection are also displaced into a lost past which is severed from the present. What is offered is a kind of negative nostalgia that attaches itself to the very narrative of “It’s terrible!” that Mao himself—in the 1927 “Hunan Report” from which Chan quotes—clearly demystifies as the ideology of the old feudal regime which was not being “subverted” but revolutionarily eliminated and transformed. Mao writes: In a few months the peasants have accomplished what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted, but failed, to accomplish in the forty years he devoted to the national revolution. This is a marvellous feat never before achieved, not just in forty, but in thousands of years. It’s fine. It is not “terrible” at all. It is anything but “terrible.” “It’s terrible!” is obviously a theory for combating the rise of the peasants in the interests of the landlords; it is obviously a theory of the landlord class for preserving the old order of feudalism and obstructing the establishment of the new order of democracy, it is obviously a counter-revolutionary theory. No revolutionary comrade should echo this nonsense. If your revolutionary viewpoint is firmly established and if you have been to the villages and looked around, you will undoubtedly feel thrilled as never before.12

Chan’s negative nostalgia offers an (un)happy rationalization of the present. Her viewpoint does not consider a past with a positive and historically situated value,

11 See Antipov Strelnikov speaking to Yuri Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2010), Part 14: “There was the world of … [f]ilth, overcrowding, destitution, the degradation of man in the laborer, the degradation of women. There was the gleeful, unpunished impudence of depravity, of mama’s boys, well-heeled students, and little merchants. The tears and complaints of the robbed, the injured, the seduced were dismissed with a joke or an outburst of scornful vexation. This was the olympianism of parasites, remarkable only in that they did not trouble themselves about anything, never sought anything, neither gave nor left the world anything!” (p. 545, emphasis added) “But why am I saying all this to you? For you it’s a clanging cymbal, empty sounds” (p. 547). 12 Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 27.

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but instead conjures up and satisfies what Marx calls a class “social want”13 for a past which has to be condemned in the name of “catastrophe,” disaster, terror, or nightmare. History, along with the people who live through it and make it, is in Chan’s mind, as Sartre put it in his analysis of William Faulkner’s fiction, “merely a veiled, furtive drift of events” in “a sort of surreality … changeless”14—a serial, episodic stray of discontinuities. As Fredric Jameson argued concerning what he called the “safest [way] to grasp the concept of the postmodern”—safest because this “attempt to think the present” is situated within the dominant idealism and agnosticism of poststructuralist ideology—Chan’s “cultural logic” reflects and reactivates a mode of mystification and fabrication (a “loss of historicity”) which “has forgotten how to think historically.”15 Chan doesn’t read “his people” of the Mao era as existing, thinking and revolutionizing in a “history of all hitherto existing society [as] the history of class struggles,”16 as in the dialectical materialist theory of Marx and Engels. In the Manifesto, what Marx and Engels call the reactionary “feudal Socialism”—the fake “socialism” of the dying feudal aristocracy in a “literary battle” against “modern bourgeois society”—arose as “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future … always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”17 In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now antiquated… [T]hey forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their form of society.18

For Marx and Engels, the “ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same 13 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), p. 336. 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Temporality in Faulkner,” in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2013), p. 20. 15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. ix. 16 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 30. 17 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, pp. 60–61, emphasis added. 18 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 61, emphasis added.

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time its ruling intellectual force,” exercising “control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to … nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas … the ideas of its dominance.”19 From such a conception, it is an absurdity—an “illusion,” a “hallucination” of post-Maoism—to say that Mao was writing to “his people.” This is because, on the contrary, he was writing to and for the people who make revolution against the system of classes throughout the epoch in which class struggle arises with the force of inevitability and necessity: “like a mighty storm,” as Mao says, “like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.”20 What is at issue is not “his people” but the people connected in this revolutionary past, present and future. Mao himself says plainly, “Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly.”21 However, Chan wants the reader of Mo Yan Thought to see Mao confined with “his people.” She has achieved “affinity” with Mo’s hallucinations. This hallucinatory, vaguely “left”-sounding criticism provides cautionary rationalizations for capitalist-reading by forgetting the dialectical materialist theory of “never forget class struggle,” by forgetting that “class struggle is the key link” and “everything else hinges on it.”22 This is the safest way to grasp and “subvert” the class struggle

19 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Vol. I, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), emphasis added. This core theory is from Vol. I, Part I, Sec. B, “The Illusion of the Epoch,” subsection on “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas,” in The German Ideology. The “materialist conception of history,” Marx and Engels say, “has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category,” e.g., “hallucinatory realism,” “but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice; and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into ‘self-consciousness’ or transformation into ‘apparitions,’ ‘spectres,’ ‘fancies,’ etc., but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history … and all other types of theory … It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances” (subsection on “Conclusions from the Materialist Conception of History”). 20 Mao, “Report on an Investigation,” p. 23. 21 Mao, “Report on an Investigation,” p. 24. 22 These core principles are widely credited to Mao’s speeches and talks during the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee Conference of the Chinese

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of the people in the Mao era by “forgetting” how to think historically and, on the quiet, relegitimizing the reactionary hallucination that “his people” were merely under a terrible spell, a mass cult, a “mania of the barricades” which the postcritic has intellectually surpassed in a “furtive drift.” In the same way, in her analysis of Mo’s novel Sandalwood Death, Chan points to the professional executioner Zhao Jia’s attempt “not to please the foreigners but to fulfill his own desire,” how he “thoroughly enjoys the job, obtains great pleasure from it, and effectively turns the cruel torture into an art form.”23 She explains this as Mo’s “attempt to spearhead the attack on the cannibalism amidst his own people and culture.”24 These are signs of Mo’s “passion” in the portrayal of violence, she argues, “especially when he is driven by an impulse to speak for his fellow citizens and a commitment to condemn wicked behavior resulting from a cruel reality.”25 Thus Mo’s “writing of violence is artistically appealing [for whom?] and powerful but simultaneously suffocating and disturbing.”26 For

Communist Party, Aug. and Sept., 1962, held at Beidaihe, Hebei Province. See William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 313: “The slogan raised by Mao at Peitaiho was, ‘Never forget class struggle.’” “The most profound lesson … is that at no time must we forget class struggle, [nor] forget the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Mao quoted in Hinton, p. 314). “The present struggle is one to reeducate people. It is to reorganize the revolutionary class forces for waging a sharp tit-for-tat struggle against the capitalist and feudal forces which are brazenly attacking us, in order to crush their counterrevolutionary arrogance and ferocity and to transform the overwhelming majority of the persons involved into new people” (Mao quoted in Hinton, p. 315, emphasis in original). Part IX of Hinton’s Shenfan, the final part of the book, is itself entitled “Never Forget Class Struggle,” including Chapter 82, “The Devil Take the Commonweal.” See also Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 196, 204. The “theory of a new bureaucratic class, with interests fundamentally opposed to the interests of the masses,” writes Meisner, “is a matter now beyond the pale of acceptable political discussion… [T]he radical deemphasis on class struggle serves to obscure the social contradictions generated by the post-revolutionary order itself ” (p. 231). See also “Never Forget the Class Struggle,” Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 20 (13 May 1966), pp. 40–42; “Criticism of ‘Taking the Three Directives as the Key Link,’” Peking Review, Vol. 19, No. 14 (2 Apr. 1976), pp. 6–8; and Fang Kang, “Capitalist-Roaders Are the Bourgeoisie Inside the Party,” Peking Review, Vol. 19, No. 25 (18 June 1976), pp. 7–10, 24. 23 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 24 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 25 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 26 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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“our pessimistic novelist,” according to Chan, “violence is an external form of human evil that causes suffering and renders reality absurd at best and sinister at worst.”27 And yet, this same “external” violence which is “pervasive, unavoidable, and universal … [also] resides primarily within the human soul; therefore there is no end to it.”28 External and within: a blend of obscurantism as “criticism” which is, nonetheless, undoubtedly a fairly accurate and safe mirroring of Mo’s passionate vision which “ponders profoundly, senses sharply … and writes freely.”29 Chan reads this as a “more direct political critique” and “critical edge.”30 And how is that? “As argued throughout this study,” she says, “signs in Mo Yan’s works indicate that he is gradually moving away from the role of the ‘social conscience’ or the ‘engineer of human souls’ that has traditionally been imposed on Chinese writers.”31 His writing signifies a “move beyond” this wen yi zaidao—literature as “a vehicle to convey moral truth”—with an “unconstrained language and composition [which] in some cases are free from any practical function and in this respect serve the sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing.”32 Such is Chan’s case for the Moist “critical edge” in the “writing of violence.” But it is by no means clear how “in some cases” or “in this respect” Mo has moved beyond the role of “social conscience,” a notion which is Chan’s recoding of ideological discourse by calling it “traditional”—and thereby jettisoning ideology and the critique of ideology on behalf of bourgeois postmodernist “passion.” While she aims to mark the distance between Mao’s writing to “his people” and Mo’s writing to “his own people” and “his fellow citizens,” now culminating in the “sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure,” the nagging question remains (“furtively”) as to how and why the people who read Mo are somehow “free” from a “new” articulation of the same “old” bourgeois class “social conscience” that now hides behind the all-out, hard core display of pleasure in violence.33 As Teresa 27 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 28 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 29 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 30 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion. 31 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion. 32 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion, emphasis added. 33 For a range of inquiries into the connections between capitalism and class pleasure, see e.g. Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Abu Ghraib and Class Erotics,” in Ebert and Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. 99–102; Deborah P. Kelsh, “The Pedagogy of Excess,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice (2013), pp. 138, 149–54; Teresa L. Ebert, “Left of Desire,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1999), pp. 32, 43–48; Bai Di, “Interview with Bai Di: Growing Up in Revolutionary China,” Revolution, No. 161 (12 Apr. 2009);

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Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argue, for example, in the context of contemporary American romance novels (Mo’s writings are also always about “love”), Mo’s “sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing” (Chan’s reading) is “not the articulation of an autonomous imagination” but rather a “new” ideological inscription of the “extension” of “the cultural imaginary of capital that normalizes the ‘condition which requires illusions.’”34 Mo Yan Thought is a fulfilling writing of “a narcosis of violence—simultaneously eroticizing it and desensitizing the reader to aggression.”35 Bai Di similarly suggests that “capitalism is very good at creating a void in people’s psyche,” which “teach[es] you that the only way you feel okay is to want more.”36 Chan’s dilemma of the “people” turns out to be a mystification of class in the so-called “writing of violence.” In her own word, repeatedly invoked throughout the book, it is a problem of how and why the signs and meanings of violence are “legitimized” in society and culture, how violence is encoded at the “core” of the social order of things. Chan’s own (re)legitimizing reading of Mo’s writing of violence is boldly spelled out in the title of her third chapter: “There Is No End to Violence.” This notion of the “writing of violence” is an ideological poetics by which Chan undertakes, through a double movement, a “critical edge” celebration and normalization of Mo’s storytelling as “subversively” familiar, as a mode of “controversy” which thrills, shocks and disgusts while also providing an invisible barrier against the red controversy of Marxist class struggle. Why? In her reasoning, it is because Moism has gone “beyond”—has transcended—the struggle of classes, not only for capitalistic China since the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, but worldwide. And naturally, the reader who truly “gets” Mo’s hard core fiction, speeches, lectures and interviews will also get the idea that class struggle to end classes forever is just an “unrealistic” idea. As Maurice Meisner puts it in his extensive and in-depth historical study, the Dengist shift (1976–78) to the “postMao” era “inaugurated the wholesale deradicalization of a revolution,” marking an “astonishingly rapid decline in revolutionary commitment in Chinese society,” Ronald Strickland, “Never Grow Old, Never Grow Up: Postmodernity and the Infantilization of American Culture,” in Sailing Uncharted Waters, ed. Elena Crestianicov (Chisinau: University of Moldova Press, 2009), pp. 75–78; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “The New Mystic: On Bataille’s Inner Experience,” in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2013), pp. 47–54, 76–82. 34 Ebert and Zavarzadeh, “Abu Ghraib,” pp. 103, 98, 97, quoting Marx, emphasis added. 35 Ebert and Zavarzadeh, “Abu Ghraib,” p. 102. 36 Bai Di, “Interview.”

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and “the fading of any real vision of a socialist and communist future”—hence the proliferation of a “profoundly anti-utopian”37 mood. The reader who gets the core point, however, must also temporarily forget that “hallucinatory realism” is also unrealistic, but never mind about that! “Sandalwood Punishment is controversial mainly because of its intensely violent descriptions,”38 says Chan. Mo’s writing, which is, all at once or intermittently, artistically appealing, suffocating, powerful and disturbing, “reminds one of a Van Gogh painting.”39 The “gratuitous, sensational, and even voyeuristic aspect of his violence is one of the reasons for the controversy surrounding his fictional works.”40 Thus Chan proposes that Mo “might … be considered the Chinese Baudelaire, whose descriptions of human evil” could fill a “Chinese Les fleurs du mal,”41 i.e., Flowers of Evil. This is only a fleeting suggestion from Chan’s “well-heeled” (Strelnikov!) literary-critical memory. But it is remarkable in that it reflects yet again, along with the remembrance of Faulkner, Márquez, Dickens, Van Gogh, etc., how the bourgeois postmodern mentality never forgets to discern the affinitive likeness among the world family of great artists who, as Marx put it on the philosophical level, “interpreted the world” in varying ways but were unable or unwilling to raise the consciousness to fundamentally “change it”42; and in this process of change, as Mao insisted (and in which he included himself), to “remould” human consciousness itself.43 Remembering Van Gogh paintings and Baudelaire through Mo Yan Thought is an ideological reflex of forgetting class struggle and mystifying this forgetting under the flag of “controversy” in fleshy pleasures, unconstrained desire, and the suffocating jouissance of ironicized disgust. Baudelaire’s ideal subject is very clearly identified, at the end of his preface to The Flowers of Evil, as the hypocrite, an idea and ideal that Chan updates and relegitimizes through her elevation of the “hypercritical” reader/writer as

37 Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 102. 38 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. Goldblatt’s translation of the novel as Sandalwood Death had not yet been published at the time of Chan’s writing. 39 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 40 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 41 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 42 Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 155. 43 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 70–76, 94–95.

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a “sympathetic” metaspectator of pluralistic violence. For Baudelaire, already struck by an emptied religiosity in the face of urban alienation, “It is the Devil who pulls the strings that move us!”44 Of course he doesn’t really believe that the Devil is ultimately to blame; the artist on the avant-garde edge is driven only to mirror the symptoms. “We steal … a clandestine pleasure/Which we squeeze hard like an old orange.”45 Baudelaire bears witness to “his people,” to borrow Chan’s phrase, “[p]acked tight and swarming like a million maggots,” for whom a “crowd of Demons carouse in our brains.”46 The great artist paints the “banal canvas of our pitiful fate,” where “our soul, alas, is not bold enough.”47 But how, then, would one make the soul (subjectivity) bold enough? Baudelaire’s vision sees “among the jackals, panthers, bitches,/Monkeys, scorpions, vultures, serpents,/The monsters squealing, yelling, grunting, crawling/In the infamous menagerie of our vices”—and among all these, “[t]here is one uglier, more wicked and more foul than all!” who “would gladly make the earth a shambles.”48 This uglier one, he boldly proclaims, “is boredom! … You know him, reader, this delicate monster,/—Hypocrite reader—my twin—my brother!”49 To be “bold enough,” for Baudelaire, is to become the self-knowing subject of the “hypocrite reader” who is the twin, the likeness, and the brother of the great artist himself, and nothing more than this. Baudelaire’s “beyond,” if there is one, is a perpetual becoming of internal “self ”-recognition. Knowingly hypocritical reading/writing is, as Sartre argued, a slick display of “dandyism, the cult of artificiality” of the “distressed soul” whose aims and ends shift according to the playful discipline of volupté, a flowing pleasure of sensation, satisfaction and sensual delights: now the uglier one stresses “‘the whole of my religion (travestied),’” but now again “‘say the opposite’” and play up “‘a work of pure art, monkey tricks, juggling, and … lying like a trooper.’”50 Avant-garde boldness stands in thrall of its own hypocrisy. But this is not to move beyond the horizon of bourgeois hypocrisy itself. Why? For Baudelaire, like Mo and (perhaps) for Chan, bourgeois hypocrisy marks the interpretive living end of 44 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen: Selected Poems, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2010), p. 3. 45 Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, p. 3. 46 Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, p. 3. 47 Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, p. 3. 48 Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, pp. 3–4. 49 Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, p. 4. 50 Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (New York, NY: New Directions, 1950), pp. 159, 82, 48, quoting Baudelaire.

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history, society and culture themselves, an untranscendable and untransformable yet infinitely reinterpretable limit of what Marx called “bourgeois right,” the juridical expression and justification for the material foundation of hypocrisy in exploitative and alienated social relations, in “unpaid labor,” in systematic, legalized robbery.51 Baudelaire knew this hypocrisy, confronting it face to face when his writings were suppressed and he himself was dragged into court, but he explained away its sins by recourse to the metaphysics of an always “certain ambivalence” which “identifies Evil with Nature” and where the “‘natural’ is synonymous with legitimate and just.”52 Thus it appears “legitimate” that with this “taste for death and decadence,” the writer of hypocritical ultra-interpretivism occupies the strangely privileged place of “a parasite on a class [the bourgeoisie, the ruling class] which [is] itself parasitic,”53 i.e., exploitative. And the “creation of a work of art”—as if “cultivating pure thought and pure art”—“inside bourgeois society [is] equivalent to providing a service.”54 The “creative act … is emptied of its substance and assumes the form of an act which is strictly gratuitous … and even absurd … transformed into mystification.”55 This is Sartre’s relentlessly demystifying reading of Baudelaire from the left.56 By contrast, in order for Chan to find subversivity in Moism by way of Baudelairean hypocriticalism, she is compelled to remystify the “twins” through a reading from the middle, or what amounts to the same thing, from the

51 See Marx, Capital, Chaps. 24–27. What “really takes place,” Marx says, is that “property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others” (p. 547). 52 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 102, emphasis in original. 53 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 138. 54 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 145. 55 Sartre, Baudelaire, p. 145. 56 Sartre’s Baudelaire was originally published in French in 1947. Even in 1944, however, in “Existentialism: A Clarification” (in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven [New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2013]), Sartre was attempting to align his theory of existentialism with “the conception of man found in Marx” (p. 88) and “class struggle” (p. 90). He opposes “an eternally established nature” (p. 88), i.e., “human nature” as a declassed bourgeois abstraction, and he strenuously contests the “claptrap” and “stupidity” which confused his philosophy with a “quietism of anguish,” as if he had tried to “cultivate a refined despair” that “likes to poke about in muck and is much readier to show men’s wickedness and baseness than their higher feelings” (pp. 86–87). For Sartre these are modes of hypocrisy; the critical reader may well notice that they are quite accurate depictions of Mo’s so-called hallucinatory realism.

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standpoint that Lenin referred to as “radical democracy” which “has been corrupted by the ideologists of capital.”57 Writing violence from the “core” of the middling class view, Chan’s “historical” understanding of contemporary China is obscurely reflected in the idea she borrows from none other than Robert B. Reich: so-called post-Mao China is essentially a “capitalist-communist” society characterized by “uncontrollable human desire.”58 China is a “system that is both capitalist and communist (i.e., a capitalist economy with an authoritarian government).”59 Her otherwise eclectic reading of Mo ignores the writings of Maurice Meisner (e.g., The Deng Xiaoping Era, 1996), William Hinton (e.g., The Great Reversal, 1990), and Robert Weil (e.g., Red Cat, White Cat, 1996). “Capitalist-communism” is the syncretic combination of opposites, a “frothy”60 substitute for critical thought lacking any interest in understanding “communism” in terms of class struggle. Consequently, the most convenient way out of “binary” thinking and “the ultraleftist trend of thought that led to the ten-year Cultural Revolution,” is to muddle capitalism and communism together in a “kaleidoscopic” mixture of history “in a broad sense.”61 With Chan, hypocritical reading undergoes a hallucinatory costume-change into “hypercritical” reading, which she derives from her own translation of a passage from Sandalwood Death. We shall examine this shortly. The first order of business, however, is the faithful, appreciative, uncritical reading of Moism in such a way that the enduring, eternally (un)satisfying tale of “human nature” is established as the underlying explanatory rationalization for all the ills of humanity, particularly hypocrisy and “violence” in all possible forms. Despite her own indication of Mo’s belief that “it is the environment that makes people cruel and merciless,”62 Chan holds that Mo has a “consistent interest in exposing the hypocrisy of human beings who, he believes, are no more civilized than animals,” which makes him a “satirist” of “human absurdities.”63

57 Lenin, “Learn From the Enemy,” p. 61. 58 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 59 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4, emphasis added. 60 See James Kidd, “Mo Yan’s Boxer Rebellion Novel an Orgy of Pain and Pleasure,” South China Morning Post (20 Jan. 2013). 61 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 2. 62 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 2, quoting Mo; Chan’s translation, my emphasis added. 63 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4.

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Mo reveals (“exposes” readers to) the “ugliness of human nature”64 and the “dark side of human nature.”65 And this “antipathy toward human nature applies to all people regardless of their social or class status.”66 By now we may safely forget what Chan says Mo said about “the environment that makes people” (do “people” with “human nature” also make the environment?). Yet the critical scholar still insists that Mo’s “superior writing skills” serve a “cultural criticism”—not natural criticism?—that reveals “a culture of cruelty that exists not only in history but also in modern reality and even in human minds.”67 In history, in modern reality (“regardless” of social class), and even—the horror!—in human minds, which are no more civilized than the minds of animals! But this is cultural criticism, and “more direct political critique” as well. There is only one way out for this cultural criticism, and this turns out to be the “hypercritical” road, which is itself absurdly similar to Nietzsche’s epistemological agnosticism of the “will” (inherited from Schopenhauer) to knowing that “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”68 Even this “knowing” as cynical certainty is itself known to be hypocritical. If all truths “are” illusions (“this is what they are”), and if this is what we have forgotten (this is also an illusion), the essential task is the eternally illusory remembering of this illusory, magical, unreal quality of all truths. Yet this is also the quasi-illusory foundation of idealistic agnosticism for which truths are equated with illusions; the contradiction of truth and illusion is playfully “overcome” by combining and fusing them. The theory itself is hypocritical, but since it knows 64 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 65 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chaps. 3, 4, Conclusion. 66 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 67 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 68 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 47. This core principle of epistemological agnosticism is also commonly translated as: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusion.” Walter Kaufmann points out that “Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers since Plato whom large numbers of intelligent people read for pleasure” (Kaufmann in Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans./ed. W. Kaufmann [New York, NY: Modern Library, 2000], p. xix, emphasis added). Compare Nietzsche’s infinitely in-“adequate” theory of knowledge (truths = illusions) with Lenin’s dialectical materialist theory of knowledge in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, where he writes, for example, that “by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies” (p. 130, emphasis in original).

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and accepts its hypocrisy as an ever-emptying “core,” nothing can be more (un) happily satisfying than this endless vacillation, turning and (re)spinning of remembering what was forgotten and forgetting again what was remembered. It is a kind of utopian dystopia of “radical liberal” bourgeois pluralism which is, as William Hinton writes in Shenfan, “the rotten feudal and bourgeois concept of humanism (the essence of which is the denial of class struggle).”69 As a critique, one may freely point out that in this agnostic theory there is no conception of a class politics of truth according to which “truths” become fixed and determined as dominant—and later are contested and displaced; however, from the viewpoint of agnosticism, such a class politics of knowing is supposed to acknowledge its own illusory status as “equal” in the olympian levelling of all illusory claims to truth. If it appears to be “true” that a class of owners fattens itself by taking unpaid labor from a class of unfree workers, this is not ultimately because of the fundamental, existing reality of the class contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited—which can be changed through real historical and social struggle; rather, it is because of an epistemological error that has been forgotten. There is really no class structure existing outside of consciousness, which is reflected by consciousness, but instead the class structure is a “trutheffect” in an endless series of effects of “metaphysical” human yearning. The fact that a worker yearns each month to pay the rent or the mortgage, while a capitalist yearns for another luxury car, another house, a farm in the countryside to “get away from it all,” or a vacation in the tropics—these are also questions of “metaphysics” and epistemology, but not reflections in human consciousness of the real class struggle over metaphysics and epistemology. While Chan eruditely panders to the cliché that Mo’s fictional world gets “beyond” (“post”) the political knowledge of class conflict, and forgets any critical engagement with any of the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, she doesn’t forget to stress that “Mo Yan writes historical fiction that is consonant with ‘Nietzsche’s insistence … that the “historical” is an aesthetic creation whose truth is dramatic rather than objective.’”70 This is “challenging,” says Chan, to the “progressive conception of history” and the “revolutionary history … of the Maoist monologue … filled with class struggle and collectivism.”71 Moist “historical fiction,” by contrast, “is full of desire and imagination, … the élan vital of individuals” as “history under Mo Yan’s pen.”72 Likewise, when finding the “hypercritical” dimension in Moism, 69 Hinton, Shenfan, p. 179. 70 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1, quoting Paul Jay. 71 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 72 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1.

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she remembers that Foucault’s analytic of the disciplinary spectacle is also “consonant”; that is, Foucault’s Nietzscheanism is “apt” and “applies”73 very well. As we see in the notion of reading Mo’s “frothy” combinationalism of opposites and the “going beyond”74 class and politics in literary creation, Chan’s reading of hypocritical “hypercriticism” is scaffolded upon a repeated appeal to the poststructuralist dogma that “binaries” are intellectually, politically and aesthetically unsatisfying for the true heirs of avant-garde narration. “On the one hand,” Chan argues, Mo “attempts to demoralize, so to speak, the moralized history”75—that is, the “moral” of Maoist (Marxist, Leninist) revolutionary struggle for classless society. “On the other hand,” Mo “tries to problematize history itself by subverting the binary opposition between good and evil.”76 In this “demoralizing” spirit, she asserts, the “characterization of the individuals in Mo Yan’s novels is true to life, full of mixed qualities and human complexities.”77 Complexity is just fine, but this demoralizing is at the same time a remoralizing of the bourgeois “human” with little if any class qualities (“regardless”); and thus, this demoralizing is also a form of preaching on behalf of readers with no class consciousness, “so to speak,” who imagine themselves as “true to life” amidst the complexities of capitalist society and culture. Complexity, in other words, is meaningless if it isn’t dialectically decomplexified by a simplifying force of thinking (reading and writing) that grasps the complex flux of phenomena on an other level of understanding. But Chan presents this incessant movement of dialectics in thought in such a way that “complexity” and “mixed qualities” are apolitical and non-ideological ends in themselves, “true to life” for bourgeois speculation on the hypocritical blurring of “good” and “evil” devoid of class analysis. Through the back door, then, the dreaded binary 73 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 74 See Kidd, “Mo Yan’s Boxer Rebellion,” in the South China Morning Post: “The tone … is a frothy combination of opposites.” See Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei, “Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life,” China Daily (7 Dec. 2012): “The key to producing a great piece of work, he [Mo] said, is whether a writer can go beyond class and politics, and be compassionate, even with people who level criticism at you behind your back.” See Mo Yan, “Afterword: Narration Is Everything,” in Mo, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 386: “In that muddy stream of language, the story is the conveyor of language and a byproduct of it. What about ideology? About that I have nothing to say. I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.” 75 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 76 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1, emphasis added. 77 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1, emphasis added.

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opposition reasserts itself unconsciously as “good” is complexity and “evil” is simplicity. Nietzsche himself, not to mention Lenin, would laugh out loud at the deformed philistinism and unphilosophical emptiness of this cynical cashing in on the skepticism of “goods” and “evils.” Chan’s reading of Mo is “true to life” not only for the person with little or no understanding of dialectics as “unity of opposites” and “interpenetration of opposites,” but more importantly for the person who does not know how to use and actually develop thought dialectically in order to produce rigorous critique for revolutionizing theory and practice. While preaching complexity, her analytical appreciations become simple-minded and even forget that “true” to life necessitates something false to life, and that the “mixed” quality (“froth”) necessitates a separation or an unmixing of qualities. The very idea of “subverting” binarity is ludicrous without the thought and practice of oppositionality, because the political meaning of subversion is precisely to oppose and undermine one force with another. Chan’s bourgeois poststructuralist theory of “binaries” is epistemologically idealist and agnostic, and hence the Moist subversion of binaries is also aimed at (re)moralizing a quietist, meditative, indeterminate idealist consciousness which anxiously and indefinitely postpones the necessity of collective class struggle to destroy capitalism and thereby eliminate the material foundation of classes themselves. “Creating a binary opposition between the rich and the poor is certainly necessary for the theory of class struggle,” says Chan, cunningly followed by mouthing the simplistic rhetoric “created” by Mo himself for one of his own characters: “exactly as Lu Liren claims: you are either revolutionary or counterrevolutionary and there is no middle ground.”78 We are here supposed to believe that the theory of class struggle, with its “binary” oppositionality, is “exactly” like this, just as Mo the subversive voice tells us it is through Lu Liren in Big Breasts and Wide Hips. The complexity of the critic’s ideology could hardly be more simplistic, and rhetorically effective at that, for here we are treated to Mo’s own reflection of the theory of class struggle as a doctrinaire “absurdity.” The move is equivalent to calling a hostile witness to testify as an unbiased expert. Yet Chan in fact believes that the theory of class struggle is “exactly” like this. The idealism of this mouthing of theory is suggested in the notion that the theory of class struggle (i.e., Marxism) is guilty of “creating” the deadly binary of rich and poor. But the theory does not “create” the binary; it reflects the objective truth and reality of this “binary” as it exists in class society. This is materialist 78 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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dialectics. Only an idealist would say “exactly” that a theory is “creating” what is “certainly necessary.” Theory is, of course, a creative force in the sense that it is a human work of critical consciousness. But this does not mean that theory “creates” the world all by itself. Binarity is certainly necessary in revolutionary class theory, not because binaries are “created” out of thin air, but because they reflect the material realities of the world and its “certainly necessary” human and dehumanized social relations, its truths and its falsities, its good and its evil, and all the murky vacillations of the “middle ground.” For Chan, Mo “problematizes”79 this kind of binary opposition which he himself spins up for the satisfaction of his “middle ground” standpoint. This problematizing means that Moism “leads to the pondering of issues on more profound levels, taking into consideration political and human complexities.”80 Once again, the “human complexities,” now with concerned scholastic “pondering” on “profound levels.” To “problematize” a theory and a practice should mean that one looks deeper into it. Merely to invoke “pondering” and “human complexity” is in fact superficial and artificial if the underlying drift of the argument is simply to return to the vacuous post-historicism of “human nature.” Chan’s problematizing reading of Moism reaches its highest and ultimate expression with the theory of the “hypercritical.” We now need to look deeper into this demoralizing moral at the heart of Mo’s resplendent storytelling.

Hypercritical Hallucination Under Mo Yan’s pen, as Chan says repeatedly,81 “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.”82 She acknowledges that this aestheticization of violence and torture came under fire in China following the publication of Sandalwood Death (Tanxiang Xing in 2001). 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.”83 Now, however, instead of “problematizing” these critical problematizations of the Moist aesthetic of violence, Chan immediately changes the subject to point out the marketability 79 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 80 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 81 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chaps. 1, 3. 82 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 83 Xie Youshun quoted in Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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(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. Xie Youshun was making “accusations.” Such “accusations,” says Chan, “have not prevented the book from selling well in the market,”84 referring then to sales of 80,000 volumes by 2003, and Mo’s own estimate including pirated copies, that the number should really be three to five times this amount. Still, Mo “said he did not know why the book sold so well.”85 Here again then the “human nature” rationale is used to further 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.”86 We saw this earlier. 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 … [E] njoyment of writing for the author is to take delight in writing about violence as well as in the imagination of violence.”87 In this “subversive” defense, Chan deals shocking blows to Xie’s mere accusations—how?—by confirming them. 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.”88 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? The resolution is found in “hypercritical” sensibility. Chan’s theory on this essential point, just as in the broader appeal to a supraclass “human nature,” reflects the viewpoint that Mao called “immobilism” and “equilibrium” within an “eternally unchanging”89 structure of social relations and psychic responses. It is a legitimizing reading of Mo’s fictional world of violent 84 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 85 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 86 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 87 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 88 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 89 See Mao Zedong, “Dialectical Materialism—Notes of Lectures,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Chap. II; and Mao, “On Contradiction,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 312–13, 332–37.

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“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”90 of law and order: “the discipline necessary for the wage system.”91 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.’”92 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 through 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”93 just like the fictional spectatorial masses. In other words, the writer-as-executioner serves the state, and the readers-as-spectators watch. 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,”94 as “no longer a person, but … the sacred and somber symbol of the Law,”95 as “conductors producing exquisite music.”96 And yet a professional executioner is also adept at “being clever by acting dumb.”97 He views the masses

90 See Marx, Capital, pp. 686–93. 91 Marx, Capital, p. 688. 92 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, my emphasis added. 93 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 94 Mo Yan, Sandalwood Death, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), p. 38. 95 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 41. 96 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 44. 97 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 47.

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as “law-abiding citizens,”98 and he “looks down on all people, in the same way that you look down on pigs and dogs.”99 Still, according to Chan, Mo is a leading “subversive voice.” 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 literary “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”100 of it—by spectacularizing itself and “deconstructing itself.” Mo’s thought is, “I’m not myself ”101 through the hypocriticism of hypocrisy. 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” Semyon Karmazinov (a polemical characterization of Ivan Turgenev), whose “rather long and verbose” writing is subtly cultivated “solely with the object of self-display.”102 Karmazinov is one of “these talented gentlemen of the middling sort who are sometimes in their lifetime accepted almost as geniuses.”103 Of Karmazinov’s tales “written with an immense affectation,”104 Dostoevsky’s narrator cuts through the 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 … [H]ere I was horrified and could not bring myself to look … [I]sn’t that interesting?”105

98 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 47. 99 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 34. 100 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro. 101 See Mo Yan, “‘It’s as if I am under a social microscope’: Mo,” ed. Chen Jie, China Daily (19 Oct. 2012): “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.” See also Alison Flood, “Mo Yan Dismisses ‘Envious’ Nobel Critics,” The Guardian (28 Feb. 2013). 102 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (The Devils), trans. Constance Garnett (Lexington, MA: EZ Reads, 2009), p. 82. I am referring here to Chap. III of The Possessed, “The Sins of Others.” 103 Dostoevsky, Possessed, p. 81, emphasis added. 104 Dostoevsky, Possessed, p. 81. 105 Dostoevsky, Possessed, p. 82, emphasis added.

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“The cunning fellow” Karmazinov “got all that could be got out of the circ­ umstance.”106 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.”107 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.”108 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.”109 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, 106 Dostoevsky, Possessed, p. 83. 107 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (1847). 108 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 109 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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doom and pessimism, however, is still “cultural criticism” in the grand hypercritical style. 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,”110 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 … [P]eople 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.111

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,”112 as Lenin put it. Looking at the same passage in Goldblatt’s translation of the novel, “hypercritical” sympathy is not to be found (it has “disappeared”), but instead one finds “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

110 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 111 Chan’s translation of Tanxiang Xing (Sandalwood Punishment), in Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3; she cites page 240 of the novel; my emphasis added. 112 V.I. Lenin, “Tolstoy and the Proletarian Struggle,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 353.

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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.113

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”: 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.”114 Let us “go to the core” with Chan’s rewriting of the text under the cover of translation. In both instances where Chan invokes Mo’s literary doctrine of spectatorial hypercriticism, by quoting her translation of the 2001 Chinese text, 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. What does “treating … as evidence” mean? 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?”115 But it is Chan in her “especially true” 113 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 188, my emphasis added. 114 Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 144–45. 115 Lenin, Materialism, p. 323 (a “great discovery!”). “It is astonishing that there are people who can take seriously a philosopher who advances such arguments!” (p. 62) “The sophistry of this theory is so manifest that it is embarrassing to analyse it … [It is] 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 … [It is] philosophical obscurantism, the carrying of subjective idealism to absurdity” (p. 64, emphasis in original).

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reading of Mo’s novel (which he says is “easy to understand”116) who propounds the Moist doctrine that “reading may be regarded as an experience of spectatorship for the reader.”117 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.”118 Strelnikov: “remarkable”! Karmazinov: “Isn’t that interesting?” 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 (U.S. 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.” 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 as a “lyricism of protestation” at “degree zero,”119 a “caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason”120 at “the doors of time, of a tragic structure,”121 the 116 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 407. 117 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 118 Goldblatt, “Foreword,” in Chan, Subversive Voice. 119 Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), p. xxvii. 120 Foucault, History of Madness, p. xxviii. 121 Foucault, History of Madness, p. xxix.

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“immobile structures of the tragic”122 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.”123 To be sure, Chan does not say this. But this is what she means because this is the core of “affinity with the common man”124 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”125 of bourgeois moralizing criticism, now reflected in the ludic postmodern neomorality of tragicomic sense and, of course, cynical “sympathy” in spin overdrive. 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.”126 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.”127 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 for 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 [is instead]

122 Foucault, History of Madness, p. xxx. 123 Foucault, History of Madness, pp. xxxi-xxxii. 124 Mo, Sandalwood Death, p. 407. 125 Marx, “Moralising Criticism.” 126 Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, Kindle edition, 2009), Chap. 7. 127 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 7.

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a stripping away of the fantasies that cover up the lack in the subject.”128 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.”129 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.”130 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. Updating and rejuvenating classical poststructuralist doctrines, it is not very 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 the Manifesto: 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” which personifies and relegitimizes the structural contradictions of the international capitalist system. 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.”131 Hypercritical sympathy and affinity with the “common man” do not know this because these artifices and edifications of 128 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 7, quoting Marx and Engels, emphasis added. 129 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 7. 130 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 7. 131 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 67.

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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”132 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 all of the processes of exploitation. The material foundation of this “lack” (its “realism”) is clearly expressed in Marx and Engels’ revolutionary dictum, at the conclusion of the Manifesto, that the workers of the world “have nothing to lose but their chains.”133 Proletarians have nothing to lose, that is, because the very nature of the capitalist system demands that they have already been separated and alienated, not only from the products of their labor but from any genuine ownership and control of all means of production and the realm of Nature itself—such as, for example, clean air and water in “hyper”-exploitative countries such as China. Chan’s erudite discovery of the dismal kaleidoscope of human nature in Moist fiction, à la mode de “dialectical historicism,” is captured in Marx’s dialectical materialist conspectus of Proudhon. He sought “‘the principle of accommodation, which must be derived from a law superior to liberty itself… [W]e have only to find its equilibrium, I would be ready to say its police.’”134 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.”135 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,”136 a “professorial rigmarole” to “now and again bombard the reader 132 See “Chinese Writer Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize,” The Irish Times (11 Oct. 2012), quoting Peter Englund of the Swedish Academy: “He [Mo] has such a damn unique way of writing.” 133 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 76. 134 Marx, Poverty, p. 66, quoting Proudhon. 135 Mo, Sandalwood Death, pp. 369–70, emphasis added. 136 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 84, 86.

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(in order to stun him)”137 with “pure subjective idealism,”138 with the “world is our sensation,”139 with “literary methods” lavishly arrayed in “such an incredible hotchpotch”140 of “the purest and most dreary scholasticism.”141 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.

Proletarian Human Nature In studying Chan’s account of Moist “cultural criticism” as a playfully postmodern “enjoyment of cruelty,” as “evidence of the evil features of human nature,” as “proof that a thirst for violence does reside within the human soul,” as “implying that no one will be able to escape … the evil inherent in human nature,”142 any serious reader of Foucault might well wonder how it is that Chan manages to enlist Foucault’s posthumanist or antihumanist inquiries in the service of her insistence that Mo’s subversivity is grounded in such a morbidly pessimistic conception of “human nature.” What she repeatedly calls the “writing of violence” is a mark of Mo’s “postrevolutionary” imagination, she argues: “To Mo Yan, violence is an external form of human evil that causes suffering and renders reality absurd at best and sinister at worst. Violence is pervasive, unavoidable, and universal, and it resides primarily within” (though simultaneously an “external form” of) “the human soul; therefore there is no end to it… [It] becomes a power with the ability to destroy, a power beyond knowledge and reason” “in the mind of our pessimistic novelist.”143 The contradiction suggested here is that, while on the one hand this violence brings with it the “ability to destroy,” on the other hand, since it is “beyond knowledge and reason”—in other words, “post”-theoretical yet also quite clearly intelligible for Chan’s “not uncritical” analytic standpoint—it is, unfortunately for all of us, unable to “destroy” its own “power” of evil in order to transform into a “power” for the social good of humankind. This is an exemplary variety of posttheory anti-theoretical ideology because the intelligibility of the object of inquiry

137 Lenin, Materialism, p. 80. 138 Lenin, Materialism, p. 79. 139 Lenin, Materialism, p. 80. 140 Lenin, Materialism, p. 72. 141 Lenin, Materialism, p. 80. 142 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 143 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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(“violence” as a “power”) exceeds and surpasses the critical function of the theory itself, since theory is, of course, the “knowledge and reason” which is reduced to a sustained state of passive observation: “not uncritical” criticism. This “knowledge and reason” is now a “lack” of historical and social effectivity, devoid of any interventionary or “practical” force to change the conceptual and ideological underpinnings of “violence” and “power” themselves as sites of contestation in the “postrevolutionary” society and culture of international capitalism. As we shall see, it is precisely this post-theoretical superficiality of “subversive” bourgeois aestheticism that underwrites Chan’s appropriation of Foucault for Mo Yan Thought. If Chan finds Foucault “apt,” as she says, in grasping Mo’s worldview, and if she sees Mo as challenging “Maoist discourse,” why doesn’t she theorize “human nature” as an historically situated “discourse” aimed at securing the docile submission of the subject required by, in Foucault’s postmarxian terms, the dominant power/knowledge relations? How can one seriously contemplate “human nature” in connection with Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy? Recall, for example, Foucault’s famously cryptic suggestion at the end of The Order of Things, that “man” itself—the “subject” of consciousness and unconsciousness as hitherto understood—is “an invention of recent date” and “one perhaps nearing its end”144 in the complex unfolding of an epistemic shift and reconfiguration. As he says repeatedly in the Remarks on Marx interviews from 1978, specifically mentioning the “conception of human nature,” what developed in his own thinking and that of others (Althusser, Lacan, Blanchot, Bataille) during the 1960s was “the calling into question of the theory of the subject”: “One not only wanted a different world and a different society,” says Foucault, “one also wanted to go deeper, to transform oneself and to revolutionize relationships to be completely ‘other.’”145 This is not an acceptance of “human nature.” In James Faubion’s introduction to Foucault’s earlier work of literary/cultural criticism from 1963, Death and the Labyrinth, he comments that the “death of man” suggestion in The Order of Things was a “somewhat brash formulation of the historicity and historical variability of the form and substance of our comprehension of ourselves as subjects.”146 Faubion likewise says in the Foucault 144 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 387. 145 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York, NY: Semiotext[e], 1991), pp. 58, 47–48, emphasis added. 146 James Faubion, “Introduction,” in Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (London: Continuum, 2004), p. xviii.

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volume entitled Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, that Foucault “was convinced that the sciences of man emerge in error, in the mistaken postulate of a stable, definable, suprahistorical human essence, a fixed human nature.”147 In Remarks on Marx, Foucault himself criticizes the “death of man” hypotheses of The Order of Things as “speaking … in a way that was confused, simplifying, and a bit prophetic,” and he proposes instead that “[m]an is an animal of experience.”148 He elaborates: “man had invested his very subjectivity even while transforming it, man had never found himself in the presence of his own ‘nature’”; “in the course of their history, men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is, to shift continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of something that would be ‘man.’”149 In Foucault’s theory of “their history” of “constructing” and “constituting” themselves, however, the class structure in which subjectivities are realized in everyday life becomes blurred or subsumed by questions of language and epistemological “experience.” While being “not uncritical” and even seeming “radical,” one gets used to forgetting that “their history” is a materialist dialectic in which others are the masses (workers and future workers) who are “themselves” subject to the continual changes of the dominant “constructions” that reinforce the class “power” structure of the capitalist system. Capitalism needs the economic illusion of a “free” subject (an “animal of experience”) who can “play” with the notion that she or he is continually “constructing” an “infinite and multiple series” of selves by endlessly complex and cynical “self ”-constructions.150 For Marx, by contrast, the everyday life of “subjects” revolves around the “working-day.”151 Without the “working-day”—in other words, without an organization of labor—no human society will ever be able to “constitute” or reproduce itself. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels theorize “subjects” (social human beings) in connection with the “ruling class” and its “ruling ideas.” Robert Tucker

147 James Faubion, “Introduction,” in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. J. Faubion (New York, NY: The New Press, 1998), p. xxxvi. 148 Foucault, Remarks, p. 124. 149 Foucault, Remarks, pp. 123–24. 150 See Marx, Capital, Chaps. 6 and 28. Marx speaks of “the wants of capital” articulated in the “dull compulsion of economic relations [which] completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist” (p. 689). 151 See Marx, Capital, Chap. 10. The capitalist as subject, for example, who presides over the order of the working-day, puts into concrete practice “the brutality natural to a man who is a mere embodiment of capital” (p. 286, note 1).

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comments that “[r]evolution for Marx is a social, an economic, a technological, a political, a legal, and an ideological phenomenon… [R]evolution means transformation of man himself. In Marx’s words, ‘the whole of history is nothing but a continual transformation of human nature.’”152 Alex Callinicos similarly points out that “[i]f production is a social activity, then it follows that changes in the organisation of production will bring about changes in society, and therefore, since ‘the essence of man is the ensemble of the social relations,’ changes also in people’s beliefs, desires and conduct. This is the core of Marx’s materialist conception of history.”153 In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels critique the purely abstract “Human Nature” of so-called “true” socialism as “Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”154 “Does it require deep intuition,” they ask, to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.155

Foucault’s notion of “otherness” involves “shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs,”156 to “think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known,”157 the “idea of the working of reason upon itself ”158 in the “transformation of the subject itself through the elaboration of knowledge,”159 or yet again in the same key, to produce writings that contest “always being the same.”160 Chan’s theory of Mo Yan Thought as a “cultural criticism” based on a universal, all-pervasive “human nature,” with “no end” to its “violent” powers, is utterly incompatible with Foucault’s project “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.”161 152 Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970), p. 5, quoting Marx. 153 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, p. 69, quoting Marx, emphasis added. 154 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, pp. 65–66, emphasis added. 155 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 55. 156 Foucault, Remarks, p. 12. 157 Foucault, Remarks, p. 13. 158 Foucault, Remarks, p. 68. 159 Foucault, Remarks, p. 69. 160 Foucault, Remarks, pp. 32, 41. 161 Foucault, Remarks, p. 9.

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However, Foucault’s imperative to “think differently” toward “otherness”—to “challenge the way we think”162—is itself fundamentally different from revolutionary Marxist thinking. Foucault’s “different” thinking for “other” subjectivities is a development of his sustained “reading and assimilation of Nietzsche.”163 Nonetheless, the point I intend to stress here is that Foucault, perhaps more radically than any other poststructuralist intellectual, clearly stands out as a theorist—or, as he typically suggests, “more an experimenter than a theorist” (“above all to change myself and not think the same thing as before”)164—of and for the critique of “human nature,” at least from his broadly “different” conceptual standpoint. As Lenin argues, Foucault’s standpoint is “critical idealism,” a variant of epistemological agnosticism and “radical” skepticism: “the recognition of the fundamental idea common to both Hume and Kant, … the deduction of particular ‘conditions of experience,’ particular principles, postulates and propositions from the subject, from human consciousness,” which “‘for a time satisfy the fundamental human need of introducing reason, Logos, into the irrational stream of experience.’”165 This critique of “human nature” is nothing other than the critique of the “subject,” a critical inquiry into the social and cultural formations of “subjectivity” or modes of consciousness and thought. It is simply impossible to find in Foucault any affirmation or assertion of the idea that a timeless and unchangeable “human nature” ever existed—except of course for the underlying Nietzschean thesis of the “will to power” or the “will to truth.” But even this is also quite clearly the very target of Foucault’s investigations and reflections, to engage in what he called a “de-subjectifying undertaking.”166 As Christopher Norris comments, “[h]istory writing on Nietzschean terms … becomes a question, in Foucault’s words, of ‘risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in the endless deployment of the will to knowledge.’”167 Chan’s recruitment of Foucault as an intellectual support for Mo’s “subversive” fiction in the case of Sandalwood Death is plagued by this essential contradiction: Are we to understand that an evil “human nature” should be taken as a given—as she indeed convincingly argues as Mo’s thinking—or, on the contrary, are we to understand that “human nature” is itself a discursive construct of the “subject” 162 Foucault, Remarks, p. 12. 163 Foucault, Remarks, p. 62. 164 Foucault, Remarks, p. 27. 165 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 153–54, emphasis in original. 166 Foucault, Remarks, p. 31. 167 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1988), p. 86, quoting Foucault.

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situated in conflictual social relations of power/knowledge, as Foucault would, I think, quite clearly contend in the project to “de-subjectify” historical subjectivity “instead of legitimating” what is already considered to be “known” about human beings and human society? Chan’s invocation of Foucault as a theorist of Moism’s “playfully postmodern” narration of torture in the mode of “hypercritical sympathy” reflects this contradiction by obscuring the very problem of historical subjectivity and, in the deradicalizing move of post-theory, converts Foucaultian critique into a legitimation of “evil human nature.” Foucault becomes relevant in Chan’s discussion of Sandalwood Death in the paragraph immediately following her argument that the torture depicted in the novel—its “writing of violence”—“‘stirs up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators, and satisfies their evil aesthetic taste at the same time,’” thereby inserting “both the writer and the reader” as “participants in the cruel punishment” and “treating them as evidence of the evil features of human nature—proof that a thirst for violence does reside within the human soul,” an “evil inherent in human nature.”168 Now the turn to Foucault: “As far as turning torture into an art of pain is concerned, Foucault’s analysis of torture is apt for Sandalwood Punishment.”169 For Chan, Foucault’s analysis of torture in Discipline and Punish is “apt” for her analysis of Mo Yan Thought only “as far as” she recognizes Foucault’s aesthetic conception of torture, which brings with it the desired “hypercritical” effect of “turning” us away from Foucault’s broader critique of “power/knowledge.” “Torture is a technique … [D]eath is a torture … [D]eath-torture is the art of maintaining life in pain, by subdividing it into a ‘thousand deaths,’ by achieving before life ceases ‘the most exquisite agonies.’ … Torture rests on a whole quantitative art of pain.”170 Adopting the hyper-ironic evasiveness of “mo yan”—meaning “don’t speak”—Chan makes absolutely no further analytical comment on Foucault’s analysis; the carefully excised passage is merely quoted in order to allow it to float and “speak for itself ” as an authoritative metatheory. This leads and encourages the unsuspecting reader of Moist “subversive” criticism to simply accept as a matter of obviousness that “Foucault”—the name now so commonsensically associated with the unholy “radicalism” of ludic postmodernism’s “thinking differently” for “other” consciousnesses—reduced torture, punishment, discipline and death to modalities of “art,” however gruesome they may at first appear; or indeed, the

168 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 169 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 170 Foucault quoted in Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3.

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more horrific the better for our hypercritical sympathy toward “a whole quantitative art of pain.” But such a glossy, post-theoretical rendering of Foucault’s intervention in the historiography of the social power to “discipline” the masses both assumes and promotes an absurdly hallucinatory misunderstanding of Discipline and Punish. It becomes a text of superficial declarations that can make an otherwise conventional bourgeois discourse of literary criticism seem “cutting edge.” To be sure, Foucault’s characteristically stylized complexity and “effect”-producing mode of inquiry is no innocent victim of co-optation; and in this aspect of Foucaultian ambiguous subtlety and unwinding flow, Chan’s attraction to the idea of an “art of pain” may be understandable. However, it is precisely Foucault’s tendency for highly “nuanced” excursions and often quite obviously debatable meanings that forces the critical reader to engage in the struggle of knowledge-production and “take sides” in the face of a kind of relentless epistemological agnosticism. And it is here that Chan’s use of Foucault for an aesthetic conception of torture reveals its ideologically reactionary character. Foucault’s book does not argue for an aestheticist conception of an “art” of pain which can be casually transferred in bourgeois scholastic fashion into the wide-open realm of literary “techniques” and narrative pleasures. Its point—if we “take sides” in reading for the intellectually transformative direction Foucault himself points out in the Remarks on Marx interviews—was not for an aesthetic historiography but rather to uncover and critically illuminate the operation of “techniques” and “mechanisms” by which human beings are “disciplined” into compliant, docile subjects within the regime of the dominant power/knowledge relations. “Torture” is indeed a changeable set of “techniques” for Foucault, as he says. But then, techniques for what, techniques “invented” and practiced in the interest of doing what to the people who see and have consciousness of them? They are techniques of instilling and disseminating the kind of “knowledge” of oneself, others, and society at large that ensures the domination of the masses; “knowledge” itself is demystified as the site of conflict. “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge,” declares Foucault, “nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”171 Power/knowledge relations do not exist for the sake of “art” and “taste” and aesthetic sensualism; on the contrary, art, taste, and aesthetic sensualism are socially produced and manufactured

171 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 27.

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for the sake of relegitimizing and extending the scope of the dominant regime of power/knowledge relations. Chan’s “art of pain” cuts Foucault’s experimental theorizing away from its core ideological lesson. Her deployment of Foucault is essentially a hypercritical artifice. It has less to do with comprehending Foucault’s analysis of power than with relegitimating a “taste” for the Moist aesthetics of “evil human nature” for all times and places. After all, isn’t the concept of an “art of pain” itself a mode of knowing what art is and does? The Chanese pedagogy of hypercriticism in this way teaches us that “Foucault’s analysis of torture is apt” by gutting this “analysis” itself and without offering any “analysis” of exactly how and why it is “apt.” Referring then to the same passage from Discipline and Punish, Chan goes on to point out that Foucault “also noted the nature of rituals of punishment and the importance of spectators, both of which are critical,” she says, “to Sandalwood Punishment.”172 According to Foucault, “Torture forms part of a ritual” which “must be spectacular, it must be seen by all … The very excess of the violence,” together with “the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out,” are not merely “shameful side-effect[s]” but are “the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force.”173 These words being duly “noted,” once again without any analysis, Chan then tells us that “[t]his applies” to the “spectacular public punishment and the presence of spectators in Mo Yan’s work, in which the notion of seeing is a major theme.”174 We are then presented with Chan’s translation of the passage from Sandalwood Death in which she discovers (invents) Mo’s imagination of torture as a “‘process of performance’” that “‘could stir up the hypercritical sympathy of the spectators, and satisfy their evil aesthetic taste at the same time … [P]eople got so excited by their wicked interest.’”175 Now Chan has pointed out that Foucault’s comments on the ritualism and spectacularity of torture are “critical” and that “[t]his applies” to Mo’s fiction. Here is what she says: In this case, all spectators are voyeurs. Death has become an entertainment that is consumed by the spectators. “Seen by all” [quoting Foucault] is less a “ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force” [quoting Foucault], as Foucault postulated, than a routine enjoyment for the masses, offering an element of excitement to their boring everyday lives.176

172 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 173 Foucault quoted in Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, my emphasis added. 174 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, Chan’s emphasis. 175 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, quoting Sandalwood Punishment. 176 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, my emphasis added.

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Did Foucault apply or not? Was Foucault’s postulation “critical” or not? According to Chan, the torture is “less” a ceremony than it is a “routine enjoyment.” This is how hypercritical criticism as post-theorhetorical hotchpotch finds Foucault “apt” and “applies” Foucault in “critical” fashion. Lenin’s words are now apt and critical: Chan’s “confusion is utter.”177 And this is the last we hear about Foucault in Chan’s “not uncritical” work which conjures up our “sympathy” for Foucaultian critical idealism while somehow finding it “less” than ideal—hence, in the obscure movement of the “hyper”-critical, postulating something more applicable and more apt for Mo Yan Thought. Chan’s ideological ceremony around Foucault turns out to be a “process of performance” of the routine enjoyment of a “would be” Foucaultian. “The bourgeoisie demands reaction of its professors.”178 The cruel fact is that it was never Foucault’s “postulations” themselves that were “apt” and applicable, but rather merely the name “Foucault” as a pedantic ritual to support the Chanese postconceptual utterance of “hypercritical sympathy,” which means … . In this case, to borrow Chan’s phrase, what is absurdly obvious is that the Foucaultian discourse she takes pains to render for a “playfully postmodern” doctrine of torture, says absolutely nothing about “human nature.” And as I argued earlier, this is for very good reason: central to Foucault’s epistemological agnosticism is the fact that he never believed in any “human nature” because he saw instead the changeability of the “subject” of modernity. Here is Foucault once again, for the “critical” edification of would be Foucaultians: I worry about comprehending the effective mechanisms of domination; and I do it so that those who are inserted in certain relations of power, who are implicated in them, might escape them through their actions of resistance and rebellion, might transform them in order not to be subjugated any longer. And if I don’t ever say what must be done, it isn’t because I believe that there’s nothing to be done; on the contrary, it is because I think that there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they’re implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. From this point of view all of my investigations rest on a postulate of absolute optimism. I do not conduct my analyses in order to say: this is how things are, look how trapped you are. I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality.179

But no, immediately after professor Chan confusedly attempts to “apply” Foucault by asserting the distinguished-sounding nonsense that “‘[s]een by all’ is less a 177 Lenin, Materialism, p. 154. 178 Lenin, Materialism, 149. 179 Foucault, Remarks, pp. 173–74, emphasis added.

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‘ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force,’ as Foucault postulated,” etc., she concludes: “Consequently, seeing in this book [Sandalwood Punishment] in fact represents Mo Yan’s satire on the evil of human nature—that of Chinese people in particular.”180 A little further on: “Mo Yan … reveals the people’s sinister nature, depicting them as more morally corrupt than the remorseless executioners.”181 His “writing of violence is artistically appealing and powerful,” she thinks, “but simultaneously suffocating and disturbing.”182 Is this perhaps a “not uncritical” moment? Why does Chan herself recognize Mo Yan Thought as suffocating? It is because, as pointed out earlier, Moism is a “cultural criticism” of “implying that no one will be able to escape.”183 This was said just prior to her sympathetic appeal to Foucault. Hypercritical sympathy and Moist “cultural criticism” notwithstanding, these postulations of Chan’s Mo Yan Thought have nothing in common with Foucault’s “postulate of absolute optimism” grounded in archaeological and genealogical critique. Foucaultian critical theory is not Marxist revolutionary critique by any means, but while he finds us “implicated” and “inserted” in relations of power, he does not tell us, “look how trapped you are!” Foucault teaches exactly the opposite of this. Chan’s Foucault turns out to be a Moist fiction of Foucault, and this is “suffocating and disturbing” indeed. Toward a not uncritical “end” of this (re)writing of violence, I would like to postulate here, on the broad level of transformative internationalist theory, that the reader of Chan’s certainly interesting and expensive book ought to study the revolutionary Marxist conception of “human nature” as presented in condensed form in Mao’s 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. This text Chan only condescends to mention in order to exclude from her “core” discourse because it elaborates an unsophisticated scheme that she suggests is merely a “literary monoglossia.”184 The violent fact, on the contrary, is that just as we find in her dealings with Foucault, Chan avoids any real reading of Mao because his texts are intellectually and ideologically alien to her petty-bourgeois professorial notions of “subversive” creativity. It is hardly a perspective of “literary monoglossia” (i.e., violent closed-mindedness) when Mao argues as follows: We must take over all the fine things in our literary and artistic heritage, critically assimilate whatever is beneficial, and use them as examples when we create works out of the literary and artistic raw materials in the life of the people of our own time and place.

180 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, Chan’s emphasis. 181 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 182 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3, emphasis added. 183 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 184 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro.

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It makes a difference whether or not we have such examples, the difference between crudeness and refinement, between roughness and polish, between a low and a high level, and between slower and faster work. Therefore, we must on no account reject the legacies of the ancients and the foreigners or refuse to learn from them, even though they are the works of the feudal or bourgeois classes. But taking over legacies and using them as examples must never replace our own creative work; nothing can do that. Uncritical transplantation or copying from the ancients and the foreigners is the most sterile and harmful dogmatism in literature and art.185

Mao’s call for “taking over” consciously reflects his revolutionary class standpoint, which may be contrasted with Chan’s understanding of Moism as “subversive.” But how would people subvert the society and culture of “human nature”—the stirring “taste” for evil that Chan discovers in Mo Yan Thought—if, as she argues (clearly for Mo if not for “herself ”), there is no escape, if we are all eternally trapped and suffocating? It is not by accident that the goal here is “escape.” In Marx’s critiques of Feuerbach, however, the hard core is that “the point is to change” the world (Thesis XI) by “grasp[ing] the significance of ‘revolutionary,’ of ‘practical-critical,’ activity” (Thesis I) as the “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing [which] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (Thesis III): not “merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact,” but instead, “for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.”186 “By Marxism,” Mao says, “we mean living Marxism which plays an effective role in the life and struggle of the masses, not Marxism in words” but rather “Marxism in words transformed into Marxism in real life.”187 Chan’s postulation of subversive escapism would seem to be, in the “end”—there is “no end to violence” in the worldview of the Moist hard core—an illusion, a hallucination, a fantasy, an unrealistic or “post”-realistic kind of ludic entertainment. Mao’s communist oppositional pedagogy reads Chan’s discourse on Moist human nature: it applies revolutionary Marxist ideological critique to the “logic” of hypercritical sympathy and demystifies it as a continuing symptom of the two-line struggle of classes in the field of ideology. As Mao suggests just before addressing the “theory of human nature,” her theory inserts the subject of the “completely new reading experience” of “hypercritical sympathy” in the position of someone with “all sorts of muddled ideas.”188 185 Mao, Talks, p. 81, emphasis added. 186 Marx, Essential Writings, pp. 153, 155, emphasis in original. 187 Mao, Talks, p. 79, emphasis added. 188 Mao, Talks, p. 90.

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“Is there such a thing as human nature?”189 Mao asks. In characteristically bold and dialectical materialist form, his argument is: Of course there is. But there is only human nature in the concrete, no human nature in the abstract. In class society there is only human nature of a class character; there is no human nature above classes. We uphold the human nature of the proletariat and of the masses of the people, while the landlord and bourgeois classes uphold the human nature of their own classes, only they do not say so but make it out to be the only human nature in existence. The human nature boosted by certain petty-bourgeois intellectuals is also divorced from or opposed to the masses; what they call human nature is in essence nothing but bourgeois individualism, and so, in their eyes, proletarian human nature is contrary to human nature. “The theory of human nature” which some people in Yenan advocate as the basis of their so-called theory of literature and art puts the matter in just this way and is wholly wrong.190

Mao’s text implicates and critiques Chan’s theory as one that “some people in Yenan advocate[d]” seventy years ago, and indeed well beyond that. In his notes from lectures on dialectical materialism, Mao writes: A sentence popular with the metaphysical thinkers of ancient China, “Heaven does not change and the Way also does not change,” corresponds to … a theory of the immobility of the universe… In their view, the basic nature of the universe and of society was eternally unchanging. The reason why they adopted this attitude is to be found primarily in their class limitations. If the feudal landlord class had recognized that the basic nature of the universe and of society is subject to movement and development, then most certainly they would have been pronouncing in theory a death sentence on their own class. The philosophies of all reactionary forces are theories of immobilism.191

189 Mao, Talks, p. 90. 190 Mao, Talks, p. 90, emphasis added. 191 Mao, “Dialectical Materialism,” Chap. II, emphasis added. See also Mao Zedong, “On Practice,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 307–08: “As man’s practice which changes objective reality in accordance with given ideas, theories, plans or programmes, advances further and further, his knowledge of objective reality likewise becomes deeper and deeper. The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending and so is man’s cognition of truth through practice. Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice… The struggle of the proletariat and the revolutionary people to change the world comprises the fulfilment of the following tasks: to change the objective world and, at the same time, their own subjective world, to change their cognitive ability and change the relations between the subjective and the objective world… And the objective world which is to be changed also includes all opponents of change, who, in order to be changed, must go through a stage of

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As Alex Callinicos points out, the supra-class doctrine of “human nature” is the “oldest argument against socialism” and also “the most popular… Any attempt to create a society free of poverty, exploitation and violence,” so the argument goes, “is bound to run up against the fact that human beings are naturally selfish, greedy and aggressive.”192 Mao’s theory of human nature is apt for (re)understanding and problematizing the class ideology of “original sin” in Chan’s Mo Yan Thought as hard core hype. The other hard core is internationalist revolutionary practice.

compulsion before they can enter the stage of voluntary, conscious change. The epoch of world communism will be reached when all mankind voluntarily and consciously changes itself and the world.” 192 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, p. 65.

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2.  Taking Mo Yan “in Context” by Strategy The contributors of this volume … put their specialist knowledge in careful conversation with other specialists’ knowledge in the hopes of fulfilling David Damrosch’s belief that “the specialist’s knowledge is the major safeguard against the generalist’s own will to power over texts that otherwise too easily become grist for the mill of a preferred historical argument or theoretical system.” —Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang1 People … talk about literature and art as transcending classes, but in fact they uphold bourgeois literature and art and oppose proletarian literature and art… Whatever is under the leadership of the bourgeoisie can not possibly be of the masses. —Mao Zedong2

Contextual Knowledge in Contestation Contextualization as an active intellectual practice is, of course, a very common and even commonsensical notion. In a broad sense, one might say that the aim of pursuing knowledge “in context”—as suggested in the title of Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s anthology of scholarly commentary, Mo Yan in Context—is to assert the importance of inquiries that consider the surrounding circumstances of phenomena, or to put it another way, to examine the “conditions of possibility” of meaningfulness as well as the effects of meanings. However, contextualization is a contested theory as well as practice. Whatever importance is attached to it concerns not just “what” context is considered, not just “how” context is studied, but more importantly why context becomes a site of critical inquiry: is contextualization developed in the interest of (re)legitimization through rationalization and justification, or is contextualization developed in the interest of pointing out and sustaining a critique of both the “object” (being) in context along with the “subject” (thinking) that grasps it? To ask why of “context” is to produce “context” as a site of socio-intellectual controversy, not merely to reduce “context” to a liberal pluralist/humanist “multi”-contextualism 1 Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, “Introduction to Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), pp. 8–9, quoting David Damrosch. 2 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 76.

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according to which all contextualizing practices are presumably “equal” and equally enlightening. Contextuality, in other words, is always already a conceptual analytic operation involving what Marx calls the “force of abstraction” in order to grasp and elaborate the significance of “more composite and complex forms” of “minutiae”3 appearing at the level of “concrete” reality as so many developing and interconnected sites of “the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse.”4 Throughout this chapter I am going to discuss this political economy conception of contextuality by examining Duran and Huang’s collective text, Mo Yan in Context, which asserts “in context” as its central order of inquiry into Mo Yan Thought.5 Dialectical materialist contextualization, I argue, is the contextuality of (and for) revolutionary social transformation. It is precisely because “context” in contextualizing knowledge production is a “common” pursuit in the context of worldwide capitalist society—and the culture industry which needs to “contextualize” the regime of wage-slave labor as the limit of all human possibility—that the very idea of “context” becomes a complex zone of ideological struggle on the horizon of theory and “critical” intelligibility. To follow V.N. Volosinov’s dialectical materialist conception of language, while the sign of “context” is put to use in various ways by “the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs”—hence a sign situated in “common” usage—social class itself, which organizes the fundamental economic existence of all “users” of signs, “does not coincide with the sign community”; and thus the intellectual use of “context” “becomes an arena of class struggle.”6 What is marked by the sign of “context” is underwritten by class conflict and contestation “in the context” of the unfolding contradictions between capital and labor. The very idea of “context” constantly, if only reluctantly, drags in its train 3 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), p. 19. 4 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, NY: Penguin, Kindle edition, 2011), Notebook M, Section 3. See also Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Pedagogy of Totality,” jac: a journal of rhetoric, culture & politics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2003), pp. 21–41. 5 The focus of my inquiry here is Duran and Huang’s “Introduction” to their collection because it deserves close scrutiny as the organizing articulation of the work as a whole. Their book includes three main parts, which they call “Leaves,” “Trunk,” and “Roots,” plus an Epilogue. 6 V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 23, emphasis added.

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the question of the transformability of all existing contexts into revolutionary other contexts of collective struggle for classless society. As Marx argues in implicitly “contextual” terms, what all past and existing class societies have inexorably created through their contradictions is “a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal …”7 A proletarian class theory of “context” in the interest of the class struggle of and for this class of “universal character” is a communist theory of contextuality. Its purpose is to enable a sustained challenge of the ideological limits of the dominant “community” of knowledge practices as abstractions of containment of context—strategies which consciously and unconsciously contain “context” within the boundaries of the “ideas of the ruling class … which is the prevailing material force of society [and] is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” “in its whole range” of power to “regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age.”8 Lenin makes essentially the same argument as Volosinov, but more powerfully and broadly, in his text of 1913 for the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment). That is, Lenin’s text, which was produced before Volosinov’s, puts Volosinov’s text in a more expansive context because Lenin, in following and developing the Marxist theories of Marx and Engels, already comprehended the class struggle “behind” the dominant discursive practices which it is the task of proletarian cultural critique to “seek out” and demystify. To learn to “seek out” something “behind” something else—depth in relation to surface—is a dialectical materialist practice of enlightenment. In Lenin’s pedagogy, one learns to examine “texts” by elaborating their ideological contents—which are themselves not obvious but must be actively produced by “reading” ideological discourses theoretically, through the “force of abstraction.” Lenin writes: People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only

7 Karl Marx, “Toward a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 50–51, emphasis added. 8 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1989), p. 64. See also Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks, 1987), pp. 99, 65–104.

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one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and this is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must— constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle. Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.9

Lenin argues here for the revolutionary Marxist materialist dialectics of contextuality. The “spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished” marks the terrain of an oppositional pedagogy that resituates the intellectual and affective subjectivity of thought (“spirit”) as the interior space of “all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises”— behind which lies the mystified exterior of class contradictions: the broader, deeper, and determining force of class-based interests in perpetuating the “old order” and which the transformative subject of study must learn to “realize” in order to (re)understand and act collectively to create “the new” of classless society and culture. Resistance-knowledge is a productive mode of investigation “to find,” Lenin says, “in the very society which surrounds us,” the social forces of human “subjects” in “their social position” of the exploited and the oppressed, who not only can but must be “enlightened” and “organized” as the international class that constitutes the “power” of sweeping away the very conditions of economicosocial existence that brought this “revolutionary combination, due to association,” into being (and thinking) as bourgeois society’s own “grave-diggers”—the “spectre … haunting” international capital and its own contemporary intellectuals of “vicissitudes” and “universal panaceas”10 under the banner of “globalization.” Duran and Huang’s universal panacea emerges here as the promise of Mo’s “global storytelling” in “prize culture.”11 In Lenin’s theory of contextuality, the “true position of the proletariat” is situated “in the general system of capitalism,” which the “culture” of the dominant global cultural studies conceals and camouflages “behind” its ideological project of “further[ing] global conciliation”12 which is “fully dependent,” say Duran and

9 V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 28, emphasis added. 10 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), pp. 46, 29, 20. 11 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 3–4. 12 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3.

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Huang, “on the increased communication, access, and travel that are the hallmarks of globalization.”13 Hallmarks indeed, but in their conception of globalization, such hallmarks form occasions of “conversation”14 on the “ambivalence” of “cultural capital,” “cultural authority,” and “cultural exchanges.”15 In other words, while ambivalently nodding to the existence of “global economies, or systems,”16 Duran and Huang lead the “disciplinary conversations”17 of “(specialist) depth”18 so as to forget that behind the vague hallmark they call “access,” for example, lies the problem of money for the purchase of access, and behind money lies the problem of commodity exchange, and behind commodification lies labor in exchange for wages and “salaries,” and behind labor and wages lies the capitalist “system” in which human labor is itself reduced to a commodity for exploitation under the rule of “access” to labor markets. This “hallmark” implicates not merely a surrounding system of “cultural exchanges”19 but a “global” structure of production for profit: the omnipresent “prize” in the dialectical materialist theory of power/knowledge relations in the context of underlying class antagonisms and the “conciliatory” discourses that obscure them. What Duran and Huang celebrate as “hallmarks”—“the variety of the contributors’ national, linguistic, and disciplinary identities” as “human agents behind this volume,”20 they proudly proclaim—are symptoms. The reader in an ambivalent state of conciliatory “conversation,” however, is not supposed to notice this symptomatically superficial recitation of symptoms—and “seek out” their sources—because “today’s global culture” in “‘our own moment’”21 is thought in a phraseology of culturalist context, not “culture” in dialectical materialist context. As Lenin argues—himself in a mass politicizing “conversation” with readersas-workers—the question is to learn to “seek out” the class interests being served by “disciplinary conversations … requir[ing] a specialist’s sensitivity to the texts themselves”22 and the unrealized context lying behind this sensitivity in the “force of abstraction” of the unthought.

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 4. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. ix, 8–9, 12, 14. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 4. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1, quoting James English. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8, emphasis added.

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Momma Said “Ambivalence” is also a sign “in context” for Duran and Huang’s collection. What, in the first place, is promised as the real subject of “Mo Yan in Context”? They assert that the book’s specialist conversations “[refer] to the author by the Chinese phrase and pen name ‘Mo Yan’”—meaning “Don’t Talk,” in honor of Guan Moye’s “mother’s admonition”—and thus aim “to imply a rigorous concentration on the textual and cultural expressions of a specific author, not on a historical individual.”23 According to this explicitly implied contextualist rigor, in other words, the phrases of the “author”—including the hyperironic pseudonym’s “‘virtue of silence’” as a precondition for “‘one’s energy in writing’”—are to be taken as “textual and cultural expressions” beyond any “historical individual” who nonetheless appears to be quoted in this same paragraph as declaring that he has “‘made writing my career.’”24 It is “ambivalent” that a “specific author” of textualities might need a “career” like any other mere “historical individual.” But for Duran and Huang, this implies “rigorous concentration.” However, the apparent ambivalence of this “capacious model of scholarship” in “the newness of the historical, cultural, and linguistic conditions that enable”25 Duran and Huang’s “logic of the vegetative metaphor that governs”26 the conversation—leaves, trunk, roots, blossoming, flowering—is neither as ambivalent nor new as it seems and as the editors seem to believe. “Capacious” derives from the Latin root form capere, meaning to take and contain, as in the sense of capaciousness as taking up space. By taking the subject of Mo Yan Thought in the mode that they promise, i.e., as the “Mo Yan” of phrases of writing as “textual and cultural expressions” and not as an “historical individual” as writer, thinker, imaginer, etc., Duran and Huang are, whether they realize it or not, already (re)fashioning a conciliatory conversation within what is now the “old” but ever-present doctrine of the poststructuralist “cultural turn” of textualism. In Ernesto Laclau’s words, for example, “[t]here is nothing specifically social which is constituted outside the discursive … History and society are an infinite text.”27 This preferred mode (and “model”) of taking up a position on the “author”—and thereby taking the reader along this same path—as a savvily self-(de)constructing

23 24 25 26 27

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Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 2–3, emphasis added. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3, quoting Mo. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 7, emphasis added. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 5. Ernesto Laclau quoted in Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. 27, 26–46.

mo yan-effect of “don’t talk” (repressed “free speech”) unleashed in energetic writing as textualist “freeplay,” is itself only an ambivalent-seeming sign of Duran and Huang’s “specialist” concentration within the dominant discursive context of what Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology calls the “axial proposition.”28 It “seems to us in principle,” he says, to be “not commentary” but instead “our reading” along trajectories that “must be intrinsic and remain within the text.”29 Thus the “method” of the textualist axis, which Duran and Huang mo yan about (“don’t talk” about) in its philosophical context but nonetheless (re)appropriate wholesale as their own “specialist” model of concentrated rigor, is this, as Derrida originally declared in French half a century ago: “There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte].”30 The “historical” or “textual” status of Mo Yan’s dear “mother” and her “‘admonition from way back’”31 are also implicated in Derrida’s all-encompassing textualist method. Derrida does not exclude a “prime interest to us,” he says, in “Jean-Jacques’ life, or the existence of Mamma … themselves,” but he reiterates that “we have access [my emphasis] to their so-called ‘real’ existence only in the text [my emphasis] and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right [my emphasis] to neglect this limitation.”32 This is Derrida’s admonition on the textual limits of the “right” to recognize “so-called ‘real’ existence.” And “thus to infinity,”33 Derrida declares with absolute confidence. This very same paragraph begins with the anti-metaphysical proclamation that “reading” in the context of his “methodological considerations” “cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other,” such as “a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, … outside the text” and “could have taken place outside of language, … outside of writing in general.”34 In Derrida’s philosophical jurisdiction, the writer-as-reader of reality is strictly limited to the “right” of “access” to a search for knowledge within the bounds of “writing in general,” which could only be (mis)construed as a “specialist” project in the absurd sense of authorizing specialist textual readings “to infinity”; yet Derrida simultaneously holds that this infinitization of textual method is itself 28 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Corrected edition, 1997), p. 163. 29 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 30 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158, emphasis in original; Spivak’s translation and brackets. 31 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 2, quoting Mo. 32 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158. 33 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159, emphasis added. 34 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158.

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somehow a displacement and overruling of “metaphysical” modes of knowing “a reality.” And the “metaphysical,” of course, “cannot legitimately” claim any “right.” Consequently, “a reality” that “words like ‘real mother’ name, have always already escaped, have never existed,”35 “in the sense,”36 he says, that such words “transgress the text” by “metaphysical” or “historical” conceptions. And thus to infinity, in the context of Duran and Huang’s implied rigor: the phrase “Mo Yan” along with this phrase’s “Mamma”—which (who?) gave him the phrase itself “from way back”—are not to be taken as “metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.” Instead they are to be taken “in context” in “Mo Yan in Context” as if they “never existed” except inside the textualism of “writing in general.” Such is the quagmire of implied “rigorous concentration” in which the editors take themselves with their “capacious model.” For Derrida, indeed, and Duran and Huang would probably have to agree, this textualism is “what opens meaning and language” in “writing as the disappearance of natural presence.”37 This “opening” of meaning suggests that the infinite “reading” as (re)writing of “a reality” takes up space in a supposedly well-governed postmetaphysical, posthistorical “sense that we give here”38 in the “right” to talk (“converse”) about “there is nothing outside the text.”39 But if this is “opening” meaning through textualist rigor, the phrase “in context” must always already imply the jurisdiction of textuality as itself more or less equivalent to “in context,” or as Derrida subtly puts it, the “impossibility” of “destroy[ing] writing by the writing that is yet reading.”40 In other words, “in context” is itself a phrasal textuality. Its space of operability is marked as preferred in advance by “writing in general.” Thus “in context” is ultimately only another way of expressing the right—and only this right—to textual knowingness, which is itself infinitely marked by the ludic play of indeterminacy, uncertainty, undecidability, ambivalence, tracing, spacing, differing, deferring, and aporia-as-writing-in-general. All such notions, in a potentially “infinite” variety of supplementary signs, Derrida regards as inherent properties always at “risk”41 in “language” itself as the sine qua non (“but for”) antecedent “tissue”42 35 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 36 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158. 37 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159, emphasis added. 38 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158. 39 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 163. 40 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 41 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158. 42 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159 (“proper texture”).

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of signification within which every “so-called ‘real’ existence” is constructed; and so this “‘real’” is “infinitely” subject to the operable moves and methods of deconstruction. Any other means of “reading … the literary ‘symptom,’” Derrida suggests, “is most banal, most academic, most naive.”43 Yet if “Mo Yan in Context” signifies textualism for Duran and Huang, they also take as a “prime interest,” to borrow Derrida’s words, “the contention” that “the readily visible signs of Mo Yan’s artistic works, towering within the literatures of the world, are rooted in cultural, literary, and critical systems.”44 To “jostle”45 with “critical systems,” they propose that “rooting the cultural narratives within and about Mo Yan’s works in its [what its?] native China and in the West, primarily the U.S., enriches our appreciation of the variety and specificity of the discourses …”46 Are “native China” and “the U.S.” not signs of “metaphysical” or “historical” realities of the kind that Derrida calls “a reality” in “transgression” of texts? By what “right” of “rigorous concentration” do they talk of such things? Did Mo Yan’s “mother” actually live as “a reality” in the author’s “native China” after all? … The editors’ sense of ambivalence returns to their rigorous concentration and “rooting” for conversation on Mo’s “towering” works. But ambivalence is not merely an affectively undecidable state of “simultaneous attraction and repulsion,” as they believe to be “especially helpful” in their conception of “cultural capital.”47 Ambivalence is the sustained ideological contradiction expressing itself through the texts of bourgeois “specialist” intellectuals. As Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton have argued, the “attraction” at stake here is an attraction to “trading on”48 an eclectic, diluted, obscured mixture of “old” textualist theory in order to legitimize the phrase “in context” as an indeterminately speculative haven of leisurely “appreciation” in conversation where “elements … come into play.”49 What Duran and Huang are attracted to, and not “repulsed” by, is a reformed contextuality that “purposefully leav[es] intact the overall institutional system for constructing student-citizens as bourgeois subjects and willing servants of the status quo.”50 This project of “leaving intact” the 43 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 44 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6, emphasis added. 45 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3. 46 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6. 47 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1. 48 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, “War of the Words: The Battle of (and for) English,” In These Times (28 Oct. 1987), p. 18. 49 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 1. 50 Zavarzadeh and Morton, “War,” p. 19, emphasis added.

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“global” analytic grid of storytelling for a “new” bourgeois subject—rather than, as Lenin says, working to explain and clarify “the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism”—is further examined in the next chapter through a close study of Duran and Huang’s texts of the “vegetative metaphor” they call “Leaves.” The “in context” movement of Duran and Huang is an attractive means of arriving at what Gilles Deleuze calls “a life”—devoid of any class “depth” that dialectical critique “seeks out,” as Lenin insists—whose “living” existence flows on a “pure plane of immanence.”51 “We will say of pure immanence,” Deleuze proclaims in a “towering” philosophical moment, “that it is A LIFE, and nothing else… A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.”52 Furthermore, “nothing is able to reveal it” because it is only “in itself ” and is “removed from any revelation.”53 In Deleuze’s philosophy, “a life” is essentially the same as Derrida’s “so-called ‘real’ existence,” not because they say the same things in their own different (con)texts of poststructuralist theorizing, but rather because of the different ways they don’t say that “life” and “existence” are knowable through the dialectical materialist philosophy of Marxism, which theorizes “life” and “existence” by rigorously recognizing the social and political context of the continuing class war between the exploiters and the exploited. Deluze’s project is not a “seeking out” activity for class consciousness and socialist revolution, but rather, if it can be said to “seek” anything whatsoever, is a “seeking in” within the existing “immanence of immanence” of the capitalist order. What Duran and Huang are implicitly and subtly repulsed by, therefore, is the “radical alternative” of materialist dialectics, which is “to ‘read’ the dominant social system and its texts against itself by finding in the folds, seams and faultlines of its ideologies spaces in which to oppose oppressive modes of understanding and behavior.”54 To “come into play” is exactly the “sense” of ambivalent uncertainty that Derridian textualism judges as the “right” way of “writing” “a reality” in the infinite space (“capacious”) of contextualism-as-text. After all, if “nothing outside the 51 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2005), pp. 25–34. Compare Deleuze to Marx in Capital, p. 172, where he calls on the reader to “take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface,” and instead to peer “into the hidden abode of production” where “we shall see … the secret of profit making.” 52 Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 27, emphasis added. 53 Deleuze, Pure Immanence, p. 26. 54 Zavarzadeh and Morton, “War,” p. 19.

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text” is “right,” how could “context” ever be anything other than a plural network and unending expanse of “text”? The prefix “con-” is merely a supplementary code for permitting or preferring that reading should mean to “come into play” in “writing in general,” which is infinite. And nothing is outside of infinity, just as “to infinity” is supposedly not “metaphysical.”

A Word Has Been Changed In the “infinite” logic of writerly supplementarity, Derrida himself later went on to declare the “right” meaning of methodic textualism as contextualism. According to Derrida two decades after Of Grammatology, the originally “shocking” verdict on the limits of “legitimate” reading—that “there is no outside-text” (“the axial proposition … that there is nothing outside the text”)55—had been “so badly understood,” he laments, that it became necessary to re(in)state the same principle, which “means nothing else” than “there is nothing outside context.”56 As I pointed out above by “legitimately” reading the “badly understood” text within its own field of “tissues” and “risks”—particularly the notion of “to infinity”—Derrida is quite “right” so long as one obeys the law of internal signetic space and avoids “transgressing” the philosophical boundaries of his conversion of idealist agnosticism into its textualist equivalent in the service of a “new” “official philosophy,”57 as Lenin says. It moves “fashion-lovers … to ecstasy”58 by (re)articulating the “old sophistry of idealist and agnostic philosophy … with a new sauce”59 in order to “stupefy the people”—Derrida’s “people” are textual subjects possessing only a chimera of “themselves” in “so-called ‘real’ existence”—“by a twisted idealism.”60 Duran and Huang explicitly state that the “trajectory” of their collection involves just such an insider-textuality “driven by the internal logic of Mo Yan’s works.”61

55 Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 158, 163. 56 Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion,” in Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 136, emphasis added. 57 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 88. 58 Lenin, Materialism, p. 80. 59 Lenin, Materialism, p. 106. 60 Lenin, Materialism, p. 125. 61 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 5.

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But “right” always has its “wrong,” as Derrida’s own highly determined judgment of “bad” understanding makes unambivalently clear. This “gesture”62 of rectifying authority is itself a reiteration of the earlier text’s dictum of what “cannot legitimately” be done in the name of “proper textur[al]”63 reading within the regime of “methodological considerations” where it is deemed entirely legitimate to only be capable of rigorously gesturing toward “a reality” of a “so-called ‘real’ existence” which is not “outside the text” and also not “outside context.” In other words, Derrida’s viewpoint on “bad” understanding and the scope of “right” reading is a juridical “force of abstraction.”64 It elaborates a criminal code to be applied in cases where “bad” understanding constitutes a “transgression” of ideological “professorial rigmarole.”65 Lenin’s text of 1908—Materialism and Empirio-criticism—offers precisely a very “bad” dialectical materialist understanding of Derrida’s rectification of “bad” understanding. When Derrida asserts that “no outside-text” really “means nothing else: there is nothing outside context,” Lenin nails this punceptual gesture for exactly what it does and, behind the authority of its “good” and “correct” understanding, what it is in the unfolding of bourgeois philosophy: “A word has been changed!”66 writes Lenin. Derrida’s rectification is essentially the same as in the earlier historico-philosophical “context” where Alexander Bogdanov “refuses to acknowledge his idealism, because, you see, instead of the ‘metaphysical’ concepts ‘nature’ and ‘mind,’ he has taken the ‘experiential.’”67 Derrida is “‘moving in a circle,’”68 as Oskar Ewald says in the “context” of Richard Avenarius. The “muddle is glaring,” yet by the subtle adjustment of the terms he does “not clear up this muddle, all [he does] is to obscure the matter, to cover up the traces with the help of an erudite philosophical gibberish,”69 as Lenin says in the “context” of Karl Pearson, Ernst Mach (with his “elements”), and Avenarius. Derrida has “taken the ‘experiential’” of Bogdanov, Mach, and Avenarius and converted it into a textualist contextuality which “means nothing else.” Ludic “play,” as the infinity of undeciding, indetermining “reading” of textual (con)textualities, comes to an abrupt end—on the side of the line drawn by poststructuralist 62 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 63 Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159. 64 Marx, Capital, p. 19. 65 Lenin, Materialism, p. 80. 66 Lenin, Materialism, p. 325. 67 Lenin, Materialism, p. 325. 68 Lenin, Materialism, p. 78. 69 Lenin, Materialism, p. 79, emphasis added.

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idealist philosophy—when the master says so. And beyond this line “moving in a circle,” there is (notice Derrida’s repeated certainty in “There is nothing …” and “there is nothing …”) “nothing else” except, of course, the criminality of an other discourse of texts which “cannot legitimately” be elaborated. To put it another way, Derrida’s bluntly revised decision upon being “so badly understood” is ludicrous on its face. The conversion of signs from “nothing outside of the text” (with emphasis) to “nothing outside context” is an argumentish stylization of “argument.” It entertains in the performance of slippery subtlety more than it really says anything of any substance. Its staunch appearance of philosophical authority rises up not from what is said—because this is merely a slight change of a single word—but rather from its ideological mo yan-effect, that is, the meaning of what it doesn’t say: what it doesn’t say is that context-astextuality-and-textuality-as-context serves the “prime interest” of the ruling class in “deconstructing” the material basis of class relations of exploitation within which working people carry on their “so-called ‘real’ existence” as “subjects” of class antagonism. Derrida’s law of (con)textuality can (and should) also be badly (re)understood within Volosinov’s Marxist theory of signs as intersecting contests of meaning in “an arena of class struggle.” When this is done to Derrida’s doubling texts, one may begin to recognize that his puncept of “context” is (“there is” always a class interest behind texts in capitalist culture) an attempt, by means of an “ideological sign,” to mark the meaning of “context” so as to appear “withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle … cross[ing] beyond the pale of the class struggle … degenerating into allegory and becoming the object not of live social intelligibility but of philological comprehension.”70 Derrida’s (con)textuality, as Volosinov goes on to say, obscures an interest in rendering texts/contexts “incapable of serving as arenas for the clash of live social accents,” that is, “different classes … us[ing] one and the same language” and therefore “clashing” in class struggle expressed at the level of signs, meanings, philosophical/theoretical premises (“metaphysics”), and, not least of all, “the social struggle” of “live social intelligibility” with “glimmers of life.”71 The implicitly “good” understanding laid down in the declaration that text “means nothing else” but context is a ruling to shut down and cancel the “multiaccentuality of the ideological sign” and thereby suppress text/context as the site

70 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23, emphasis added. 71 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23.

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of historical “vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development.”72 And yet in another “context,” this same staunch anti-metaphysician, who says “means nothing else,” also declared, in honor of Nietzsche, that “truth is plural.”73 Is this not hypocrisy “in context,” hiding behind the change of a word and the complaint of being “so badly understood”? Derridian deconstructive pluralism (re-“contextualized”) writes new life into the dominant capitalist ideology of liberal pluralism; it is also determinately fixed, although its surface hailings appeal to a more elusive and unrestrained sense of un-fixing and in-determining. If there is only (“only in the text,” “nothing else”) ever an excessive plurality of truth(s), this is also to say that there cannot be any “other” intelligibility and theory of “truth”—and thus the plurality notion closes its own circle. Liberal pluralism in capitalism works the same way, thereby blocking and silencing theories of truth (such as the Marxist theory of “ruling class ideas”) that contest the ideological system of liberal pluralism as the occulted dogma of “free” thought and action within the capitalist system. Derrida is a textualist epistemologist, not a theorist of the political economy of knowledge, and yet his epistemology conceals its own political economy. By “differing” from “other traditional proponents of capitalism, the task of system maintenance is performed by Derrida in a fresh and unorthodox manner and in intellectually exciting vocabularies of nuance and fine distinctions” involving “rapturous terms of ‘dangerous’ supplementarity, spectrality, undecidability, traces, and différance that have become part of a performativity of destabilizing, anarcho-readings of the social.”74 Context, in short, becomes an arena of class struggle, not because “truth is plural” and (con)text is necessary for seeking the truth of reality, but because (con) text in “global” capitalist society is necessarily structured by the ever-developing, antagonistic social relations of classes, namely, exploiters and exploited in their “so-called ‘real’ existence.” There is nothing outside of the “context” of class structure so long as capitalism exists. The point, however, as Marx said in the context of his critique of Feuerbach, is to change the existing “context” by radically and

72 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23. 73 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 103: “only a surfeit of it.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josephine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 250–51: “See each word and sentence scurry/to the tick tock chain so long … ‘Yes, my man, you are a poet’/shrugs the pecker in the wood.” 74 Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Getting Class Out of Culture,” in Ebert and Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. 42.

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systematically subjecting it to sustained revolution in thought and in collective social action.75 The simple textual fact that Derrida’s poststructuralist punception—that “nothing outside the text” means “nothing outside context”—is itself outside of and unwritten in Duran and Huang’s text, does not undo the obscured and deeper truth that Derrida’s textualist contextuality as “writing in general” is the ideological underwriter behind their ambivalently vague notion of “in context,” about which they have nothing seriously “theoretical” to say at all. In fact, it is exactly this mode of mo yanning (not saying anything) about “in context,” which is nonetheless the very key “idea” promised by “Mo Yan in Context,” that makes their (non)conception of “in context” inquiry all the more seemingly innocuous. This is for “readers to participate [in] as global citizens”76 without thinking very much about any “outside” ideological investments at work in “disciplinary conversations” with a “specialist’s sensitivity to the texts themselves.”77 They take “the most opportune moment to note” that when their book “refers to the author by the Chinese phrase” (“Mo Yan”), this is to “imply a rigorous concentration on the textual and cultural expressions of a specific author, not on a historical individual.”78 The “texts themselves” are “in context,” and “in context” is the “texts themselves” and “cultural expressions” of a “specific author” who savvily “constructs” himself as a writer with the phrase “Mo Yan.” “‘Now … I will write down all that I would like to talk in words,’” says the “‘very talkative’”79 Mo Yan. But the “towering within the literatures of the world”80 is supposedly not what is called an “historical individual.” Derridian text-as-context haunts Duran and Huang’s “concentration.” But since this haunting is already the “cultural expression” of the “writing in general” of the “ideas of the ruling class”81 in the epoch of “global” capital and bourgeoisdominated world literature studies, they need only “imply” their (non)conception

75 See Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 152–58: “In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things” (p. 156, Marx’s emphasis). 76 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 16. 77 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. 78 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3. 79 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3, quoting Mo. 80 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6. 81 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 64. Compare Derrida, Grammatology, p. 159: “there has never been anything but writing.”

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of “in context.” As Marx and Engels suggest, “in an age” where “globalization” expresses the “contending for mastery” among all the “world literatures” of all the internationally enmeshed ruling classes, “mastery is shared” in those effective ideological doctrines which may then be “expressed as … ‘eternal law[s].’”82 It seems, in short, quite “natural,” as Duran and Huang themselves say in another “opportune” moment of confession on their “logic of the vegetative metaphor that governs”83: “Natural growth—from leaves, to trunk, to roots—is opportunistic, as is this volume …”84 Global storytelling in globalization, you see, is playfully vegetative and “natural.” The only demand of the intellectual critic as specialist, conciliator, conversationalist, textualist, etc., “amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognise it” (Derrida’s “a reality,” in which he admits a “prime interest”) “by means of another interpretation” while ambivalently suspending dialectical materialist inquiry into “their own material surroundings.”85

Mo Yanning Duran and Huang’s prime interest in Mo Yan Thought “in context” is itself an obscured bourgeois ideological work of mo yanning thought that “doesn’t talk”— “Don’t talk too much”86—about its “own material surrounding”87 inside the existing class structure of capitalist social relations on a worldwide scale. While I also share an interest in the “community … of users”88 of Moism’s signs, texts and narratives “towering” and “circulating” in a “transfer of knowledge”89 bound up with “world” literature and “global” storytelling in “globalization,” “economic systems,” and “critical systems,” my interest lies in furthering a critique of this developing knowledge and the class interests behind it, not merely an appreciating “conversation” (“to infinity”) aimed at “global conciliation”90 within the “everchanging and ever-powerful cultural forces”91 of capital and its literati. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 65, emphasis added. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 5. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 7. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 41. Mo quoted in Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 2. Mo is talking about “himself ” in the third person and quoting his mother’s reminder. 87 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 41. 88 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23. 89 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 1, 4, 6, 13, 15. 90 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3. 91 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 10. 82 83 84 85 86

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Duran and Huang’s conciliatory posture in relation to the “modernity”92 of capitalism and its contemporary articulation today in what they call “the major twenty-first-century powerhouses of China and the U.S.”93 leads them, despite the call of “context,” “(specialist) depth,” and “cultural and critical breadth,”94 to explicitly announce in dramatically moving phrases how their collection of “disciplinary conversations” is incomprehensive. This move is not simply because, as Engels points out in Anti-Dühring, comprehensive knowledge is endlessly developing95 along with the developing world itself, but rather because they suspect that the very goal of “comprehensive” knowledge is pernicious and menacing “within an increasingly borderless world.”96 What their incomprehensive contextualism fails to notice is that this “borderless” world includes the fundamental borderline—a “facile binary”97—between the owning class and the working class. The book, they say, is tethered relentlessly to Mo Yan yet extends broadly in its contexts of the interface of literature and Chinese and Western, primarily U.S., societies. Yet it in no way aspires to be comprehensive.98

Why? … Because this is “cultural studies,” and it “can be thought of ” as involving the “notions” that “‘[c]omparative cultural studies is a combination of tenets of comparative literature and cultural studies … including the ideological orientation of cultural studies.’”99 They are correct, of course: these are “notions” and nothing else. And they remain vaguely eclectic “notions” precisely because the editors ambivalently shy away from and mo yan about (“don’t talk” about) what “ideological orientation”

92 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3. 93 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 14. 94 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6. 95 See Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972), p. 44: “Mankind … finds itself faced with a contradiction: on the one hand, it has to gain an exhaustive knowledge of the world system in all its interrelations; and on the other hand, because of the nature both of man and of the world system, this task can never be completely fulfilled. But this contradiction lies not only in the nature of the two factors—the world, and man—it is also the main lever of all intellectual advance.” 96 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. 97 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9. 98 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8, emphasis added. 99 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8, quoting Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise Vasvari, my emphasis added.

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may be understood in “cultural studies.” Once again, as Volosinov argues on the comprehensively moving level of dialectical materialist theory, “cultural studies” is registered here as an ideological sign. “Yet,” for Duran and Huang’s circulating theorhetoric, the definite class “orientation” of its “use” and articulation is “withdrawn”100 from open class struggle. Thus “cultural studies” seems to imply only one murky “ideological orientation,” as if “cultural studies” were not a contested, unequal, and intersecting zone where the “combination of tenets” that are deployed always implicates, as Lenin argues, “the interests of some class or other.”101 For Duran and Huang, “cultural studies” as comparative cultural studies is also notionally “borderless” in its hospitable, conciliatory inclusion of “the ideological orientation.” But this is an ideologically withdrawn way of writing without saying “too much,” just like Mo’s Mamma said to do in order to avoid “‘troubles to my family.’”102 By contrast, the orientation to which Lenin points for the class-conscious critique of ideology is not simply a “notion.” It marks a class conceptuality that argues for the militant development of what Volosinov calls the “live social intelligibility”103 of the revolutionary communist class comprehensive theory of “cultural studies.” It is not merely an innocuously vague quotation of “notions,” which are in fact only empty phrases designed to mask their “global” bourgeois “cultural authority,” which is a global outlook emptied of class struggle. Lenin’s outlook conceptualizes “glimmers of life”104 for socialist transformation. In the revolutionary Chinese opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Stragegy, such glimmers of life are directed toward the necessity of “[r]evolutionary wisdom” as “collective wisdom” for “the red flag [to] fly all over the world” to “uproot exploitation,” “smashing the chains of a thousand years” in order “to change the world.”105 To “take by strategy” in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy is to comprehend and

100 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23. 101 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 28. 102 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 3, quoting Mo. 103 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23. 104 Volosinov, Marxism, p. 23. 105 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Oct. 1969 script in Peking Review, Vol. 12, Nos. 51/52 (26 Dec. 1969), pp. 19–20, italics in original. This revolutionary Peking Opera is a radical theatrical reworking of the original novel by Chu Po, Tracks in the Snowy Forest, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978). In Chapter VIII of Chu’s novel, “Flying Across the Abyss, Into the Tiger’s Den,” we read: “to strike from within and without at the same time” (p. 108).

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put into practice “this critical task” to “strike from without and within,” a “wellthought-out plan” to “strike from within and without.”106 In “no way aspir[ing] to be comprehensive,” Duran and Huang and family construct their own “facile binary” that blocks out the striving for comprehensive theoretical practice. The “trouble” they suggestively promise to avoid, of course, is the “will to power” at stake in contextualizing knowledge. “Yet” again, however, what they fail to notice is that the so-called “will to power” can only be dealt with by some other “will to power” which, as they seem to imagine (in their professed “ideological orientation”), is itself not a “will to power” in its own “right” but rather a “careful conversation” in “hopes” and “belief ”107—in other words, a peacefully reformist will to virtuous “ethics” that thwarts the unethical “will to power.” What they say, therefore, is that the various writers in the book do not eschew but rather put their specialist knowledge in careful conversation with other specialists’ knowledge in the hopes of fulfilling David Damrosch’s belief that “the specialist’s knowledge is the major safeguard against the generalist’s own will to power over texts that otherwise too easily become grist for the mill of a preferred historical argument or theoretical system.”108

The trouble here is that “specialist knowledge” is itself always suspicious (in Lenin’s class sense) in class societies and their cultures. The question is what kind of specialist knowledge: knowledge “in context” for the ever-deepening awareness of class antagonism so that classes may be ended, or knowledge “in context” unaware of class conflict and purporting to be withdrawn from the class structure within which knowledge is developed and used? The trouble with Duran and Huang’s hopes of fulfilling Damrosch’s belief is that these hopes are not only hypocritical on their face, but that they block out what Maoist theory calls the “red and expert” project of working on and for knowledge in the class interests of the broader and deeper purpose of revolutionary social transformation. The “red” in this conception is not simplistically and undialectically opposed to “expert,” which of course is “specialist knowledge.” As Ruth Gamberg explains in Red and Expert, her in-depth and comprehensive study of the Chinese revolution in education during the early to mid-1970s, the openly class-based political idea of “ideological qualification” was considered “most important”109 for

106 107 108 109

Taking Tiger Mountain, pp. 19–20, italics in original. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 8–9, quoting David Damrosch. Ruth Gamberg, Red and Expert: Education in the People’s Republic of China, foreword by William Hinton (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1977), p. 242. See also Dongping

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teachers, students, and all cultural workers in the vanguard of thinking and constructing the new socialist and, ultimately, communist society. “So long as redness—the ideology of serving the people that is the overriding consideration in China—has been deeply internalized,” writes Gamberg in her chapter on “Teaching the Teachers,” “the expertise can be expected to develop through conscientious and persistent practice.”110 Specifically, for example, there are teachers like the young man we met who taught politics at Shanghai’s Pai Kwang Middle School after only one year of teacher training. His experience working on a commune had been judged sufficient to provide “the most important [ideological] qualification.”111

In the present context, what Gamberg is saying is that the general question of world outlook (“ideological qualification,” i.e., class stand) conditions and determines the specific expertise developed and elaborated in a given field of inquiry and practice in the class interests of the working masses for the continual transformation of their society and culture and themselves as collectively organized “subjects” in the struggle to change the world. What Duran and Huang hold aloft as Damrosch’s “belief ”—which they also seem to believe and wish to spread to readers as class-transcending “global citizens” in the “brave, significant, critical”112 context of their disciplinary conversations—is in fact a simplistic, undialectical promise in an obscured class language that merely asserts, by way of an inversion of the “generalist” and the “specialist,” that specialist knowledge (the code of the sovereign “individual” intellectual) is the “major safeguard” against generalist knowledge. The “hopes” here, to put it differently and in their own “preferred” discourse, are to safeguard the bourgeois subject of knowledge from the other “preferred” knowledge of the general “material surroundings”113 of class contradictions. Damrosch “forgets”—as do Duran and Huang, who hope to serve his decidedly general “belief ”—that this heroical specialization is itself a “general” proclamation; he doubly forgets that specialist knowledge, especially if it is to be used for any purpose (including the purpose of the pedagogy of “conversation”), is already situated and implicated in a social system of relations of class “power.”

Han, “The Socialist Legacy Underlies the Rise of Today’s China in the World,” Aspects of India’s Economy, Nos. 59–60 (Oct. 2014). 110 Gamberg, Red and Expert, p. 242. 111 Gamberg, Red and Expert, pp. 242–43. 112 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 16. 113 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 41.

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Materialist dialectics holds the general view that it doesn’t matter whether Damrosch the Harvard (formerly Columbia) academic subject of knowledge “believes” in or doesn’t believe in the “generally” existing material surroundings of the system of class power relations; the system exists whether he is aware of it or not, notwithstanding any subjective “will” or “belief ” he might have to deny it.114 In the ideological sense—which Duran and Huang claim to “include” in some “general” way or another—therefore, Damrosch’s specialist “guard” is always already a “generalist” of one kind or another who does indeed harbor a “preferred historical argument or theoretical system”; yet this is concealed behind an illusory and distracting safeguard of “generally” disinterested specialization. The guiding Damroschian “belief,” given in sincere academic seriousness by Duran and Huang, is structured within his very own general, “preferred historical” (non)argument and (anti)theoretical system of liberal humanism. Its preferred subject believes that the virtuous scholarly specialist is capable of stepping outside of the world system of class power/knowledge relations at will. Such scholars perform this service, of course, in the quiet seclusion of their studies and offices, which are built by the labor of wage workers who are exploited by construction companies, which are contracted and paid by state and private universities, which in turn hire and nurture the specialists who mo yan (“don’t talk” too much) about this system of material surroundings.

114 See Lenin, Materialism, pp. 54–73, 174–80, et seq. For example, among numerous other contexts in Lenin’s book, in the first chapter he critiques Avenarius and Mach’s subjective idealist “defense” of “naive realism, that is, the ordinary, non-philosophical, naive view which is entertained by all people who do not trouble themselves as to whether they themselves exist and whether the environment, the external world, exists” (p. 54). Recall Derrida’s problems with “trans”-textual entities such as “Mamma” existing outside textuality “themselves” or “a reality” (Derrida, Grammatology, p. 158). Lenin argues: “The ‘naive realism’ of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist independently of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our self and of man in general… Our sensation, our consciousness is only an image of the external world, and it is obvious that an image cannot exist without the thing imaged, and that the latter exists independently of that which images it. Materialism deliberately makes the ‘naive’ belief of mankind the foundation of its theory of knowledge” (p. 56). Later on, in the third chapter, he clearly points out (against Bogdanov’s “perplexity” toward Engels) that the “materialistic” position is “the recognition of the objective reality of the external world and of the laws of external nature, and of the fact that both this world and these laws are fully knowable to man but can never be known to him with finality” (pp. 176, 130).

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Comprehensivity If Damrosch, Duran and Huang were interested in a critique of “all existing conditions” of “wrong in general” and not “human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order”115—the comprehensive context of study in which “[c]apital is” taken as “the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society” and “must form the starting-point as well as the finishing-point, and must be dealt with” “in modern bourgeois society”116—they might begin the task of producing a changing theory of the theoretical system of the “will to power”117 as itself a bourgeois class philosophy: a “force of abstraction”118 that limits the structure of human comprehension within “the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc.” as ideas which are “but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, … the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class,” a “selfish misconception … transform[ed]” over and over again “into eternal laws of nature and of reason.”119 The general usefulness of the “will to power,” as an ideological phrase and “right” mode of rationalization within existing conditions, is to delegitimize and—with the seal of Harvard academic authority—reinstate the verdict against the Marxist thought of class power, thus unmapping the general comprehension of class power/knowledge relations from the “context” of knowledgeable discourses. Duncan Kennedy, to take an example from the critical “legal left” inside the

115 Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 41, 51, 58, emphasis in original. 116 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook M, Section 3. 117 See e.g. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1969); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1968); Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I (The Will to Power as Art) and Vol. II (The Eternal Recurrence of the Same), trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1991); Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans./ed. Colin Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 126–28, on the “specific” as opposed to the “universal” intellectual; Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991); and Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” transversal (May 2001), discussed below. 118 Marx, Capital, p. 19. 119 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 52, emphasis added.

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Harvard Law School, declares that “Marxism has disappeared from the political and intellectual landscape altogether,” and thus he regards his position as situated within “the remnants of ‘radicalism’ (that’s me), associated with a post-Marxist and/or post-structuralist critique of the social,” or “the post-social left,”120 whatever this is supposed to mean. The notion that Damrosch’s powerful viewpoint is “specialist” and not a recirculation of a well-established “generalist” conception (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, …) is absurd. In this regard it is not too difficult to “comprehend” the ideological logic behind Duran and Huang’s simultaneous gravitation around Damrosch’s “belief” and Mo’s neo-absurdist narratives in so-called hallucinatory realism. As Lenin says, a “word has been changed”—“generalist” is a bad idea (the “mill”), and “specialist” is a good idea (the “hopes”)—in order to mystify the general ideological acceptability of a transhistorical and indestructible “will to power,” which is the philosophical code of capitalistic “self-interest.” The “specialist” subject of knowledge accepts this as an eternal law of all civilizations. It follows that her most progressive “hopes” can only be sought in an equally endless network of “patient” and specific reforms which, as a matter of fundamental principle, exclude any other “will to power” (as collective class struggle to end classes) that aims to abolish the “will to power” of capital’s domination of labor. Duran and Huang are most unambivalently attracted to Damrosch’s “belief,” not because of its theoretical rigor or “newness,” but because it rearticulates in dumbed-down form a commonsensical “belief” about the workings of “power” within a carefully confined bourgeois ideological context. This is, in short, a mill— inside the global cultural-industrial complex—of “hopes” and “belief” in anti-theory. Damrosch’s leading question of what? in “What is World Literature?”121—the (con)text from which Duran and Huang get their “hopes”—obscures a class comprehension. It is a misleading question that diverts attention away from the analytic of why whatever is “world literature” is always, in the material surroundings of class societies, a discourse of class contradictions underwriting “imaginary” narratives. Just as in Kennedy’s ironically savvy (“that’s me”) jingoisms of “‘radicalism’” (within scare quotes) on the “post-social left,” this is more a concern with “what” is arguable within the terms of the dominant theoretical “landscape” rather than a transformatively-oriented critique of “why” Marxism can be said to have “disappeared … altogether.” 120 Duncan Kennedy, “The Social Justice Element in Legal Education in the United States,” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Vol. 1 (2005), pp. 102, 101, 103. 121 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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What class interests are served by this “disappearance”? What class interests are served by talking about a “will to power” as if this were not a “generalist” and very popular idea? These are in fact theoretical and practical questions of why. Their purpose—why contextualize?—is to theorize the “what” and the “how” dialectically in connection with the broader and deeper material logic of class contradictions. What Kennedy’s intellectual narrative of the “disappearance” of the Marxist world outlook amounts to is a mo yanning about the class logic behind discursive invisibilities and silences. As the “towering” Moist writer—who “no longer is”—suggests in his afterword to the novel Pow!, this narrative has “a comforting effect” which, within its own playfully controlled contextualities, “isn’t all that meaningful” because “narration is the goal, narration is the theme and narration is its construct of ideas”—in short, the “goal of narration is narration.”122 Thus, “about ideology,” he writes, “I have nothing to say. I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.”123 The question of ideology, in other words, has “disappeared … altogether,” except of course for the wily narration that narrates the disappearance (“pride in my lack”) and “gains satisfaction.”124 There is, however, an other historical narrative at stake here. As Teresa Ebert points out, the idea that “‘talk of revolution … has long since disappeared’” is hardly “new” in its deceptively clear implication for “‘accepting the existing order in one way or another.’”125 The point, she argues—which Kennedy’s tale completely misses—is “de-writing ‘revolution’ as a thing of the past and rewriting it as a viable strategy for the present,” to “lay bare the assumptions that ridicule revolution as impractical and show that what is called practical is merely what works within the dominant system.”126 This deceptive clarity at work on the surface of bourgeois ideological narratives, such as the “will to power” and the “disappearance” of Marxism, is a hallmark of what Georgi Plekhanov called “cowardly idealism,” a concept which, as we shall see shortly, is quite enlightening in dialectically contextualizing Judith Butler’s neo-Foucaultian discourse.

122 Mo Yan, “Afterword: Narration Is Everything,” in Mo, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), pp. 385–86. 123 Mo, “Afterword,” p. 386. 124 Mo, “Afterword,” p. 386. 125 Teresa L. Ebert, “Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic,” jac: a journal of rhetoric, culture & politics, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2003), p. 554, quoting “Situationist International #6” from 1961. 126 Ebert, “Manifesto,” p. 554.

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In the context of “subjecting to criticism” a book by Joseph Petzoldt, Plekhanov argued in 1910 that cowardly idealism is characterized by “that deceptive clarity” which, rather than “help[ing] one to overcome the difficulties of the subject,” instead “tends to conceal” difficulties by employing “the clarity of very superficial thinking, which brings its work to a halt just where its main task begins.”127 Cowardly idealism articulates “not a bad thing,” Plekhanov writes with biting sarcasm, but on the contrary offers up “the philosophical infatuation fashionable just now, … follow[ing] the latest fashion in philosophy” without comprehending “the contradiction in which [it] is so ludicrously struggling.”128 As Mao argues, Damrosch’s discourse of “what” is a means of “talk[ing] about literature and art as transcending classes”129 on a “world” scale, while in fact he upholds a bourgeois analytics of studying any literature and art whatsoever. His “leadership” in the ideological field of studies in literature and art is “the leadership of the bourgeoisie” and “can not possibly be of the masses.”130 While appearing in the guise of “hopes” to oppose the “will to power” in the abstract, the “specialist’s knowledge” becomes the “preferred” mode of hallucinating the class theory of power outside of the context, which of course “in no way aspires to be comprehensive.”131 In Plekhanov’s words, this is “not a bad thing” for Duran and Huang. And “yet” it is a negative comprehensivity. Its ideological function is to bar an other comprehensivity by hiding behind sincere-sounding “hopes” of willfully “in no way” aspiring toward any comprehensive standpoint and analysis. In the same ideological community with Duran and Huang, let us take specifically, for example, one of the most “readily visible”132 specialist intellectuals in the “will to power” family, Judith Butler. She patiently finds Michel Foucault’s virtue as a “radical” intellectual by quietly correcting (retranslating) the words of his text from saying “the subject in the context [le jeu] of what we could call … the politics of truth,” to saying “the subject in the play of the politics of truth.”133 You see, “context” is or becomes “play” because it was already “play” (le jeu). In the same manner, Butler playfully recontextualizes a bit of Nietzschean wisdom and 127 Georgi Plekhanov, “Cowardly Idealism,” in Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Section I. 128 Plekhanov, “Cowardly,” Section I, emphasis in original. 129 Mao, Talks, p. 76. 130 Mao, Talks, p. 76. 131 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. 132 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6. 133 Butler, “What is Critique?,” quoting Foucault’s “What is Critique?”; Butler’s brackets, my emphasis added.

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virtue by cajoling her audience to become more “patient” like cows: “here I would ask for your patience,” she says, “since it turns out that critique is a practice that requires a certain amount of patience in the same way that reading, according to Nietzsche, required that we act a bit more like cows than humans and learn the art of slow rumination.”134 Acting out a “discursive impasse” or what she calls a “tear in the fabric of our epistemological web,” the intellectual pretends not to notice that “cows” are docile subjects.135 This more cow-like subject, which Butler regards as the model of critique in the Foucaultian “ethical subject,” is a perpetually “not yet” human “[e]ngaged in ‘arts of existence’” and is “both crafted and crafting” in a state of “‘indistinguishability’ … produced in the context of a self-making which is never fully self-inaugurated.”136 If we think (in rumination) that this “aesthetic mode of selfmaking is contextualized within ethical practice,” she reminds us of Foucault’s reminder that “this ethical labor can only take place within a wider political context, the politics of norms.”137 Echoing Derrida’s grand proclamations concerning the “outside,” Butler stresses for the more cow-like that Foucault “makes clear” that “there is no self-forming outside of a mode of subjectivation, which is to say, there is no self-forming outside of the norms that orchestrate the possible formation of the subject.”138 Which is to say that, in spite of all this distinguishedsounding crafting, there is no formation of subjectivity “outside of the norms” of existing social structures, which of course “orchestrate” the economic and intellectual limits of “the possible.” This sounds almost exactly like what the “radical” Kennedy is saying: the “norms” of the “landscape” of the post-social left critical legal “social justice element” have “orchestrated” the “disappearance” of Marxism “altogether.” It follows that the “radical” intellectual becomes more and more “patient” and cow-like. It is now “radical” to play with the words “‘radicalism’ (that’s me).” This is cowardly

134 Butler, “What is Critique?” 135 For a revolutionary conception of the use of “patience,” see Kung Chun and Chao Hui, “Workers’ Commentary: How to Look at Intellectuals Correctly,” Peking Review, Vol. 12, No. 8 (21 Feb. 1969), p. 6: “We must be active in re-educating intellectuals, but being active does not mean being impatient. The change in the intellectuals’ world outlook is a revolution. They must undergo a long and even painful process of tempering. The obstinacy of bourgeois ideas determines that giving re-education will be an arduous job.” 136 Butler, “What is Critique?” 137 Butler, “What is Critique?” 138 Butler, “What is Critique?,” emphasis added.

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idealism within its own “context.” Given Butler’s leadership in “indistinguishability,” it is not likely that the more cow-like will be able to distinguish whether they are in a capitalistic field or whether, by sharp contrast, they are in a collectively owned and operated socialist commune such as in the socialist life of the Yangtan People’s Commune in Shanxi Province, with 2,400 families, which excluded the capitalistic orientation altogether. In the revolutionary context of the Yangtan Commune, as Fan Cheh-ju put it, the watchword was: “Go all out, aim high and get greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism. People began thinking big and doing big.”139

Ridding the Subject of … Butler’s neo-Foucaultian “indistinguishability” in existing contextuality—a “play” of “artistry from constraint” in an “aesthetic mode of self-making,”140 etc.—is ultimately hard to distinguish from Derrida’s play between text and context. In the context of Duran and Huang and Damrosch’s “belief ” in countering any “generalist” will to power through specialist knowledge, what Butler is saying is that the specialist is “virtue becom[ing] the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, … occupying that ontologically insecure position.”141 This “ontologically insecure position” is another way of saying what Duran and Huang say: “in its contexts … it in no way aspires to be comprehensive.”142 Virtuousness is the cult life—Derrida’s “so-called” life or “a life” with Deleuze—of learning to be at home (“post-social” with Kennedy) in “insecure” positions which have gone “beyond” all aspirations for comprehensivity: “in no way.” However, this very incomprehensivity is, in Butler’s theorhetoric, “one might say, … compelled … within practices that are more or less in place,” “within forms that are already more or less in operation and underway.”143 Butler’s contextuality within established “norms,” forms and practices—“specific” sites and fields— obscures the materially comprehensive logic of capital, which is grounded in the one fundamental “norm” of the economic law of the accumulation of profit for

139 Fan Cheh-ju quoted in “In Yangtan People’s Commune,” Peking Review, Vol. 9, Nos. 10–15 (4 Mar.–8 Apr. 1966, six-part series), Part I, p. 8. See also Mobo Gao, “Why Is the Battle for China’s Past Relevant to Us Today?,” Aspects of India’s Economy, Nos. 59–60 (Oct. 2014). 140 Butler, “What is Critique?” 141 Butler, “What is Critique?” 142 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. 143 Butler, “What is Critique?,” emphasis added.

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the few by the exploitation of the many. This is the real mill of world capital: in Marx’s words, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime… [B]ut with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.144

Is it a “will to power” to comprehend this? Indeed, it is: it is the “will” to class power/knowledge of (and for) the class which is made powerless and economically “insecure” within the structure of capitalism. Duran and Huang’s hopes of “in no way” becoming comprehensive are a negation of the comprehensive in the name of studying Moism “in context.” The negation of this negation is the task of red and expert internationalist cultural studies. As Lenin writes, the theoretical critique offered by revolutionary Marxism is “comprehensive” and provides the worldwide working class with “an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression.”145 By (re)writing class struggle in dialectical materialist contextuality, Marxism is the “ridding” of the subject “of the prejudices of bourgeois society”146 which are disseminated in culture as the infinitely “right.” As Marx says, these prejudices are the signs of wrong in general.

144 Marx, Capital, pp. 714–15. 145 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 23. 146 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 28.

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Part Two: Surfaces

3. In Search of the Theoretical Meaning of Leaf Reading “in Context” Mo Yan … evoke[s] a powerful sense of futility and loss. —Howard Goldblatt1 Misery is exploited consciously to procure the charitable person “the piquancy of a novel, the satisfaction of curiosity, adventure, disguise, enjoyment of his or her own excellence, violent nervous excitement,” and the like … thereby unconsciously express[ing] the mystery which was revealed long ago, that human misery itself, the infinite abjectness which is obliged to receive alms, must serve the aristocracy of money and education as a plaything to satisfy its self-love, tickle its arrogance and amuse it. —Marx and Engels2

Critical Criticism as Fearless Translation for the “Spellbound” With the exception of Janice Wickeri’s 1991 translation of Mo Yan’s Explosions and Other Stories, Howard Goldblatt has been the leading English translator of Mo’s writings, beginning with Red Sorghum in 1993. Goldblatt’s opening contribution to Mo Yan in Context, according to the anthology’s editors Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, “works to situate” Mo’s 2012 Nobel Prize win by means of a “text based” account aimed at “establishing his [Mo’s] bona fides as a master storyteller.”3 Duran and Huang place Goldblatt’s essay as the first of five essays in “Leaves,” which is the title of the first part of the book addressing “the shimmering shadow” that Mo’s storytelling has “cast as world literature and in world literature.”4 Goldblatt’s text, Duran and Huang say, also “doubles as a spirited

1 Howard Goldblatt, “A Mutually Rewarding yet Uneasy and Sometimes Fragile Relationship between Author and Translator,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 26. 2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works (Lexington, KY: First Rate Publishers, 2015), p. 733, emphasis in original. 3 Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, “Introduction to Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. A. Duran and Y. Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 9; Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 23. 4 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 5.

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defense” of Mo’s selection as being “based on the right reasons,” meaning that the author is none other than “contemporary China’s finest writer.”5 Duran and Huang’s insistence on the “method”6 of “text based” situating, however, seems rather curiously strained when contrasted with Goldblatt’s own criticism of the contemporary problem he calls “literalism” in Chinese-to-English literary translation, as he comments in a 2007 interview. The “thing that’s really killing translation in our field is literalism,”7 he says. According to Goldblatt, “[t] oo many translators are afraid of the text … They’re all afraid of the text. You need to overcome your fear of the text, put some distance between you and it” “because Chinese and English are so different.”8 This “fear of the text,” he says, arises because “young academics” working in the field of translation “can’t handle it—they believe in being literal.” Being “afraid of the text” results in translation “without any care about good writing” and thus produces “crappy reads” in English. His antidote to this problem is “reading good stuff in English” and thereby getting “a sense of what English ought to be.”9 To put it another way, the translator who can “handle it”—like Goldblatt, according to Goldblatt—should be trying to produce “good stuff ” in English. But what then is “good stuff ”? Just prior to his diagnosis of literalism and/as “fear of the text,” Goldblatt suggests that the production of “good stuff ” is linked to his belief that “the translator’s primary obligation is to the reader, not the writer.” He “think[s] that we need to produce something that can be readily accepted by an American readership.”10 Is this the discourse of a “text based” method, as Duran and Huang insist? Of course it isn’t. For Goldblatt, a “text based” approach to translation is “really killing translation” by “being literal” with the focal text, by being “afraid of the text” in the sense of giving “primary obligation” to its “literal” textuality without caring or knowing about “good writing” that can be “readily accepted” by the reader. His approach is not text-based—at least not “primarily”—but rather is reader-based: based on what he regards as his “primary obligation … to the reader,” not to the writer, and not to the literal text. Goldblatt is not “afraid” to alter the literality 5 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9. 6 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9; Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 23. 7 Howard Goldblatt in Andrea Lingenfelter, “Howard Goldblatt on How the Navy Saved His Life and Why Literary Translation Matters,” Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry, translation and the arts, Vol. 2 (Summer 2007). 8 Goldblatt in Lingenfelter, “Howard Goldblatt,” emphasis added. 9 Goldblatt in Lingenfelter, “Howard Goldblatt.” 10 Goldblatt in Lingenfelter, “Howard Goldblatt,” emphasis added.

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of texts, in other words, because his aim is the production of “good stuff,” and good stuff is what can be “readily accepted.” The “reader” here is viewed, more or less, as a consumer of literary texts, not as a critical and discerning reader who is interested not simply in reading “good stuff ” (or even “crappy reads”) but who is interested in determining why “readily accepted” narratives and discourses are readily acceptable in the first place. Although this textually fearless project seems at first like an obviously “good” idea for readers of world literature, like all bourgeois ideology, its obviousness conceals a strikingly conservative ideological agenda in reproducing “readily accepted” narratives without questioning how and why the “accepted” texts are implicated in existing social inequalites and antagonisms where “readers” live out their real lives on a daily basis—and perhaps find their real lives readily unacceptable and want to know why this is so. While Goldblatt clearly advocates breaking away from a strictly “text based” method of “literal” translation for international reading, he winds up with a vaguely (neo)canonical notion of “good stuff ” and the “ought” that looms over critical reading practices. This same vaguely evasive logic of the perpetual renewal of the world literature canon is evident in Duran and Huang’s appeal to “the popular and populist characters in Mo Yan’s fictions” within “‘the concept of world literature’” as “‘chiefly … a canon, a body of works and their presence as models of literary quality in the minds of scholars and writers’”; yet the phrase “world literature,” they assure us, “‘is not used exclusively.’”11 Why of course not! The phrase “world literature” as chiefly meaning a canon of “good stuff ” is not used exclusively, but the notion that their “presence as models” originates “in the minds” of right-minded scholars and writers is an exclusively idealist conception. It excludes the materialist and dialectical conception of “minds” with class interests in societies made up of classes. Duran and Huang write “good stuff ” like this precisely because “in the[ir] minds” they are bourgeois academic ideologists who believe and think (or perhaps at least “hallucinate”) that their own intellectual position in the global discourses of culture is “based on the right reasons”12 for all and for all to be “readily accepted” as the nonexclusive “ought” of liberal pluralist consensus. In Duran and Huang’s conception of “method,” they very broadly cover what they mean by “text based” by saying that this “means understanding the process of translation, respecting reader reception and authorial intent, and referring to

11 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9, quoting Haun Saussy; my emphasis added. 12 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9.

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the work primarily.”13 “Text based” means essentially everything. But is “understanding” itself something that is text-based? Is thinking and comprehension a purely “text based” human act? Is the world of world literature ultimately and “primarily” text-based? Are the social relations of readers “text based”? When someone purchases one of Mo’s books—hoping that it won’t be a “crappy read” but rather “good stuff ”—from the income she has been “paid back” from the capitalist enterprise that exploits her labor power five days a week, is that exchange something that is “text based”? Is “text based” really nothing more than an alibi for “really killing” the social and ideological significance of studying world literature? Goldblatt’s text becomes interesting here not just because it is “text based”— which of course it is, to some degree—but because, as he says, he is not “afraid” of pointing to his own translations of Mo’s texts as “good stuff ” that can be “readily accepted” by American readers. The readily acceptable text within capitalism, of course, is the text of the dominant ideology because its “model” provides consumer-readers with that “literary quality” for reproducing the “right reasons” for believing that, notwithstanding the crappiness of capitalism, at least it gives us the “good stuff.” The dominant ideology’s reader is the target of what Goldblatt describes as the sense of the “spellbound”14 conveyed in Mo’s writing. The question then becomes: How and why is spellbinding writing readily acceptable, in Duran and Huang’s glowing rhetoric, as a sign of Moism’s “bona fides”15 as master storytelling? In Goldblatt’s text-based narrative of Mo’s spellbinding writing, he offers the example of Mo’s novel The Republic of Wine as a “metafictional novel” of “incisive and trenchant social satire” that “packs a real wallop,” full of “wit and venom,” “explosive” with “structural inventiveness” and “surprises … in this cornucopia of comedy, ingenuity, and technical dexterity.”16 The novel’s “purpose,” he says, “dawns upon us gradually as we discover a fictional structure unlike anything we are likely to have seen before.”17 “In the end,” according to Goldblatt, this “explosive” tale is “a complex allegory” of “the Chinese character” and also “the larger issues of how we define truth, reality, imagination, and creativity.”18

13 14 15 16 17 18

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See Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 23; Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9. Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9; Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 23. Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 28. Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 28. Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 28.

As an exemplary text of this “complex allegory,” Goldblatt points to a passage in the early stages of The Republic of Wine in which the protagonist, detective Ding Gou’er, “reacts” in hallucinatory realist fashion to a banquet table scene in the home of a “local boss”19 in the mining town of Liquorland. Ding, a “hapless special investigator,” suspects the existence of a cannibalistic crime ring in which “children are being raised as food for the jaded palates of corrupt officials.”20 Mo’s witty narration of Ding’s “reaction,” in other words, provides an example of his approach to social satire focussing on “the subject” (“Chinese character”) engaged with “the larger issues” of how “we” understand the timelessly mysterious mixture of truth, reality, imagination, and creativity. This is hallucinatory realism: truth is also creativity, and imagination is also reality. The quasi-omniscient narrator tells us that detective Ding’s eyes blurred … Feelings of dread pressed down on him like a boulder, weighing heavily on his shoulders until he felt that his … skeleton could crumble at any moment. He was face-to-face with a bottomless, foul-smelling cesspool that would pull him down into its obliterating muck and keep him there forever. But … the boy gushing perfume, a tiny son … sitting amid a fairy mist the shape and color of a lotus flower, raised his hand, actually raised his hand toward me! His fingers were stubby, pudgy, meaty and so very lovely. Wrinkles on his fingers, three circular seams; the back of his hand sporting four prominent dimples. The sweet sound of his laughter wound round the fragrance hanging in the air. The lotus began to levitate, carrying the child along with it. His round little belly button, so childish and innocent, like a dimple … The cooked little boy smiled at me. You say this child is actually a famous dish … I hear them wailing in crackling woks, on chopping blocks, in oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, … and cooking liquor. They are wailing in your intestines, in the toilets, and in the sewers. They are wailing.21

This is Goldblatt’s “text based” example. How then does he propose that “we” understand the writer’s complex understanding of “the Chinese character” and “the larger issues”? He immediately follows the sample with this: “You get the idea, although the scene continues for a while, with an encyclopedic litany of accusations that keep readers spellbound.”22 Indeed, the scene does continue “for a while” in the sense that the “complex allegory” itself cannibalizes the entire tale by rewriting “continuity” (“how we define truth”) as a self-contradictory flux of discontinuous “experiences” that serve to blur and merge all distinguishability

19 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 28. 20 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 28. 21 Mo Yan, The Republic of Wine, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, 2000), p. 78; quoted in Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” pp. 28–29. 22 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29, emphasis added.

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of truth from reality, imagination, and the “creativity” of storytelling. The idea that the reader is supposed to “get” in its “readily accepted” significance of “a real wallop,” is that subjectivity, truth, reality, imagination, creativity, and so forth—in sum, all the “metaphysical” problems involving “thinking” in relation to “being”— all revolve endlessly around the interior experiences of “me” and “I”: in short, the good but “hapless” bourgeois “character” as an individually and uniquely knowingly unknowing subject who (re)discovers “fun,” as Goldblatt confesses of his own “fun as a translator,”23 in perpetually coming “face-to-face” with the world in a sustained “spellbound” state. It’s not a “crappy read” but “good stuff.” As Shelley Chan writes in her analysis of this novel’s “equally reliable (or unreliable)” storylines which merge to form “a sense of postmodern playfulness,” while the book opens in the “cliché” genre of “a detective story, in which the hero [Ding] is expected to lead the reader in discovering the truth,” it “ends up being nothing like a detective story and is antiheroic in nature.”24 “To be precise,” Chan argues, “the novel sets itself up as a detective story but gradually fails to conform to the logic of that traditional genre because it [the detective story] signifies an ultimate goal that [in Mo’s storylines] becomes more and more confusing, unclear, and meaningless.”25 Here again, this is the “model” of hallucinatory realism’s “right reasons.” Thus the playfully postmodern Moist neodetective story, “to be precise,” reforms and revises its “cliché” origins by “subversively” reinventing the very idea of investigativeness. What the neodetective subject is now expected to “get” is the ludic program—which supposedly isn’t a “cliché”—of savvy investigation in which the search for “truth” turns out to be an hallucinatory Nietzschean eternal return of “imagination” dressed up as rationality. Ding’s “eyes blurred” and “[f]eelings of dread pressed down on him like a boulder” because, although he is supposed to be an investigator, his subvertigation turns out to be an hallucinatory, sensual drift of bottomlessness that “pull[s] him down into its obliterating muck and keep[s] him there forever.” As Goldblatt says, the scene goes on “for a while.” He further suggests that the idea to “get” (the “readily accepted” text with new twists of “structural inventiveness”) is “a Joycean stream-of-consciousness” idea of flowing ideas unwound as “a physical and psychological odyssey” from beginning to end; thus, in his own

23 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29. 24 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Chap. 4. 25 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4.

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estimation—and he is no “young academic”—this is nothing less than “a tour de force of literary imagination.”26 The Moist odyssey of streaming consciousness(es) is aimed at reading as “evok[ing] a powerful sense of futility and loss,” a “case for cultural degeneration” in which the narrative “embraces contradictions.”27 The ideological point of “spellbound” readership is this “loss” of any sense of a point, hence a “powerful sense” of the pointlessness of seeking the “truth” of “reality”; and yet the futility of pointlessness is the self-contradictory empty point of the narrative’s continuation “for a while” in sustained discontinuity. The spellbound subject is called as a supportive, “fun”-reading, imaginary witness to what Mo and his “scarred generation”28 of writers—the “post-Cultural Revolution generation” after the “nation-crippling Cultural Revolution”29—consider to be, in Mo’s words, a “‘nagging sense of our species’ regression,’ … a sense of despair over a growing impotence, either natured or nurtured.”30 The futility and loss of a point to history (and a point to life itself, hence “a sense of despair”) is, as Chan points out, the gradually unfolding failure to “signif[y] an ultimate goal.”31 And thus, by sharp contrast with revolutionary socialist works such as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and The Scouts, which Chan specifically points to in this same passage of her analysis, the “expectation of heroism … fall[s] short.”32 Getting the idea of the spellbound is to “embrace contradictions” with a “fun” sense of loss, futility, and despair. Chan suggests that The Republic of Wine allies the reader with the “antiheroic in nature,” becoming “more and more confusing, unclear, and meaningless as the plot progresses.”33 When Goldblatt speaks of Moism’s grand “embrace” of contradictions in “a vibrant style that [also] embraces fantasy and surrealism,”34 for Chan this is the writer’s “ridicule [of] the irrationality and absurdity of the present,”35 and thus it is “subversive.” But this is a ridiculously irrational playing out of neosubjective solipsism as sursubversivity within the ruling logic of class contradictions.

26 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29. 27 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 26. 28 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 26. 29 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 25. 30 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 27, quoting Mo’s The Garlic Ballads. 31 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 32 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 33 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 34 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29. 35 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4.

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For Marxist materialist dialectics, to “embrace” contradictions is a purposefully purposeless strategy of getting away from grasping contradictions through investigations that use the revolutionary class viewpoint, as Marx said, to change the world through continuing the “ultimate goal” of the development of explanatory knowledge (“truth”) in the service of social transformation, in the service of ending the contradictions of classes themselves, and ending the “present” senses of despair and loss caused by alienated social relations “in their given social connection,” in the “existing conditions of life,” in the “present conditions of life.”36 Marx writes: “In reality and for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things.”37 This demands something very much other than a spellbound sense of fatalism in going along and “getting” along “for a while.” It requires the material and conceptual collective heroism of class struggle against the antiheroism of hallucinatory subjectivism. “You get the idea” that to “keep readers spellbound”38 is a class idea that is “mutually rewarding” only for the owning class and its professional ideologists. The world literature of Moism, like all untransformative world literature produced in the contradictory “given social connection” of class society, articulates not one but two lines of dialectically opposed possibilities for readers. The dominant line calls the reader to “get” the idea (not unlike “getting a job” and “settling down”) of the capitalist reader as the “readily accepted” state of “spellbound” pleasure—to “get good and drunk”39 on mystification. At the same time, however, a suppressed other line calls the critical reader—despite the author’s lurid cynicism and the translator’s authorial hostilities toward what he calls “reckless remarks,” “sophistry of otherwise rational individuals,” “verbal histrionics and intemperate remarks,” “bizarre criticisms,”40 etc.—to the possibility of becoming the socialist reader as “the communist” for whom the main and continuing question is not “accepting” what is “given” but rather “practically attacking and changing existing things.” Reading Moism, in short, from the viewpoint of proletarian reading, is a two-line struggle of and for class-consciousness at the level of texts of culture. 36 Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 157–58. 37 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 156, emphasis in original. 38 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 29. 39 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Oct. 1969 script in Peking Review, Vol. 12, Nos. 51/52 (26 Dec. 1969), p. 32. 40 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 31.

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Marxist revolutionary reading therefore becomes the “bizarre” critique, the “bizarre” investigation, the “bizarre” world outlook. It activates the refusal to “embrace” contradictions as the inevitable and endless fantasies of a seemingly “surreal” real world based on the economic cannibalism of exploitation. Instead, socialist readers learn to become braced for class struggle, as Lenin argues, by “tak[ing] part … as socialist theoreticians” who work “to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge.”41 That knowledge is turned into “[r] evolutionary wisdom”42 that makes its way “into the enemy stronghold” to “strike from within and without.”43 Two-line reading dispels the “dumbfounded”44 logic of the spellbound. Goldblatt’s Mo Yan Thought translates a fearless abandonment to the spellbound state: it leaves the reader spellbound.

Critical Criticism as Neodetective Drama, or, Hallucinatory Overacting Thomas Chen’s densely detailed contribution to the “disciplinary conversations”45 of Mo Yan in Context is itself an exemplary case of neodetective critical criticism. In his analysis of the changing texts of Mo’s novel The Garlic Ballads,46 Chen’s inquiry into “the constitution of subjectivity”47 through the “fetishism of censorship”48—or, “where editing and revising end and where censoring begins”49—moves beyond the “cliché,” as Shelley Chan suggests, of merely “discovering the truth.”50 Chen begins by asking, “what is censorship?,” pauses in the middle to ask “where does editing end and censoring begin?,” and concludes, quite truthfully in the last sentence, by asking, “[w]here does editing end and censoring begin?”51 41 V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 384, note. 42 Taking Tiger Mountain, p. 20. 43 Taking Tiger Mountain, pp. 19, 20. 44 Taking Tiger Mountain, p. 32. 45 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 8. 46 Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Viking, 1995). 47 Thomas Chen, “The Censorship of Mo Yan’s 天堂蒜薹之歌 (The Garlic Ballads),” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 38. 48 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 41, 45. 49 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 41, 42, 48. 50 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 51 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 37, 42, 48.

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But the contextualists Duran and Huang tell us that Chen’s exposition operates “on a macro-scale” which “gives insights” and doesn’t “mask the complexity.”52 Revolutionary reading, however, needs to ask about the “constitution of subjectivity” at stake in this very “complexity” of giving “insights” that effectively collapse the beginning and the end of critical inquiry in the mask of “complexity” itself as an end in itself, a kind of vaguely Zenonian (speculatively stoical) criticism written as detection for detection’s sake. Instead of “discovering the truth,” Chen’s approach to insightfulness enacts “a sense of postmodern playfulness” by becoming “the destruction of the detective-story logic,” hence (re)constructing the theater of avant-garde knowledge as a nimble, mobile spectation on signs in “more and more confusing” states of uncertainty and flux: a “collapse of the heroic” without “an[y] ultimate goal” other than, of course, “indulging in the enjoyment” of “various snares” as if one were “trapped in a conspiracy”53 of labyrinthine passages from which there is no (“true”) way out. The indulgingly playful logic of detection for detection’s sake—the critical critic’s translation of art for art’s sake—is dramatically articulated near the “end” of Chen’s searching analysis of the mysterious epigraphic quotation from Stalin—or from “words of a famous person”—as it appears in four different versions of The Garlic Ballads but is “dropped” from two other versions; and yet Mo cleverly comments in an afterword to one of the latter versions (where the Stalin quotation has been dropped) that he, in Chen’s words, “simply made up the epigraph.”54 As Mo puts it, in the hallucinatory manner, the “words were spoken by Stalin … to me alone in my dream.”55 Chen’s lead-up to this revelation mirrors the sensationally artistic dramatism of Mo’s own writerly pleasure in psychological tricks: “Imagine our shock,” says Chen, “when we read in Mo Yan’s ‘afterword’ … a complete fabrication.”56 This cultivation of surprise is replayed a little further on with, “Imagine our disbelief … when we note …”57 On another page, however, Chen flatly denies that there is any “final verdict”58 to the drama of the Stalin words, which themselves conjure up Mo’s Nietzschean taste for a joyous pessimism in the “tragedy” of “man’s fate” bound up with the

52 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 9–10. 53 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 4. 54 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40. 55 Mo quoted in Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40; Chen’s translation, my emphasis added. 56 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40. 57 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 42. 58 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41.

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writer’s “fate.”59 Being that there is no “final verdict” in the “spectrum of writing,”60 Chen the neodetective critic suddenly, in mid-paragraph, announces: “And now my interrogation has a new target.”61 But the new “target” quickly turns out to be a series of speculatively “better question[s]” oscillating around “instance[s]” of “‘the commodification of small differences’” in the “‘fetishism of censorship.’”62 Chen, of course, finds this to be an “astute” remark. Thus, he suggests dramatically in the following paragraph that the “differences” of The Garlic Ballads (referring specifically to Goldblatt’s 1995 translation in which the Stalin epigraph is “unique … but with qualifications”63) “overflow the pages themselves.”64 They “overflow the pages themselves.” No doubt this “might” be a “true” insight for “me alone in my dream.”65 The “might” of the persistently uncertain investigator approaches the level of a “cliché” in Chen’s text: we “might presume the reason”; we “might be tempted at this point”; this “line of thinking might lead us”;66 the irony of Moism “might go over the heads … might it not? It might not, but then …”67 Neodetective criticism is dramatically translated here in the “insight” of fluxually moving along to postulate “a new target,” one following after another in a renewing “shock” of “semantic loophole[s]” of “suspecting” texts “and/or” reality “and/or” truth through a “complexity” that “complicates” so that there are no “clear oppositions such as propagandistic and subversive, censored and free,” or “being subversive and being tamed.”68 This incessant movement from one verdictless target to another is what Duran and Huang have in mind when they summarize Chen’s text as one which “considers” things from “a” comparative cultural studies perspective (which perspective?) and “problematizes” the “facile binary” of “a powerless writer pitted against an all-powerful state.”69 Tellingly, however, the most intriguing “truth” underlying Chen’s considerations is the fact that this very unpowerless writer of The Garlic

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41, quoting Richard Burt. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 39. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 48. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41. Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9.

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Ballads has had his novel, in one form or another, published and republished six different times in Chinese and English, not to mention also in “Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, among other languages.”70 And yet this is supposed to be considered a “censored” work. “Might” this not be a censored work, but rather the very opposite of a censored work, a very popular and sensationalistic work indeed, which “a” poststructuralist cultural studies perspective dramatically portrays as a “censored” work in order to mystify the class politics of censorship? It is not a question of whether this “might” be the case. As Chen more and more “scrutinizes the intricacies of censorship in a global context,”71 this is a sophistically determined ideological tendency toward the occultation of class politics in which he only once permits the word “class” to appear (as “class stance”72). When he makes the un-might-y claim that the “fetishism of censorship is doubly profitable,”73 what he is actually most concerned about is not the class structure of exploitation at the founding level of capitalist relations of production; instead he is most interested in how Mo’s books are “purchased”74 by readers-asconsumers. This scrutiny around the “fetishism of censorship” involves a distinctly bourgeois “critical” tendency to move the analysis more and more away from the fetishism of commodities in the capitalist system. The fundamental level of “profitability”—the making of profit in the social order by which human labor is organized and controlled—is not the purchase of literary texts but rather the commodification of workers themselves who are systemically compelled to “sell” themselves; they are “purchased” as human units of labor power to be exploited for wages. These wages (the money that purchases labor power and covers up the systemic inequality between labor and capital) in turn may then be returned to the capitalist class through the “purchase” of other commodities. This is Marx’s dialectical materialist verdict on what “I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” and this “Fetishism of commodities has its origin,” Marx writes, “in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them,” i.e., “articles of utility becom[ing] commodities.”75 This fetishism is haunted by 70 71 72 73 74 75

Chen, “Censorship,” p. 39. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 38. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45. Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 337; see also Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political

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the dominant ideology that needs to reproduce “the enigmatical character of the product of labor”76 as “a mysterious thing … at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses… There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things,” not unlike “the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world.”77 Chen’s “fetishism of censorship” unveils “intricacies” about the “differences” in the reproduction of censoring processes. But the superordinate logic of neodetection—the flux of “new targets” without “final verdicts”—actually censors out the class analytic that Marx theorizes through the critique of the fetishism of commodities. In other words, this is a textualized aestheticization (“drama”) of “fetishism” which moves the “logic” of the “‘complicity and collaboration between censors, authors, and critics’”78 further and further away from the revolutionary Marxist critique of the dominant ideology. It is not a radical dialectical materialist critique of ideology but rather an endless sleuth of “shocking” dramatizations in “disbelief ” about what “[w]e might be tempted”79 to speculate if “we” critical critics scrutinize the “intricacies of censorship” in six versions of a literary work as “the censorship game”80 played out in a spellbinding “dramatization of censorship.”81 This mode of scrutiny possesses the charismatically elusive charm, as Marx says, of “the enigmatical character” as a critical critic of enigmatic texts. Traversing one target and then another, the writer as enigmatician dons a “mystical veil” at the very same time that he “lay[s] special claim to critical acumen.”82 The neodetective critical critic, rapturously caught up in the dramatization of censorship, is play-acting in his own readers’ theater with his “set of books”83 in order to perform scrutiny in a sustained state of shock. For Marx, the “unmistakable letters” under his analysis “belong to a state of society” in which “the process of production”—including the production of censorship itself—“has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him.”84 Therefore, as Chen puts it,

Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), pp. 76–87. 76 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 336. 77 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 337. 78 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45, quoting Richard Burt. 79 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 39. 80 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45. 81 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 42–43, 45–46. 82 Marx, Capital, pp. 84, 87. 83 Marx, Capital, p. 81. 84 Marx, Capital, p. 85.

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“[c]riticism itself also becomes suspect.”85 Indeed, for Marx as well, “criticism” becomes suspect. But with Marx it becomes suspect from the materialist theoretical standpoint of the oppositional critique of class, and Chen has precisely nothing to say about this kind of suspecting which is not “a” cultural studies perspective but Marxist ideology critique. Critical criticism for Chen becomes, in Marx’s “unmistakable letters,” the eternal, stoical suspecting of the “cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments.”86 In its dominant line of persistent “complexity,” “complication,” “interrogation” and “problematization,”87 Chen’s text spellbinds the reader of Moist narratives. His (neo)investigative pursuit points out over and over again how, as he puts it, “we are struck”88 by “Mo Yan himself [as] a player and sometimes also a playwright of the drama of censorship.”89 The author of The Garlic Ballads offers “thinly veiled fiction” which articulates, according to Chen, a “counterarchive” written “against all odds of censorship.”90 Chen more or less agrees with professor Chan: Mo Yan Thought is “subversive,” and the critical critic “complicates the opposition between being subversive and being tamed.”91 The subversive is always being tamed, yet the tamed is also always being subversive. Tame subversivism and subversive tameness are “complex” dramas of oddities “against all odds.” And so, for example, a textual “ellipsis points to his suffering of elision,”92 says Chen. To be sure, the “suffering of elision” by way of Mo’s unmistakable letters is a new form of high drama in dramatic critical criticism. What is the historical and social foundation of this “suffering of elision”? Is an ellipsis (…) supposed to be “subversive”? What Chen’s ludicrously serious “criticism” of Mo Yan Thought “points to” here is its own dramatic bourgeois ideology of libertine textualism “against all odds.” Its superficial “complexity” articulates what Marx calls the “society in abstracto”93—devoid of class-consciousness and yet “oddly” at the same time reflecting “bourgeois relations, in an underhand

85 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. 86 Marx, Capital, p. 83. 87 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 41, 43. 88 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 40, emphasis added. 89 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 46, emphasis added. 90 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 46, 47. 91 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 41, emphasis added. 92 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45, emphasis added. 93 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 307; see also Marx, Grundrisse: Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, NY: Penguin, Kindle edition, 2011), Notebook M, Section 1.

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way”94—presented as “the fiction [semblance] and only [merely] the aesthetic fiction of the small and great Robinsonades,” or, to use Marx’s more “dramatically” polemical wording, “insipid illusions.”95 What is now left to be considered is not a “new target” but the same target which is the “force of abstraction”96 that Duran and Huang vaguely refer to as “a” cultural studies perspective working on “a macro-scale”97 in Chen’s text. The question, in other words, as I suggested earlier, is what kind of cultural studies perspective, what kind of macro-scale, what kind of “theory,” i.e., “force of abstraction”? Carrying on the tradition of Nietzsche as expounded in “left” postmodern thinking, Chen is interested in “Power.”98 He says, not in a “might” sort of way (e.g., “[w]e can answer yes or no or maybe”99), but rather with an air of certainty: “Studies in censorship in contemporary Chinese literature would do well to heed Judith Butler’s call that ‘descriptions of censorship presuppose a more general theory of the subject of power.’”100 And in the following paragraph, Chen declares: “We need to extend our dissection of censorship beyond a Foucauldian analytics of the anatomy of power.”101 Butler, in other words, offers Chen the call for going “beyond” Foucault; or so it seems, since we are not advised to move “beyond” Butler’s perspective but, on the contrary, to “heed” it. If one heeds Butler’s truth of the revelation that all descriptions presuppose “a more general theory,” does this mean that it’s good to have, and know that one has, a more “general theory”? Does one “do well” with a more general theory, or rather, in heeding Butler’s savvy sense of performativity, does one “do well” merely by speculatively knowing that “general theory” inevitably shadows the critic’s descriptions of subjects of power? What is neodetective critic Chen’s point? Does the critical critic “do well,” in other words, by becoming ever-more paradoxically self-aware? Aside from these ostensibly definite declarations as to how one would “do well” and what “we need” for our tasks of “dissection,” Chen writes nothing more about Butler or Foucault’s theories. But is Butler’s “call” a “theory”? It is intriguing to note here the wavering persistence of Chen’s neodetective movements in the very same instance that he proclaims the perspectives of Butler and Foucault. Butler 94 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 307 (“quietly smuggled in”). 95 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 303 (“unimaginative conceits”). 96 Marx, Capital, p. 19. 97 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 9. 98 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. 99 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 46. 100 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44, quoting Butler. 101 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44.

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herself, for example, in the context of pointing out how “a Foucaultian perspective might argue,” has indicated the “skeptical” and “paradoxical” character of her thinking (perspective) by saying, “I do not understand the notion of ‘theory,’ and [I] am hardly interested in being cast as its defender.”102 Yet Chen does cast the Butlerian subject of knowledge in this role. He admonishes us—in a strikingly un-neodetective turn—that we would “do well to heed” her call. Chen’s position is suddenly not so paradoxical; instead, he issues carefully worded warnings while at the same time clouding up the role of “a more general theory.” Butler’s paradoxicalizing perspective is itself an authoritatively safe haven for the indeterminacies of neodetective criticism. As Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argue in their theorizing critiques of ludic postmodern discourses, Butler’s performative, quasi-“theory” dramas of “‘[n]ot knowing’ ha[ve] become the mark of genuine ‘knowing’” because the discourse of “theory” has itself been marked—censored out—with the sins of “elitism,” “utopianism,” and the “totalizing” of thinking that threatens “totalitarianism.”103 Butler herself is so paradoxically skeptical of “theory”—by which she quite clearly means revolutionary Marxist thought in the vanguard that Lenin called “militant materialism” in the aftermath of postmodernism’s “quest of fashionable reactionary philosophical doctrines” which subtly articulate the “philosophical prejudices of so-called educated society”104—that she names it (without naming any names) an “untimely resurgence,” an “embracing [of] an anachronistic materialism,” a “theoretical anachronism” (says someone who does “not understand the notion of ‘theory’”), a “new and eerie political formation of neo-conservative Marxisms,” and a “new rhetorics of unity” that she opposes in the name of “resistance to ‘unity’” as the “affiliation with poststructuralism” carrying the “cipher of democratic promise.”105 Butler’s “affiliation” is the “call” that Chen himself heeds and in fact performs in his exuberantly stylized twists and turns. Chen “ciphers” as follows: “We can understand Mo Yan’s caution … and we might presume the reason”; “[w]e might be tempted”; “thinking might lead us”; “[b]ut some of us, certainly, would argue”; 102 Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), p. 14, emphasis added. 103 See Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. 139, 134–49. 104 V.I. Lenin, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 228. 105 Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text, Vol.  52/53 (Autumn-Winter 1997), pp. 268, 276–77.

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“there will be others, surely, who cast their vote”; “we are struck by a quotation”; “we lament”; “our shock”; “[p]erhaps we will then begin to consider explanations”; “our disbelief ”; “[c]ould we then deduce”; “[c]ould we surmise”; “[b]ut then we wonder why”; “[b]ut surely Goldblatt is not a censor”; “[o]n the other hand, are we ready”; “[y]es, some would argue”; “what can we say about the Power”; “[w]e might then suppose”; “[c]ould we say”; “[w]e can answer yes or no or maybe, but,”106 and so on. Chen’s textualist carnival of “[t]he more one scrutinizes”107 rearticulates Butler’s paradoxistic ciphering of what she calls Foucault’s “effort to reconceive Nietzsche’s doctrine of internalization” whereby, for Foucault—although she also criticizes his “critical power” as “severely undermined” by his “metaphysical commitments”108—the “figure of the interior soul” is “inscribed” as “the illusion of an ineffable depth,” a “play of surface significations” that “perpetually conceals itself as such” and is “as such” a “signifying practice” which is “itself … a signifying lack.”109 Following Butler, Chen aims to move “beyond” Foucault’s “critical power” by maintaining a paradoxistic “depth” that cleanses itself of “metaphysical commitments” so that, as Butler says, there are “no magical or ontotheological origins, structuralist distinctions … subversive or otherwise.”110 The more Butler scrutinizes Foucault’s narratives of “drama,”111 the more Foucault’s analytic of power resembles Derrida’s drama (a scrutiny of logocentric metaphysics) and Lacan’s drama (a scrutiny of desire in the Symbolic). Butler’s tale of scrutiny, however, plays out its own drama “as such.” The “metaphysical commitments” she criticizes in Foucault’s Nietzscheanism—namely, the theory of “subjection” as simultaneously “specific in its modalities” but also the “essential and transhistorical precondition of ‘history’ writ large”112—return to haunt Butler’s scrutiny because the elimination (censoring out) of “metaphysical commitments” leaves her “theory” with only a perpetual drama of “signifying lack.” This is no less “metaphysical” than Foucault’s commitments: it merely reinstalls a more covert “metaphysics” that resists all metaphysics in the name of anti-metaphysics. A commitment to anti-metaphysics—as in Derrida’s play in textualities 106 Chen, “Censorship,” pp. 39–44, 46. 107 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 45. 108 Judith Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 86, No. 11 (Nov. 1989), p. 606. 109 Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” pp. 605–06. 110 Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” p. 607. 111 Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” pp. 603, 606. 112 Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” p. 606.

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and Lacan’s hypnotic symbolizations of desire—is still a metaphysics, only an emptying one which is neither “subversive or otherwise.”113 To move “beyond” Foucault by scrutinizing the paradox of his so-called “metaphysical commitments” is a paradoxistic bourgeois ideological alibi for dismantling Foucault’s Nietzschean explanatory apparatus which itself “lacks” class analysis and diverts all scrutinies to “power” devoid of class structure. By contrast, the “metaphysical commitments” of militant materialism (Lenin’s commitments) are the analytics of the dialectics of class struggle: it is a theory to guide the practice of social revolution to abolish classes. Any theory without a set of “metaphysical commitments” is an empty theory, an anti-theory theory, a “theory” for theory’s sake that merely leads the “subject” of speculation back to its own stoical meanderings, neither “subversive or otherwise” but aloof in discursiveidealist interpretationalism. The “metaphysics” of revolutionary Marxism is: “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice,” and this is not “a purely scholastic question.”114 What is “eerie” about Butler and Chen “beyond” Foucault is precisely the scholastic character of their modes of scrutiny. What is eerie is the clever mannerisms of drama through which their sleuthing texts become new articulations of what Chen himself calls “stodgy educators”115 in the service of bourgeois “democracy” with “left” conceit. What is eerie in the epoch of “global” capitalist social relations based on the “metaphysics” of exploitation is how they fail to notice that the point is not “merely to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact” but that “for the real communist it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.”116 But Chen cannot expound the viewpoint of a “real communist” in the Marxist sense. His heeding of Butler demands that the critical critic of the subject of power must abandon this “real” as an “as such”—in other words, a “metaphysical commitment” toward, as Marx puts it, “a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.” It is necessary to point out here, from the “real communist” standpoint of revolutionary practice, that in order to develop among working class readers the real question—the real necessity and possibility—of the real overthrowing of the existing state of things, these readers must have “a more general theory” that teaches them the scientific socialist viewpoint of the knowability 113 114 115 116

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Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” p. 607. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 153. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 155.

and the ruthless truth of the existing state of things “as such,” as an objective reality of materially existing and developing relationships in the world, not in the playfully hallucinatory “dreams” of Moist fantasy-stories. However, the teachings of “real communist” knowledge, as Marx put it, themselves exist and develop in a sustained state of contradiction, antagonism, and protracted struggle with the prevailing and “popular” teachings of the class that exercises its own class interest in dominating throughout the realm of “culture,” knowledge, art, and “ideological” discourses in general which constantly evolve “new” modes of censoring out Marxism “as such.” Marxism “as such” is censored out because this knowledge is the real negation of the negation of the proletariat as the collective “subject” of revolution to end the “subjection” of exploitation. This contradiction and class struggle in the field of knowledge production, for example, is reflected in Engels’ observation that, “[w]ithout German philosophy”—especially Hegel and “the other Hegelians”—“scientific socialism would never have come into being.”117 Further, as the editors and translators of Lenin’s Collected Works note, during the late 1890s Lenin himself “was compelled for censorship reasons to substitute the term ‘modern theory’ for ‘Marx’s theory’ and ‘the well-known German economist’ for ‘Marx,’ ‘realist’ for ‘Marxist’ [and] the word ‘paper’ for Capital, and so on,” in order that his writings could still reach out to the working people through the “legal Marxist”118 press. The truth remains, however, that Lenin’s text—written in exile—still clearly commands and expounds the real communist class perspective even when “compelled” under the sway of censorship. In his obituary for Engels in 1895, Lenin writes that “Marx and Engels constantly taught” that “‘The emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself.’”119 “But,” he immediately points out, “in order to fight for its economic emancipation, the proletariat must win itself certain political rights.”120 Namely, for example, the political right to become rigorously knowledgeable in the theoretical realm of the teachings of revolutionary Marxism itself, “as such”—the “real communist” materialist dialectics of consciousness. It is glaringly clear here that Lenin, Marx, and Engels do not cordon off the question of the “political” (“power,” “force”) and the so-called “subject of power” (“subjection,” 117 Frederick Engels quoted in V.I. Lenin, “Frederick Engels,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 21, note. 118 See V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 547– 48, note 44. 119 Lenin, “Frederick Engels,” p. 27, quoting Marx and Engels. 120 Lenin, “Frederick Engels,” p. 27, emphasis in original.

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“subjugation”) from the ultimate and fundamental question of economic struggle and the “overthrowing” of the existing state of things. Marxism teaches, as Lenin further suggests, that proletarian theoreticians, readers, and writers must necessarily become deeply “suspicious” of any discourse that enacts, in one way or another, a “betrayal of the great cause of social revolution,”121 for example, by romantically attempting to disconnect “power” and the “subject” from their roots in the system of economic relations that must be “overthrown.” Indeed, on the question of learning to become “suspicious” from the class viewpoint of real communism, how do we know what Chen the critic is “really” saying with his words unless we read what he is saying with “a more general theory”? Is he not saying things “as such” in order to blaze the trail in search of the subject of power of censorship? Chen’s “real” calling to Butlerian counter-“as such”-ism is given in this “more general theory”: Our subjectivities are constituted not prior to power (including censorious power) but through power. There is no preformed subject in which censorship intervenes from the outside.122

How does Chen the neodetective know these things with such generality and certainty, and yet, heeding Butler, manages to escape the sin of “metaphysical commitments”? All subjectivities, all subject positions, all subjects, are “[o]ur subjectivities.” Is this not “true” for Chen? Is this not what he says? All subject positions are formed “through” power. This “through” is an uncensored, dramatic incarnation of what Lenin calls a “haze” of truth: “A haze is a particularly suitable atmosphere in which to don all sorts of disguises.”123 But what kind of “power”? Political power, ideological power, economic power, class power? What kind of “power” does the “subject” exist and operate “through”? Labor power, managerial power, or the power of ownership—for example, the power of ownership of economically sustainable (i.e., profitable) printing presses? How is there no so-called “preformed subject”? How would one prove this, one way or the other? If there is no so-called preformed subject, how does the critical critic of the subject of power ever arrive at the certain conclusion that there is no so-called preformed subject?

121 Lenin, “Frederick Engels,” p. 27. 122 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44, emphasis added. 123 V.I. Lenin, A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism (Sismondi and Our Native Sismondists), in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 213, note.

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These are, of course, in Butler’s own paradoxical criticism of Foucault, calls toward “metaphysical commitments.” The “outside” of Chen’s Butlerian critical criticism is a theory of class relations and antagonisms—in a word, class power relations of subjects—which have been censored out of his general theorizing. We, with our Marxist subjectivities that develop historically and socially through interventions in the hazing rituals of the dominant class knowledges, can only come to recognize and know this by learning to be deeply “suspicious” from the proletarian point of view, from that definite subject position of consciousness and power taught in the writings of Marxism. This is why Lenin concludes his text on Engels by calling on his readers in this way: “Let us always honour the memory of Frederick Engels, a great fighter and teacher of the proletariat!”124 One becomes suspicious in reading Chen, among numerous other reasons, because we know that he has nothing to say about the teachings of Marxism and instead enjoins his readers—all of “our subjectivities”—that the way to “do well” in the study of censorship is to heed the call of Butler and, moreover, get “beyond” Foucault “[i]n the age of transnational capitalism” where, he prates, “suppressed speech has much currency in the global economy.”125 How true and truly suspicious this is. For while Chen proclaims his “left” enmity toward capitalism, Butler and Foucault provide the discourse of “power” and the “subject” to effectively suppress the real communism of Marxist “speech.” What exactly do we come to understand of class subjectivity from Chen’s neodetective speech in the age of transnational capitalism? He chooses to point to Mo’s speech concerning “class stance.”126 Here is the only instance in which “class”—in the age of transnational capitalism—makes its appearance, in a haze: He [Mo] stated that he is against censorship in general while acknowledging that no conditions of total freedom or total censorship are possible because the relationship between censorship and the practice of literature is a complicated one mediated by the extent to which [!] the writer is “free inside” … to overcome one’s own political and class stance.127

How complicated “as such” and to what an “extent”! But we are assured that Chen solemnly swears against transnational capitalism, that he enjoys lampooning liberalism and “stodgy educators,” and so forth. Let us turn in conclusion to Lenin’s Marxist speech on the class politics (“power”) of censorship and the complicated,

124 125 126 127

Lenin, “Frederick Engels,” p. 27. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 38. Chen, “Censorship,” p. 38, quoting Mo; Chen’s translation, my emphasis added.

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mediated system of transnational capitalism about which Mo, as Chen tells us, “acknowledges” that no conditions of “total freedom” are possible owing to this strange “extent” to which “the writer” (all writers, no doubt) may or may not be “free inside.” It is in this “extent”—not unlike the “through”-ness of the subject of power—that “the writer” may or may not (“might”) find himself at any particular moment “free inside” to overcome his own political and class stance; but Chen has also declared that “the writer”—in the character of “our subjectivities”—is also not “preformed.” Whatever Chen may be saying so complicatedly about Mo Yan Thought, in any case, with Lenin we may very well come to know to what great and greatly suspicious “extent” Chen censors out the real communist theoretical teaching which alone—“as such”—provides “our subjectivities” with the revolutionary class stance for overthrowing the bourgeois (un)freedom of transnational capitalism. Chen’s obscurely complicated mediation of Moism’s “original” obscurity is merely an apologia for denying and diverting “our subjectivities” more and more away from the transformative “total freedom” of what Engels calls the political economy of “socialist critique.”128 “This critique proves,” says Engels, in sharp contrast to the Butlerian paradox of Foucaultian “ineffable depth” which is ineffably performed in Chen’s pointlessly stodgy drama of neodetectivity, “that the capitalist forms of production and exchange become more and more an intolerable fetter on production itself, that the mode of distribution”—of texts and narratives of “knowledge” of reality itself, for example—“necessarily determined by these forms has produced a class position which is daily becoming more intolerable—the antagonism, sharpening from day to day, between capitalists, constantly decreasing in number but constantly growing richer, and propertyless wage workers, whose number is constantly increasing and whose conditions taken as a whole, are steadily deteriorating; and finally, that the colossal productive forces developed within the capitalist system of production, which the latter can no longer master, are only waiting to be taken possession of by a society organised for co-operative working on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society the means of existence and the full development of their capacities, and indeed in constantly increasing measure.129

Chen’s “call” to a subject of power of censorship “beyond” Foucault merely resituates his drama on the same (ur)intellectual plane as Herr Dühring’s “bad socialist

128 Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972), p. 167. 129 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 167, emphasis added.

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translation”130 of “force” as the determining site of “power.” He now tells us, on behalf of Mo Yan Thought, à la the heeding of Butler, that power/force works “through” our subjectivities, and thus our subjectivities are not “preformed” by any “outside” structure of power/force. Chen writes through Dühring while dramatically believing that we would “do well” by merely following Butler, and this itself is merely because his Marxist knowledge “as such” has been systematically censored out. In effect, therefore, the subject of his ineffable discourse avoids being “preformed” by Marxist socialist critique. As with Dühring’s “force” theory, Chen’s Butlerian Moist post-Foucaultian power theory does not know, as Engels says, what “[e]very socialist worker, no matter of what nationality, knows quite well”—namely, “as such,” that “force [i.e., power] only protects exploitation, but does not cause it; that the relation between capital and wage labour is the basis of his [the worker’s] exploitation, and that this [relation of class antagonism] arose through purely economic causes and not at all by means of force.”131 Chen’s un“preformed” subject position is a “parsons’ mode of thought—lifeless, insipid and impotent,”132 in other words, stodgy beyond stodgy. Now for Lenin’s speech. Unfortunately for Chen’s theory of our subjectivities, Lenin’s “modern theory” is “preformed” by the knowledge of Marxism. The reader may judge for herself—provided she is “free inside” to do so!—whether this speech is “complicated” or not, or to what “extent.” In the course of expounding his twenty-two theses concerning bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat on March 4, 1919, at the First Congress of the Communist International held in Moscow, Lenin addresses the problem of class society and revolution in connection with so-called “freedom of the press.” This is, of course, somewhat “complicated” in the present context to the “extent” that Lenin never uses the word “censorship.” Lenin does not speak explicitly of the power of censorship (nor the “subject” of censorious power) because, given the theoretical framework of Marxism through which he speaks, censorship “as such” is merely the concrete, definite practice of class power exercised throughout the sphere of “freedom of the press,” that is, what may or may not be said or written, published, distributed, taught, made “popular” or “unpopular,” and so on.133 Is this so 130 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 169. 131 Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp. 169, 176–203. 132 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 203. 133 See “Economic Censorship,” in the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism (Massline. org, 2014): the “censorship of political ideas through economic means,” which is “the dominant method of political censorship in most countries in contemporary capitalist society”; “[it] is the genius of bourgeois democracy that the ruling class is

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complicated? … Here is what Lenin says in one of the most brilliantly lucid and bold expositions on the “freedom” of speech/writing to be found in the history of revolutionary Marxist writings: “Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy.” And here, too, the workers know—and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times— that this freedom is a deception while the best printing-presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example. The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed. The capitalists have always used the term “freedom” to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of “pure democracy” prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the

able to almost entirely prevent revolutionary ideas from reaching the great majority of the working class and masses … not through making the expression of such ideas illegal or through overt forceful suppression and arrests, but rather through the simple means of owning almost all the media and means of communication.” See also Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Getting Class Out of Culture,” in Ebert and Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), pp. 3–46. Contrast this conception with Chen’s discussion of the “traditional definition of censorship,” which appears on the same page where he suggests, in (post) Foucaultian form, that “we have trouble describing Power within some center”; thus he asks, “what can we say about the Power to censor and about censorship?” (Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44). For Marx’s early critiques of censorship, see “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” (1842): “The censor … is accuser, defender and judge in a single person; control of the mind is entrusted to the censor; he is irresponsible.” “The real, radical cure for the censorship would be its abolition.” See also Marx, “Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel” (1843): “Anyone who often has to hear directly the ruthless voice of want among the surrounding population easily loses the aesthetic tact by which his thoughts can be expressed in the most elegant and modest images.” “The free press … brings the people’s need in its real shape, not refracted through any bureaucratic medium, to the steps of the throne.” This latter article concerns the “distressed state” of the vine-growers (of grapes) of the Mosel wine region, whereas Mo’s Garlic Ballads concerns garlic growers.

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press from capitalist enslavement. Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the Communists are building, and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any workingman (or groups of workingmen, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing-presses and public stocks of paper.134

Complicated? … A better way of putting it would be to say that this is a rigorously dialectical materialist exposition on the “freedom” of writing, or, a “modern theory” or a “socialist critique” of the “freedom” of writing. It reflects the extent of Lenin’s powerful extension of Marxist theory to the question of the class politics of censorship in “the age of transnational capitalism … in the global economy.”135 Chen’s drama of neodetective work does not “do well” with it at all. Instead, he does quite well indeed at avoiding it. And why does he avoid it so well? Because it is merely the truth, and the truth in the age of transnational capitalism always involves a “class stand.” In any event, professor Chen must be praised for his ineffably “metaphysical commitment” to Mo Yan Thought as “free inside” for overacting, which merely leaves the subject of hallucinatory criticism in a drama about drama.

Critical Criticism as “Breadth” Noriko Horiguchi makes no explicit reference to the poststructuralist theories of Judith Butler, as in Chen’s fleeting declaration to “heed” Butler’s “subject of power” as “constituted not prior to power … but through power.”136 Nonetheless, Horiguchi’s analytic of subject position also is underwritten by Butler’s “more general theory,”137 as Chen puts it. For Horiguchi, this is the theory of the “body” as a performative site of “paradoxically” fluid and “floating”138 movements of desire unconstrained by or “lacking” “metaphysical commitments.”139 As Duran and 134 V.I. Lenin, First Congress of the Communist International, March 2–6, 1919, in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 460–61, emphasis added. 135 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. 136 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44. 137 Chen, “Censorship,” p. 44, quoting Butler. 138 Noriko J. Horiguchi, “Representations of ‘China’ and ‘Japan’ in Mo Yan’s, Hayashi’s, and Naruse’s Texts,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), pp. 51, 55, 56–58; see also Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 10. 139 Butler, “Foucault and the Paradox,” p. 606.

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Huang suggest, “Horiguchi demonstrates the paradox of the stories of individuals who construct subjectivities and simultaneously resist and recreate perspectives of empire and its doings.”140 In Horiguchi’s book Women Adrift, she heeds the call of Butler, pointing out that in her analyses, “the body … is defined as discourse … as a boundary and surface of inscription,” thus “concur[ring] with Judith Butler, who contends that ‘the body is not a “being”’”—a “metaphysical” essence or determined human entity that would limit the motions of “drift”—“‘but a variable boundary and surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field.’”141 This paradoxical driftiness of the literary “body in motion”142 is eventually recoded in Horiguchi’s argument as “breadth,” which her mode of reading aims to “appreciate” more deeply and “consider … more sensitively.”143 “There is a danger,” she cautions near the end of her essay—for those “who live today”—a “danger with art whether textual or cinematic to focalize uncritically rather than to acknowledge the breadth that artists like Mo Yan and [Fumiko] Hayashi possess and signal in their works.”144 Let us consider more carefully how—and ideologically, why—Horiguchi’s critical focalizations position us for “dealing with”145 the “doings,” as Duran and Huang put it, of subjects of “empire.” Horiguchi is the only writer in Mo Yan in Context who makes any attempt at all at dealing with Shelley Chan’s work, A Subversive Voice in China, which of course theorizes Mo’s writings as playfully postmodern and “subversive” of Maoist “discourse” as well as developing a post-Lu Xunian standpoint. Interestingly in fact, Duran and Huang invoke “breadth” as a vague means of distinguishing their anthology from Chan’s “thematic study.”146 Their collection is “distinct” from Chan’s work, they say, due to their “degree of interdisciplinarity,” which “ensur[es] that (specialist) depth is brought to bear on its cultural and critical breadth.”147 In any case, Horiguchi’s aspiration for “the breadth” of Moist narratives finds Chan to possess enough “depth” to point out that

140 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 10, emphasis added. 141 Noriko J. Horiguchi, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xv, quoting Butler. 142 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 57. 143 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. 144 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 60, emphasis added. 145 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. 146 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6, quoting Chan. 147 Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” p. 6, emphasis added.

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Mo Yan focuses on “minor figures” who wander through [recall Chen’s subject “through” power] at the bottom and periphery of society. These characters appear to challenge political orthodoxy and free themselves from “ideological dogma within a highly politicized grand narrative.”148

This is just about all Horiguchi has to say about Chan’s book, except for going on to assert that “yet”—that is, paradoxically—despite the way Mo’s wandering characters “appear” to “free themselves” from ideological dogma and grand narratives, Mo also writes “political allegory” by articulating “historical dialogues” of “reconstruct[ed] memory in highly imaginative ways.”149 These insights are at least in part derived from Horiguchi’s reading of Chan’s “breadth” of constructing Mo as “subversive” in “mov[ing] beyond the ultimate principle in the Chinese literary tradition that literature is a vehicle to convey moral truth or wen yi zaidao,” thereby (re)constructing the writer “in some cases,” says Chan, as “free from any practical function” and “serv[ing] the sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing” that “no reader of contemporary Chinese literature can ignore or afford to miss.”150 However, while writing in this “free” spirit and “sole purpose” for the individualist subject’s pleasure, Chan insists in this same paragraph at the end of her book that Mo “willingly turns his works into more direct political critique,” “fascinating,” “achiev[ing] great artistic success” with a “critical edge even more incisive.”151 For Horiguchi, perhaps, this is “the breadth”: on the one hand, the great writer as “free” from traditional principles, and therefore beyond any construction of moral truth—“free” only for the fulfillment of his own little petty-bourgeois writer’s pleasures, which is not a construction of “moral truth,” despite “great artistic success”; on the other hand, the amoral, socially self-withdrawing pleasurist is also and at the same time “free” to construct “more direct political critique” on a “critical edge,” but this is also not a construction of “moral truth,” even though it is “even more incisive.” The breadth, in other words, is a contradiction, yet this is not a concept in Horiguchi’s own focally critical breadth: instead, “paradox.” For Chan, following David Der-wei Wang’s commentary on Moist “historical space,” breadth is given to readers as the “kaleidoscopic” serialism of changing beautiful forms (kalos-eidos) that “‘locate concrete people, events, and places into a flowing kaleidoscopic historical coordinate … the fruits of his historical

148 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 52, quoting Chan; my emphasis added. 149 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 52. 150 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion, emphasis added. 151 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion.

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imagination’”—or in Chan’s words, with Mo “the idea of history is to be treated in a broad sense.”152 These slightly differing expressions of valorizing “the breadth” that Horiguchi claims as “possessed” and “signalled” by Moism are remarkably similar to what Engels called the “bouquet of glorifications of Herr Dühring by Herr Dühring”: “the historical works [of Dühring] are … notable for ‘my historical treatment in the grand style’” with “‘creative changes’” and “a ‘new mode of thought’” that finds “‘its strength in concentrated initiative’—whatever that may mean.”153 In Engels’ chapter on Dühring’s philosophically “new” thought of time and space, he reads Dühring’s “grand style” as the undialectical and unmaterialist ideological mask of a “helpless wandering and confusion ‘in the dark’”154 where “we have perpetually gone deeper and deeper into ever sharper nonsense.”155 Horiguchi wants to enable us to recognize and understand “more sensitively” and “gain a deeper appreciation” of the representation of wandering subjects and “the politics of ” these subject positions as “intervention and negotiation” through “texts [that] reconstruct the memory of the victimization of women.”156 The Japanese author Fumiko Hayashi and her literary characters “belong to the generation of Mo Yan’s grandmother,”157 says Horiguchi. Like her characters, Hayashi the writer and artist “participated in the discourse that both resisted and reproduced the Japanese empire,” and thus her narratives are stories of women who “move through, occupy, and re-create political spaces in the context of Japan’s imperial competition with the West.”158 Horiguchi’s reading stresses “discourse,” not “ideology,” and therefore not the critique of ideology; and yet she also recognizes that Japan’s “imperial competition” and “empire,” as she puts it, “encompassed” China “into a modern capitalist system.”159 Her reading revolves around the “realization” that a woman “can be an aggressor while also being a victim of the same system”: while “they live at the economic margin of society,” these subjects of movement and paradox also “participate in the state’s central discourse.”160

152 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro., quoting David Der-wei Wang; my emphasis added. 153 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 35, quoting Dühring. 154 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 64, emphasis added. 155 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 63, emphasis added. 156 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. 157 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53. 158 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53, emphasis added. 159 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53. 160 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53, emphasis added.

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This mode of realization as sensitive and appreciative reading is an exemplary variety of bourgeois intellectual critical criticism within the parameters of so-called “post-poststructuralist”161 theory and analytics which finds itself—and the reading subject position that it privileges and institutionalizes as the “critical edge”—wandering in-between the idealism of “discourse” and the materialist dialectics of Marxist ideology critique. In this movement is reflected, as Engels puts it, “a shamefaced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism while publicly denying it.”162 One ends up, more than anything else, wondering just what kind of “critical edge” is being offered and what kind of conclusions for practice are being proposed, if any. Horiguchi’s “more sensitive” reading for “deeper appreciation” and “perhaps better tools for dealing with the continuing battles”163 obscures the fact that her theory is “exhausted” and emptied of “any historical foundation upon which to base effective political praxis,”164 as Jennifer Cotter argues concerning the broader context of culturalist feminist discourses in their poststructuralist and postpoststructuralist articulations. Horiguchi’s analyses (as in Thomas Chen’s endless rhetoric) are characterized by a “moving on”165 that always finds a “new ‘new’” position dispersed in a “collage of locations.”166 But the “new ‘new’” always avoids “emancipation and revolution,”167 not to mention the question of building proletarian “party” organizations (e.g., Bolshevism). Again as Engels argues, the subject of critical criticism moves perpetually deeper into sharper-minded appreciation of indeterminacy, which is a deeper sensitivity toward “nonsense.” This bourgeoisscholastic sensitivity mystifies “a modern capitalist system,” to use Horiguchi’s phrase, in which the overwhelming majority of “subjects” are not “marginal”—nor 161 See Susan Lurie, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Carla Kaplan, Tania Modleski, and Hortense Spillers, “Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 679–707. 162 Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, forewords and notes by Georgi Plekhanov (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), pp. 19, 85 (“agnosticism is merely shamefaced materialism”); see also V.I. Lenin, “Vacillating Tactics,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 179–83; and Lenin, “Wavering Above, Determination Below,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 17–19. 163 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61, emphasis added. 164 Jennifer Cotter, “Making Feminism Matter Again,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, Dept. of English (Pittsburgh, PA, 2007), p. 8. 165 Misha Kavka quoted in Cotter, “Making Feminism Matter,” p. 8. 166 Cotter, “Making Feminism Matter,” p. 9, quoting Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. 167 Cotter, “Making Feminism Matter,” p. 9.

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are their “bodies” merely discourses, although of course there are idealist ideological discourses (like Horiguchi’s “concurrence” with Butler) that tell readers very straightforwardly that bodies should be “defined as discourse”—but are central and necessary for the systemic exploitation that enriches a small minority which, in turn, “demands reaction of its professors”168 and realizes it in the form of “mock erudition and sage jargon”169 on “marginal” “bodies” as “discourses.” In other words, Horiguchi’s discourse of the wandering, marginal, moving subject of “a modern capitalist system” is itself a mildly moving study in futile wandering and wondering criticism. It is a writing about writing (discourse) about bodies and places and settings as discourses in what Marx regarded as “speculative” and “contemplative” critical criticism, as opposed to and in denial of the “relentless criticism of all existing conditions.”170 This ruthless critique of existing bodies in existing real social relations in existing social conditions, which are reflected by real bodies with consciousness and discourses, is the hallmark of the distinctly unwandering and unwondering mode of critique in revolutionary Marxism. This dialectical materialist perspective is produced as the continuing struggle-writing in the discourse (revolutionary reasoning) of “bodies” with radicalizing class-consciousness of the exploitative and oppressive social relations in which “bodies” are always positioned. Marxist critique does not “wander” because it is the articulation of the proletarian vanguard, nor does it end up “wondering” what is to be done (“dealing with … continuing battles,” says Horiguchi) because it is the historically and socially necessary philosophical arm of class struggle to abolish classes and “marginalized” subject positions themselves: “Just as philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy” as “the lightning of thought” with the aid of which the proletariat “will emancipate themselves.”171 What conception does Marx offer here of the “body”? Is the body “defined as discourse,” as with Horiguchi’s agreement with Butler? Marx theorizes the body 168 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 149. 169 Lenin, Materialism, p. 148. 170 Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 41. 171 Karl Marx, “Toward a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 51–52.

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as the dialectical unity of revolutionary philosophy and “the people”: “Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart.”172 As the revolutionary socialist writer Liu Ching suggests in The Builders, the “Communists taught the peasants the principle that labour created the world. There never was a truer word.”173 As Marx writes in his critique of Hegel’s idealist dialectics, Horiguchi is expounding a “sensitivity” through which she positions readers to discover “merely … an abstract, logical and speculative expression of the historical process,”174 which is “nothing but the alienated world mind thinking within the bounds of its selfalienation, i.e., conceiving itself in an abstract manner”175 “within alienation,”176 “within the condition of alienation”;177 hence a “reabsorption of this alienation, the subject as this process; pure, unceasing revolving within itself,”178 “endlessly shuttling back and forth in itself.”179 This is the “divine dialectic”180 as “a divine process … of mankind,”181 which the subject “traverses” as the “bearer”182 of alienation. Horiguchi’s analysis presents a sensitive contemplation—silently obliterating the active and intervening historical time of class struggle—from within the alienation of existing society and its dominant cultural industry of narratives which, as Marx says, “reflect” knowledge and thought as “only the phenomenal being of the alienation of real human life,” hence “[a]ll alienation of human life is therefore [represented, constructed in ideological discourse as] nothing but alienation of self-consciousness.”183 This in turn is re-represented in the critical critic’s discursive lesson as the “more sensitive” and more “deeply appreciative” attitude that “sets h[er]self up as the measure of the alienated world,”184 but still within a contemplative, speculative mode of measured reading that excludes the 172 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 52. 173 Liu Ching, The Builders (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001), p. 532, emphasis added. 174 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 130. 175 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 131, emphasis added. 176 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 133. 177 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 136. 178 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 138. 179 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 139. 180 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 138. 181 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 137. 182 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 137. 183 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 134. 184 Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 131.

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dialectical activity of revolutionary supersession of alienation through “communism as the annulment of private property” and “by the destruction of the alienated character of the objective world, by the annulment of its alienated mode of existence.”185 This is the “more sensitive” materialist dialectics of Marx, who conceptualizes “man” (the human subject in society) as “an embodied [corporeal], living, real, sentient, objective being” for whom hunger, for example, is not a “discourse” but rather a human “need,” a “need of a body for an object which exists outside itself and which is essential for its integration and the expression of its nature.”186 But Horiguchi’s representations of representations do not represent things in this way; therefore, contrary to her promises, her moving analyses do not offer us “better tools for dealing with”187 things (contradictory social relations) in this radical revolutionary way. There is, in short, a class politics of “dealing with” things. Her discourse is in fact telling—symptomatic—in that the very concept of “alienation” (along with “dialectics” and “ideology”) is utterly absent from her (con)text which at the same time speaks sensitively of the wandering subject as a “loner” with a “loss of home”188 who “floats adrift as a vagabond” filled with “anger” and “helplessness,” who “finds no grand narrative of salvation” but “wishes for the explosion of a society that confines her body” where “living becomes suffering”189—and so on, but never a word about “alienation.” Despite the fact that her victimized, vagabond subject is, as Horiguchi tells us, “[led] … to question the position and conditions of the lower socioeconomic class” in “excruciating working conditions … long working hours,”190 the word and concept of alienation in Marxist theory remains, as Marx says, “a secret”191 that looms like a dark cloud over her moving, sensitive, appreciative discourse about discourse. Marxist critique, by contrast, is the theoretical analysis that sensitively exposes this secret which is an ideological symptom of Horiguchi’s vacillation, “shuttling back and forth in itself ” (wandering and wondering), in-between the worldviews of idealism and materialism. Following Horiguchi’s discourse in this sense, her analytics, ironically, does not wander and does not wonder very much at all, since her discourse essentially has nothing to do with revolution and the construction 185 186 187 188 189 190 191

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Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 136. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 135. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 54, emphasis added. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 54. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 132.

of revolutionary subjects. Horiguchi’s text, in other words, is a critical criticism in mo yanning (avoiding talking) about revolutionary practice and the ideological critique which is necessary for this revolutionary movement of the vast majority of “subjects” in the world of worldwide capitalism. Her contribution to Mo Yan Thought “in context” itself enacts a wandering and wondering around the peripheries and on the surfaces of Mo’s narratives. As the critical reader may notice, she in fact has very little of substance to say about what Mo has actually written; his texts crop up almost as afterthoughts and notional observations. Let us observe more closely one of the moments of Mo Yan Thought that she seems to regard “sensitively” enough to quote from it, and how she “deals with” it. In pointing out the paradoxical and seemingly anti-“dogmatic” manner (the dangerous artistic “breadth”) by which Moist writing articulates characters who “free themselves from ‘ideological dogma within a highly politicized grand narrative’” while “yet” engaging in Moist “political allegory,”192 Horiguchi’s critical narrative drifts and floats into David Der-wei Wang’s authoritative saying that “‘all the morally perfect characteristics of the Chinese nation and tradition’ in Mo Yan’s texts seem to lie in mothers.”193 Mothers and grandmothers represent positions of “extreme importance as figures of power,”194 she says, and then offers the following text of sensitive and appreciative honesty from Mo—in which, of course, he quotes “himself ” in the customary, self-sensitive manner—where he espouses his own love of his own mother and all “mother figures.”195 Mo Yan Thought “sets [it]self up as the measure of the alienated world,”196 as Marx says, in the sensitive and appreciative mode: Readers often ask after finishing this book [Big Breasts and Wide Hips], “is the mother in the book the author’s mother?” I am positive of the answer, “[Y]es. It is my mum, and I also hope that it is also your mum. The mother in the book has endured unthinkable pains, worked hard in the most difficult times, and has managed to live on. She extends her kindness to those who are in need, and cherishes life. These qualities are exactly those of our mothers.”197

192 193 194 195 196 197

Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 52, emphasis added. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 52, quoting Wang. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53, emphasis added. Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic,” p. 131. Mo Yan quoted in Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53, my emphasis added.

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Horiguchi, who cautions us with powerful vagueness about “a danger with art … to focalize uncritically rather than to acknowledge the breadth,”198 has precisely nothing more to say about this sensitively heartwarming representation, aside from merely commenting, as she sets it up, that it represents Mo’s mum as a figure of “power” where he “calls attention to his celebration of femininity.”199 Is it possible in reading to focalize critically, as Horiguchi suggests, in order to grasp the deep content of “the breadth” that Mo “possesses” and “signals” in this narrative? “Yes,” the artist affirms with unreserved positivity (the “truth”), the mother in the book is his mum. Translated in Horiguchi’s discourse, the “representation” of the mother in the textuality of the book “is” his mum, a “figure of power” of “extreme importance.” The representation is “discourse.” The being given in discourse “is” his mum, not a “reflection” of his thought and knowledge of his real mum in the real world outside the book that he wrote. This essentially confirms Horiguchi’s Butlerian position, insofar as Mo’s mum is a “body,” that his mum is—yes, “discourse.” Horiguchi reads this as calling our attention to the “extreme importance” Mo “signals” by “his celebration of femininity.” What Mo is celebrating, however, is an “extreme” strain of pure subjective idealism in textuality, in representations, in discourse, in narratives, which are “everything,” as the artist playfully insists in the afterword to his other book, Pow! In this view, there is no “outside” of “representations.” Yet as we have seen, Horiguchi’s discourse at the very same time “signals” the breadthy positivity of such things as “the position and conditions of the lower socioeconomic class,” the “marginalized in society,” the “lower and peripheral strata of society,” the “state apparatus,” a “nightmarish reality,” a “modern capitalist system,” and so on. Why doesn’t Horiguchi point out how and why it is of “extreme importance” that the artist-writer “Mo Yan” feels that he has to quote “himself ” when he is so utterly “positive” that the mother in his book “is” his mum? … “The breadth” is that the Mo Yan who quotes his own thought is also a “representation” of a subject who “drifts” and “floats” in Horiguchi’s discourse, and hence it is also “a danger with art” that Horiguchi herself wanders around and sets the reader of critical criticism up in an agnostic state of “critical” wondering. This sustained state of suspension in-between pure subjective-textual idealism and materialism is of “extreme importance.” It is an ideological state, as we see in Marx’s transformative reading of Hegel, which “shuttles” the subject

198 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 60. 199 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53.

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of idealist flux within the endless speculativity of contemplative agnosticism, thereby (re)producing the subject (the historical potentiality of the social citizen as “thinker” with class-consciousness) as an ambivalent, indeterminate being of the self-cancellation of materialist knowledge by idealist knowledge that “plays” with(in) textual solipsism. This is, I would argue, a serious reading—as dialectical materialist critique—of Moism’s playfully celebratory discourse of “hope” about “our mothers,” a discourse that subtly and persistently deploys “play” (pleasure) in the social arena of representations in order to block and paralyze the very idea of seriousness—“more theoretical enlightenment of the proletariat”200—while simultaneously seeming to address things seriously as “I am positive of the answer,” followed by an answer which is nothing more than sentimental “sound common sense.”201 But let us take Horiguchi’s passage of “extreme importance” still more seriously for what it tells us (without telling us consciously) about the class politics of Mo’s celebrated mum. Mo constructs “mum” by way of a relay to two intertwined subtexts that, in themselves, have only a vague and tangential relation with transformative class politics (class struggle) in the Marxist sense of the necessity and possibility of overthrowing the existing social order of alienation: these two subnarratives are the “enduring” of misery (“endured unthinkable pains”) and the ethical example of kindness (“kindness to those who are in need”). I shall only “focalize” here on the first subnarrative: The mother in the book has endured unthinkable pains, worked hard in the most difficult times and has managed to live on.202

The point of this localist story—which at the same time drifts into a “grand” story of “qualities … of our mothers” (Mo), “all the morally perfect characteristics” (Wang) of “mothers” and “femininity” in general—is to displace the class analysis of subject position: “our mothers” or any other embodied human beings in society. Sympathetic ideology, of which Mo is a master craftsman, accomplishes this displacement with the quasi-argument that the most “suffering” elements and strata of the existing social order are not only deserving of recognition in sentimental “memory” but, indeed, that these paradoxical “figures of power” represent the most exemplary “locations” of the human spirit in their “traversal,” as 200 Marx and Engels quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (London: Bookmarks, 1987), p. 151. 201 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (1847). 202 Mo quoted in Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 53, my emphasis added.

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Marx puts it, of the timeless “human tragedy” of “life” itself as a purely abstract life floating through a stream of phenomenal and affective duration beyond a “thinking” of class structure. Their tragic experiences of sheer endurance of “unthinkable” pain and misery are not “thinkable” experiences; they do not enable us to comprehend the social conditions causing their sufferings, and thereby grasping the essence of what is necessary to abolish those conditions themselves and replace them with superseding conditions in which such suffering is eradicated forever. Instead, the “power” of their endurance itself is celebrated, almost as an end in itself, so that we are given to understand—in the “unthinkable” thinking of hallucinatory criticism—that the goal of life itself, from birth to death, in honor of these subjects of “unthinkable pains,” is simply “to live on.” The complex narration of this “living on” is the task of celebrated artist-writers such as Mo (Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, for example, as well as Sandalwood Death and the fluxual metamemoir Change). Mo the sensitive artist is in good European company here. Derrida’s mystical ideas are in complete concurrence with Mo’s discourse on his mum. “All the ideas that have helped me in my work,” Derrida affirms in a 2004 interview,“were related to the idea of ‘survival,’” of fortleben as “living on, to keep on living.”203 His deconstructive writing of “survival as a complication of the opposition death-life”204 at once subtly and simplistically resolves the dialectical contradictoriness of “deathlife” as a restfully restive “unconditional affirmation of life.”205 The “discourse I undertake,” Derrida says with the usual ironic twist, “is not death-oriented, just the opposite, it is the affirmation of someone living who prefers living, and therefore survival … because survival … is the most intense life possible.”206 The “unthinkable” element of ideology that links Mo Yan Thought and Derridian thought in the grand project of “living on” is that, as Derrida quite boldly puts it, the way of living on is “unconditional”; in other words, the material class structure that determines the quality of the subject’s life—whether the subject is exploited and oppressed, whether the subject is an exploiter and an oppressor, or whether the subject lives a “middle” life of relative comfort in-between and oblivious to the polarizations of poverty and wealth—is, to use Horiguchi’s 203 Jacques Derrida, “I am at war with myself,” S/V (Nov. 2004; trans. of Jean Birnbaum’s interview with Derrida in Le Monde), p. 6; see also Derrida, “Living On,” in Derrida, Parages, trans. Tom Conley, James Hulbert, John P. Leavey and Avital Ronell, ed. J.P. Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 103–92. 204 Derrida, “I am at war,” p. 5, emphasis added. 205 Derrida, “I am at war,” p. 15. 206 Derrida, “I am at war,” pp. 15–16, emphasis added.

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expression, drifted out of consideration, out of the “thinkable.” Thus, in effect, contrary to the surface insistence on “unconditionality” in “manag[ing] to live on” and “endure” through the pains of an abstract life, the actual, real conditions of this “living on” are also affirmed. The mo yanning effect (of playfully not talking) is that the material conditions underlying “unthinkable pains,” “hard work,” “most difficult times,” and so on, are (un)thoughtfully “affirmed” through thick sentimentality as more or less unalterable in any fundamental way. “Surviving” and “enduring” are reinscriptions of the experientially sublime and timeless “life” of spirit that transcends class conflicts and yet also plays on “tragic” sensibilities (Derrida’s “war” within “self ”) as in a sermon on the imperative of the divine path. The prime “good” is simply the complex and “complicated” manner by which the subject “endures,” for as Derrida claims, this in itself constitutes the most “intense” life possible, and it is what he “prefers” in a high philosophical subtlety where a “preference” between “opposites” is rewritten as a meta-preferential meditation in-between. Revolution to change the real conditions of “living on” is, essentially, out of the question and impossible for the subject of “intense” living. The issue here is not whether “death” is or is not preferable to “living on”— Derrida’s survivalist “opposition” deeply undertaken through the “complication” of his reading—but rather that both Mo and Derrida avoid and mystify the very question (which is the Marxist revolutionary question that must be affirmed) of what Marx calls the “supersession,” the collective historical project of transformation of the materiality of “life” through class struggle, which of course is an oppositional conception of “living on” to change the world and oneself rather than merely experiencing and (re)narrating “intensities” by “enduring” life in its presently existing reality. Mo’s narrative of the enduring mum places this dialectical materialist perspective beyond the pale, so that its philosophical force is deadened and becomes the silent ideological content of his “intense” mo yanning on his mum and “our mothers”: “our mothers” have no class position—this is the “positive” negation in his “hope.” Mo’s mum is, above all, an endurer of suffering, which of course reflects a certain strength and determination, a Nietzschean Sisyphus with “big breasts and wide hips.” However, she is not a subject in supersession, not a revolutionary subject position. The bourgeois ideological illusion in his celebratory narrative is that he celebrates the unending endurance of existing conditions of alienation as “the good” in itself. Mo’s mum “shuttles” within the world of class contradictions. Yet for Horiguchi this is a signal of “the breadth.” It is the breadth

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of contradiction—an aggressive passivity and a passive aggressivity, an “antagonism” in sublime form—in a state of pained equilibrium. Mother Teresa (re)represented as Mum Sisyphus lives on “in the moment.” This familiar moral psychology of the enduring subject, whose only project is to manage to “live on,” works ideologically to dismiss and obscure the more “encompassing” (Horiguchi’s own word on the capitalist system) viewpoint that Alex Callinicos expounds in terms of “workers’ power,” which “depends on the organisation, consciousness, and activity of the working class” itself becoming for itself in “‘class struggle as the immediate driving power of history.’”207 The working class’s “capacity to abolish classes,” he writes, “arises from its position within capitalist relations of production”: “it is the place that the working class occupies within the capitalist system of exploitation which gives it the power to abolish classes”208 through what “‘[w]e call communism’” as “‘the real movement which abolishes the present sta[t]e of things.’”209 Mo’s celebration of the subject of endurance and Horiguchi’s “critical” focalization on the art of “place,” “setting,” “movement,” and so forth, articulate no such conception of the “position” and “place” of the socially transformative worker as the human subject in the social relations of labor. The “real movement,” as Marx puts it, to abolish the class system of exploitation and oppression in which Mo’s mum endured “unthinkable pains” and “worked hard,” is not grounded in the phenomenal, experiential mythology of “endurance” of suffering as a futile end in itself. Callinicos explains: The decisive role which workers play in the struggle against capitalism does not arise from their being the most oppressed section of society. On the contrary, there may be others in a worse position… Marx points out [in Volume I of Capital, concerning the “supernumerary” subject] that there are sections of the industrial reserve army, what he calls the “stagnant element,” “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat,” “the demoralised, the ragged, and those unable to work,” who are permanently excluded from the process of production, and are worse off than the rest of the working class. It does not follow that they are more revolutionary. On the contrary, just because they are never subject to the discipline of capitalist production they are more liable to be picked up by reactionary movements able to exploit their misery. The lumpenproletariat’s “conditions of life,” Marx predicted in the Manifesto, “prepare it … for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”210

207 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, pp. 140–41, quoting Marx and Engels. 208 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, pp. 141–42, emphasis added. 209 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, pp. 142, quoting Marx and Engels. 210 Callinicos, Revolutionary Ideas, p. 143, quoting Marx and Engels; my emphasis added.

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The “unthinkable” ideological significance of Mo’s breadthy narrative of his mum is precisely that her “life” in “living on” is a representation of “the part”—the subject—of reactionary intrigue that proudly exploits her misery as the timeless moral correctness of simply “living on” within the existing world of alienated “life” with no “grand narrative” of overthrowing the conditions of this “life” and collectively building the life of socialist and communist society, as Liu Ching depicts in his forgotten novel The Builders. “There were always vulgar individuals,” Liu writes, “who judged people with noble ideals by their own low standards. She [the young communist Kai-hsia] couldn’t be bothered with them.”211 The real contradiction at work in Mo’s representation (and this is not merely a “paradox” for wondering) is that the tale of “my mum”—becoming the “hope” for “our mothers”—is itself a cunning grand narrative told with high hallucinatory intrigue. Mo shares in this obscured grand narrative with none other than Derrida and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben, as Rob Wilkie demonstrates in his critique of Agamben’s so-called “cenobitic” communism. Agamben’s “communism” contemplates a panhistorical “life” lived on in “poverty” as itself an “act of resistance” within “mythical moment[s] of resistance.”212 Horiguchi, in any case, solemnly believes that “the breadth” of Moist representationality vaguely offers us a more sensitive and appreciative means of “focalization” for “dealing with”213 the still more vague notion of “a danger with art.”214 The “danger” with art, however, as with Horiguchi’s drift of critical criticism, is still the same old danger dressed up in “new” representational devices— “better tools,”215 she says. The same old danger is bourgeois ideology “lurk[ing] in ambush”216 to lure the proletariat into accepting what Liu Ching critiques as the “vulgar” standard of the drift of life as “endurance” and “survival” as the last words, the last representations in a world of representations of representations. As Marx and Engels argue, the standard of “the speculative world” is “nothing but semblances … semblances … semblances … and semblances” of a “higher mystical significance … grown out of the ether of your brain.”217 211 Liu, The Builders, p. 48. 212 Rob Wilkie, “Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Cenobitic Communism’ and the Limits of Posthumanism,” International Critical Thought, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2015), pp. 47–48. 213 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. 214 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 60. 215 Horiguchi, “Representations,” p. 61. 216 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 45. 217 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 625, emphasis in original.

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When Mo Yan the artist pours out his grand representations of “my mum” in the “subversive” style of semblances within hallucinatory memory, he is storytelling in “the speculative way” so that he also plays the part of an intriguing semblance of himself who “says something extraordinary” and thereby “performs a miracle” (a wandering wonder) by flowing into mystic representations “as an Absolute Subject outside himself.”218 My mum in “the breadth” becomes a holy mum in Mo’s ideology of “hope.” Religious meta-mystification infuses the “hallucinatory” apparatus of semblances, thereby making social transformation its deep secret. As Lenin remarked in a different “context”: It is obvious that to search for any theoretical meaning here would be an almost hopeless undertaking… [T]he subjectivists confined themselves to concocting theories which consoled the “solitary” individuals with the statement that history is made by “living individuals.”219

Horiguchi leaves any theoretical meaning in a fixed “breadth” of enduring its own driftiness through Derrida’s “affirmation” of fortlebenality, the banality of “living on” for the sake of living on.

Critical Criticism as “Divine Justice” Social justice is one of the core ideas in contemporary humanities studies. But the idea of “justice” in the humanities—as well as in most law school courses, if they are even offered at all, concerning “law and literature”—is usually treated more or less as a kind of eternally recurring psycho-aesthetic “theme.” Students are called upon to appreciate this thematic constellation and its locally varying “topics” and thereby acquire a “humanistic” intelligibility of humankind’s noble, ironic, comic, and ultimately tragic “dream” of a world free from oppression, alienation, corruption, and exploitation. In this mode of study, teachers and students are positioned in the spaces of the dominant ideology that Marx and Engels called “Critical Criticism as the tranquillity of knowledge.”220 The goal or quest of social justice is sympathetically registered and relegitimized within the discursive “context” of intellectual and emotive practices that are necessary for the maintenance of the status quo.

218 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 626. 219 V.I. Lenin, “The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve’s Book (The Reflection of Marxism in Bourgeois Literature),” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 398. 220 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 607.

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By contrast, this thematic or topicological pedagogy of justice in the humanities is both deepened and challenged by an approach to social justice as a conflictual site of intellectual inquiry into the social conditions of social conflict itself. What is called for in this mode of study is the elaboration of concepts for rigorous arguments aimed at (re)understanding what “social justice” ought to mean, and indeed for (re)understanding what is necessary for human society to make social justice a reality in the everyday life of all people around the world. In order to engage and explore this problem—of leaving or settling for “social justice” at the degree-zero level of “theme” or topic—in its contemporary historical setting, where “globally”-oriented scholars of the humanities have renovated their interpretive practices in line with the demands of the dominant “theory” of the past several decades,221 I now turn to the remaining two texts of “Leaves” in Mo Yan in Context. Of course, Mo’s fictional worldview has been popularly characterized as “hallucinatory realism.” The main angle of my discussion, therefore, addresses this basic question: What is the class politics of (reading) Mo’s hallucinatory justice? On October 29, 2015, the Chinese government announced its decision to end the One-Child Policy, which had originally been introduced in 1979 under the so-called post-Mao leadership of Deng Xiaoping.222 On the question of the legal right of married couples in China to have children, the current law is now essentially a “Two-Child” Policy that applies universally to allow all Chinese married couples to have two children, regardless of whether the children are male or female, and also continuing certain “exceptions” (also in effect under the OneChild Policy) that allow various minority ethnic groups and rural-area residents to have more than two children. The emergence of the Two-Child family planning law does not, of course, render the historical and social realities of the One-Child era irrelevant. Quite on the contrary, the knowledge of society and culture throughout this era has become more, not less, ideologically significant because of the deepening of the 221 For extended examinations of this main trend, see Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Post-Ality: The (Dis)Simulations of Cybercapitalism,” Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture, Vol. 1 (Spring 1995), 1–75; and Stephen Tumino, Cultural Theory After the Contemporary (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 222 See Julie Makinen, “China’s One-Child Policy is Now a Two-Child Policy,” Los Angeles Times (29 Oct. 2015); Mu Guangzong, “A Two-Child Policy For All,” China Daily (11 Aug. 2014); and Penny Kane and Ching Y. Choi, “China’s One Child Policy,” BMJ, No. 319 (9 Oct. 1999), pp. 992–94.

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contradictions of the worldwide capitalist system and the Chinese workers’ developing situation within it. Mo Yan’s novel Frog—originally published in 2009—offers a bewildering and highly sentimentalized case in point of this ongoing ideological contestation: class struggle on the “literary” frontlines of the bourgeois avant-garde knowledge industry. To borrow Marx’s famous words, the “memory” of the era—and the social relations—of the One-Child policy now “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”223 because, especially for petty-bourgeois writers of supposedly “historical” narratives such as Mo, the “nightmare” of the struggle of classes articulated at the level of the “birth” of future citizen-workers needs to be mystified by way of heavily ironic, disjointed sermons on individualistic “experience” in the unfathomable “vicissitudes of life.”224 This notion of the “vicissitudes of life” comes from Lanlan Du’s translation of a passage from Frog in her contribution to Mo Yan in Context. Du considers the novel to be a work of “extraordinary experimentation.”225 She contends that the novel “represent[s] reproductive issues sensitively and courageously”226 through a tale of “atonement,” “corporate lament,”227 “corporate grief,” and a “persistent reminder of the fragility and brevity of life.”228 While Du’s analysis of the novel does provide critical readers with significant insights into its “sensitive” strategies of textual representation, what I want to inquire deeper into here is how Frog—as well as Du’s “contextual” commentary on it—are complicit in the (re)construction of “life” without the slightest notion of class consciousness. The epistolary “letters” that propel the narrative(s) of Frog are so disjointed and saturated with Mo’s brand of intricately localizing details (for example, constantly shifting names of a grand host of characters) that Du could have rather easily selected virtually any scene from the story in order to read it as a “sincere” postmodern witnessing of “life” from the presumably incontrovertible vantagepoint of the memories of the wannabe “great playwrite” called Tadpole (Xiaopao)—the overflowing narrator who proclaims that he could describe his 223 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), p. 9. 224 Lanlan Du, “Abortion in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and Mo Yan’s 蛙 (Frog),” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 72. 225 Du, “Abortion,” p. 64. 226 Du, “Abortion,” p. 75. 227 Du, “Abortion,” p. 73. 228 Du, “Abortion,” p. 74.

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dear Aunt Gugu’s “life” by “using such potent metaphors as ‘surging forth magnificently’ and ‘rife with twists and turns.’”229 “There are so many stories,” he feels, and he doesn’t know “how long this letter ought to be, so with your indulgence, I will put my meagre talents to use by simply writing until the time has come to stop.”230 I shall engage Du’s reading of a scene from Book 3, Chapter 8 of Frog. But first, I would like to point to an example of this “meagre talent” for disjointedness that all serious readers are led to “indulge.” In a portion of this same Chapter 8 that precedes Du’s specific area of textual focus, Tadpole gives us a glimpse of the relationship between his wife (Little Lion) and his daughter Yanyan, who happens to be “carrying a little umbrella with animals printed on it.” His daughter, he recalls, treated Little Lion and himself “with cool courtesy.” Then the daughter held her hands behind her back when Little Lion offered her sweets, but said, Thank you, Gugu. Call her Mama, I said. She glared at me, shocked. She doesn’t have to, she doesn’t have to call me anything like that. People call me Little Lion—she pointed to the lion on her umbrella—so you can call me Big Lion.231

Now, the reader of Frog may find it somewhat challenging to take a little quiz on what we have just read. Who “glared” at Tadpole? … A hint: Was it Yanyan the daughter, or Little Lion? Who “pointed to the lion on her umbrella”? … A hint: Was it Little Lion or the daughter? Who is “Gugu” here? … Is Gugu not also the dear aunt of Tadpole? “Gugu,” as the reader may have discovered on her own (since this is not explained in Goldblatt’s English translation), is the Chinese word for a paternal aunt, the sister of one’s father; by contrast, the maternal aunt, i.e., the sister of one’s mother, is yi. Why then does Yanyan, Tadpole’s daughter (from an earlier marriage), call Little Lion “Gugu”? … Tadpole is, as he says, “simply writing until the time has come to stop.” The reader may either “get it” or not. The preferred reader of this work of “extraordinary experimentation”232 is one who is also called to “simply reading” without caring very much whether one scene or another makes much sense. Coherence, in other words, is not really necessary in hallucinatory realist storytelling, but rather simply the flow of the

229 Mo Yan, Frog, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, Kindle edition, 2014), Book 1, prefatory letter. 230 Mo, Frog, Book 1, prefatory letter. 231 Mo, Frog, Book 3, Chap. 8. 232 Du, “Abortion,” p. 64.

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“extraordinary” which itself becomes the breadthy grid of the “new” ordinary. To borrow Louis Althusser’s observation from a different context, it is only ever Tadpole as a “Little Human God” (or a “little lay god”) who knows when “the time has come to stop” telling “so many stories” by “simply writing” because, as Althusser says, Tadpole the writer is endowed with the “stupefying … power of ‘transcendence,’” the “prodigious power of being able at any moment to step outside of … reality, of being able to change its character” through “the amazing power of ‘transcending.’”233 Lanlan Du, however, maintains that such scenes are all about “life.” I focus here on her argument in the last section of her essay, under the heading “How form links with theme.”234 She states that both Faulkner (in The Wild Palms) and Mo (in Frog) “adopt experimental forms to support the themes of their novels,”235 hence the notion of a “link” between form and theme. Frog, she says, “employs narrative strategies that require much from readers.”236 Indeed, this is quite correct, as I suggested above from the relatively “simple” example of who exactly is doing anything and who is speaking—without any use of quotation marks—in the exchange between Tadpole, Little Lion, and the daughter. But Du’s point is that Mo “uses a combination”—this is a standard reading of Moism’s “blending” or “merging” of elements—of “epistolary, fictional, and dramatic forms to express his concern with the conflicts between state politics and traditional fertility culture, emphasizing the characters’ sense of guilt and the outlets for redemption.”237 This “guilt and redemption” complex, for Du, constitutes the central theme of the “drama” about Aunt Gugu, which “works intertextually.”238 The paramount theme (guilt and redemption) is thus “intertwined,” so that what becomes “required” in reading the experimental “narrative strategies” is the recognition that “Aunt’s and Little Lion’s infertility are symbolic as are Aunt’s insomnia and fear of frogs.”239 For her exemplary demonstration of this “symbolic” linkage of form and theme, Du selects the following passage in which, she says, “[r]eaders learn” of Aunt Gugu’s infertility from the viewpoint of Tadpole’s vividly complex recollections of 233 Louis Althusser, “Louis Althusser Replies to John Lewis,” Australian Left Review (Dec. 1972), pp. 26–27. 234 Du, “Abortion,” pp. 71–75. 235 Du, “Abortion,” p. 71. 236 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72. 237 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72, emphasis added. 238 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72. 239 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72.

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Gugu as she is “busy chasing down the pregnant Wang Dan.”240 “Busy” is also a good word for Mo’s “strategies.” Here is Du’s translation of the passage: It suddenly occurred to me [Tadpole] that Aunt is now forty-seven years old. Her youth has long passed and she is now walking on the course of middle age, but her face shows the desolate look of an old woman, revealing the fact that she has experienced the vicissitudes of life [my emphasis]. It reminds me of my Mother’s words who has said the following more than once: What is a woman born for? A woman comes to the world to have babies … A woman who cannot give birth to a baby experiences [my emphasis] the most painful pains; a woman who cannot give birth to a baby is not a complete woman. Moreover, if a woman doesn’t give birth to a baby, she will become cold-hearted and will grow old quickly. Mother’s words are meant to speak to Aunt, but she never speaks these words in the face of Aunt [because mother is deceased!]. Does Aunt’s growing older have anything to do with having no children?241

Goldblatt’s translation is quite different—no doubt in part because of the “much” required from readers, as Du puts it in order to credit Moism’s own vicissitudinal character with a “strategic” aura; nonetheless, it is still more or less recognizable as a version of the same story. Goldblatt’s text says: As I thumped Little Lion’s back I sneaked a look at Gugu, who lowered her eyes one moment and smiled the next. I wondered what was going through her mind. She was forty-seven years old, and it suddenly dawned on me that her youth was far behind her, that she was well into her middle years. And yet her weatherworn face had the sad look [my emphasis; Du’s “desolate look”] of someone much older. I thought back to all those times my now departed mother had said to me: What is a woman born to do? When all is said and done, a woman is born to have children. A woman’s status is determined by the children she bears [my emphasis; Du’s “comes to the world”], as are the dignity she enjoys and the happiness and glory she accrues. Not having children is a woman’s greatest torment [Du’s “experiences the most painful pains”]. A woman without children is something less than whole [Du’s “not a complete woman”], and she grows hard-hearted [Du’s “become cold-hearted”]; a woman without children ages faster [Du’s “grow old quickly”]. Mother had Gugu in mind when she said that, but she’d never have said it in front of Gugu. Was Gugu getting old so fast because she was childless [Du’s “have anything to do with”]? At forty-seven, if she did find a husband, was a child even possible? And where was the man who might be that husband?242

The key question in Du’s discussion on the “link” between form and theme is how she constructs “critical” sense of this scene that she has gone to the trouble to 240 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72. 241 Frog quoted in Du, “Abortion,” p. 72; Du’s translation; my emphasis and brackets added. 242 Mo, Frog, Book 3, Chap. 8; my emphasis and brackets added.

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translate, a scene in which she recognizes that “[r]eaders learn” of Gugu’s infertility “from Tadpole’s point of view.”243 Since Gugu and Little Lion are, according to Du’s reading, “intertextually” and “intertwinedly” “linked” and “combined” by way of Mo’s “experimental” narrative “strategies,” how does the passage reflect Mo’s “concern”? Little Lion and Gugu are both “barren women,”244 she says. Following her quotation of the passage, she devotes the remainder of a paragraph to commenting on its significance. However, in her critical commentary, Du quietly abandons the “intertextual” dimensionality which she has just trumpeted as the mark of Mo’s “strategic” storytelling. Instead of further examining how and why (the “concern”) the narrator Tadpole invokes his deep memory of his “mother’s words” in his musings on Gugu’s “desolate look,” Du slides into an explication of the mentality of Tadpole’s mother. In other words, Tadpole’s own narrative viewpoint becomes “combined” more or less completely—or “merged” within his own sentimental reminiscence “of my mother’s words”—with the solemn beliefs of his mother. “Tadpole’s mother, a traditional Chinese woman,” says Du, “holds that women’s true and natural function is to procreate.”245 Of course this is exactly what the passage reveals, whether in Du’s translation or Goldblatt’s: a woman’s biology is her “true and natural” destiny, or to put it another way, a woman’s place is in the home. In Tadpole’s memory of his mother’s words, a woman is only “born for” procreating and “comes to the world to have babies,” which is the only way for her to become “a complete woman” who is not “desolate” or “barren.” A woman is “born to have children,” and her “status is determined by the children she bears” so as to avoid the “greatest torment” of being “something less than whole” and, therefore, “hard-hearted.” But does Tadpole also think this is “true”? Du completely ignores the question. By doing so, she follows along with the Moist tale itself, which “intertextualizes” the mother’s “traditional” beliefs only in order to have them rearticulated through Tadpole’s meditatively “concerned” speculations, how he was inwardly “reminded” of his “mother’s words.” The “strategy” in operation here is not merely “intertextual” with “some magic realistic elements,”246 as Du would have readers learn. Rather, such strategies are deployed so as to have readers learn the softly sentimental “concern” of Moist bourgeois ideology which “experimentally” constructs Tadpole as the hallucinatory mouthpiece of his mother. Referring again to Tadpole’s mother, Du continues with an “interpretive” reading which carefully 243 244 245 246

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Du, “Abortion,” p. 72. Du, “Abortion,” p. 72. Du, “Abortion,” p. 73. Du, “Abortion,” p. 72.

avoids becoming an ideological reading and certainly not a critique of “mother’s words” in Tadpole’s magical memory: “She [the mother] … interprets Aunt as unnatural because she devotes her life to the cause of family planning, remains childless after she marries in her fifties, and mistreats pregnant women who violate the family planning policy.”247 But again, is this not also Tadpole’s “interpretation” of Gugu? Since Gugu (and Little Lion) are coded as “unnatural” persons and “barren women,” they become, as Du proceeds to point out, subjects for “consequences” and “punishment” within the symbolic order of Tadpole’s quasi-juridical drama of “concern.” Following along with the story’s own “interpretive” logic, Du teaches us that “Aunt’s insomnia and fear of frogs function as additional consequences to the infertility of both Little Lion and Aunt, symbolizing the punishment for their inhumane, heavy-handed enforcement of the national policy.”248 One of the most intriguing aspects of Du’s reading of Frog is her broad assertion of Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist theories of the “biopower” or “biopolitics” of “bodies.”249 According to this view, Du says, “the governing of collective human life, health, and welfare has become a key objective of modern states,” and “China is no exception.”250 “Since 1978, birth planning has been a national policy.”251 But the problem with Du’s Foucaultian-angled argument is that these notions of “modern states” and “national policy” she invokes have nothing to say about whether the state in question was or is moving along the path of socialism—the workers’ state clearly envisioned by Mao’s leadership—or rather the very opposite of socialism, the capitalist state, which is what Mao warned against all along, and which is precisely what began to emerge in the so-called post-Mao era around 1978.252 Du’s mode of “critical criticism” falls in line with Foucault’s pan-“state” conceptions, which obscure the deeper dynamics of class contradictions in the articulation of “power” over “life.” By contrast, in the revolutionary

247 Du, “Abortion,” p. 73. 248 Du, “Abortion,” p. 73. 249 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 1979, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 27–50. 250 Du, “Abortion,” p. 66. 251 Du, “Abortion,” p. 67. 252 See Mobo Gao, “Why Is the Battle for China’s Past Relevant to Us Today?,” Aspects of India’s Economy, Nos. 59–60 (Oct. 2014).

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Marxist conception, “the state is an organ of class domination, an organ of oppression of one class by another.”253 Another way of putting in question Du’s vague nods toward the Foucaultian outlook is to simply ask: What exactly is wrong with a “modern state” that aims to govern and organize the “collective human life, health, and welfare” of its citizens? Is there something inherently wrong with this social goal in and of itself, or rather, does it make a fundamental difference which class is in power in carrying out this goal? Du avoids framing the question of “biopolitics” in this way because, from the Foucaultian angle on all inquiries into “power” politics, fundamental questions of class structure and class consciousness are considered to be basically irrelevant in the “non-economic analysis of power.”254 To put this issue more sharply and in less “tranquil” terms, Foucault’s perspective offers bourgeois “critical” academics like Du an “up-to-date” means of fantasizing that they have moved “beyond” class conflict in their interpretive and analytical practices, and of course at the same time appearing all the more intellectually “advanced” by familiarity with and adoption of “Western” bourgeois modes of thinking which, since 1968, have more and more aggressively “aborted” the radical conceptual framework of Marxist class struggle aimed at revolutionary socialism. The general result of this bourgeois eclectic adoption of the Foucaultian outlook on biopolitics, then, is to (re)create a tranquil sense of Marxist class struggle theory-as-critique as “barren” in the sense of being socially and culturally marginal to what counts as “critical” knowledge. From the revolutionary Marxist viewpoint, the workers’ state will certainly govern “collective human life, health, and welfare” as it abolishes the governance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat and all other oppressed and exploited strata of society; the socialist workers’ state replaces this governance with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is grounded in the socialist mode of production and non-exploitative social relations, including the relations that structure family life. In the historical and social struggle for revolutionary socialism, there is 253 V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1994), p. 9; see also Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works (Lexington, KY: First Rate Publishers, 2015), pp. 539–42. 254 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., ed. C. Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 88–89; see also Teresa L. Ebert, “Towards A Red Feminism,” Against the Current, No. 65 (Nov./Dec. 1995).

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nothing “wrong” with this mode of governing. In the bourgeois “modern state” apparatus, by contrast, the so-called “governing” that Du speaks of, in the name of Foucault, is actually a governance that serves the economic, political, and ideological interests of the ruling class and its representatives over and against the life, health, and welfare of the exploited masses, including all the children who grow up within the existing order of things. As a consequence of this conflict and divergence of conceptual perspectives, when Du makes the Foucaultian-sounding claim that Gugu “firmly believes in the official discourse of family planning and becomes a practitioner infamous for her merciless enforcement of the One-child policy,”255 in fact she is unable to articulate whether this “official discourse” originates in bourgeois class politics or proletarian class politics. Likewise, since Tadpole’s tranquilly combinatory memory of his “mother’s words” is also an “intertextual” site of “discourse” governed by a “traditional” set of beliefs that are reactivated in “magical” speculations, Du is unable to offer any real ideological critique of these “words” as a contested intersection of class conflict. Instead, what she offers is a very casual, appreciative, and supposedly “contextual” reaffirmation of the obviousness of a “traditional” belief system without touching its class character. To borrow Du’s words, this “intertwining” way of examining Mo’s literary discourse is barren of critical class consciousness. This approach to making sense of the text and its “intertextual” motion therefore becomes an academic ally in the “magical” mystifications of the story itself, a story which makes dear Aunt Gugu and Little Lion the subjects of literary punishment in the name of “divine justice.”256 This speculatively spiritual aura of “divine justice” is the tranquil quasi-knowledge of hallucinatory justice: “holy” justice within the unholy juridical imaginary of the “modern state.” As Marx and Engels argue, this tranquil knowledge becomes the ideological means by which “[t]he propertied class … feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, … recogniz[ing] estrangement as its own power and ha[ving] in it the semblance of a human existence.”257 This “divine justice,” which Du celebrates as the complement of Faulkner’s “poetic justice,” finds its “experimental” expressivity, of course, in Tadpole’s deep memory of “mother’s words.” But what is at stake is not so much a scene of magically intertwining intertextuality as it is a circular mystification of what Tadpole clearly suggests as

255 Du, “Abortion,” p. 71. 256 Du, “Abortion,” pp. 70, 66, 73–74. 257 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 607, emphasis in original.

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the “truth” of Gugu’s “desolate look” as an unfortunate one who has “experienced the vicissitudes of life.” In the Moist juridical imaginary, since Gugu has brought herself under the symbolic rule of “divine justice” and its punishment, the next step, as Du points out, is to rehabilitate her through the consoling practice of the “possibility of atonement”258 for her sins. This process of atonement “comes only through Aunt’s marriage to the folk artist Hao Dashou, who is capable of creating vivid clay babies, and their combined efforts in creating the clay babies modeled on the babies Aunt aborted.”259 Thus Tadpole’s mother’s words, that all “women’s true and natural function is to procreate,” are aesthetically carried out through Gugu’s uniquely individual marriage to a “folk artist.” What this means politically is that the “traditional” belief that governs the way Tadpole’s mother (and Tadpole) “interprets Aunt”260 turns out to be the “true” jurisprudence of symbolic punishment and atonement. Yet despite Du’s broadly worded reliance on Foucault’s thought, she fails to notice that this “experimental” aestheticism itself manifests and reinforces the operation of a “disciplinary” apparatus of power/knowledge aimed at returning Gugu—along with readers who have learned to “follow along” with the story, as Du’s superficial literary “criticism” does—to the submissive “tradition” of the bourgeois-patriarchal logic that governs the subject according to the timeless dictum of biological determinism: “a woman who cannot give birth to a baby is not a complete woman.”261 Du’s tranquil ideological apparatus of reading is itself an interpretation that relegitimizes a combining mixture of “traditional” feudal and bourgeois common sense in the name of “divine” law and order. Again as Tadpole muses: “A woman comes to the world to have babies,” or, “When all is said and done, a woman is born to have children.” The differences in translation between Du’s and Goldblatt’s texts can’t conceal the essential “truth” of Tadpole’s “magical” rote memory as the quasi-explanatory story of “woman” being at once biologically determined and mystically predestined—by “divine” laws, about which no one knows the why’s and wherefores—to “have babies.” According to Du, what this means is that “Mo Yan appeals for a respect for life.”262 With scholarly seriousness, she tells us that Frog offers the general lesson

258 259 260 261 262

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that “[i]t is the combination of different organs that forms a complete life.”263 The goal of attaining a “complete life,” in other words, is grounded in the vulgar bourgeois matterism of bodily “organs” whose only organization is the “combination of different organs.” The problem, however, is that “organs” of human bodies—provided of course that they are living organs—belong to real, historically and socially situated humans whose “bodies” are organized, ultimately, by the prevailing mode of production and its social relations of labor in the life of the social formation. This is the Marxist materialist dialectics of “organs” in the economic and political order of all social “life,” which is always, since the division of all societies into classes, a “life” organized by the fundamental antagonism of rulers and ruled. As Jennifer Cotter explains in the context of her critique of Donna Haraway’s “posthumanist” writing, Du’s notion of “different organs” amounts to “a matterist understanding of biology which substitutes the bodily sensuous—the received biology of ‘flesh and blood’ or the ‘physical’—for the ensemble of material relations that determine the development of a species,” an historical and socially situated development that is “mediated by what Marx explains as the dialectical praxis of labor which acts on nature and transforms it in order to meet needs and in doing so produces new needs.”264 Tadpole’s memorial discourse of the “complete life,” along with Du’s literary “criticism” in the declassed rhetoric of “respect for life,” both, in different registers of writing, obscure the underlying laws of motion of

263 Du, “Abortion,” p. 74. 264 Jennifer Cotter, “The New Class Common-Sense: Biopolitics, Posthumanism, and Love,” in Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities After Humanism, eds. J. Cotter et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Kindle edition, 2016). See also in Human, All Too (Post)Human, Stephen Tumino, “‘Theory Too Becomes a Material Force’: Militant Materialism or Messianic Matterism?”: “Matterism ultimately treats matter as that which resists human thinking and control [hence Mo’s “hallucinations” as deep memory] and which, in effect, ends up substituting pan-physicalism for the analysis of the historical conditions shaping the human and nonhuman world under capitalism”; and Kimberly DeFazio, “The Commune, NOT the Common,” arguing that “matterism” articulates “the idealist concern with bodies and affects as self-generating and autonomous sites of resistance” under the banner of “the ‘concrete’ as opposed to the abstract”; thus, DeFazio writes, “society as an interconnected totality disappears [“hallucinated” away, yet also an “hallucinatory realist” claim on “reality” is asserted in “historical novels”], backgrounded by nuanced appeal to ‘differences’”—Du’s “different organs”—“which are given high philosophical (and increasingly ‘ontological’) significance as signs of the individual’s ‘singularity’ within the ‘common.’”

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class struggle in which “life” is always a subject position in social class relations, which are not simply combinatory relations of bodily “organs.” Du’s argument—if that is what it is—about the “combination of different organs that forms a complete life” is, I think, very hard to read seriously, although I have reread it seriously many times, and I still find it empty, silly, and absurd. But this is an academic silliness and absurdity masquerading as literary criticism. It is governed by the ideological logic of petty-bourgeois ludic postmodern (neo) organicism. The point of her argument is to teach readers an understanding of “life” in such a way that the “differences” between life under feudalism, capitalism, and socialism are obliterated. Du’s literary criticism is symptomatic of generations of academics in China who, since Mao’s death in 1976, have fashioned themselves into “knowledgeable” and willing ideologists of the reversal of the socialist revolution. Her interpretive practice is completely unconcerned with the development of ideological critique and, instead, finds it more enlightening to “read” texts of literary culture according to banal, T-shirt style sophistries of “respect for life” as “organs.” The class ideology that governs this mode of reading is an obscurely mixed combination of what Engels called “Reactionary Socialism” on the one hand and “Bourgeois Socialism” on the other, both of which collude in order to block Marxist socialist theory in transformative cultural critique. Engels argues that Reactionary socialism observes “the evils of existing society” and “concludes … that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils.”265 From this perspective, the “critic” of existing social evils “seeks to establish the rule of … a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.”266 At the same time, Du’s reading mingles with Bourgeois socialism in adhering to “present-day society” but also wanting “to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it.”267 Thus, Engels writes, “under the pretense of re-organizing society”—by reorganizing “organs” themselves in a “different” order of “combination”—what is actually “intended [is] to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society.”268

265 Frederick Engels, “The Principles of Communism,” in The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works (Lexington, KY: First Rate Publishers, 2015), pp. 239–40. 266 Engels, “Principles of Communism,” p. 240. 267 Engels, “Principles of Communism,” p. 240. 268 Engels, “Principles of Communism,” p. 240, emphasis added.

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The next question is, what kind of life is “respected”—that is, (re)legitimized— by Tadpole’s sentimental memory of his dear mother’s words in Frog? One of the clearest answers to this question has been provided by the Marxist feminist writer Evelyn Reed in her essay, “Is Biology Woman’s Destiny?” Here it is important to recall once again Goldblatt’s rendering of Tadpole’s mother’s words, which professor Du rests content to interpret in terms of “form” and “theme”: “When all is said and done, a woman is born to have children.”269 Du’s translation is: “What is a woman born for? A woman comes to the world to have babies.”270 Is this a literary appeal to “respect for life”? No, it isn’t—or rather, it is a patriarchal-capitalist appeal disguised in “hallucinatory realist” stylizations of “memory” as knowledge. As Reed argues, what is at stake here is a continuing literary-ideological “tangle of myths aiming to prove that women have always been the second sex” and whose “work [is] confined to home and family.”271 I would like to quote here a somewhat lengthy passage from Reed’s text because it bears so directly on Du’s supposedly “critical” interpretation of “respect for life” in Mo’s novel. Reed explains: It is often said or implied [as in Tadpole’s memory] that from the very beginning of human history to the present day the division of labor between the sexes has been a division between the husband and wife of a family. The husband goes out to work while the wife stays home to take care of the household and children. Some women in the liberation movement are indignant because the husband gets paid for his work while the wife does not. But the injustice goes deeper than this. It involves the stunted, dependent, culturally sterile life of a woman caged up in a domestic enclosure doing stupid and stupefying chores. … They are deprived of the kind of socialized work which would give them economic independence; such work is largely reserved for men. Marriage and the family are upheld as the fittest career a true woman can pursue… . According to the … guardians of the established order, woman’s place is in the home and always has been [“when all is said and done”], serving a husband and children because the family has always existed. But it is not true that procreation, which is a natural function, is identical with the family, which is a man-made institution. While women have always been the procreators of children, they have not always been isolated in selfenclosed units, each woman serving a husband and family. The “eternal family” hoax is only the ultimate expression of the “uterus theory” of female inferiority.272

269 Mo, Frog, Book 3, Chap. 8, emphasis added. 270 Du, “Abortion,” p. 72, translating Frog. 271 Evelyn Reed, “Is Biology Woman’s Destiny?,” International Socialist Review, Vol. 32, No. 11 (Dec. 1971). 272 Reed, “Is Biology Woman’s Destiny?,” emphasis added.

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In other words, “when all is said and done” through Tadpole’s rote memory of his mother’s words and Du’s “reading” of these words as an avant-garde articulation of “respect for life” in China’s “modern state” of “biopower,” and so forth, what we have here is the “uterus theory” of female inferiority reformulated as an “organ” theory. The “organ” theory, however, is designed ideologically to mystify the material organization of the sexual social relations of production under patriarchal capitalism. Du’s reading of Frog is historically as well as politically misleading because she merely follows along with the surface logic of the novel itself, which is essentially an “experiment” in hallucinating away the boundaries of class struggle between the socialist state of the Mao era, the feudal state of Tadpole’s mothermemory (literary fantasy), and the capitalist state in which Tadpole’s story unfolds. To use Du’s term, this is the hallucinatory “intertwining” of the ideological text. When Du refers to the “modern state,” this state has no class character because her strategies of interpretation reflect her absence of class consciousness; or rather, her interpretation is premised upon the fullness of bourgeois class consciousness which conveniently “forgets” the struggle for socialism and communism that Mao’s leadership crystallized in theory and practice. To begin to grasp the meaning of “respect for life” in a socialist way as opposed to an “hallucinatory realist” way, or a Foucaultian “modern state” way, or in the way of Tadpole’s memory, it has become necessary to remind bourgeois literary “critics” like Du of Mao’s theory. In 1955, Mao argued that, In order to build a great socialist society it is most important to mobilize the masses of women to join in productive activity. In production men and women must receive equal pay for equal work. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized in the process of the socialist transformation of society as a whole.273

Du’s celebratory reading of “atonement” in Frog is also stressed in Chengzhou He’s essay that follows directly after Du’s in Mo Yan in Context. He says that

273 Mao Zedong, “Editor’s Notes from Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), p. 263, emphasis added. See also Hsu Kwang, “Women’s Liberation Is a Component Part of the Proletarian Revolution,” Peking Review, Vol. 17, No. 10 (8 Mar. 1974), pp. 12–15; Soong Ching Ling, “Women’s Liberation in China,” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 6 (11 Feb. 1972), pp. 6–7; Lu Yu-lan, “Lu Yu-lan Talks About: Liberation of Women,” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 10 (10 Mar. 1972), pp. 10–12; and Fu Wen, “Doctrine of Confucius and Mencius—The Shackle That Keeps Women in Bondage,” Peking Review, Vol. 17, No. 10 (8 Mar. 1974), pp. 16–18.

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in Frog Mo “adopts an ethical perspective of the grassroots in the countryside characterized by an attitude of regret and forgiveness,” a “theme of atonement.”274

Critical Criticism as “Alternative View” of Revolution For Chengzhou He, the “local atonement for a national policy” in Frog “performs an understated yet bold atonement at an international level and by extension a fully human one,” all of which is part of Mo’s “metaphorical manner” of storytelling “to resist or complement the grand discourse of history and revolution.”275 Instead of dwelling further on this characteristically “tranquil” notion of knowledge in “atonement,” what I will do now is engage He’s broader contentions about Mo’s hallucinatory realist notions of social justice as what He regards to be an “alternative view” of revolution and social progress. Like Du’s reading practices, He’s teachings on Mo’s fiction are also ultimately aimed at religitimizing capitalist social relations as the only “alternative” that is possible. Here again I want to point out, nonetheless, that He’s text can be quite useful; but its usefulness in the pedagogical arena of radical critique needs to be produced through oppositional and interrogative practices of inquiry that disturb the “tranquillity of knowledge” with the elaboration of critique for what, as Marx argues, “is a question of revolutionizing the existing world, of practically attacking and changing existing things.”276 In order to align his interpretive practice with the powerfully entrenched “left” modes of “‘thinking of philosophy and of literary theory,’” He refers (without anything more) to Derrida and relies on Jonathan Culler’s authority for the pluralist doctrine of reading performativity and “performanz”277 effects. He agrees, following Culler (and Derrida), that a reading ought to “remain open to the various interpretations of the performative” text and not “‘try to restrict or simplify the performative’s domain by choosing one strand of reflection as the correct one.’”278 In He’s own words, this means “to seek opportunities to read literature

274 Chengzhou He, “Rural Chineseness, Mo Yan’s Work, and World Literature,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 86. 275 He, “Rural,” p. 87, emphasis added. 276 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 156. See also Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory as Resistance: Politics and Culture after (Post)structuralism (New York, NY: Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 9–30, 83–107. 277 He, “Rural,” p. 78, quoting Jonathan Culler. 278 He, “Rural,” p. 78, quoting Culler.

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and performativity against and in cooperation with each other.”279 If He had a theory of ideological class struggle at the level of reading (which he does not), it would mean proletarian reading “in cooperation” with bourgeois reading so that there is no “restricting,” no “simplifying,” and no “correct” reading, but only a remaining “open” to “various interpretations.” This, of course, is the ideological zone of the “tranquil.” Moist performances of the “discourse of rural Chineseness”—as a “‘microcosm of China, even of the whole world’”280—produce “multiple effects,” He argues, which “suggest that the author’s experience of a split between fiction and reality and his enjoyment of the freedom are narrated in the imaginary worlds of his creation.”281 The task of the “open” critical critic of Mo Yan Thought, therefore, is to “join Mo Yan in the performance” and “[join] in on performing Mo Yan” with his “new perspective” of the “unique”—reading “from all perspectives.”282 This is He’s “open” pedagogy of joining in with Mo in Derrida’s Nietzschean formula, “truth is plural.”283 “Truth,” as Derrida suggests in an interview with the “great critic”284 and mystic psychologist Julia Kristeva,285 is the realm of signifiers enacting “a kind of structural lure, what Kant would have called a transcendental illusion,” which is “never simply surpassable” and is “impossible to reduce” to a “simple structure of opposition.”286 Small “t” truths in the name of the “plural” emerge “to oust all metaphysical concepts” and come into play “before being determined as human … or nonhuman”: they “name the element” which is “without simplicity,” like an “irreducible atom” within “the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the 279 280 281 282 283

He, “Rural,” p. 78, emphasis added. He, “Rural,” p. 85, quoting Mo Yan. He, “Rural,” p. 85, emphasis added. He, “Rural,” p. 88. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 103. 284 John Sutherland, “The Ideas Interview: Julia Kristeva (Why is a great critic ashamed of being fashionable?),” The Guardian (14 Mar. 2006). 285 For Kristeva’s own “historical” mystery-suspense novels, see e.g. her Murder in Byzantium, trans. C. Jon Delogu (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006) and Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014). 286 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 33.

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origin of meaning in general.”287 In the name of “cooperation with each other,”288 He softly marginalizes Marx’s argument for the class politics of interpretive practices as the critique of “interpret[ing] the world, in various ways” because, from the position of the proletariat, “the point is to change”289 the world. This of course is not He’s point. His point is merely to “join” in Moism in reading as “enjoyment” of the “freedom” of “various interpretations.” He is the champion of what he calls “an alternative discourse” and “an alternative view of revolution and social progress”290 in the Moist imaginary. Such a perspectivism, he claims, can not only “distance itself ” from politics but even “transcend politics.”291 According to Mo “himself ” in a seemingly deep and sincere moment, “‘a novelist … must take a humanistic stance, and write accordingly’” to “‘not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics.’”292 He stands for this “greater” stance. The real question becomes, what is “an alternative”? Not surprisingly, He’s soft appeal to Culler’s soft warning against any “correct” reflection eventually disintegrates. He claims that Moist “counterdiscourse” constitutes “a reflective or corrective manner”293 of literarity. “I argue,” he says, “that the rural Chineseness that Mo Yan has performed in his texts and in literary events functions as a counterdiscourse to resist, revise, and supplement, if not subvert, the dominant grand discourse of modern China in a reflective or corrective manner.”294 Here I am going to examine the class limits of “cooperating” with He’s managerial “discourse”—or “counterdiscourse,” as he believes—in order to critique it as symptomatic of contemporary “left” ideological correctness in the erasure of class struggle. He’s text of joining in a Moist interpretive analytics, in other words, is itself a “performanz” of the dominant bourgeois ideology imagining (“hallucinating”) itself, in Mo’s words, as “a humanistic stance” which is “greater than politics.”

287 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Corrected edition, 1997), p. 9. 288 He, “Rural,” p. 78. 289 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 155. 290 He, “Rural,” p. 85. 291 He, “Rural,” p. 87. 292 He, “Rural,” p. 88, quoting Mo. 293 He, “Rural,” p. 78. 294 He, “Rural,” p. 78, emphasis added.

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This “greater” humanism is a “post”-political ideological narrative of softly obscured codes, similar to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls her “codic”295 writing that “weave[s] together heterogeneous tissues of concrete text without imposing any overarching arguments (abstractions) on them.”296 Joining Moism in the name of “‘innovative fiction’” as a “‘mixture’” of declassed aesthetic discourses “‘nurtured by fine art, music, even acrobatics,’” He represents his critical criticism as this “kind of blending [which] is essential to modern Chinese literature inclined to learn from both classical Chinese and nonnative, mostly Western literatures.”297 The goal of such mixing and blending (e.g., “a reflective or corrective manner”) is to mystify the class interests of bourgeois intellectuals who remain “open” to—and “cooperative” with—capitalistic social relations and “resist” socialist revolution. In other words, since socialist revolution means proletarian class politics becoming “greater” than bourgeois politics and society itself, this is not the kind of “alternative” vision He is inviting the reader to “join in.” It is important to notice, for example, that when he speaks of “classical Chinese” and “mostly Western” literatures, He speaks of them in a kind of “greater” sense of “reflection” (a “strand,” as Culler puts it) that glosses over their class content, that is, their fundamental ideological orientation in relation with either capitalism or socialism—which for Derrida are signs of a “structural lure.” But He’s approach to the “innovative” is hardly innovative in academic careerist terms. It camouflages its own sense of what being “greater” than politics means: to join in is the hope of being “internationally successful”298 with a “new perspective” for “domestic and international audiences”299 who “formulate their concepts of rural China”300 in a subtly relaxed but decidedly “post”-class manner. He’s notion of the “successful” innovative world literature and criticism has nothing to do with “resisting” world capitalism; on the contrary, his discourse is a strand of the thicker pedagogical narrative of cooperating with the regime of capital by “subverting” the development of class consciousness. This process of subverting

295 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Post-colonial Critic,” in G.C. Spivak, The PostColonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 69. 296 Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, Kindle edition, 2009), Chap. 1. 297 He, “Rural,” p. 84, quoting Mo, emphasis added. 298 He, “Rural,” p. 84. 299 He, “Rural,” p. 88. 300 He, “Rural,” p. 85.

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is sustained through “classless” traditional rhetoric about the “blending” of literatures in which class orientation is taken for granted. The greatest moments of He’s ostensibly “better understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics”301 in Mo Yan Thought are offered in his discourse on rural Chineseness as “an alternative discourse.”302 Despite his inclination to join in with Derrida, He argues that Mo “consolidates his nativist identity” and that rural Chineseness is “intrinsic to Mo Yan’s literary image.”303 Derrida, however, would very likely have found such notions highly problematic. “Identity,” for Derrida, itself incessantly resists any “consolidation.” The task of the Derridian reading is to follow and tease out the “freeplay” of signifying slippages which undermine any seemingly stable “consolidation.” Likewise, for Derrida, there is nothing “intrinsic” to anything (except “freeplay” itself, which interminably problematizes the notion of the “intrinsic”) because the supposed discovery of intrinsicality in anything is the illusory residue of a “metaphysics of presence.” The only “intrinsic” quality for Derrida is the “intrinsic” put in question—under erasure—as the effect of differing and deferring significations in freeplay. Again, it is the task of the “vigilant”304 Derridian reader to “traverse” and unravel the “pluri-dimensional”305 dispersal of “differences” from within themselves rather than to re-colonize a stable domain of self-presence and fullness in the name of the “intrinsic.” He sidesteps all of this Derridian teaching while attempting to (re)consolidate the authority of “Jacques Derrida and others”306 very early on in his text—with just one sentence and no “reading” of Derrida’s text. Here He’s tranquil adoption of Derrida is very similar to Lanlan Du’s adoption of Foucault. Nonetheless, “cooperation” prevails. He manages to save himself from a complete violation of Derrida’s post-metaphysical reading strategies by claiming that the rural Chineseness “intrinsic” to Moism is located in the literary “image,” which is “performed through his texts.”307 What is “intrinsic” turns out to be a performing of images which are, of course, “texts” that are marked self-consciously with paradoxical twists, differential self-miming, and the “author’s wiliness” turned against itself in a meta-cunning play with “criticisms about his [own] political 301 He, “Rural,” p. 85. 302 He, “Rural,” pp. 85–88. 303 He, “Rural,” p. 85. 304 Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 92–93. 305 Derrida, Grammatology, pp. 85–87. 306 He, “Rural,” p. 78. 307 He, “Rural,” p. 85.

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attitudes.”308 According to He, in this way Mo Yan Thought “avoids being overpoliticized by his interpreters.”309 How then does He’s own “performanz” in critical criticism deal with this “wily” author’s avoidance of “over”-politicizing interpretation, whatever this means? His interpretation is supposedly not “overpoliticized”; it is merely a “cooperative” reading that affords us “a better understanding”310 of how Moist performanz “subverts” the relationship between aesthetics and politics. These (anti-)theoretical slips in He’s discourse on “an alternative,” however, are not simply the manifestations of “intrinsic” freeplay in his textual performanz as literary criticism. Rather, they are the highly determined results of his petty-bourgeois academic class interests in (re)normalizing the “subversive” as the paradoxical “wiliness”311 of deconstructive textualities that are supposedly cut loose from the economic substratum of class contradictions and class struggle. In other words, He’s theory for a “better understanding” of how Moism “provide[s] an alternative view of revolution and social progress”312 is an opportunistic anti-class theory. It relegitimizes “critical” intellectual inquiry as the “internationally successful”313 pursuit of popularity within the existing world order of capital. Being performatively “wily” is what matters, not writing in order to construct theory as class consciousness among the masses of the reading public. Being “wily” is “subversive,” but the theory of class is “overpoliticizing” things. The pedagogy of critical criticism in this way becomes hypocritical criticism. In support of his argument that Moism “challenges, or rather subverts, the dominant grand narrative of Chinese history and politics,” or the “official orthodox discourse of history,” thereby providing “an alternative view of revolution and social progress,”314 He cites Mo’s novel Red Sorghum315 as an exemplary “successful” text. His reading of Red Sorghum adopts the reading of David Derwei Wang and Michael Berry, who view the novel as a kind of “wily” narrative that undermines its appearances and reflects a pessimistic “failure” of revolution. Wang and Berry write that

308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315

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He, “Rural,” p. 85. He, “Rural,” p. 85. He, “Rural,” p. 85. He, “Rural,” p. 85. He, “Rural,” p. 85. He, “Rural,” p. 84. He, “Rural,” p. 85, emphasis added. Mo Yan, Red Sorghum, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1993).

Mo Yan appears to be paying tribute to works of revolutionary historical fiction. But on closer examination, we realize that not only does his revolutionary history fail to deliver the promise of ultimate meaning, but it actually reveals a historical degeneration in which each generation fails to live up to the preceding one.316

Wang and Berry’s deciphering of the narrative of “failure” and “degeneration” in Red Sorghum is also reflected in Shelley Chan’s analysis of Moism as the viewpoint of “our pessimistic novelist.”317 He “joins in” and extends this reading by proposing that the novel doesn’t follow the “usual official pattern of narrating a story” about the Chinese people’s collective war of resistance against Japanese imperialism by “defending the nation and liberating the people.”318 No—for He, the story performs an “[o]n the other hand”319 logic. In Red Sorghum, he says, Grandpa leads an attack on the Japanese purely out of revenge for the Japanese soldiers killing many villagers. The brave act passed on orally to and inspiring Mo Yan is part of a rural history that supplements, if not deconstructs, the official narrative of history.320

What He fails to notice—in much the same way as he fails to notice core elements in Derridian doctrine—is that this “subversive,” “deconstructive,” and “inspiring” tale of Grandpa’s “pure” instinct of “revenge,” performed at the microcapillary level of village life, is itself inspired by the very popular bourgeois historiography of Nietzschean “ressentiment.” Nietzsche’s anti-dialectics of the “will” to power has been more thoroughly institutionalized through Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical analytics of localized “power” struggles at a “distance,” as He suggests, from the Marxist analytics of class struggle. He’s reading of the purity of “revenge” as the underlying, motive force of historical and subjective conflict is itself the “official” and “dominant” and “usual” explanatory apparatus of bourgeois postmodern populism. But remember, He is not constructing interpretations in any “overpoliticized” way. Furthermore, He fails to comprehend that Grandpa’s subjective motive of revenge does not in any way disprove the Marxist “grand narrative” of class conflict, although his narrative of interpretation does attempt to discredit Marxist theory,

316 David Der-wei Wang and Michael Berry, “The Literary World of Mo Yan,” World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 3 (2000), p. 490; quoted in He, “Rural,” p. 86, my emphasis added. 317 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 318 He, “Rural,” pp. 85–86. 319 He, “Rural,” p. 86. 320 He, “Rural,” p. 86, emphasis added.

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which is precisely He’s main ideological motive and what “inspires” his reading. To put it a different way, in the materialist dialectics of Marxist reading, Grandpa’s sense of revenge is not “pure,” however much Mo’s story makes it appear to be so. His degree of (mis)understanding of his own intensities of “revenge” reflects Grandpa’s lack of class consciousness, which is quite easily understandable as a result of the “old” world outlook that grounds his consciousness in individualistic, declassed terms. “Revenge” is what makes sense for Grandpa because it’s all he knows and all he ever wants to know: his own “revenge” is his own intensity of desire. When his revenge is exacted, there is nothing more that needs to be done, such as the revolutionary socialist transformation of society in its totality. But “revenge” is an unconscious class logic of localist vigilantism. It is popularly portrayed as the “spontaneous” response to the material social conditions of capitalistic imperialism, the very conditions which governed the Japanese invasion and occupation of China. These social conditions make “revenge” a real necessity of life and death struggle. “Revenge” is not its own “intrinsic” grounding in “rural Chineseness,” as He believes; rather, it is materially conditioned and produced by the deeper logic of capitalist-imperialist conquest. Grandpa’s mentality and feelings of “revenge,” in short, are structural effects of class contradictions. In the “brave”321 Moist tale of anti-theory, however, Grandpa is not allowed to know this. Moism descends, as Foucault puts it, to “rural history” because this Nietzschean revisionism of historiography as herkunft “subverts” Marxist class consciousness with “popular” scripts of “power” in an endless “failure” of humanity to resolve its social contradictions.322 Grandpa is thus the subject of “repetition” in degeneration. To use Wang and Berry’s expression, Grandpa represents for Mo Yan Thought the grand “promise of ultimate meaning”323 in eternal pessimism: inspiring! As Teresa Ebert points out in her demystification of Nietzschean pan-interpretationalism (He’s “all perspectives” in “cooperation”), Derrida himself speaks with exactly the same “brave” super-individualism as old Grandpa. Derrida proclaims: 321 He, “Rural,” p. 86. 322 See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Foucault, Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64; and Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 35–66. 323 Wang and Berry, “Literary World,” p. 490.

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I am not part of any group… I do not identify myself with … a national community, a political party, or with any other group or clique whatsoever, with any philosophical or literary school… I want to keep my freedom, always: this for me is the condition not only for being singular and other, but for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others.324

Grandpa is a “brave” Derridian-like subject of “singularity,” atomism, and the seeming irreducibility of “spontaneous” vengeance, and “all subjects,” for Derrida, “are singularities, whereas abstractions … form the machinery of totalization.”325 Ebert argues that this is the core of the contemporary neoliberal ethics of capitalism … [which] becomes the discursive means for legitimating the status quo, largely with the excuse of resisting totality, and any project for substantive change is dismissed as an exercise in the will to truth, a totality that is indifferent to difference.326

What is “inspiring” and “passed on”327 in He’s celebratory critical criticism of Red Sorghum is a passing on of this petty-bourgeois ideology of core individualism masquerading as “an alternative” discourse. But as Han Dongping explains in his writings on the seventieth anniversary of the Chinese victory against Japanese fascist and anti-Communist aggression (1931–1945), this fourteen-year war (which He incorrectly represents as 1937–1945) was “more than a war” in the sense that “[i]t was a social movement.”328 In other words, the protracted struggle of resistance was not “led” by Grandpas motivated “purely” by their vigilantism filled with “revenge.” The social movement of mass resistance against the Japanese fascist ruling class was fundamentally led, Han writes, by the Communist Party: the vanguard of revolutionary theorists and strategists that effectively mobilized and “organized peasant associations.”329 It was the Communist forces

324 Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), p. 27; quoted in Ebert, The Task, Chap. 1. 325 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 1. 326 Ebert, The Task, Chap. 1, emphasis added. 327 He, “Rural,” p. 86. 328 Han Dongping, “On the Outcome of the War of Resistance Against Japan: The Irony of History,” Chinadaily Forum (10 Sept. 2015), emphasis added; see also Han Dongping, “It Is More Than a War. It Is a Social Movement: The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Fascists,” Chinadaily Forum (10 Sept. 2015); and “The Socialist Legacy Underlies the Rise of Today’s China in the World,” Aspects of India’s Economy, Nos. 59–60 (Oct. 2014). 329 Han, “On the Outcome.”

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“who represented the fundamental interests of the Chinese working class” which “accounts for more than 90 percent of the Chinese people.”330 It was the Communist forces with their “red bases,” such as “the one led by Chairman Mao and Zhu De,” which “set up the first representative government of workers and farmers.”331 What is significant here is that this in no way discredits the “bravery” and sense of “revenge” in Grandpa and the millions of other heroic peasant farmers—village-level labor, a point which He completely ignores. Rather, Han’s argument (re)situates their “individual” acts of “will” and determined resistance in the social movement of real historical development in which the Communists played the central role in organizing the collective forces of resistance by joining with and co-operating with the villagers toward the socialist transformation of the countryside.332 The crux of the matter is that He’s individualistic reading of Mo’s “inspiring” story of “pure” revenge obscures this more “abstract” and more comprehensively real social history. And to fearlessly aid in his own as well as Mo’s “international success,” he calls it “supplementing,” “deconstructing,” and “subverting.” He’s performanz in critical criticism is petty-bourgeois ideology in a pure state of mind. His pedagogy of Moist hallucinatory justice converges—“joins in” and “merges” —with Lanlan Du’s individualistic teachings on the morality of atonement. Together they leave the conceptuality of “justice” in the imaginary world of bourgeois ethics. By (re)reading these “critically” popularizing scholarly narratives of Mo’s fictions from the displaced and occluded standpoint of Marxist theory—which alone offers a dialectical materialist critique of critical criticism as the “tranquillity of knowledge”—I have sought to show here that what is ultimately at stake is the hallucinating away of the deeper social logic of class struggle. Marxist inquiry into the shifting and intersecting boundaries of “justice” and/in the humanities enables readers to acquire and develop this conceptual approach to the question of social justice, not merely as a literary “theme” but as an urgent site of contestation for changing the world. As Marx framed the problem in 1845 in what he called the “materialist doctrine,” the “coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary 330 Han, “On the Outcome.” 331 Han, “On the Outcome.” 332 In the realm of socialist struggle in literature and art, see e.g. Liu Ching, Wall of Bronze, trans. Sidney Shapiro (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954); and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.

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practice.”333 It is only through such an understanding that the contemporary mystic aestheticism of leaf reading—as in the exemplary articulations of Goldblatt, Chen, Horiguchi, Du, and He—can be effectively drawn out and contested from the foundations of class knowledge. What such a mode of theoretical practice serves to reveal is, in Lenin’s words once again, that the search for any theoretical meaning in the ideological densities of Moist critical criticism becomes an almost hopeless undertaking. Where leaf reading ends, where it “leaves” the reader to merely settle in with a superficially textual and experiential “sense of futility and loss,”334 where this “sense” ends, there class knowledge and class struggle begin. Marx: “[W]e therefore take leave … of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface …”335

333 Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” p. 153. 334 Goldblatt, “Mutually Rewarding,” p. 26. 335 Marx, Capital, p. 172, emphasis added.

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4.  Cages and Class Struggle As far back as 1905 Lenin pointed out emphatically … the characteristics of proletarian literature as … “a free literature, because the idea of socialism and sympathy with the working people, and not greed or careerism, will bring ever new forces to its ranks… . a free literature, because it will serve, not some satiated heroine, not the bored ‘upper ten thousand’ suffering from fatty degeneration, but the millions and tens of millions of working people … a free literature, enriching the last word in the revolutionary thought of mankind with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat, bringing about a permanent interaction between the experience of the past … and the experience of the present … struggle of the worker comrades.” —Mao Zedong1

Since the late 1990s with the publication of his book Chinese Christians in America,2 Fenggang Yang has steadily emerged in the world capitalist social structure of “globalization” as one of the leading sociological theorists of what could be called the “religious turn”3 among China’s citizens. Yang, of course, is originally from mainland China and is a professor in the United States.4 At the same time, Mo Yan has become one of the most high-profile fiction writers on the scene of world literature, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 for what was then termed the “hallucinatory realism” of Mo’s continually expanding works of “storytelling,” as he likes to say, from Red Sorghum (1993) to The Garlic Ballads (1995), The Republic of Wine (2000), Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (2001), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2008), Change (2012), Pow! (2012), Sandalwood Death (2013), and most recently Frog (2015). His tales

1 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 75, 97, note 1, quoting V.I. Lenin, “Party Organisation and Party Literature,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 48–49. 2 Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 3 See Louisa Lim, “Chinese Turn to Religion to Fill a Spiritual Vacuum,” NPR (18 July 2010); Fenggang Yang, “The Other Chinese Miracle: Great Awakening Shifts Growth of Global Christianity to the East,” The ARDA (1 Dec. 2015). 4 See Robin Young and Fenggang Yang, “Tiananmen Square, A ‘Watershed’ for Chinese Conversions to Christianity,” Here & Now (4 June 2012). In this interview, Yang states that he converted to Christianity in 1989, being originally “from an atheist background.”

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have been described as displaying an “unbridled imagination”5 that “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”6 to convey a “nebulous terrain exist[ing] in the hearts and minds of every person”7 and “will point us to the source of light.”8 More storytelling in hallucinatory realism is certainly expected to follow from China’s celebrated “subversive” literary star, as the literary critic Shelley Chan reads Mo’s writing in her book, A Subversive Voice in China.9 What do Fenggang Yang and Mo Yan have in common? According to Yang, they share a concern with what he calls “soul searching.” Yang is one of the key contributors to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s interdisciplinary anthology, Mo Yan in Context. In this book published by Purdue University Press, where Yang is a professor of sociology and founding director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society,10 a significant number of scholars explore the contextual (inter)relation between religious thinking and “literary” imagination. Following the recurrent religious and spiritual-oriented contextualizations of Mo’s writings as discussed in essays by Lanlan Du, Chi-ying Alice Wang, Jinghui Wang, and Donald Mitchell and Angelica Duran, Mo Yan in Context concludes with Yang’s epilogue entitled “Soul Searching in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Society.”11 In this text he attempts to relate Mo’s 5 Chi-ying Alice Wang, “Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in the Context of Religious and Chinese Literary Conventions,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 124. 6 Peter Englund quoted in Fang Yang, “Profile: Nobel Laureate in Literature Mo Yan,” Xinhuanet (11 Oct. 2012). 7 Mo Yan quoted in Sabina Knight, “The Realpolitik of Mo Yan’s Fiction,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 99; Mo Yan, “Storytellers: Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (7 Dec. 2012), p. 8. 8 Alexa Huang and Angelica Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work and the Politics of Literary Humor,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 163. 9 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011). 10 In his Curriculum Vitae available at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society (Purdue University) website, Yang indicates that he has “received over $7 million [in] external grants as the PI [Principal Investigator] … of projects.” See Fenggang Yang, “Curriculum Vitae,” Center on Religion and Chinese Society (as updated to Feb. 2016), p. 3. 11 Fenggang Yang, “Soul Searching in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Society,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), pp. 215–20.

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“contemporary” vivifying tales of “some beleaguered souls”12 within the framework of “the question of soul searching.”13 He contends that this soul searching is central to “the quiet spiritual revolution that is like wildfire sweeping a vast land” as “the spirit of the era.”14 Yang refers to “Mo Yan’s work as a key example.”15 However, on careful examination of his discussion, one gets the impression that he seems to have little interest in Mo’s actual texts, or perhaps as if, in a “nebulous” way, Mo’s stories serve as convenient pretexts for Yang’s sociological reflections. I say this because in the course of his five pages of metanarrative in the spirit of the “sociological imagination,”16 Yang never bothers to even refer to, much less quote from or analyze, any real “key example” from any of Mo’s writings or talks. But in light of Yang’s worldwide scholarly “notoriety,”17 as he helps us to recognize, what we read here is supposedly the “sociologist’s reflection”18 as reading Mo Yan “in context.” Yang the sociologist is most concerned with what he calls the “caged” soul of soul searching. The problem I take up in this chapter is to understand the (ideo) logic of Yang’s “cage” theory. In order to do this in the way that Yang’s theory itself makes necessary—as will become clear, I believe, for critical readers and scholars in such fields as sociology, social philosophy, cultural critique, religious studies, world literature, and so forth—I do not provide here a conventional exegesis on Yang’s books or numerous articles, although I do point out what I consider to be the fundamental premises of his thinking. Instead, what I try to do here is to take Yang’s speculative thinking to task by carefully examining and demystifying the bourgeois ideological traces of “global” capitalist common sense that invisibly and silently structure his discourse on soul searching. This mode of analysis is aimed at sparking and enabling the revolutionary-minded initiative of other

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

As mentioned above, see also the following texts in Mo Yan in Context: Lanlan Du, “Abortion in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms and Mo Yan’s 蛙 (Frog)” (pp. 63–75); Chi-ying Alice Wang, “Mo Yan’s The Garlic Ballads and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in the Context of Religious and Chinese Literary Conventions” (pp. 123–35); Jinghui Wang, “Religious Elements in Mo Yan’s and Yan Lianke’s Works” (pp. 139–51); and Donald Mitchell and Angelica Duran, “A Textbook Case of Comparative Cultural Studies” (pp. 195–210). Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. C. Wright Mills quoted in Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 218. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215.

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engaged readers to produce and expound more radical-critical critiques of Yang’s or Mo’s writings. Counter-conventional interventions of this kind are necessary, I believe, for contributing to the socialist and communist transformation of existing world capitalist society. Anything less than taking the dominant bourgeois intelligentsia to task is missing the point. As Mao argued in 1962, the point is that “at no time must we forget class struggle.”19 As I said, Yang is most interested in theorizing the “soul searching” of the “caged” soul. His thinking mirrors his grandly glossy treatment of what I call Mo Yan Thought, which is, in Mo’s own words, a “nebulous terrain” of selfconscious “gaps,” “flows,” “all this jabbering,” “bad luck,” “flux,” and “happy fate.”20 Yang’s theory, in other words, is an exercise in obscurantism which, as Engels described Herr Dühring’s “axiomatic” and “system-creating” logic, “trickles out in a meaningless subtilising.”21 Interestingly, Dühring likewise invoked the dilemma of the “cage” of thinking. He promised that he was “not philosophis[ing] out of a cage.”22 Engels reads Dühring’s “complexity” of thought as “apparently mean[ing] that he philosophises in a cage,”23 namely, the cage of Hegelian idealism. I find a similarly convoluted logic of “cage” theory in Yang’s discourse on soul searching. Is Yang’s sociology of religious thinking a sociological reflection “out of a cage” or “in a cage”? In order to theorize a “cage,” of course, the theorist need not necessarily be “in” the cage in question—although it might help to have some actual “experience” of being (and thinking) in the cage.24 Yet at the same time, if the 19 Mao quoted in William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 314. 20 Mo Yan, Change, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), pp. 18–19, 25, 60, 89. 21 Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972), pp. 48, 52. 22 Dühring quoted in Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 53, emphasis in original. 23 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 53, emphasis in original; see also Wang Che, “How Engels Criticized Duhring’s Apriorism—Notes on Studying ‘Anti-Duhring,’” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 10 (10 Mar. 1972), pp. 5–9. 24 Wang Shu-chen, “Study Materialist Dialectics and Be a Vanguard Fighter in Consciously Making Revolution,” Peking Review, Vol. 13, No. 49 (4 Dec. 1970), pp. 15–17. See also “Class Origin,” in the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism (Massline.org, 2014) and as discussed in William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2008), pp. 280–316, 400–16; and in Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 236–39.

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theorist is indeed thinking “out” of the cage, his or her outsidedness may still be positioned within some larger cage. Is it possible for theory to think or grasp the “cage” while also being caged, and yet also be able to theorize a way “out” of the cage—in short, to revolutionize the caged situation? Let us turn to see how Yang deals with the problem. In his epilogue to Mo Yan in Context, Yang states that his main point is that “Chinese souls have been caged by traditionalism, modernism, MarxistLeninist-Maoist atheism, and totalitarianism, and so are the souls of Chinese novelists.”25 What is striking at first glance is Yang’s sophistic rhetoric of vaguely amorphous generalities. If you want to challenge “traditionalism,” what kind of traditionalism, but then what precisely is the problem with “modernism”? Is modernism also a traditionalism? If you want to contest Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, do you contest them on the basis of their atheism? Doesn’t everyone oppose totalitarianism? But how is “totalitarianism” (inter)related with traditionalism, modernism, and the atheism of Marxism? As Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argues, the notion of the “totalitarian” and “its derivations … have always been used by liberals to guarantee ‘liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the leftist critique of liberal [capitalist] democracy as … the “twin” of the Right Fascist dictatorship.’”26 Yang’s theory of caged souls is based on an eclectically updated idealist “belief system”27 framework according to which people’s “souls” or inner-spiritual lives have been suppressed, repressed, oppressed, or otherwise dominated by external socio-cultural forces and movements. Religious believers like himself, he says, “seek alternate meaning systems.”28 Describing his own “conversion”-experience in which he became “a believer,” he says: “I was looking for something,” and “[w]hen I looked for the different religious traditions, Christianity made the best sense to me, so I converted.”29

25 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. 26 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Pedagogy of Totality,” jac: a journal of rhetoric, culture & politics, Vol. 23, No. 1 (2003), p. 6, emphasis added; quoting Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001). 27 Fenggang Yang, “Chinese Conversion to Evangelical Christianity: The Importance of Social and Cultural Contexts,” Sociology of Religion, Vol. 59, No. 3 (1998), p. 241; see also Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 34. 28 Yang, “Chinese Conversion,” p. 251; see also Yang, Chinese Christians, p. 93. 29 Young and Yang, “Tiananmen,” emphasis added.

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His “cage” concept suggests the fairly common idea of a contradiction between freedom and conformity, or liberation and domination. Its political reading is organized around the liberal model of oppression-domination, not the Marxist materialist model of exploitation. But since all socio-cultural formations always produce and engender “systems” of beliefs, modes of thinking, and boundaries of legitimate behavior and social intercourse, the important question raised is: what kind of social order and system of thought would be most conducive to the development of “free” consciousness for all? After all, who would want to live a “caged” existence? In this sense it is certainly hard to disagree with the liberationist or emancipatory implications of Yang’s underlying paradigm, setting aside the validity of his more specific (though still extremely vague) series of claims against “traditionalism,” “modernism,” and so on. In other words, my reading of Yang’s central claim reveals that his cage conception itself is premised upon a systemic mode of inquiry into the politics and ideology of social and cultural “systems” that impact human “souls.” What he means by “souls,” of course, at least in my understanding—which might arguably be “caged,” according to Yang—is a spiritual code word for human consciousness, modes of thinking and belief, or the “subject” of society in critical theory. Since Yang’s cage conception involves contradiction and a certain recognition of the subjection of the subject (“souls”) in the oppression-domination model, it should not be surprising that he postulates the possibility of strivings in “resistance.” It is in this light that Yang goes on to say that, despite the general problem of the caging of Chinese souls and the souls of Chinese novelists, “we have seen some souls slip out of the cage and wander, a bit in the dark but wander nonetheless.”30 Here he seems to imply that there is just one cage—“the cage.” Earlier in this same sentence is where he refers to “Mo Yan’s work as a key example.”31 But as I pointed out, Yang does not find it necessary to refer to nor even suggest any analysis of any “key example.” I find this problematic for a book that stresses “contextual” thought and analysis; yet on the contrary, Duran and Huang assure us that Yang’s sociological reflections are “not an afterthought but [are] in many ways the flowering of the explicit and implicit sociological and

30 Yang, “Soul Searching,” pp. 215–16, emphasis added. 31 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215.

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literary arguments that precede”32 his text. Yang is thus saved by what Hegel calls a “state of innocence.”33 While my main purpose here is to examine Yang’s “soul searching” epi(ideo) logue, I want to briefly turn to one specific “key example” from Mo Yan’s narratives. This example appears in Shelley Chan’s discussion of Mo’s novel Red Sorghum in Chan’s book, A Subversive Voice in China. The narrator in Red Sorghum considers his Grandma (Dai Fenglian) to be a hero. Referring to her paper-cuttings (jianzhi), he says: “She [Grandma] said a katydid perched on top of its cage, and that’s what it did.”34 Chan reads Grandma (or the narrator’s construction of his memory of her) as “a woman defiant of traditional moral values, one who is determined to decide her own fate.”35 However, Chan does not analyze the narrator nor Grandma in terms of the “cage.” Instead, she employs a similar notion of people being “trapped” in a “regressive” “degeneration of humankind.”36 According to Chan, “Mo Yan’s notion of the degeneration of humankind … not only challenges the progressive conception of history since the turn of the twentieth century but also subverts the historical materialism of Communist ideology.”37 Later in this same chapter she discusses Mo’s novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out also as an “historical novel” that mixes “the real and the surreal by means of postmodern playfulness” in order to “laugh at the absurdity and ridiculousness of history.”38 It is here that she calls up the “trap” image-conception, as in “the system of Buddhist cosmology, [where] all creatures are trapped and suffer within the wheel of life due to their sinful actions,” symbolizing “the suffering of people who are trapped in man-made adversities with no escape.”39 Nonetheless, Chan is highly enthusiastic about Mo’s “subversive” and “postmodern” worldview articulated in his fiction, and at the same time she calls him

32 Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, eds., Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 14. 33 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1967), § 775; see also Teresa L. Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking’ as the Interpretive Logic of the Popular,” Textual Practice, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2014), p. 16. 34 Mo Yan, Red Sorghum, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 132; quoted in Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 35 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 36 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 37 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. 38 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1. See Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 2008). 39 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 1, emphasis added.

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“our pessimistic novelist.”40 But not unlike Yang, Chan’s “subversive” theory of Moism ignores Lenin’s brilliant dialectical materialist critique of Tolstoy as a literary ideologist of the “[d]espair [that] is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”41 Despite Chan’s interpretive baptism in the playfulness of (poststructuralist) postmodernist historiography—along with a mixed congregation of “modernist” and “traditional” intellectuals in her book—she seems to accept Moism’s “pessimism” as the true and holy (de)construction of all historical moments. By contrast, for Lenin the “pessimistic” attitude of “despair” (masked by ludic postmodern “play” interwoven with melancholy) is underwritten by a class attitude: “Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing.”42 Returning to Yang, what he proposes is that the subject is capable of “slipping out” of cages and “wandering.” The question then is: what kind of “resistance” is ultimately at stake here? Is it sufficient to “slip out” and “wander” while still leaving the “cage” intact? This again is a question of the systematicity of the “cage” paradigm. In his oppression-domination model, is the system of “cages” actually called into question? Marx, for example, theorizes the “social totality” of the mode of production and its contradictory system of social relations along with their contested articulations in the realm of the superstructure.43 But Yang has already contended that Marxism’s atheism is one of the cages. In his final paragraph, Yang repeats the “cage” idea ten times.44 What is presented in the form of an epilogue as a “biographical account,” a “personal observation,” and also a “sociologist’s reflection,” becomes what is, in effect, a manifesto on behalf of the “searching souls in literature” as the “quiet spiritual revolution 40 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 3. 41 V.I. Lenin, “L.N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967), p. 332. 42 Lenin, “L.N. Tolstoy,” p. 332. 43 See the following: Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 161; V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx (A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), pp. 15–16; Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 81; Mao Zedong, “On Practice,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 298, 302–03; Mao, “On Contradiction,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 322–24; and Brian Williams, “Lenin versus the Early Lukacs,” Socialist Action (10 Feb. 2011). 44 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219.

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that is sweeping the vast lands of China like wildfire.”45 He says that “all kinds of religions are surviving and thriving in China,” manifesting “a great awakening with various spiritual movements.”46 However, here Yang summons his literary knowledge in order to propose a sharp contrast between “the modern West”47 and contemporary China. In Europe and the United States he finds that “dramatic social changes have generated some great novels that are both reflective of the era and inspirational in some eternally relevant spiritual dimensions”; but in China, he says, “so far I have not seen an outpouring of Chinese novels like those in the modern West.”48 Yang’s notion of “great novels”49 seems to be highly inclusive. Not unlike his vaguely knowledgeable gesture toward Mo’s fiction as a “key example” without any real example, the only actual novel from the “modern West” that he ever specifically refers to is Harry Potter. He tells us that he was “happy and envious” to see his own U.S.-born children “enjoying” the Harry Potter novels and films “because when I was a child this was impossible for me to experience.”50 This is a telling moment in Yang’s autobiographical narrative: it marks both the intellectual and ideological limits of his approach to the sociology of religion when applied to the goals of reading practices in the study of literary texts. Despite his posturing against “traditionalism,” when it comes to the “newness” of Harry Potter—which a number of critics have identified as a “popular” rearticulation of bourgeois gothic romanticism centered around the adventures of the youthful Individual as “hero” against the dark forces of Evil and the looming threat of apocalyptic doom51—Yang finds deep consolation in returning to the very traditional model of reading literary works for the “experience” of “enjoying” them. 45 46 47 48 49

Yang, “Soul Searching,” pp. 215, 219. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. On literary “greatness” in Mo Yan Thought, see Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei, “Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life,” China Daily (7 Dec. 2012), paraphrasing and quoting Mo, my emphasis added: “The key to producing a great piece of work … is whether a writer can go beyond class and politics,” and “‘[t]he key is a writer’s thoughts deep in his heart.’” See also Mo, “Storytellers,” p. 8, emphasis added: “So long as the work correctly and vividly describes this nebulous, massively contradictory terrain, it will inevitably transcend politics and be endowed with literary excellence.” 50 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 216. 51 See e.g. Kendall Brunson, “Potter versus Snape: Vying for the Title of the True Romantic Hero,” Journal of Research Across the Disciplines, Vol. 2 (2010), pp. 1–23; Maria Nikolajeva, “Harry Potter and the Secrets of Children’s Literature,” in Critical Perspectives on

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This “sociological” appeal to “some eternally relevant spiritual dimensions” subtly works to divert the “experience” of reading away from the critical practice of problematizing the social dimensions (the “cage”)—as Marx and Engels put it, the “material surroundings”52 of economic practices and relationships that form the “social totality” shaping historical consciousness—that this readerly enjoyment is conditioned by without becoming self-reflexively knowledgeable of its own position and role in the prevailing structure of social relations. Marx argues that the “true reality” of the social subject of imaginings, experiences, and enjoyments is not subjectivity as “an abstract being, squatting outside the world” but rather is the subject of/in the “human world,” which is “[t]his state, this society, produc[ing] religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world.”53 Importantly, Marx contends that the workers “must seek [their] true reality” if they are to become “radical” with “the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.”54 “To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.”55 In other words, the working class must learn to become active in the critical practices of inquiry that “seek” to invert the inverted world of consciousness and invert the inverted world of the capitalist ruling class itself. As Lenin puts it, the task is to “[learn] to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises” in order “to find, in the very society that surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing

52 53

54 55

Harry Potter, ed. Elizabeth E. Heilman (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 225–42; and Atara Stein, “Immortals and Vampires and Ghosts, Oh My!: Byronic Heroes in Popular Culture,” Romantic Circles (Feb. 2002). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1989), p. 41. Karl Marx, “Toward a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), pp. 45–46, emphasis in original. See also Andrew M. McKinnon, “Reading ‘Opium of the People’: Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion,” Critical Sociology, Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2 (2005), pp. 23–29; and Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” pp. 18, 28–29. Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” pp. 45, 47–48, emphasis in original. Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 47. See also Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory, (Post)Modernity, Opposition: An “Other” Introduction to Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (College Park, MD: Maisonneuve Press, 1991), pp. 189–230; and Martha E. Gimenez, “(Mis-)Reading/(Re-)Reading Marx,” Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (June 2001).

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to their social position, must—constitute the power of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.”56 To “seek out” in this context means, among other things, to open up the question of why Harry Potter is so popular and indeed so extraordinarily profitable, not only in the United States (and not just for children) but also in China since 2000, where all the novels, films, and related merchandise (spectacles, clothing, bookbags, etc.) have catapulted “children’s literature” into a major economic enterprise.57 Yang clouds this issue through the sentimental rhetoric of being the “happy” onlooker. In doing so, his “sociologist’s reflection” obscures the ideological and dialectical relation between subjective experiential “enjoyment” and the objectively “surrounding” structures of the capitalist mode of production. To put it a different way, the social “cage” of capitalist exploitation needs (future) workers whose “experience” of reading is both contained and stimulated by the pleasures of “enjoyment” without being taught to inquire deeper into the complex of causes and effects between pleasure and profitability. Again as Marx writes, “[w]e have to be concerned” with “the theoretical life [existence] of man” and, in doing so, “make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism.”58 But from the perspective of Yang’s “markets of religion” or “economy of religion,”59 which heralds “the spirit of the era,”60 Marx’s materialist dialectics of the “theoretical life of man” is “(mis)read”61 as an unjust “atheism” that has conspired in the caging of souls. This is an ideological (mis)reading that distracts attention away from the Marxist revolutionary project as the articulation of class struggle in the theoretical critique of the “social principles of Christianity [that] preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the

56 V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 28, emphasis in original. 57 See “Birthday Boy Harry Potter Still Magic in China,” China Daily (1 Aug. 2015), reporting on the 15th year anniversary of the Harry Potter boom in China and noting that since its “debut” in 2000, the series has sold more than 16 million copies nationwide, “remaining an annual best-seller.” The “happy” editor from the People’s Literature Publishing House says they never expected the series to be “so popular,” but it has turned into “a miracle.” 58 Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 42. 59 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 218; Yang, Religion in China, pp. 85–158. 60 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 215. 61 Gimenez, “(Mis-)Reading.”

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latter is the pious wish [that] the former will be charitable.”62 “Happy people!”63 exclaims Marx with biting sarcasm. In his vague rehearsal of “post”-Marxist common sense, Yang suggests that the Marxist theory of religion64 may be ambiguously dismissed as what he calls “the Marxist adage,” cynically referring to the argument that “religion is the opium of the people.”65 On the contrary for Yang, religious soul searching is not an opium

62 Karl Marx, “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter,” in Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 268. 63 Marx, “The Communism,” p. 276. 64 Among Lenin’s writings, see the following: “What Our Liberal Bourgeois Want, and What They Fear,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 9 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 240–45: “[e]very bourgeois ideologist has the soul of a thoroughgoing huckster” (p. 243); “Socialism and Religion,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 83–87; “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 402–13; “Classes and Parties in Their Attitude to Religion and the Church,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 414–23; “On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), pp. 227–36; and “To Maxim Gorky” (second half of Nov. 1913), in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 35 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), pp. 127–29. Lenin’s letter to Gorky is especially significant in its strongly militant materialist critique of Gorky’s remark that “God is the complex of those ideas, worked out by … mankind, which awaken and organise social feelings” (p. 127, Lenin quoting Gorky). Lenin replies, in part: “It is untrue that god is the complex of ideas which awaken and organise social feelings. That is Bogdanov[’s] idealism, which suppresses the material origin of ideas. God is (in history and in real life) first of all the complex of ideas generated by the brutish subjection of man both by external nature and by the class yoke—ideas which consolidate that subjection, lull to sleep the class struggle” (p. 128, emphasis in original). See also Mao Zedong, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (originally published in the People’s Daily in 1957), in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), pp. 384–421: “We cannot abolish religion by administrative order or force people not to believe in it. We cannot compel people to give up idealism, any more than we can force them to embrace Marxism. The only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, criticism, persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression” (p. 389). This passage from Mao’s work is quoted on the back cover of Donald MacInnis’ book, Religious Policy and Practice in Communist China: A Documentary History (New York, NY: MacMillan Co, 1972). Mao’s position is clearly consistent with Lenin’s. 65 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 216.

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but rather a “quiet spiritual revolution” to “slip out of the cage and wander.”66 Just as in his vague reference to “the fact” of Mo Yan’s “prolific novels”67 and the experiential joy of Harry Potter, Yang’s basic attitude toward the “Marxist adage” is nebulously conveyed by a wandering non-argument rather than any kind of substantive critique. As Zavarzadeh puts it, Yang’s authoritative “thought” is fundamentally characterized by a “vacant”68 anti-theoretical posturing that is “critically hollow” in its “thoughtless thoughtfulness.”69 As Martha Gimenez argues in the context of the “social determinants” of the “silent classroom,” Yang’s ambiguously superficial tactics of double-reduction— reducing the Marxist world outlook to “atheism” while also reducing Marxism’s political conception of religion to an “adage”—enact a “quiet” indication that his “theory” conceals “enormous difficulties in dealing with abstractions.”70 When one carefully reads Yang’s “sociologist’s reflection” side-by-side with such engaged and critical intellectual studies as those offered by Andrew McKinnon, John Molyneux, and Teresa Ebert,71 it becomes quite difficult to take his “adage” (anti)theory of Marxism very seriously. Is it a “serious” theory? Why? Here is also the silent problem of taking Yang’s ideological discourse to task, as I said earlier. It is precisely this conscious reflection of contradiction (“difficulties”) that points to the work of critique as a means of intervening in and changing the ruling class modes and structures of (un)thought that attempt to obliterate the revolutionary thinking of Marxist dialectical materialism: in Marx’s words, “philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat” while “the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy.”72 If Yang’s sheer rhetoric of the “Marxist adage” is not seriously engaged, the result is, ironically, that it merely continues to be taken “seriously” in the ideological terrain of capitalist common sense while “silently” retaining what Lenin calls “inner falsity.”73

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Yang, “Soul Searching,” pp. 215–16. Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. Zavarzadeh, “Pedagogy,” p. 34. Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. xix. Martha E. Gimenez, “Silence in the Classroom: Some Thoughts About Teaching in the 1980s,” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1989). McKinnon, “Reading”; John Molyneux, “More Than Opium: Marxism and Religion,” International Socialism, No. 119 (June 2008); and Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking.’” Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 51, emphasis in original. V.I. Lenin, “Tolstoy and the Proletarian Struggle,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 353.

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I say “capitalist” common sense here because the capitalist system is the quietly obscured deep structure that Yang’s “economy of religion” attempts to normalize—and eternalize—by simultaneously fusing and confusing the complex dialectical relationship between the capitalist mode of production and religious thinking. For example, he suggests at one point, in a typically vague construction, that the “ocean of market economy” in China is the social space in which more and more people have become “devoted to materialism, consumerism, and capitalism, which may be taken as substitutes of religion,”74 then referring to one of his own articles entitled “Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s.”75 Notice, according to Yang, “capitalism” may be taken to signify a “substitute of religion.” Nebulously, the capitalist “ocean of market economy” is not to be comprehended—as it is in Marxism’s “atheism”—as the “material surroundings” of class antagonisms that produce alienated (“lost”) social relations, which give rise to religious modes of intelligibility, which in turn (perhaps unintentionally) serve as theologico-ideological supports for capitalism because religious “soul searching,” by itself and for itself, is by no means identical with Marxist materialist dialectics. The theoretical practice of taking seriously Yang’s “difficulties … with abstractions” is necessary, as Lenin constantly undertakes in his polemical writings, especially those in which he develops an ideological critique of “caricatures” of Marxist thought.76 As he wrote in 1916 contra Y.L. Pyatakov (P. Kievsky), “it requires roughly ten pages of print to untangle and popularly explain ten lines of confusion.”77 Such is the case today with Yang’s “notoriety” and “flowering.” As McKinnon explains (although he does not discuss Yang), Yang’s idea of “markets of religion” articulates one strand of thought within the wider paradigm of so-called “Rational Choice” theory in the sociology of religion, which views religion as a “marketplace of beliefs”; but because they “fail to adequately historicize their problematic,” rational choice theorists tend toward “reifying certain dynamics of capitalist societies”78 and thereby contribute to the mystification of “the 74 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 218. 75 Fenggang Yang, “Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 44 (2005), pp. 423–41. 76 See V.I. Lenin, “A Caricature of Bolshevism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 383–94; and “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), pp. 28–76. 77 Lenin, “A Caricature of Marxism,” p. 48, emphasis added. 78 McKinnon, “Reading,” p. 33.

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machinations of the capitalist machine itself.”79 While Ebert’s line of inquiry is critically distinguishable from McKinnon’s—for example, her opposition to Fredric Jameson’s “non-dialectical”80 reading of Hegel—she also argues that “[u]nder capitalism—with its mode of commodity production—the daily life of appearances … at the level of the market” engenders and reinforces capitalist ideology as “‘the reverse of the inner reality of the productive process.’”81 The “material logic”82 that organizes this “inner reality” has far less to do with “rational choice” or “substitutes of religion” than with the compulsory economic system of exploitation of one class by another: in Marx’s words, the “dull compulsion of economic relations [that] completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist” and “breaks down all resistance,”83 insuring that “the workers must not be allowed to come to any understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common.”84 Yang’s “economy of religion” involves an “inner falsity”85 that dissolves religion into capitalism and capitalism into religion. In effect, he constructs a “saved” sociology of religion that is, as Marx says, imbued with the “spiritual aroma”86 of religion. In order to (re)understand and critique this “inner falsity,” Lenin argues, it becomes necessary to “work against it both from without and within” and “untiringly expose this deception” that subtly undermines “the unity of the workers’ class struggle for communism throughout the world.”87 Jettisoning the analytics of class struggle, Yang’s alternative theory, of course, centers on the “cage.” He is supposedly moving the sociological study of religion—and “soul searching” in literary studies—far beyond the “adage” of Marxist atheism in which, as Marx writes, 79 McKinnon, “Reading,” p. 32; see also McKinnon’s essay, “Ideology and the Market Metaphor in Rational Choice Theory of Religion: A Rhetorical Critique of ‘Religious Economies,’” Critical Sociology (2 May 2012), pp. 2–3. 80 Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” p. 17. 81 Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” p. 18, quoting Jorge Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), p. 126. 82 Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” p. 19. 83 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), p. 689. 84 Marx, Capital, p. 693. 85 Lenin, “Tolstoy,” p. 353. 86 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 46, emphasis in original; see also Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” p. 29; and McKinnon, “Reading,” p. 23. 87 V.I. Lenin, “Letter to the Austrian Communists,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 268–69, emphasis added.

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Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.88

McKinnon’s examination of Marx’s theory places considerable stress on the need to grasp the “metaphorical”89 dynamics of “the opium of the people” as the articulation of an “unstable, fluid, and polysemic”90 site of contradictory social meanings. This is a totally different approach to Marx’s theory than that proposed by Yang’s simplistic (mis)reading of the “Marxist adage.” Yang’s (mis) reading deliberately reduces Marxist thinking to a “caricature” in order to construct the ideological pretext for dismissing Marxism’s dialectical materialist project of revolutionary class struggle. If we were to conceive “the opium of the people” as a point of contestation in a “trial” of critical theory, what McKinnon’s study does is to prove that Yang’s (mis)reading of the “Marxist adage” is utterly groundless and banal. And yet at the same time, dialectically, Yang’s caricaturization of Marxism has to be (re)read back to its material grounding in the bourgeois class politics of his “theory.” Following Ebert’s study of Marx’s materialist (re)understanding of religious thinking through his critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Yang’s caricaturization of Marxism as well as his own alternative imagism of “cages” constitute exemplary texts of religious “picture-thinking” (Vorstellung). This “picture-thinking” diverts Marxist conceptual thinking from its historical and social task of proletarian revolution for socialism and communism. As Ebert argues, “picturethinking—whether in religion or popular narratives, … reifies appearances, obscures the underlying social relations, obstructs critical self-consciousness and blocks ‘knowing’ the social totality.”91 Yang’s “difficulties … with abstractions” carry over into his own alternative theory of “cages.” What becomes especially clear in the final paragraph of Yang’s epilogue is that the “metaphorical” imagery of his theory devolves into an empty abstraction that reproduces the commonsensical notion of humankind’s “eternal” spiritual quest to “slip out” of “cages” and find redemption beyond worldly persecution. As I mentioned earlier, he repeats the “cage” idea-image here no less than ten times. It is somewhat ironic: while Yang attempts to dismiss Marx’s theory of religion as merely an “adage,” his own alternative theory itself becomes a kind of

88 89 90 91

Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 46, emphasis in original. McKinnon, “Reading,” pp. 16–21. McKinnon, “Reading,” p. 17. Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” p. 16.

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insistent “saying” of itself over and over again; but still each time he repeats it, the “theory” acquires no more conceptual depth nor explanatory power. In this final paragraph, Yang sets up his speculative sociology of caged souls by saying that he “wonder[s] why” he has not yet “seen an outpouring of Chinese novels like those in the modern West.”92 His answer to the problem is: I think it is because Chinese souls are in cages. There is the cage of modernism, the cage of Marxist-Maoist atheism, the cage of totalitarianism, and the cage of traditionalism. Chinese souls were caged especially during the Cultural Revolution. The forming of the modernist cage can be traced back to the May Fourth and New Cultural Movements about a century ago. These two cages are still in place today. In or through literature, we have seen some souls slip out of the cage and wander in the dark, as noted. Of particular interest here is the fact that Mo Yan’s prolific novels have vividly portrayed some beleaguered souls as a result of the social and political struggles… What will emancipate the souls in bondage? Will the thriving religions in China emancipate the souls or enforce the cages? We have seen only a few glimpses of the searching souls in literature, but sociologists have observed and study the quiet spiritual revolution that is sweeping the vast lands of China like wildfire.93

In short, it seems that in Yang’s view the only “ism” or movement or struggle that has not constituted cages of souls is the “quiet spiritual revolution” of “thriving religions” in the “markets of religion” or the “economy of religion.”94 But the question that is begged “in or through” this narrative of cages is: exactly how and why is it that the so-called “quiet spiritual revolution” of religious thinking does not itself reproduce the ideological forms of “cages” that are historically necessary for the perpetuation of the capitalist social totality, which is founded on the “material logic” of exploitation, private property, and class antagonism? It is interesting that Yang himself ends up (re)posing the very questions that underlie his “sociologist’s reflection”: “What will emancipate the souls in bondage? Will the thriving religions in China emancipate the souls or enforce the cages?” As I said earlier, what emerges in Yang’s driving insistence to “think” of “soul searching” in terms of “cages” is a subnarrative of empty abstraction and vaguely uniform, declassed blocs (traditionalism, modernism, etc.) that serve as “substitutes”95 for and diversions from a materialist and dialectical inquiry into

92 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219. 93 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 219, emphasis added. 94 Yang, “Soul Searching,” p. 218. 95 In Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), Lenin painstakingly critiques the Machists’ “subterfuges” (p. 8), which operate

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the economic substratum that makes “man,” in Marx’s words, “not an abstract being, squatting outside the world” but rather “man” as “the human world” situated and conditioned by the contradictions of “[t]his state, this society,” which “produce religion … [as] an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world.”96 To put this a different way, what Yang proves himself unable and unwilling to “think,” as Lenin argues in the text from which the present chapter’s epigraph is taken—concerning the very question of “free literature” based on the revolutionary struggle for socialist society and culture—is that “bourgeois individualists” who “talk about absolute freedom” are in fact talking in “sheer hypocrisy.”97 This is because [t]here can be no real and effective “freedom” in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. Are you free in relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer[?] … One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution. And we socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class

ideologically to construct “loophole[s] for fideism” (pp. 34, 63). In sharp contrast to Yang’s very mainstream recitation of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) as ten “lost” years of “caging” (i.e. a total “disaster”), see Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008) and Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2008). Also in striking contrast to Yang’s altogether bizarre construction here of the New Culture (1915–19) and May Fourth (1919–21) movements, see Maurice Meisner’s Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 98–100: “In socialism the young intellectuals found a means to reject both the traditions of the Chinese past and the Western [capitalist-imperialist] domination of the present” (p. 100). See also Meisner’s Mao’s China: A History of the People’s Republic (New York, NY: Free Press, 1979), pp. 14–19: “the intellectuals … now began to look more to Western socialist theories, which were themselves critical of the West as it was, in place of the conventional Western liberal ideologies, which sanctioned the existing capitalist-imperialist order” (p. 18). “Marxism was seen as the most advanced intellectual product of the modern West, but one that rejected the Western world in its capitalist form and its imperialist relationship with China” (p. 18). 96 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 46, emphasis in original. 97 Lenin, “Party Organisation,” p. 48.

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society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat.98

Lenin’s core thesis here is that “[o]ne cannot live in society and be free from society.” Since literature is a human expression and reflection of life “in society” and is produced “in society,” the historical marks of “freedom” in literature are always either “linked to the bourgeoisie” or “linked to the proletariat.” Yang’s “theory” of cages is nothing more (or nothing other) than a confused inversion of this dialectical materialist and class struggle theory, since his demand is that “souls” (the subjects of society) ought to live and “search” for their lives “in society” yet also be “free from society”: to “slip out of the cage and wander.” This is “inner falsity” masked as a sociology of religion in the sphere of literature studies, and its caricature of “thinking” is “in reality linked to the bourgeoisie.” As McKinnon, Molyneux, and Ebert all suggest, Marxists in the transdisciplinary class struggle for the revolutionary socialist world outlook should not allow our Mr. Writer with his sociologist’s reflections to “slip out” of our grasp, for we do not want him to feel that he is alone (“free from society”) in the theorization and practices of “soul searching.”99 With this in mind I will conclude here by pointing once again to Lenin’s dialectical materialist argument for “soul searching” from 1913. He contends emphatically that the “genius of Marx” lies in “the doctrine of class struggle.”100 People have “always been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics,” Lenin continues, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution … is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and,

98 99

Lenin, “Party Organisation,” p. 48, emphasis added. For some exemplary texts from the Cultural Revolution years, see the following: “A Great Revolution That Touches the People to Their Very Souls,” Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 24 (10 June 1966), pp. 8–9: “people’s souls, in other words, their world outlook” (p. 8); “Mao Tse-tung Thought is the Soul of the Revolutionary People,” Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 40 (30 Sept. 1966), p. 12: “remoulding of souls is a battle between the two world outlooks, the proletarian and the bourgeois”; Ting Hsueh-lei, “Proletarian Mass Democracy is Fine!—Repudiating the Slanders of the Soviet Revisionist Group,” Peking Review, Vol. 10, No. 45 (3 Nov. 1967), pp. 29–31; and “Never Forget the Class Struggle,” Peking Review, Vol. 9, No. 20 (13 May 1966), pp. 40–42. 100 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 27, emphasis in original.

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owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.101

Seek out the class struggle. This is Lenin’s revolutionary framework. Marxism is the “atheism” of materialist dialectics that makes “soul searching” a “material force”102 with “radical chains”103 for understanding that “the root evil is capitalism.”104 But no, for Yang this is a “cage”! Mr. Writer becomes Herr Dühring: trickling out in a meaningless subtilizing.

101 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 28, emphasis added. 102 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 47. 103 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 50, emphasis in original; see also Stephen Tumino, “‘Theory Too Becomes a Material Force’: Militant Materialism or Messianic Matterism?,” in Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities After Humanism, eds. Jennifer Cotter et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Kindle edition, 2016). 104 Lenin, “A Caricature of Marxism,” p. 73.

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Part Three: Stories

5. “Hearing” the Moist Spirit of Sandalwood Death [M]y novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man… . an audience of eager listeners, not readers, who participate in the tale they are hearing. —Mo Yan1 [D]oes not Marxism destroy the creative mood? Yes, it does. It definitely destroys creative moods that are feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualistic, nihilist, art-for-art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat… . And while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed. —Mao Zedong2

Meowism as “Coherence in Contradiction” In his “Author’s Note” to Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan tells us that this novel, which is “all about sound” and is “smooth, easy to understand,” may in fact be “better suited to … an audience of eager listeners.”3 The aim of this chapter is to put his theory to the test and ask whether or not Marxist “reading” and “eager 1 Mo Yan, “Author’s Note,” in Mo, Sandalwood Death, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), pp. 406–07. One journalist pointed out soon after Mo’s Nobel award in 2012 that Mo “remains a member of the [Chinese] Communist Party, and the vice chairman of the party-run Writers’ Association”; a “leaked directive” from the Chinese government “shows censorship tactics towards dissidents” and an attempt to “take control of the conversation about Mo Yan,” a writer of “strange, subversive novels,” who has “already become a national hero: bookstores are running out of stock”; “one of his novellas has been added to the high-school curriculum.” See Benjamin Carlson, “China Scrambles to Censor Novelist Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize,” GlobalPost (16 Oct. 2012). According to Sabina Knight in “The Realpolitik of Mo Yan’s Fiction,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 95, Mo became a member of the CCP in 1978. 2 Mao Zedong, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 94, emphasis added. “Some comrades lack elementary political knowledge and consequently have all sorts of muddled ideas” (p. 90). 3 Mo, “Author’s Note,” pp. 403, 407.

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listening” may end up destroying this work’s “creative mood,” as Mao said in 1942. Throughout this “powerful historical novel … so utterly reliant on sound, rhythm, and tone,”4 as the English translator Howard Goldblatt describes it, we hear numerous and various sound-effects. Listen: Grunt grunt, arf arf (SD4)5 ah-choo! (10) zzzp zzzp (12) Waa waa waa waa (18) Ooh … Aah (19) pop … pop … crunch (45) splat (51) swish … swish … Swish (54–55) Meow, meow … Meow, meow … Meow, meow (56–57) “Cluck cluck cluck cluck” … bang! (66) ahek ahek ahek ahek, ahek ahek ahek ahek (70) whack (74) “WOO—WAY” … “WOO—WAY” (106) Bong bong bong bong bong bong—kebong kebong kebong—bong! (159) Bong bong bong bong bong—Clang cuh-lang clang (160) pow pow pow pow pow pow! Splash, splash (160) ke ke ke … oink oink (168) “Pow!” (297) tin tin tine tine (300) clang clang clang (301) Li-ge-long-ge li-ge-long-ge long (301) “oof!” (308) bong bong bong (309) Meow meow, meow meow (327) thup-thup (346) thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack (349) Splash splash, meow meow (354) pa—pa—pa (362) Ow—oh—ahh—yeow (363) snip snip (381)

4 Howard Goldblatt, “Translator’s Note,” in Mo Yan, Sandalwood Death, trans. H. Goldblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), p. ix. 5 Mo Yan, Sandalwood Death, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), p. 4. Hereinafter, all references to Sandalwood Death will be given parenthetically in the text, preceded where necessary by the abbreviation “SD.” In the following examples of Mo’s sounds, all italics are in the original.

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Amidst the variety of sound-effects, however, an especially attentive reader might notice that it is the sound of the cat—the meow or “mew”—that Mo seems to hold most dear. If “my novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man,” i.e., “the working masses,”6 says Mo, the meow is the most precious item of sound in the affinitive universe. This sound must be shared extravagantly with the affinitive “audience of eager listeners, not readers”7 by way of a resplendent repetition in childlike fashion, time and time again. In Chapter 17 (“Xiaojia Sings in Full Voice”), told from the “borderline idiot” mind of Xiaojia, who is Sun Meiniang’s husband and Zhao Jia’s son, the meow is strewn into the story no less than fifty-four times. While the mindless—yet technically competent—Xiaojia is administering the sandalwood death (punishment or torture) to Sun Bing (Meiniang’s father), for example, Xiaojia gazes out over the crowd of spectators and lustfully remembers Meiniang as she herself is “cry[ing] out in agony” for her father, “a knife-edged sound as sharp and as oily green as a bamboo leaf ” (SD365). Xiaojia thinks: There was someone on my mind at that moment, meow, know who that was? … Found her! … She used to let me suck on her breasts even during the daytime, a thought that got an immediate response from my little pecker. Meow meow, I recalled … memories of my wife’s virtues brought a soreness to my eyes and an ache to my nose, meow meow, I was nearly in tears. I started to run down the ramp … so I could feel her breasts again and smell her. (365)

This is how the “hallucinatory realist” author produces great storytelling by expressing a heart steeped in emptiness. Meow meow—even to repeat the term is to call up Mo’s deep sense of “affinity” for a hazily lost, timeless space of interior sensibility between seriousness and utter stupidity. In a mode of narration that becomes increasingly embarrassing to read, the meow of Xiaojia’s infantile mentality serves to reinforce, with a bizarre sort of rigor, this complete blurring between anything that matters and everything that fills the voided mind with pleasures and sensual escapes. What is Mo’s notion of “affinity”? Affinity is: “too enraptured to want to extract myself from the tale” (SD347). It is a “spectacle … always made for happy days … to be part of a spectacle” (348). It is “to watch the fun!” (351) It is how “I didn’t know what to think, and the harder I tried, the more confused I became” (353). It is “the long-delayed moment of excitement” (354). It is “blurr[ing] my vision, veiling everything in a red haze” (355). It is “nothing I could do about it” (355). 6 Mo, “Author’s Note,” pp. 406–07. 7 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 407.

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It is “torn between worries and happiness” (355). It is “moan[ing] with pleasure” (356). It is “clouded, sort of like a blind man” (360). It is “a serene expression” (361). It is having “gotten used to shrieks of pain” (363). It is “a tangle of confusing thoughts” (369), and so on. Affinity suggests a quasi-utopian opening and loosening-up of evanescent, sensational drift. It is the agnostic infinitude of post-political idealism, where the finite historical necessities of political positions are repetitively “subverted” and collapsed into themselves, vaporized and liquidated, infused and mixedup in order to provide a secure illusion of escape from political decodings. As for this notion that Mo’s writings and thoughts are “subversive,” I have in mind here professor Shelley Chan’s study, A Subversive Voice in China. She argues that Mo’s “postmodern playfulness” should be understood as “subversive” of Maoist “discourse” and “Communist ideology” as one finds not only during the Mao era itself but also in contemporary China, which she considers to be a “capitalist-communist”8 society. However, in this text I am not primarily concerned with Chan’s theory. Her analyses present Mo as a kind of literary-political postMaoian, post-Lu Xunian hero whose thought resonates with such poststructuralist postmodern (she does not mention the word “poststructuralism”) thinkers as Barthes, Foucault, and Hayden White. According to Chan, Mo’s “unconstrained language and composition in some cases are free from any practical function and in this respect serve the sole purpose of fulfilling his own pleasure in writing.”9 Moist sound-effects, especially the recurrent meow, enact mystical flows of freedom: transcending moments that recruit the “eager” listener to join in a zeroed-out sensorial space of sound-bites and gap-fillers. The liberal deployment of the meow plays an especially elusive, seductive, slippery role because of its slight signifying drift in relation to the name of Mao Zedong as well as the Chinese word mao, which itself means cat. Mo never mentions this parodic associative chain, and for good reason, since the meow/mao/Mao slippage provides a code of “chance,” an uncertain subtlety for humorizing the revolutionary socialist era.10 Meow is a way for the contemporary, bourgeoisified, mostly urbanized 8 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Chaps. 3, 4. 9 Chan, Subversive Voice, Conclusion, emphasis added. 10 For some generally “unheard of ” expositions on the revolutionary era in China, see Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2008). Han’s account is particularly interesting in connection with Mo’s writings and talks because Han is also from Shandong province and grew up there during the Cultural Revolution. See also Mobo Gao, The

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reader to cynically smile and laugh at the Mao era while at the same time entertaining a mysterious affectation of mourning, melancholy and confusion over Chinese society’s historical and cultural development—past, present, and future. This is the “freeplay” of meow. For Goldblatt, in any case, this is the “powerful historical novel” for which, he says, “I have exhausted my storehouse of rhyming words in translating the many arias, keeping as close to the meaning as possible or necessary.”11 The power structure of the Moist affinity with freeplay and trans-contradictoriness is not without its philosophical and ideological precedent. This version of affinitive meta-consciousness has a parallel form in the Derridian worldview of “freeplay.” Only now, however, freeplay is re-encrypted in a seemingly more “free” and playful horizon of literary pleasure, in an “overblown”12 spectacularity which no longer requires the laboriousness of “theory”; its “meaning,” as Goldblatt quietly suggests, may be either “possible or necessary,”13 or impossible and unnecessary. The ideological role of Moism in the new, world-class, bourgeois avant-garde is to re-“culture” contemporary readers with what Jacques Derrida in 1966 artfully termed the “thematic of historicity” and the “region of historicity”: “the game or free-play,” Derrida said, “is always caught up in a … tension with history, first of all.”14 Mo has not, to my knowledge, commented on any philosophical influence related to Derrida’s “algebraic formality of the problem [of “historicity”] as I see it.”15 Yet despite Mo’s seeming detachment from what he calls “highbrow circles,”16 Moist affinity is very much caught up in this thematic exorbitancy and excessivity of playful, ever-drawn-out tensionalism in which, as Derrida said,

11 12 13 14

15 16

Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008); William Hinton’s The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978–1989 (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1990) and Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2006); and Robert Weil, Is The Torch Passing? Resistance and Revolution in China and India (Kolkata, India: Setu Prakashani, 2013). Goldblatt, “Translator’s Note,” p. ix. Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 407. Goldblatt, “Translator’s Note,” p. ix. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), as reproduced online by Hydra Humanities (University of California, Irvine, 2009), emphasis added (no page numbers). Derrida, “Structure.” Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 406.

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“knowledge in consciousness-of-self ” becomes an “irreducible”17 parody and tragicomedy of itself. Hence “history” is supplemented by “historicity” as the consciousness of history, the consciousness of historical thought in tension with the historical and social determination of consciousness. For Derrida, this affinity is played out in the writing of multiplex narrative in which “even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.”18 The affinitive structure without center is “the freeplay of the structure”: a tense and intense state of slipping and drifting whereby one imagines—or hallucinates—that the “center is not the center.”19 Within an elevated and sustained paradoxism, the vigilantly freeplaying reader/writer achieves some “irreducible” sense of the “unthinkable itself ” as a state of “coherence in contradiction express[ing] the force of a desire.”20 The freeplay of this force of desire is expressed with less philosophical “algebra” and more casual, “common man” sophistry in Mo’s confession of becoming “not myself ” upon reading or hearing “some harsh criticism.”21 “Now it’s as if I am under a social microscope,” he says. Mo Yan Thought then becomes: “I’m not myself, but an observer. And that guy under the microscope is not myself, but a writer named Mo Yan.”22 In nearly identical terms, the narrator in Sandalwood Death informs us of the “professional” executioner Zhao Jia’s inner reflections: “At that moment, at least, Zhao felt a sense of supremacy. I am not me; I am the agent of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager, the embodiment of the laws of the Great Qing Dynasty!” (SD182, emphasis added) It’s always as though there were nothing to get hold of. As Lenin points out through Diderot’s materialist critique of idealism, what I call “Moism” presents an “extravagant system” which, “to the shame of human intelligence and philosophy, is the most difficult to combat, although the most absurd of all.”23 Says Diderot, “Those philosophers are called idealists who, being conscious only of their existence and of the sensations which succeed each other within themselves,

17 18 19 20 21

Derrida, “Structure.” Derrida, “Structure.” Derrida, “Structure,” emphasis in original. Derrida, “Structure,” emphasis added. Mo Yan, “‘It’s as if I am under a social microscope’: Mo,” ed. Chen Jie, China Daily (19 Oct. 2012). 22 Mo, “‘It’s as if.’” 23 Denis Diderot quoted in V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 23, my emphasis added.

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do not admit anything else.”24 We also “hear” Moism in Engels’ critique of “what Herr Dühring calls ‘my historical treatment in the grand style,’” to which Engels replies that it is “indeed very convenient for Herr Dühring” and “has the further advantage that it offers no real foothold to an opponent” of his “higher and nobler style.”25 Mo wanted “a purer Chinese style,”26 he says. “I have taken pains to fill the work with rhymes and dramatic narration, all in the service of a smooth, easy to understand, overblown, resplendent narrative.”27 Mo deploys the system of absurdity as a “force of a desire” for affinities of affinities: hazy and unreal, back and forth, one side to the other, mixed feelings, over and over, losing my resolve, and so on (see SD375, 379, 395–96). This is what we hear in our powerful historical novel. As Engels argues of Herr Dühring’s philosophical historiography “in the grand style,” Mo’s fiction of desire for affinity presents a “mish-mash of platitudes and oracular sayings, in a word, of the simple balderdash” by which he “regales his readers” with “the liquefying pap of rhetoric.”28 Listen further to Lenin in 1910. The “great task of continuing the struggle for freedom can and will be accomplished only by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, drawing with it the working and exploited masses.”29 For this task, he says, a “new worker” is arising who has “grown out of the stage of wanting to be talked to in childish language or fed with pap.”30 This “new type of workingclass member” is “not helped, but rather harmed, by … those sugary conciliatory appeals” in the form of “sheer phrase-mongering, mere childish talk that assumes the worker is not an adult but a child” unfit to understand and take up “the unpleasant … task of refashioning unpleasant forms of unpleasant struggle.”31 I should point out here that the terms “Moism” and “Moist,” as I use them, are not so-called “wordless” new para-words such as “Mobel,”32 which are empty of meaning. “Moism” and “Moist” may be “unpleasant” words, in Lenin’s sense, 24 Diderot quoted in Lenin, Materialism, p. 23, my emphasis added. 25 Frederick Engels, Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Dühring), trans. Emile Burns, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1972), p. 136, quoting Dühring; emphasis in original. 26 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 406. 27 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 407. 28 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 94, emphasis in original. 29 V.I. Lenin, “Announcement on the Publication of Rabochaya Gazeta,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 290–91. 30 Lenin, “Announcement,” pp. 290–91. 31 Lenin, “Announcement,” pp. 290–92. 32 See He Jixian, “Wordless Mo Yan Sensation: Mobel in China,” International Critical Thought, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2013), pp. 332–44.

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because they are structural and conceptual terms. Still more unpleasant for some readers of Mo’s works, perhaps, is the fact that by employing such terms, I am “pinning a label” on Mo’s stylized mode of ideological discourse. “Pinning a label” on something—such as Mo Yan Thought—is necessary in the historical development and elaboration of conceptually-oriented critique. When Derrida put “freeplay” into the discourses of critical theory, no one objected that he was “pinning a label” on the dynamics of signification that he was investigating, yet of course that was what he was doing. But when certain Marxists in the field of critical theory “pin labels” on the dynamics of the concrete and abstract ideological processes they are calling into question, some people find it “unpleasant.” As Mao often said, one should think it over.

A Kind of Pied Piper of Gaomi County Mo Yan is a spontaneous poststructuralist writer. Marx offers a general model for (re)understanding Mo’s spontaneously flowing poststructuralism in Volume I of Capital, in his class-based theory of the “gang-master” in the nineteenth-century English countryside. The gang-master was a “recruiting-sergeant,”33 an organizer and motivator of the young workers who came under his “care” and direction as he hired and delivered them daily to the actual labor site where they were employed, i.e., exploited. Although he was himself, at least on the surface, an “ordinary agricultural laborer,” the gang-master was also “generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace, unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savoir faire.”34 While being “armed with a long stick, he uses it but seldom.”35 He is, Marx says, a democratic emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gipsy life under his direction. Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give attractions to the gang.36

As he “binds” the workers to his charms, he also binds them to capitalist exploitation. Marx points out that the gang system—also known as the “public, common, or tramping gang”37—was, more or less unconsciously, even for the gang-master 33 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), p. 649. 34 Marx, Capital, p. 649. 35 Marx, Capital, p. 650. 36 Marx, Capital, p. 650, emphasis added. 37 Marx, Capital, p. 650, emphasis added.

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himself, directed toward a (re)disciplining of the exploitable subjects. This occurs on two essential levels. First, and primarily, from the materialist standpoint, the “free” workers under the guidance of the gang-master were organized “to extract within the shortest time the greatest possible amount of labour”38 from them. Secondly, and within the same dialectical time of the exploitative system, the “popular” gang-master played a key role in what Marx calls “the demoralisation of the gang.”39 This demoralization of the workers carries the benefit for capital of systematically breaking down any and all “ideals,” beliefs or values which could serve as justifications for collective opposition to the underlying law of capitalist accumulation. Marx demystifies the gang-master’s position and sociocultural function by ideologically reading the Medieval legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin as a narrative of class and exploitation masked by the attractive charms, jollity, obscene impudence, and “gypsy fun”40 of the Piper’s superficial (extra) ordinariness. The ideological logic of the Piper is determined in its contradictoriness: he is “himself ” only insofar as he is also not “himself.” As Lenin puts it, Marx’s reading introduces an “unpleasant”41 depth to the everyday. Marx shows that the “coarse freedom” of the gang-master is, from the class standpoint of the exploited, an illusory freedom, even when “freely” known as an illusion; it is a contradictory (un)freedom which prepares the ideological ground for enduring the bitterness of exploitation with a “sense” of indifference and indefiniteness. Engels points out that the “capitalist fights for his profit, the worker for his health, for a few hours of daily rest, to be able to engage in other human activities as well, besides working, sleeping and eating.”42 It is this social class “relation between capital and labor, the axis on which our entire present system of society turns,” that Marx theorizes as “the whole field of modern social relations”43 existing as “the arena of history down to the present day.”44 Listen to what Engels says “in passing” in the very same passage where he has pointed to the “fight” between the exploiters and the exploited for “other human activities”: it does not depend at all upon the good will of the individual capitalists whether they desire to embark on this struggle or not, since competition compels even the most

38 Marx, Capital, p. 650. 39 Marx, Capital, p. 650. 40 Marx, Capital, p. 651. 41 Lenin, “Announcement,” pp. 290–92. 42 Frederick Engels, “Marx’s Capital” (review of Vol. I of Capital for Demokratisches Wochenblatt, Mar. 1868), Part II, emphasis added. 43 Engels, “Marx’s Capital,” Part I, emphasis added. 44 Engels, “Marx’s Capital,” Part II.

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philanthropic among them to join his colleagues and to fix working hours to be as long as theirs.45

In this continuously unfolding struggle between exploiter and exploited, the Pied Piper appears in the scene of the workers’“other human activities”—such as “reading” or “eager listening,” for example—as the obscuring mediator, the go-between and conciliator who, in the service of the exploiting class, subtly “resolves” the struggle on a mixed psychological and emotional level. The intermediating role of the Piper is not in any sense to eliminate the underlying conflict, but in fact to further mystify it. The gang-master as Pied Piper shows and teaches the workers how to forget what they have learned, as Engels says, “from bitter personal experience,”46 and moreover how to convert this bitterness into “noisy jollity” and “fun.” Marx teaches that the Pied Piper is situated materially and ideologically in the “middle” between capital and labor. But this middling “dash of enterprise and savoir faire” does not make him neutral, notwithstanding how popular or “democratic” he may appear to be on the surface; on the contrary, being in the “middle” makes his steadfast unsteadiness very useful and of significant value to the capitalist system of social relations. The Piper is an ideological demoralizer for the supreme morality of profits and the law of capitalistic accumulation—as opposed to socialistic and communistic accumulation. Marx and Engels read reality through a persistently “unpleasant” conceptuality of the class structure of historically unfolding social relations. I follow Marx and Engels because, I believe, this is the most effective way of developing a critique of Mo’s seemingly “popular” discourses. To point to this seeming popularity and to examine its ideological significance in terms of “a kind of Pied Piper of Gaomi County,” as I am doing, is, as I commented earlier, to engage in “pinning a label.” This may be unpopular (unpleasant) precisely because it is, in my view, a necessary critical conceptual move which is consistent with—and attempts to advance—the Marxist line of struggle in ideological critique. Of course, some other critical readers of Mo’s texts may turn their ears around, so to speak, at the idea of “a kind of Pied Piper of Gaomi County,” like a horse in a Robert Frost poem.47 Yet again, in the direct line of Lenin’s thinking, one should not be too surprised by a hearing/reading of Mao’s thought about such “unpleasant” or “unpopular”

45 Engels, “Marx’s Capital,” Part II, emphasis added. 46 Engels, “Marx’s Capital,” Part II. 47 See Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in Robert Frost’s Poems (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2002), p. 189: “He gives his harness bells a shake/To ask if there is some mistake.”

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critical interventions: “It is sheer fantasy to imagine,” Mao argues, “that the cause of socialism is all plain sailing and easy success, without difficulties and setbacks or the exertion of tremendous efforts.”48 It is by no means mechanical nor “anachronistic” (as we shall later hear Derrida insinuate), I think, to theoretically realize the relevance of Marx’s demystifying reading of the Pied Piper gang-master for an “eager listening” to Mo’s storytelling. Mo’s spontaneous poststructuralist narratives, particularly as we “hear” in Sandalwood Death, are historically and socially determined echoes of this same process of class subject-formation which is brought into the light in Marx’s critique. Comrade Mo is a kind of Pied Piper of Gaomi County. He is a literary gang-master of “hallucinatory” jollity. Moism and the Moist ideological tale are rejuvenations of the Pied Piper’s task—as revolutionarily reunderstood by Marx—to be “popular” with the workers and “bind” them to the law of capitalist accumulation by (re) articulating and venting the demoralizations of alienation as “charms of the gypsy life” and “obscenest impudence.” This is a significant dimension of the ideological unconscious of the novel. As Marx writes elsewhere, what Mo says/writes is what “he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.”49 Such is the complex nature of the “test”50 of the contradictory limits of class “mentalities” (class consciousness) that Mo Yan Thought offers. In the bourgeois ideology of writing as “desire” for resplendent and overblown narrative (yet “easy to understand”), we hear in Sandalwood Death, to borrow Marx’s phrase, a “lame … anti-climax” that reflects and also mystifies the “constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes” and, as a consequence, “an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment,” an “intoxicating augmentation.”51 In the powerful historical novel, this is called “pure theatrics” (SD394).52

48 Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), p. 199; see also Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), p. 400. 49 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (1847), emphasis added. 50 See “Mo Yan’s Victory Tests Chinese People’s Mentalities,” People’s Daily Online (15 Oct. 2012). 51 Marx, Capital, p. 610, note 2, quoting William Gladstone. 52 For extensive studies of the class politics of poststructuralist (anti-)theoretical discourses of desire, see Deborah P. Kelsh, “Desire and Class: The Knowledge Industry in the Wake of Poststructuralism,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, Vol. 1, No. 2

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Mo’s humble-sounding quest for an affinity with the “common” man also reflects the very definite, limited conception of the “common” we find as the target of critique in Marx’s Capital. In England under the laws of Henry VIII, a second arrest for vagabondage was punishable by whipping and “half the ear sliced off,” while for a third “relapse” into pauperism, the “offender [was] to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal”;53 that is, an enemy of the “common” ruling class structure, at the secret center of which lies the fundamental contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited. This is the class character of the “common weal.” The masses of the toilers, as law-abiding subjects, should simply feel an “affinity” with the common weal; they should come to identify with the “force of a desire” for the inevitability of the existing order of social relations. The existing state, Marx and Engels say, must give the wholesome example of the association of capitals and labour, of an association which is honest, intelligent and fair, … which establishes links of sympathy and gratitude between these two classes and thus ensures tranquillity in the state for ever.54

Whether exploited or “supernumerary,” the working masses are expected to have “good will.”55 For Marx, the common weal is a class structure, a social totality, which is centered around the ever-developing, ever-changing “struggle between capital and labour.”56 This is the materialist dialectics of the “between” as the site of class struggle and strife; it is not a “frothy combination of opposites,”57 as one satisfied commentator on Sandalwood Death has portrayed Mo’s overblown stylistics. It is in the real material and ideological interest of the bourgeois common weal that “the workers must not be allowed to come to any understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common”58 to organize and make revolution. The bourgeois common weal needs this Marxist understanding of the “common” to disappear from the contested social arena of the legitimate and the serious, and this need is expressed in the idealist hallucination of “desire.” (Spring 1998); and Kelsh, “The Pedagogy of Excess,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, Special Issue on Education for Revolution (2013), pp. 137–57. 53 Marx, Capital, p. 686, emphasis added. 54 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, in The Friedrich Engels Collection: 9 Classic Works (Lexington, KY: First Rate Publishers, 2015), p. 735, emphasis in original. 55 Marx, Capital, p. 686. 56 Marx, Capital, p. 692, emphasis added. 57 James Kidd, “Mo Yan’s Boxer Rebellion Novel an Orgy of Pain and Pleasure,” South China Morning Post (20 Jan. 2013). 58 Marx, Capital, p. 693, emphasis added.

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This Marxist concept of the “common” is mystified by the elusively shifting, blurring boundaries of Mo’s tale. What is cast as “pure theatrics” in the grand Moist style takes “pains to fill the work,”59 and consequently, to fill the desired “eager listeners” with a vacuous liberal “left”-of-center-sounding notionalism of a “common” sensibility which is supposed to have transcended (with the help of “hallucination”) the contradictions of class structure. To use Derrida’s algebraic wording, Sandalwood Death presents the story of a “structure lacking any center” where “we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference.”60 This is, as Engels argued, a “liquifying pap of rhetoric,”61 a common bourgeois professorial muddling which fills-andlacks simultaneously with a mysterious “irreducible difference” where “we” must conceive “common ground.”62 The “structure lacking any center” is refilled with “irreducible difference” as the new “common ground” of spectatorial “historicity.” In this deconceptual, liquidationist rhetoric of “structure,” as Marx and Engels write in The Holy Family, “everything determinate is an opposite of the boundless generality of self-consciousness and is, therefore, of no significance” when guarded by “the intensity of … consciousness of sin.”63 The novel we are examining is written “in the spirit of petty-bourgeois sentimentality and social fantasy.”64 The hallucinatory realist storyteller is quite unfamiliar with Marx and just as unfamiliar with Derrida. Nonetheless, what Marx calls the “grim irony”65 is that in his afterword to the novel of 2012, Pow!, Mo proudly announces that “I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.”66 For Comrade Mo, according to three eagerly listening reporters for China Daily, “The key to producing a great piece of work, he said, is whether a writer can go beyond class and politics, and be compassionate, even with people who level criticism at you

59 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 407, emphasis added. 60 Derrida, “Structure,” emphasis in original. 61 Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 94. 62 Derrida, “Structure.” 63 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, pp. 732, 719. 64 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, note 13 in the text reproduced at the Marxists.org website. 65 Marx, Capital, p. 686. 66 Mo Yan, “Afterword: Narration Is Everything,” in Mo, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 386, emphasis added. The inside cover of this novel says that “through this tale … we can’t help but laugh. Reminiscent of the dark masters of European absurdism,” it is “a comic masterpiece,” a “bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside” in which “dual narratives merge and feather into one another.”

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behind your back.”67 This boldly ironic assertion of a “beyond” class and politics, “lacking” ideology (as noted earlier, Mo is a member of the Chinese Communist Party), is a spontaneous expression of “structure lacking any center.” The supposed lack of ideology fills him with pride because, in this display of plenitude in alienation, he realizes that this lack, this vagabondage of ideological emptiness and wait-and-see-ism, is itself a fulfilling of the new international bourgeois “force of a desire” for a mass of “common,” docile, cynical subjects. With pride in my grand lack of ideology, Mo has, as Marx puts it, “confined the struggle between capital and labour within limits comfortable for capital.”68 As Lenin would undoubtedly say, the “lack” of ideology is “sugary” and “pleasant.” The Pied Piper of Gaomi doesn’t need to be “armed with a long stick” but instead excessively regales us by playing his rendition of “gypsy fun”69 as a liquifying pap of freeplay to fill the hollowness in the souls stolen by bourgeois society founded on wage slavery. “Amen!”70

Thrill (“Is it safe?”) Are we supposed to feel “compassion” for Xiaojia the apprentice torturer? To follow Mo’s suggestions outside of the book, it seems indeed that we should. Mo Yan Thought has learned from the Chinese writer Shen Congwen “how to deal with characters in a fiction” with “a humanistic touch towards all”71 of them. Thus Mo says that “there are no particularly bad person[s] or good person[s],” and so, “even gangsters and prostitutes have their humane side.” “I try to adopt [this] same approach in my writing” because it “shows the ability of a novelist when he treat[s] all the characters as humans.”72 In other words, he treats people as all the same, as a “common” lot; he calls on readers to share in this common affinity, which again, as Kidd says, mixes-up a “frothy”73 literary treat of “smooth, easy to understand” combinations of opposites, a combining of antitheses where all

67 Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei, “Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life,” China Daily (7 Dec. 2012), emphasis added. 68 Marx, Capital, p. 692. 69 Marx, Capital, p. 650–51. 70 Marx and Engels, Holy Family, p. 719. 71 Diao Ying, “Mo Yan Pays Homage to Chinese Writers,” People’s Daily Online (11 Dec. 2012). 72 Mo quoted in Diao, “Mo Yan Pays.” 73 Kidd, “Mo Yan’s Boxer Rebellion.”

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people are hallucinated into one neo-Confucian harmony. Putting this “ability of a novelist” in only slightly different terms, Mo Yan Thought says: My works have always focused on people and human nature. In my writing, I treat people equally no matter whether they are perceived as a good person or a bad person. I do not beautify or demonize the characters. Instead I have sympathy or understanding towards them.74

Shi Liwei, the author/editor of the text quoted here, says that Mo’s winning of the Nobel prize in 2012 is “introducing his works to many young people in the post90s generation.” Mo “thinks it’s the universality of human nature that touched the western readers and brought him the award.”75 One of Mo’s Chinese supporters “credits Mo’s personality for his unique writing style,” and another proclaims that “he put all his imagination in his works, and he became a superman.”76 As for the “realism” of Moism: “With more Chinese writers like Mo,” says Shi, “the world could learn more about the real China… . Moving reflections of Chinese lives have their place in world literature.”77 In this way, Mo’s “hallucinatory realist” fiction fuses with a variation on bourgeois liberal humanism, pretending to circumvent any moral or political examination of “good” or “bad” persons: we are all “equal” in the hallucinogenic world. Mo teaches his readers that we may have “sympathy or understanding” (compassion) for Xiaojia the torturer. He is neither beautified nor demonized. Let us now listen to Xiaojia as he begins the sandalwood punishment on the condemned rebel Sun Bing: Now the real pounding began, neither fast nor slow, and I watched as my pounding drove the stake into my gongdieh’s body [i.e., in Sun Bing’s anus], inch by inch. The sound it made wasn’t heavy—beng—beng—beng—meow meow—not even loud enough to cover the sound of my gongdieh’s heavy breathing. As the stake penetrated more deeply, my gongdieh’s body began to shake; despite the fact that he was strapped down so tightly he couldn’t move, every muscle in his body convulsed, causing even the heavy plank under him to move violently. But I kept pounding—beng—beng—beng … beng—beng—beng— Meow meow—

74 Mo quoted in Shi Liwei, “Mo Yan’s Success Sparks Public Sensation,” Chinadaily.com. cn (6 Dec. 2012). 75 Shi, “Mo Yan’s Success,” emphasis added. 76 Shi, “Mo Yan’s Success,” emphasis added. 77 Shi, “Mo Yan’s Success,” emphasis added.

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My gongdieh’s body was heating up … His sunken eyes reminded me of those butchered pigs I puffed up before skinning them, meow meow, just like the hollow eyes of a puffed-up pig. pa—pa—pa— Meow … The sandalwood stake was nearly halfway in—meow … sweet-smelling sandalwood … meow … Up to this point, my gongdieh had not uttered a sound. (SD361–62, all italics in original)

In the Moist fantasy, Xiaojia is neither a “good person” nor a “bad person.” To extend the idea somewhat, one might imagine that in William Goldman’s 1974 novel, Marathon Man, the former Nazi dentist Christian Szell is also neither good nor bad and, instead, calls for the reader’s sympathy, understanding and compassion: we are and should admit that we are “equal” with him. Reviews of this classic “thriller”78 at the time of its publication are consistent with Mo’s fiction. The Library Journal called it brilliant “entertainment” in an ironic sense, “that combination of terror and pleasure that only the superb thriller can achieve.”79 Irwin Shaw called it “Dazzling … Funny and savage, baffling and logical.”80 Star-News said it had “the makings of a very rich dessert for mystery lovers.”81 And the Washington Post hailed its “literary virtues” as the “obvious virtues” of two clichés which are repeated: “It’s a good read” and “It exists on several levels.”82

78 James Patterson indicates in his introduction to the 2007 anthology, Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night, ed. J. Patterson (Toronto: Mira Books, Kindle edition, 2007), that International Thriller Writers, Inc., an organization of thriller authors formed in 2004, reported combined sales of its members’ books at that time as “exceeding 1,600,000,000 books.” 79 William Goldman, Marathon Man (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 2001), p. i, emphasis added. 80 Goldman, Marathon Man, p. i. 81 Goldman, Marathon Man, p. i. 82 Goldman, Marathon Man, p. i. In Goldman’s story, the famous torture scenes involving the question, “Is it safe?” occur in chapters 21 and 23. The “it” refers to Szell’s fortune in diamonds stored in a safe-deposit box in a bank in New York City. As Peter Janeway explains to Tom “Babe” Levy, “so that in case he [Szell] ever got caught, his fortune would be safe and he could use it to buy his freedom” (pp. 215–16). Janeway wants to convince Levy that this is “their problem” (p. 216). This “problem” at the core of the story provides the motive for Szell’s torture of Levy. The “problem” underwriting the story articulates the fundamental contradiction between the commodification of freedom (“buy his freedom”) and the regime of private property (the diamonds in the “safe”).

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“Sweet commerce!”83 exclaims Marx in Capital. In other words, what is “sweet” in the surface logic of capitalistic commercial “entertainment” stories such as Goldman’s “baffling and logical” Marathon Man and Mo’s sound-sensational— beng, meow, pa!—Sandalwood Death, is that, while intensely calling the reader (or “eager listener,” in Mo’s case) to focus on keeping track of enormously complex networks of made-up events and personalities in different historical and social time periods, they each share the common bourgeois ideological imperative of rendering the structures of class relations as if they were “natural” surroundings that need not be questioned or even hinted at, much less spoken or thought about by any of the characters who populate the narrative worlds. The sweet commercialism of psycho-thrills in Mo’s novel is both a continuation and an updating of Goldman’s already overwhelming tale of human savagery and pain, since Mo, as we have seen, sincerely encourages his readers to search their imaginations for “sympathy and understanding” in “human nature.”

Infinite Likeness In the middle of the story (Book Two, “Belly of the Pig”), the narration is quasiomniscient. A different technique of fictional development becomes increasingly evident here by virtue of a certain repetitiveness which is barely concealed by its variations. Mo insistently renders the fictional world through the use of comparativistic “simile” in which an “as if ” or “like” world of other things appears. In other words, something happens, and then it is “as if ” it were something else; something happens, and then it is “like” something else. Chapter 5 alone (“Battle of the Beards”) offers numerous examples. Here Sun Meiniang’s father, Sun Bing, comes into conflict with Qian Ding, the newly-appointed Magistrate of Gaomi County and eventually (although from the opening of the novel this is already an established fact) the gandieh or benefactor, “sugar daddy” or paramour of Meiniang. The practice of simile, of course, has been around for centuries and, generally speaking, possesses no definite “Chinese” characteristic; it is a rather common structural technique and motif with a capacity for infinite permutations that subtly combine to convey a “flux” visionariness. But Moism carries this infinite possibility of simile to an oddly “resplendent” level. The repetitive deployment of the basic technique tends to raise the question of its purposive and effective 83 Marx, Capital, p. 704. On this same page in Capital, Marx observes: “This subject one must study in detail, to see what the bourgeoisie makes of itself and of the labourer, wherever it can … model the world after its own image” (p. 704, note 1).

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character and significance. What drives it? That is the ideological question. What causality is linked to its effects? Simile appears and reappears throughout the novel with such insistence that we may situate its use along roughly the same axis by which Sartre theorized the peculiarities of temporal techniques (or the lack of them) in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury: a mode of reflecting reality according to which Mo, as Sartre puts it, “couldn’t tell the story any other way.”84 This is a mode of reflection taken up not by mere chance but with a strangely “determinate” aspect and force which obscurely reveals something significant about the dominant intelligibility of contemporary life. As Sartre said of Faulkner, Mo “employs his extraordinary art”—the “resplendent” narrative style—“to describe this world that is dying of old age and our suffocation in it.”85 Before looking further at the obsession with similes in Moism, it will be helpful to first resituate and reconnect Mo with Faulkner by way of Sartre’s analysis from 1939, for they are themselves not merely similar but nearly identical. Sartre’s reading of Faulknerian time becomes a reading of Moist time. “When you read The Sound and the Fury,” says Sartre, “what strikes you first are oddities of technique.”86 For example, the timeline of the story has been deliberately “broken up,” and the pieces are “scrambled,” not at all in the manner of an “orderly plot” where we could easily recognize “a crux to the action.”87 Whereas in Faulkner’s tale, “the first window that opens onto this fictional world [is through] the mind of an idiot,”88 with Mo we enter through the mind of the “lewd talk” of the shrewdly cunning, intensely manipulative, opportunistic Meiniang, whose husband is, she knows, an idiot. “It would be wrong,” Sartre continues, “to regard 84 Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Temporality in Faulkner,” in Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939–1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2013), p. 17. See also in this same volume, Sartre’s critical text from 1943, “A New Mystic: On Bataille’s Inner Experience” (pp. 47–82). Sartre argues: “It is for the mystic’s apprentice that Bataille writes” (just as Mo writes), “for the person who, in solitude, is making his way, through laughter and world-weariness, toward his final torment… He [Bataille] is on high, we are down below. He delivers us a message and it is for us to receive it if we can” (p. 54). The mystic enacts the “supreme escapism” of the writer in crisis with “his ‘sumptuous, bitter’ soul, his pathological pride, his self-disgust, his eroticism, … his rigorous logic that masks the incoherence of his thought” (p. 82). 85 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 25. 86 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 17. 87 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 17. 88 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 17.

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these anomalies as gratuitous shows of virtuosity: a novelistic technique always relates to the novelist’s metaphysics.”89 For Faulkner, the present is not “carefully marked between past and future” but instead is “catastrophic in its essence,” on the order of “the event that comes upon us like a thief, enormous and unthinkable”; this “present is a sinking-down” in “a kind of motionless movement” which “means to appear without reason and to sink down.”90 Faulkner is “a lost man and it is because he feels lost that he takes risks.”91 The “novelist’s skill lies in the choice of the present from which he narrates the past,” and this present is “the infinitesimal moment of death.”92 For the careful reader (“listener”) of Mo’s novel, this should be familiar. “Only by mystic ecstasies,” Sartre argues, “can one escape the temporal world. A mystic is always a man who wants to forget something.”93 But what is being forgotten? Sartre’s study of “temporality” or “time” in Faulkner in 1939 is not Marxian but rather Heideggerian, as is revealed explicitly near the end of the essay.94 This basic outlook, in turn, produces the effect—despite Sartre’s clear criticism of “mystic ecstasies” and atemporality (the “present wells up from we know not where, chasing away another present,” and the “future doesn’t exist”)—of turning his own critique of Faulkner’s art and metaphysics into a mystical muddle of consciousness as “only futurity,” as “the ‘not yet’” which is essentially “hollow” and which “must, as Heidegger says, temporalize itself ” in the face of an “event” that is “by its very nature, a having-been-future.”95 In other words, the “being in time” of Sartre’s Heideggerian thinking is not, as in Marx, the contradictory and unfree “time” of ordinary people’s exploited labor and alienated life under the controlling surveillance of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie—the bourgeoisie which, in the “crux” of everyday life, buys and sells the “time” of workers and would-be workers. Sartre can’t state such a thing as this in philosophical terms.96 As Donald Morton argues in his study of both Sartre’s and Derrida’s readings of the famously scandalous, rapturous “criminal” artist Jean Genet, “For the world’s working masses, time is the time of labor” which “has the structure of 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 17. Sartre, “On The Sound,” pp. 18–19, emphasis in original. Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 22. Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 23. Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 21, emphasis added. See Sartre, “On The Sound,” pp. 24–25. Sartre, “On The Sound,” pp. 18, 24–25. As mentioned, Sartre’s study of Faulkner’s fiction appeared in 1939; the more polemical critique of Georges Bataille’s work is from 1943.

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what Marx calls the ‘working day,’” and it is precisely the social role of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class to own and exercise “exclusive control of labor power, labor time, and the working day for profit—and for profit only.”97 In order to understand and explain Faulkner’s writing as a worldview, Sartre goes on to say, “I believe we have to look for the cause in the social conditions of our present life.”98 Sartre believed Heidegger about a “having-been-future.” But in the ideological subterfuge that Lenin (and Engels) called “shamefaced materialism,”99 the philosopher Sartre also believed at the same time in this “cause in the social conditions.” The “I believe we have to …” is Sartre believing, as Lenin argued in 1908, “without realising that his standpoint is that of a materialist.”100 This complex, contradictory pattern of quasi-theorizing belief is also what “causes” Sartre to teach readers the rather subtle lesson, as he declares, that “I love his art; I do not believe in his metaphysics.”101 Returning to Moism, the exaggerated presence of simile in the novel becomes what could be called hypersimilism and hypersimilarity.102 Just taking ten examples from the pages of Chapter 5, we “hear” the following:

Donald Morton, “Temporality as Queer History: Genet and the Time of Capital,” The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2013), p. 67. Morton points out that according to Sartre, Genet was also a “hallucinating” thinker of “rapturous writing” as a “‘succession of images’” (p. 69, quoting Sartre). 98 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 25. 99 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 171, 222, 282. 100 Lenin, Materialism, p. 342, emphasis in original. Note Lenin on “realism” in Materialism and Empirio-criticism: “Following Engels, I use only the term materialism in this sense [“as the antithesis of idealism”], and consider it the sole correct terminology, especially since the term ‘realism’ has been bedraggled by the positivists and the other muddleheads who oscillate between materialism and idealism” (p. 47, emphasis in original). In his 1873 afterword to Capital, Marx points out that a Saint Petersburg reviewer of the book found its method of inquiry “severely realistic,” “infinitely more realistic than all his [Marx’s] fore-runners,” to which Marx eventually turns and asks, “what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?”—that is, once the “mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands” (“that mighty thinker”) has been “turned right side up” (Capital, pp. 27–29). 101 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 25, emphasis added. 102 John Updike noticed that Mo’s “metaphors … are abundant and hyperactive,” a “surplus energy of figuration.” See Updike, “Bitter Bamboo: Two Novels from China” (reviewing Su Tong’s My Life as Emperor and Mo’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips), The New Yorker (9 May 2005). 97

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(1) “Commoners,” a “mass of humanity,” who “on most days would not dare even to look up as they passed by the yamen gate, now elbowed the gate guards out of the way and spilled into the yard as if a dam had burst” (SD109).103 (2) Invited members of the “local gentry were seated on catalpa wood benches arranged in a polygonal circle, looking as if they were carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders” (109). (3) “Young children, like slippery loaches, were wreaking havoc in the crowd with their erratic movements, pressing against the phalanx of yayi and throwing them off balance, like cornstalks bent before a raging flood” (109). (4) When a bench was “overturned by the crush of people,” a tall member of the gentry who had been sitting on the bench had to jump to safety, then “stood there, water pipe in hand, staring cross-eyed at the crowd, his head cocked to the side like a puzzled rooster” (109). (5) A “fat man with a long white beard fell to the ground, where he began crawling like a rooting pig.” Brushing the mud off of his silk gown, the fat man “filled the air with hoarse curses until his face puffed up like a red mass of dough right out of the oven” (109). (6) When a “yayi [security guard] was shoved down onto a bench so hard that he injured his ribcage,” he “screamed like a stuck pig until his fellow yayi rescued him from his misery” (109). (7) As Magistrate Qian made his grand appearance in the yard filled with spectators, the “trousers under his robe were so baggy that his midsection looked like a giant floating jellyfish” (110). (8) When Sun Meiniang succeeded in pushing her way “up to the front row” to witness the “battle of the beards,” her “heart had already taken flight and landed on His Eminence’s [Magistrate Qian’s] breast, like a pet bird, there to make its nest and raise its young in bone-penetrating warmth” (110). (9) As Magistrate Qian “caressed the crowd with a bewitching smile,” Meiniang “sensed his gaze brushing her face.” She “felt numb all over,” and all the “fluids in her body—tears, mucus, sweat, blood, marrow—flowed out like quicksilver. She now felt as weightless as a spotless white feather, floating in the air, like a dream, like a breeze” (111). (10) Meiniang’s “lips burned” as “a greedy desire gnawed at her heart like a little insect” (112). Turning at random to Book One (“Head of the Phoenix”), we hear Zhao Jia, Meiniang’s father-in-law, telling how he followed Grandma Yu’s example “by 103 In these samples, I have italicized the words “as if,” “as” and “like.”

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sticking the first two fingers of my left hand into the bowl and painting my face with the rooster’s blood, like an actor applying stage paint” (38). Likewise, turning at random to Book Three (“Tail of the Leopard”): Xiaojia, Meiniang’s husband, tells how some soldiers “had their backs to the shed, standing at attention, as if competing to see who could stand the straightest. Meow meow, straight as an arrow” (352). And as Xiaojia’s father “fingered his prayer beads,” he “looked like a meditating old monk,” as Xiaojia’s own “eyes, like awls, bored into Dieh’s [his father’s] hands. Meow meow, they were uncommon hands” (352). Or again further on in Book Two (“Belly of the Pig”) with the quasi-omniscient narrator: A “series of cuts” to the body of the condemned is “like slicing a cucumber” (186). “Slicing up a criminal as fat as a pig or as skinny as a monkey was exhausting work,” for example, where a woman was as blubbery as a sack of starchy noodles, so loose that her flesh quivered whenever the knife touched her. The stuff he cut off her body was like frothy snot … [S]he shrieked like a banshee, howling and wailing … It was like cutting through autumn water. (187–88)

Zhao Jia’s “infatuated recollections paused briefly … like a pose struck by an actor on the operatic stage” as he saw the woman’s “lips move with difficulty and heard her say, soft as a mosquito’s buzz: ‘not … guilty’” (189). “Her head … slumped forward, covered by a curtain of hair so black it looked as if it had just been taken out of a dyeing vat” (189). Under the fiftieth cut of Zhao Jia’s blade, Qian Xiongfei’s ribs were exposed, and his “heart was pumping like a jackrabbit wrapped in gauze” (189). Zhao looked into the condemned man’s face, and “what he saw were: hair standing up straight, eyes wide and round, the dark pupils nearly blue, the whites now red, nostrils flaring, teeth grinding, and taut cheek muscles bulging like a pair of mice” (189). Zhao turned away from Qian Xiongfei’s “solemn and tragic face … and sized up his flaccid organ,” which was “shriveled pathetically, like a silkworm tucked into its cocoon. I’m truly sorry, young friend, he muttered to himself ” (190). And so on, line after line, page after page. Hypersimilism becomes familiar. The reader notices it and gets used to it while also “appreciating” the endless aesthetic variability and range of Mo’s fantastic literary turns of phrases. Goldblatt the translator refers to the “stark beauty” which is “integral to the work,”104 a novel “so utterly reliant on sound, rhythm, and tone.”105 But what exactly is 104 Goldblatt, “Translator’s Note,” p. x. 105 Goldblatt, “Translator’s Note,” p. ix.

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the conceptual and ideological underpinning of this “stark beauty” broadcast through the panorama of hypersimilarities? This aspect of the technique is also familiar; indeed it is so familiar to contemporary consciousness that it has become an overfamiliar symptom of the dominant “common sense.” Its function is to suppress and divert critical thought by means of the array of hypersensuous “sound, rhythm, and tone.” But oddly enough, in such an extravagantly “contemporary” work, this total reliance on sound, rhythm, and tone is in itself nothing but an altered return— a “reform” and “revision”—to the old, traditional literary-aesthetic values and markers of “excellence” which elevate form over substance, “sensations” of resplendent imaginary flight over critical theoretical comprehension of the world through the prisms of literary creativity. Moist hypersimilarity reworks these old bourgeois values and unleashes them with a vaguely new sensuousness of vitality and “excitement” (thrill) by radically increasing and intensifying the jolts of “alternative” consciousness, which quickly fizzle-out just as soon as they have been fabricated, giving way to one item of simile after another. This explains, at least in part, why the Moist hypersimilizing text entices and pulls the reader along: we are obliged to recognize and adapt ourselves to a mode of storytelling which is at once familiar and odd, like something “exotic” one might have imagined about an ancient Chinese art form; yet it is not so “foreign” after all because the fundamental structure of the technique allows us to relax within a universally tried and true system of phenomenal descriptions. We have only to wait to see (and hear) what Mo will come up with next, how the next sensual image will “fill” the narrative flow with illusions of substance so as to “lose” the reader in a timeless experientialism that defies “highbrow” critical philosophical thought. Mo is a bored literary ideologist. Hypersimilism fills the time of narrative boredom to help him lose himself a little further, but without risking the demystification of contemporary consciousness which connects “bored” time with the historical time of exploitation and the systematic loss (i.e., robbery) of a sense of meaningfulness. Sartre’s study of Faulknerian temporality—stripped of a future—is precisely a “highbrow” mode of reading/writing which, despite or perhaps even because of his obscurely contradictory conclusions,106 can be useful for the critical reader to 106 How exactly are we to explain, for example, the rather commonsensical stance at which Sartre arrives, namely, the “love” of Faulkner’s art along with disbelief in its “metaphysics” (ideology)? See Teresa Ebert, “Alexandra Kollantai and Red Love,” Against the Current, No. 81 (July-Aug. 1999), arguing that “the pursuit of pleasure as a performance of freedom is a very specific historical practice of the owning classes

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expose Mo’s “powerful historical novel” as a recycled ideological text of “sound common sense.”107 If the novel is “powerful,” to what end? Moist hypersimilism burns itself up before our eyes and leads us nowhere except into an ever-renewed buzz of similarities piled up one after another; on and on, obscurely mirroring the fetishized, official torture and murder with which Mo is so obsessively fascinated, all the way to the very end when Meiniang’s “body looked like a mass of moldy cotton floating through the air, as if weightless” (SD401, emphasis added). The Moist reader (“listener”) is invited to join and revel in this ideological atemporality of “floating through the air.” Sartre argues: “nothing happens, everything has happened”; “in the very heart of things,” an “elusive, unthinkable immobility.”108 Meiniang and everyone else are reduced to “a sum total without a future”; human beings become “‘the sum of … climactic experiences,’ ‘the sum of … misfortunes,’ ‘the sum of what have you’” in an expansively reconfigured space of “lawless rumbling,” a “furtive drift of events.”109

and is not the basis for egalitarian, sharing relations of mutual sexual pleasure and personal regard among people. The valorization of excessive stimulation, excitation and sensation as ends in themselves distorts human relations and capabilities and is a direct reflection of the alienating commodification and exploitation of human relations that arises with capitalism.” See Mao in his Talks at the Yenan Forum: “Anyone who considers himself a revolutionary Marxist writer, and especially any writer who is a member of the Communist Party, must have a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. At present, however, some comrades are lacking in the basic concepts of Marxism. For instance, it is a basic Marxist concept that being determines consciousness, that the objective realities of class struggle … determine our thoughts and feelings. But some of our comrades turn this upside down and maintain that everything ought to start from ‘love.’ Now as for love, in a class society there can be only class love; but these comrades are seeking a love transcending [i.e., “hallucinating” away] classes, love in the abstract and also freedom in the abstract, truth in the abstract, human nature in the abstract, etc. This shows that they have been very deeply influenced by the bourgeoisie” (pp. 73–74, emphasis added). “There is absolutely no such thing in the world as love or hatred without reason or cause. As for the so-called love of humanity, there has been no such all-inclusive love since humanity was divided into classes. All the ruling classes of the past were fond of advocating it, and so were many so-called sages and wise men, but nobody has ever really practised it, because it is impossible in class society. There will be genuine love of humanity—after classes are eliminated all over the world” (pp. 90–91). 107 Marx, “Moralising Criticism.” 108 Sartre, “On The Sound,” p. 19. 109 Sartre, “On The Sound,” pp. 19–20, emphasis added.

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As noted earlier, Mo himself says with a characteristic mixture of precision and ambiguity that his novel “will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man,” an audience of “eager listeners, not readers, who participate in the tale.”110 Again it is important to ask, what is this “affinity” with the common man? The post-Faulknerian Mo senses that the “appreciative” reader will not be a critical reader—a “highbrow,”111 he says, with playful contempt— but rather some kind of listener who will “like” the common man and even “be like” the common man. But this appreciative subject will not himself or herself be a “common man.” The affinitive subject is similar, as in Derrida’s irreducibility of “difference” which “lets itself be designated différance … recalling something like the middle voice.”112 This position is also familiar: the so-called “middle class” has an “affinity” with the “common man.” Mo’s audience is the “middle,” exactly in the “loose” manner of the sliding between similarities, a “floating through the air, as if weightless.” Nothing happens and nothing has to happen in affinitive consciousness. It merely experiences sensations, and that’s all. Affinitiveness is very much like Faulkner’s “sum of what have you,” a resplendent whateverism of bourgeois ethical “sympathy” and even empathy for those others over there, out there, down there, the “common man” that Mo, either carefully or carelessly, associates with the humanity of the “working masses.”113 Affinity is as close as you get. The author likewise shares this affinitive space of drifting between the outlook of the bourgeois “middle” class and the mass of the exploited. It is this “sound common sense”114 of meditative, sugary, intermediating bourgeois flux that the dominant intelligentsia finds so compellingly attractive. In the words of Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang in Mo Yan in Context, Mo’s literary genius is “towering within the literatures of the world.”115 On a much broader contextual level, I would like to suggest here that Mo’s “sound” affinities resonate with the sound common sense of the hard rock music group known as AC/DC and their original, highly charismatic frontman and songwriter, the late Bon Scott. This connection becomes especially clear in AC/ 110 Mo, “Author’s Note,” pp. 406–07. 111 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 406. 112 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 8–9. 113 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 406. 114 Marx, “Moralising Criticism.” 115 Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, “Introduction to Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. A. Duran and Y. Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 6.

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DC’s popular song from 1978, “Sin City,” on their Powerage album. Bon put it this way: Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief Ain’t got a hope in hell. That’s my belief… . I’m goin’ in to sin city. I’m gonna win in sin city… .116

Of course, it is obvious that Comrade Mo is no Bon Scott, who lived his belief and died in 1980 of acute alcohol poisoning after a night of heavy drinking. Bon was himself, as he said, “a special drunkard.”117 But the same essential message becomes fairly clear for Mo’s “common man”: You ain’t got a hope in hell, so go in for the “sin city” of abandonment to sensations within the existing social relations of alienation.118

Delightful Shift and Drift, or, Syncretism Moist hypersimile capitalizes on the shifts and interminglings of differences that make no difference. Alternating and successive (re)visions never add up but are constantly accumulating—wisping, flippant, easy phrases-of-the-moment that drag the narrative out and onward, forward and backward, almost as if the story itself were reflecting and acting out the tortuous perpetuation of death with which Mo is consumed. Moism loves death to death and wants it to last as long as possible. Bit by bit, hypersimilarity contributes to this consuming post-intellectual production of fiction as an immaterial, empty arena of resplendent distractions from anything that could ever matter. Mo can’t write in any other way because the immateriality of existence is, to use Sartre’s terms, the intertwining unity of his “metaphysics” and his aesthetics. For Goldblatt, this is “stark beauty.”

116 See AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (documentary film/DVD, 30th anniversary edition), directed by Eric Dionysius and Eric Mistler (Burbank, CA: High Speed Productions and Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2011). 117 AC/DC, Let There Be Rock. 118 Taking a “fresh look” at AC/DC’s Powerage album in 2003, a commentator in the magazine Stylus writes that it “creates the perfect soundtrack to Bon’s jaded journey into the dead of night.” “The black heart of the album, ‘Sin City,’ is not only the strongest song in the entire AC/DC catalogue, but continues with Bon’s wet dream of romanticized wealth and excess… We know Bon won’t win in ‘Sin City’ and if he does, it will only be for a fleeting moment, before the devil collects his head.” See Edwin Faust, “On Second Thought: AC/DC—Powerage,” Stylus (12 Dec. 2003).

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The Moist aspiration, to be appreciated in the obscure yet “eager” satisfaction of an affinity with the common man, expresses a class ideology. This eager desire for appreciation, especially when voiced so unabashedly by the author himself, especially when bolstered by commentaries in the official press which curiously anticipates the “Chinese Dickens” and “China’s Faulkner,”119 and especially when accompanied by the joy of publishers and retailers who see Mo’s books “flying off the shelves” and even being depleted in e-book versions,120 such signs of appreciation are political signs of the times. As Marx wrote, these are signs of “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.”121 But “[h]ow lame an anti-climax” is this ideology of appreciation where, as things tend to go for world capitalist society, the “working-class has remained ‘poor,’ only ‘less poor’ in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class ‘an intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power’”—where, therefore, “the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have”122 likewise increased. And “at the same time [as] a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, [there is] an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment.”123 Appreciative reading, as Lenin argues in his critical commentaries on “the glaring contradictions of ‘Tolstoyism,’” is “least of all interested in analysing … works from the standpoint of the character of the … motive forces” constantly at work in the real political economy of the regime of class antagonisms.124 This 119 See “A Chinese Dickens?,” The Economist (20 Oct. 2012); and Calum MacLeod, “Beijing Hails Nobel Prize Win By ‘China’s Faulkner,’” USA Today (11 Oct. 2012). 120 See Xu Lin, “Nobel Winner’s Books Flying Off the Shelves,” China Daily (13 Oct. 2012): “According to Ye Xiaozhou, a public relations officer from e-commerce provider China Dangdang, more than 10,000 of Mo’s books were sold within 24 hours and they’ve ordered the last stocks from publishers.” See Liu Wei, “Mo Pens Nobel Success Story,” China Daily (12 Oct. 2012): “Some writers and critics attacked Mo on his perspectives”—the horror!—“rather than talent”; however, “Paper Republic’s [Eric] Abrahamsen appreciates Mo’s poise between literary and analytic aspirations best… ‘I think Mo Yan has kept the balance’” (emphasis added). 121 Marx, Capital, pp. 714–15. 122 Marx, Capital, p. 610. 123 Marx, Capital, p. 610, note 2. 124 V.I. Lenin, “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 205, 202. “On the one hand,” Lenin writes, Tolstoy offers “the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the ‘Tolstoyan,’ i.e.,

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“character” is reflected in “the contradictions in … views and doctrines [which] are not accidental” but, on the contrary, “express the contradictory conditions of … life.”125 Tolstoy’s “indictment of the ruling classes,” says Lenin, “laid bare the inner falsity of all those institutions by which modern society is maintained.”126 Yet at the very same time, in Tolstoy as the so-called “universal conscience” and “teacher of life,” his “doctrine proved to be in complete contradiction to the life, work and struggle of the grave-digger of the modern social system, the proletariat.”127 Without ever using the word “affinity,” it is nonetheless quite clear that Lenin rejects such “inner falsity” of bourgeois sentimental ephemeralism, and instead, he raises the fundamental question: “Whose then was the point of view reflected in the teachings” of the artist? “Through his lips there spoke that multitudinous mass … that found itself between the class-conscious, socialist

the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: ‘I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection …’ On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, ‘resist not evil’ with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i.e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism” (p. 205). See also Lenin, “L.N. Tolstoy and the Modern Labour Movement,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), pp. 330–32: “Tolstoy’s criticism is marked by such emotional power, such passion, convincingness, freshness, sincerity and fearlessness in striving to ‘go to the roots,’ to find the real cause of the afflictions of the masses, just because this criticism really expresses a sharp change in the ideas of millions of peasants … mirror[ing] their sentiments so faithfully that he imported their naivete into his own doctrine, their alienation from political life, their mysticism, their desire to keep aloof from the world, ‘non-resistance to evil,’ their impotent imprecations against capitalism and the ‘power of money.’ The protest of millions of peasants and their desperation—these were combined in Tolstoy’s doctrine… Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle” (p. 332, emphasis added). 125 Lenin, “Leo Tolstoy,” p. 206. 126 V.I. Lenin, “Tolstoy and the Proletarian Struggle,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 16 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 353, emphasis added. 127 Lenin, “Tolstoy and the Proletarian,” p. 353.

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proletariat and the out-and-out defenders of the old regime.”128 Moist affinity likewise finds itself in this between, which is to say that despite many important differences, Mo is a kind of Chinese Tolstoy, an affinitor of Tolstoyism in the class politics of fiction. The “historicity” of this affinity, to use Derrida’s term, is to postpone indefinitely, in a thousand different keys, the transformative resolution of the fundamental contradiction of class antagonism itself, which is the capitalistic foundation of “contemporary” society and culture transmitted from the past and serving as what Marx called a “fetter” against the liberation of the working class from the bondage of exploitation. In other words, Moism is determined to be appreciated as the “powerful historical” postponement of revolutionary class struggle. Far from characterizing the “resplendent” and wide-ranging struggles of revolutionary socialist dynamism and upsurge, the “thrills” of sensuous, sentimental, cynical mysteriousness encoded in Moism are, on the contrary, highly obscured signs of the transient pleasures and psycho-emotional desires of a bourgeoisie that intermittently glimpses and sinks down into the self-consciousness of its own contradictory condition of existence, a superfluous necessity. One of the central ideological effects of this necessary superfluousness (Moist aesthetics) in this novel is that we find hallucinated realism taking the specific, intensely premeditated shape of the prolongation of the public tortures and deaths “performed” and acted out on the bodies of rebel antagonists. This is the “thrill” that the bourgeoisie would like to act out in reality, but can’t, owing to the unwritten law that forbids the naked display of class violence and retribution. Ruling class law and order marks this class-consciousness of class violence and despotism as “fantasy,” as unreal, false and heretical. But enter Moism: the Moist political imaginary “plays” at the inner falsity and deep hypocrisy of this law, “subverts” its old-fashioned restrictions against the limits of pleasure, and thereby re-encodes political violence as an extended plenitude of spectacle, as a mesmerizing “rush” of popular entertainment. This is how the historical necessity of “time” and temporality (human consciousness of history) are retranslated in order to satiate and restimulate the “desire” of the owning class, along with its technicians and hoped-for future authors of ideology: a desire for a transhistorical, endless, eternal presence. In the final analysis, it is not only the “eager listener” in affinity who will appreciate Mo’s storytelling; more significantly, on the deeper level that Moism postpones, the “playful” rule of

128 Lenin, “Tolstoy and the Proletarian,” p. 353, Lenin’s emphasis.

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bourgeois ideology appreciates the tale and calls on Mo the artist to produce the spin—for which he is, as we see in reality, very well rewarded. Comrade Mo’s humble-sounding notion of “eager listeners” is a manifestation of the real fantasy—that “inner falsity”—of mass bourgeois ideology which views “reading” itself as a volatile and dangerous activity of consciousness in practice. “Reading” weighs like a nightmare in his hallucinations, like the real historical and mass social struggles of the dazibao, the big character posters of the Mao era. In the democratic emperor’s fantasy, “listeners” are more docile because they can’t contest and “destroy,” by means of intellectual critique, the fluidity and epiphenomenalism of his sensuality of “sounds.” This powerful historical ideological mission is, of course, executed in the sphere of culture in the interests of the “middle” bourgeoisie, in-betwixt-and-inbetween the capitalist class, the state apparatus, and the masses of the working class. Affinity’s theater of “eager” appreciation is spread out like the awareness of a plague throughout this triangulated bourgeois common sense marked by self-conscious fits and shifts of ambivalence, melancholy, and boundless desires for satisfaction. Yet this is a satisfaction which, like the accumulation of capital, can never be quenched or filled. Moist affinity is obsessed and overwhelmed with images of likeness, similarity, and “natural”-sounding sound-effects precisely because these trappings of spontaneous sensibility offer the illusions of an eternal, panhistorical “presence” in which, as Sartre put it, “nothing happens, everything has happened.” This signifies, in short, that transformative historical change—to “change the world,” as Marx said—has ended, suspending the “common man” of humanity with only an infinite sense of meta-subtle “historicity” according to which all facets of reality and illusion bear a strange likeness and familiar similarity to everything that has ever happened. Thus “nothing happens” except the resplendent, tragicomic playing out of a “post”-contemporary present which swallows the past and the future in the “mixed feelings” of the existing order of things. It is not by coincidence that Mo’s novel reaches its conclusion and solemn denouement by way of the “magnum opus” of Magistrate Qian’s “noble air” (SD368). Qian is a ruthless, cunning “survivor” in the present. He is aware of the duality and self-cancellation of his power and powerlessness. “Everything went dark as I struggled,” he says, “but my arms were like dead branches… My mind reeled” (401). Then comes the confession, of sorts, looking into the “tranquil face” (402) of the condemned rebel leader Sun Bing. He is “tranquil,” of course, because he has been tortured for somewhere between five to seven continuous days and now

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“comprehended the sinful nature of trying to stay alive” (400).129 “I have wronged you in so many ways,” says Qian. But … but … “but it was not I who plucked out your beard,” and with that “heartfelt comment, I [Qian] drove the knife into his chest” (402). Having thus confessed in the “heartfelt” manner required of cynically amused in-betweenism, Qian provides the necessary fix of affinity in the freeplay balancing act of guilt and innocence, wrong and something similar to right, or, not so wrong. It is not a mere coincidence that Qian brings the tale to an end because the “common man” of bourgeois ideology demands that this kind of likeness of a survivor must be able to secure the reader’s allegiance to the resplendent safety zone of middling—hazy and unreal, back and forth, one side to the other, grief and joy, don’t know why, mixed feelings, over and over. Despite Mo’s naive or pretended speculation that this novel will “likely” not be a favorite of “readers of Western literature, especially in highbrow circles,”130 this work offers in fact a kind of spontaneously unphilosophical poststructuralistic storytelling which, as one Chinese critic of Mo’s writings has suggested, “dances in chains.”131 Moist affinity is not really so very different from Derrida’s playfully mournful sentimentalism in Specters of Marx, in “highbrow” style, of a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, … but more and more visible … “out of joint,” without coordination, … without common belonging to a class … a kind of counter-conjuration.132

129 The exact duration (“temporality”) of Sun Bing’s execution is itself an entangled mystery. Meiniang (quoting herself, as Mo often quotes “himself ”) says that Sun Bing is to be forced to “linger impaled between life and death for five days, until the rail line between Qingdao and Gaomi is completed” (SD305). Xiaojia describes the beginning of the execution at page 361, but no date is given. Excellency Yuan Shikai tells Zhao Jia that he “must not allow him [Sun Bing] to die … until the ceremony to commemorate the completion of the rail line on the twenty-second” (371). Nightfall after the first day of the execution is on the “fifteenth day of the eighth month” (373, italics in original). On the eighteenth day, however, Magistrate Qian says that Excellency Yuan has commanded that Sun Bing “must remain alive until the twentieth [not the twenty-second] of this month” (380). 130 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 406. 131 Yin Deyi quoted in MacLeod, “Beijing Hails.” 132 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–86. See Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, Kindle edition, 2009), Coda and Chap. 8, pointing out that Derrida’s “general writing” is a “subtle theosophical talk” of “affinity” as “the world emerg[ing] in the form of assemblages of signifiers of remembrance and traveling affects.”

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Mo Yan Thought is very much like this. Listen further to Derrida. He goes on to say that “Hegel had already been attentive to the affinity Gas-Geist: the work of death, the fermentation of the cadaver in decomposition mark the passage from a philosophy of nature to a philosophy of spirit,” followed by a “permit me to refer to,”133 and of course a reference to his own works, Glas and Of Spirit. “To live,” Derrida speculates with an air of high certainty, “by definition, is not something one learns.”134 To live is not learned “from oneself,” and it is “not learned from life,” nor “taught by life.”135 This “to live” is a neospiritualistic postpedagogy “[o]nly from the other and by death … from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border, it is a heterodidactics between life and death.”136 This may be “highbrow,” as Mo puts it, but nonetheless one may recognize the similarity of the meditative in-between-ness with Mo’s novel. Derrida’s Specters rewrites Marx and Engels as paradoxical, meta-“hallucinatory” thought-performers in a “Marxian theatricalization”137 where “Marx all the same recognizes” that “everything … pass[es] by way of differences within a fantastics as general as it is irreducible… [T]he spirit of the revolution is fantastic and anachronistic through and through,” an “other transcendental imagination.”138 In other words, he “recognizes” that Marx “recognizes” that Marxist theory is ultimately a “fantastics”—that is, a spectacularly pleasurable fantasy of “transcendental imagination” which Marx himself (as Derrida assures us) “all the same recognizes.” How exactly has Derrida mastered all these fantastic recognitions? Listen to Lenin: An old song, most worthy Professor! This is a literal repetition of Berkeley, who said that matter is a naked abstract symbol… If the “sensible content” of our sensations is not the external world then nothing exists save this naked I engaged in empty “philosophical” fancies. A stupid and fruitless occupation!139

The “most manifest thing about the Manifesto,” Derrida says, is that “in the first place [there] is a specter … as powerful as it is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum.”140 In The German Ideology, which Derrida also (mis)recognizes at 133 Derrida, Specters, p. 188, note 11. 134 Derrida, Specters, p. xviii. 135 Derrida, Specters, p. xviii. 136 Derrida, Specters, p. xviii, emphasis added. 137 Derrida, Specters, p. 5. 138 Derrida, Specters, p. 112, emphasis in original; see also pp. 13–14, 123, 127–28. 139 Lenin, Materialism, p. 30, emphasis added. 140 Derrida, Specters, pp. 12–13.

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length, Marx and Engels critique “Saint Max” Stirner, who, not unlike Comrade Mo armed with “resplendent” storytelling, spoke excitedly of “splendour.” Marx and Engels write: “The holy warrior [Stirner] has now conquered history, he has transformed it into thoughts, pure thoughts, which are nothing but thoughts—and at the end of time only a host of thoughts [hallucinations] confront him.”141 His “ego” is “the negative unity of realism and idealism, of the world of things and the world of spirit. Schelling calls this unity of realism and idealism ‘indifference.’”142 The Derridian “almost secret link” in the world chain of bourgeois ideology is, of course, the Moist play of hallucinations. This playfulness is, as Marx and Engels write, a “series of fantastic ideas.”143 This series is recodified in the imagistic tableau of sensual vacillations and empty sophistry. The Marxist revolutionary communist realism of “relentless criticism”144 contests the dancing in chains with what Marx called “radical chains.”145 The “analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself ” is a revolutionary theoretical critique of the “real anarchy of the mind, the regime of stupidity itself ” that desperately amuses itself in “a big blank between the past and the future.”146 In the end, Comrade Mo’s “creative mood” is destroyed, as Mao argues, through Marxist critique. The “mood” is destroyed in the sense that it is subjected to the demystifying power of revolutionary theory. The “creative mood” of Moist theosophistry in Sandalwood Death—an “affinity with the common man”—is not a relentless dialectical materialist critique. It is instead an endless syncretism, as Marx

141 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Vol. I, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, trans. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), text reproduced at the Marxists.org website (no page numbers), Chap. 3, Section 5, “‘Stirner’ Delighted in His Construction,” emphasis added. 142 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Vol. I, Chap. 3, Section 5, emphasis added. 143 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, Vol. I, Chap. 3, Section 5. 144 Karl Marx, Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 41. 145 Marx, Essential Writings, p. 50. 146 Marx, Essential Writings, pp. 41–43, emphasis added. “A real anarchy of the mind, the regime of stupidity itself, has set in” (p. 41). “Even though the construction of the future and its completion for all times is not our task, what we have to accomplish at this time is all the more clear: relentless criticism of all existing conditions” (p. 41, emphasis in original). “Our slogan, therefore, must be: Reform of consciousness, not through dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is unclear about itself … It will be evident that there is not a big blank between the past and the future, but rather that it is a matter of realizing the thoughts of the past” (pp. 43–44, emphasis in original).

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explained in his polemic against the bourgeois philosopher John Stuart Mill. In Marx’s method of reading, undoubtedly it was not strange to find in the great liberal Mill’s hotchpotch of philosophy the combination, on the one hand, of the exalted first principle that “the individual is sovereign,” along with an acceptance of capital punishment on the other.147 Mill was, according to Marx, the “best representative” of “a shallow syncretism” which “aspired to be something more than mere sophist[ry] and sycophant[ism] of the ruling-classes” by trying “to harmonise the Political Economy of capital with the claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat.”148 So as to obscure and dissipate the rising tensions of “a fierce strife of classes,” and to disguise the great fear of this open conflict, Mill’s imperative for harmonizing appears as an “attempt to reconcile irreconcilables.”149 Such is the shallow syncretism of Mill. And likewise, with such striking similarity, as if one syncretist were old and English and the other new and Chinese, now in the world literature of the epoch of capital we find the shallow hallucinatory sounds of Mo’s affinity. As Lenin read Tolstoy, the empty core of Moism is marked by the “[d]espair … typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.”150 Our eager listening for the class ideology in Mo’s story reveals a “deadly irony,” as Lenin put it, “bearing in mind the proverb: ‘Speech is silver, silence is gold’”151— in the Chinese language, 沉默是金, or chen mo shi jin. Mo Yan Thought, which pleasures the subject of writing and regales us in the noisy jollity of an “hallucinatory” idealist metaphysics of affinity with the common man, is itself hard of hearing. It expresses, as Mao said, an “other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat.”152 Comrade Mo Yan’s story is an ideological mo yanning—an unsaid sensationalized as the creative writing of “do

147 See Mervyn F. Bendle, “On Liberty,” Quadrant, Vol. LIII, No. 12 (1 Dec. 2009). 148 Marx, Capital, p. 25, emphasis added. “[T]hese bourgeois economists instinctively saw, and rightly so,” says Marx, “that it is very dangerous to stir too deeply the burning question of the origin of surplus-value,” with Mill “clumsily repeating the wretched evasions” which he “confounds” (p. 483). 149 Marx, Capital, p. 25. 150 Lenin, “L.N. Tolstoy,” p. 332. 151 V.I. Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 297. 152 Mao, Talks, p. 94.

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not speak” and “don’t talk.”153 It serves the “practical function” of silencing the international proletarian class struggle to end classes. Hearing Moism from the standpoint of Marxist critical inquiry, however, recalls the urgent need to listen to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao. As Marx famously put it: “Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.”154 Contrary to Comrade Mo’s class fantasy, Sandalwood Death is not “all about sound.”155 It is, rather, all about the covering over (as by an integument) of Mao’s profound thesis: Never forget class struggle.

153 Chan, Subversive Voice, note 7 and Conclusion; and Duran and Huang, “Introduction,” pp. 2–3. 154 Marx, Capital, p. 715, emphasis added. 155 Mo, “Author’s Note,” p. 403.

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6.  Pow! as an Ideological Work Pointing to Lao Lan’s retreating back, he’d hiss: “You’re not the damned equal of one of your ancestors’ cock hairs!” A cold cinder that has risen from the temple roof floats down, like a piece of early spring poplar fluff, to settle lightly on the Wise Monk’s shaved head. Then another, its sister, does the same, settling lightly … and emanating a subtle, timeless aura that embodies a hidden flirtation. —Luo Xiaotong in Pow!1 The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German [“True”] Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths,” all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods […] recognis[ing], more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine. —Marx and Engels2

“That Nebulous Terrain” Mo Yan’s “artistic works,” according to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang in their anthology Mo Yan in Context, are “towering within the literatures of the world.”3 His novel Pow! offers one of the most recent works of what Shelley Chan celebrates as Mo’s “postmodern playfulness” in her book, A Subversive Voice in China. Mo says in the afterword to Pow! that this story “gives way to an improvisation that swings between reality and illusion.”4 This evokes the notion of “hallucinatory realism,” as Mo’s storytelling has been officially described,5 involving a “blending” or “merging” of the illusory and the real: in Mo’s words, a writing that taps into and gives priority to “that nebulous terrain … where a writer gives free rein to his talent” so that the storytelling may “inevitably transcend politics and

1 Mo Yan, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 2, italics in original. 2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 67. 3 Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, “Introduction to Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. A. Duran and Y. Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 6. 4 Mo Yan, “Afterword: Narration Is Everything,” in Mo, Pow!, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 386. 5 See Fang Yang, “Profile: Nobel Laureate in Literature Mo Yan,” Xinhuanet (11 Oct. 2012).

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be endowed with literary excellence.”6 Mo is not merely boasting of his own artistic giftedness; his point is the belief that storytelling—or “narration”—can and should achieve a “classless” aesthetic plateau of writerly and readerly bliss. This final chapter, however, presents a theoretically-oriented examination of the ideology—that is, the class politics of consciousness—of this swingy, playful, supposedly “subversive” and “alternative” postmodern storytelling. Of fundamental importance in this study is a sustained application of critical intellectual pressure—from the revolutionary Marxist standpoint as I understand it—to Mo’s characteristically bold assertion that “I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.”7 Overall, I will be arguing that the swinginess of “imagination” in Pow! enacts what Marx in the Grundrisse called a state of “happy confusion.”8 Through this mode of so-called hallucinatory realism (i.e., idealist agnosticism under a “new” banner for individualistic skepticism), Mo Yan Thought (re)articulates the “post”-class doctrine of “combine two into one,” which is the opposite of the dialectical materialist theory of class struggle as “one divides into two.” Along the way, I will also be highlighting some essential connections between Moism’s thickly cynical “logic” of storytelling and the theoretical discourses of Slavoj Žižek’s postmarxism and Jean-François Lyotard’s now canonical articulations of the “postmodern condition.”

Prattle of the “Lack” of Ideology I am going to begin by doing something that is usually avoided in the emerging scholarly writings on Mo Yan, and that is to bring Mo’s supposedly universally “popular” (“towering”) narratives into relation with revolutionary Marxism on questions of knowledge and truth. This of course is not to “transcend politics,” as Mo clearly believes he can do with the “free rein” of his talents which, he also believes, his critics merely “envy,” but instead to (re)situate the historical development of the search for knowledge and truth within the contested “terrain” of class conflict under the reign of “global” capitalism. It is this material terrain to which Marx himself points in Capital as “the international character of the capitalistic regime” in which “grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, [and] exploitation,” and “with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, 6 Mo Yan, “Storytellers: Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (7 Dec. 2012), p. 8. 7 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 8 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, NY: Penguin, Kindle edition, 2011), Notebook III.

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a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.”9 Lenin contends that the “sole conclusion” for revolutionary theory is that, “by following the path of Marxian theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies.”10 Echoing this unconcealed partisan philosophical world outlook, which always upsets “weak-minded non-partisanship” because it lays bare the ongoing “struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society,”11 Wang Che points out “the fact that Mao Tsetung Thought is a development of Marxism-Leninism,” and further: “Making Mao Tsetung Thought absolute and solidified in itself is counter to Mao Tsetung Thought. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.”12 From this “ceaseless” standpoint on the class dynamics of the knowledge of truth, ideological inquiry is the development of proletarian class consciousness which “learn[s] to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises”13 that are expressed and conveyed in writing, in language. For Marx and Engels, “language” is the “actuality of thought”14 of “ideas, views and conceptions” whereby “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”15

9 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1987), p. 715. 10 V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. Abraham Fineberg, ed. Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 130, 176. 11 Lenin, Materialism, p. 347. 12 Wang Che, “How Engels Criticized Duhring’s Apriorism—Notes on Studying ‘AntiDuhring,” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 10 (10 Mar. 1972), p. 9, emphasis in original. 13 V.I. Lenin, “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 28; see also Wang Shuchen, “Study Materialist Dialectics and Be a Vanguard Fighter in Consciously Making Revolution,” Peking Review, Vol. 13, No. 49 (4 Dec. 1970), pp. 15–17. 14 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1989), p. 118 (from Part III). 15 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 55.

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Mo Yan Thought seems to offer a different idea. Mo claims a “lack” of ideology.16 In other words, what he writes is supposedly “classless,” apolitical, “popular, plebeian,”17 or a “bottom-up” personalization of “flux” from the shifty viewpoints of “the average citizen.”18 There is nothing to seek out “behind” his social phrases, as Lenin strongly insists, because they are all only surfaces of imaginative “splendour and fullness” and performative “improvisation”19 in storytelling that “lacks” the depth of determinability along class lines. As the novelist Yiyun Li suggests in her decisively negative review of Pow! in The Guardian, this story “reads like public masturbation” presented in “hackneyed hallucinations” that have no discernible “end” nor “depth” apart from the “urge to shock” and “not to be taken so seriously.”20 Li hints at the question of whether Mo “feel[s] the calling of a market for such books.” The very next day, however, The Guardian published an entirely “different” review that celebrates Pow! as “a rich, original and highly rewarding novel” that is “pleasing,” “frequently poetic,” and “creates extremely powerful characters.”21 I’m going to attempt to defend (take sides with) what I believe to be the correctness of the former (“negative”) views expressed in Li’s polemical review of this novel. However, my position will not be identical with Li’s. This is because her discourse on Pow! is not developed as a theorizing critique of the novel’s class ideological movements and content. For example, when Li quite clearly criticizes Mo’s “work” as a repetitive, empty barrage of “hackneyed hallucinations,” she prefaces this reading by saying that she is putting “[p]olitics aside.”22 This is mainstream, aesthetic-centered “literary criticism.” While Li finds Mo’s storytelling pointless (no “end”) and depthless, her own sense of aesthetic and moral oppositionality also—by claiming to put “politics aside”—avoids the “depth” that a consciously political mode of inquiry could provide the reading public as a critical intervention in the realm of the dominant discourses, however brief it may have to be in the tabloid press. Thus instead, my critique aims toward theorizing Pow! by subjecting its narrative—along with other narratives of other readers of its narrative—to an ideological intervention from the standpoint of what Žižek 16 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 17 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 29. 18 Mo Yan, Change, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Seagull Books, 2012), from the back cover. 19 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 20 Yiyun Li, “Pow! by Mo Yan—Review,” The Guardian (18 Jan. 2013). 21 Chris Cox, “Pow! by Mo Yan—Review,” The Guardian (19 Jan. 2013). 22 Li, “Pow! by Mo Yan.”

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simplistically terms the “traditional” theories of revolutionary Marxist dialectical materialism.23 I follow Mao’s argument that the “distinguishing characteristic of Marxist philosophy—i.e., dialectical materialism—is its effort to explain clearly the class nature of all social consciousness (including philosophy)” and articulate “a resolute struggle between its own proletarian nature and the idealist philosophy of the propertied classes.”24 Mo Yan’s literary writings can be read (and I believe should be read) as closely mirroring Žižek’s so-called “wildly entertaining” and “foul-mouthed wise guy” texts of philosophical eclecticism.25 In Žižek’s postmarxist rhetoric, “[i]t is clear,” he declaims, that when “confronted with … cynical reason,” the “traditional critique of ideology no longer works.”26 These are, I would argue, the most important words in Žižek’s “wise guy” writings on the question of ideology and “cynical reason.” The social phrase he offers (“it is clear”) is the declaration that Marxist ideology critique “no longer works.” What “works” for Žižek is Jacques Lacan’s thinking. Žižek believes—if he believes anything for very long at a time—that Lacan grasps “the paradox of being”27 of the cynical. What is clear, in any event, is that this sentiment of the “paradox of being” serves, as Marx and Engels argued in the Manifesto, to “wonderfully increase the sale of [the] goods”28 of Mo as well as Žižek. 23 Marx and Engels argue in the Manifesto that the “Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (Manifesto, p. 57, emphasis added). 24 Mao Zedong, “Dialectical Materialism—Notes of Lectures,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Chap. I. When Mao speaks of the “class nature” of social consciousness, he does not mean that this “nature” is merely “natural” in the abstract, as in the bourgeois theory of “human nature.” In his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Mao argues: “In class society there is only human nature of a class character; there is no human nature above classes. We uphold the human nature of the proletariat and of the masses of the people, while the … bourgeois classes uphold the human nature of their own classes, only they do not say so but make it out to be the only human nature in existence” (p. 90). “One thing … is clear,” writes Marx, “Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power” (Capital, p. 166). 25 Edward O’Neill, “The Last Analysis of Slavoj Žižek,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 17 (June 2001); and Benjamin Kunkel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Slavoj Žižek’s Communism,” New Statesman (27 Sept. 2012). 26 Žižek, Sublime, p. 30, emphasis added. 27 Žižek, Sublime, p. 28. 28 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 67.

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So long as the fundamental contradiction between the exploiters and the exploited determines the “everyday”29 of the “working-day,”30 the question of what “works” or “no longer works” is not something “more pragmatic than argumentative,”31 as Žižek suggests; nor is it the endless and pointless drama of an ontological “lack,” “void,” “trauma,” “hole” or “gap” internal to the human psyche,32 as Žižek also asserts. What “works” is a reflection of class struggle. “Between equal rights,” Marx argues, force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working class.33

Cynical or cynical “kynical”34 consciousness as a “lack” of ideology in Mo Yan Thought, along with the “clear” idea that Marxism’s “traditional” critique of ideology lacks the intellectual capacity to “work” against cynical kynicism, are not new arguments in their class essence. They are old arguments and anti-intellectual arms in the long “tradition” of bourgeois critical criticism against revolutionary Marxism. There are three levels of counter-Moist and counter-Žižekian “newness” that need to be articulated and “learned,” as Lenin says. First of all, cynical consciousness is a more generally idealized way of rationalizing and relegitimizing “TINA,” which, as William Hinton writes, is “the ‘There Is No Alternative’ syndrome” whose keystone is the thesis “that socialism, the only possible alternative to capitalism, has failed miserably” and, therefore, “like it or not, we all have to go along.”35 TINA is the cynical “miasma of invidious spin” whose subjectivity is extremely useful “to reinforce the current global system of super exploitation by burying even the memory of a socialist alternative that came close to shutting 29 V.I. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 358. 30 Marx, Capital, pp. 222–86. 31 Žižek, Sublime, p. 29. 32 See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 15–123. 33 Marx, Capital, p. 225. 34 See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 107–110, 155–69. The “fascination of the kynical mode of life is its astounding, indeed almost unbelievable serenity,” says Sloterdijk (p. 166, emphasis added). Kynical and cynical consciousnesses “qualify each other … and finally get to know and neutralize each other” (p. 218, emphasis added). 35 William Hinton, Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2006), p. 11.

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the door on the intolerable polarization of the human race that is leading us all to disaster.”36 Cynicism is the “unhappy consciousness”37 in “reconciliation with itself ”38 that it “knows” its “sorry ‘eternal truths,’ all skin and bone”39 in order to negate the collective task of the international working class in abolishing the social conditions that cause unhappiness and give rise to “illusory being.”40 It is “wise” in the dominant ideology because it regards social transformation as “silly”41 and “terrible.”42 Secondly, the “lack” of ideology, as Mo claims in ludic cynical-kynical transparency, is a “playful” diversion for breathing new life into the old liberal “humanism” of apolitical art and the old bourgeois avant-garde slogan of “art for art’s sake.” And thirdly, Žižek’s “clear” recognition that Marxist critique is unworkable is itself a cynical act dressed up as “theory” for forgetting the historical fact that the Marxism of Marx, Engels and Lenin has always been, as Lenin put it, “hounded”43 by the philosophical representatives of the ruling class as unworkable in real human practice, however lofty its “idealism.”44 Marxist critique does not “work” for capital; that is, Marxism’s path of critique does not exist and is not developed in its practices for the sake of capital’s need for perpetual ideological relegitimization and the “clear” insights of its “left” thinkers. It works for the demystification of cynical ideology and the overthrow of 36 Hinton, Through a Glass Darkly, p. 12. 37 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J.B. Baillie (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1967), Part B, §§ 207–30; see also Teresa L. Ebert, “Globalization, Internationalism, and the Class Politics of Cynical Reason,” Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Oct. 1999), pp. 400–08. 38 Hegel, Phenomenology, Part B, §§ 208, 210, 216. 39 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 67. 40 G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969), Book II, Chap. 1, §§ 818–45. 41 Mao Zedong, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. III (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 272. 42 Mao Zedong, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 26–30. 43 V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, An Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 106; see also Lenin, State and Revolution (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1994), p. 7. 44 Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “Momentous Struggle on the Question of the Identity Between Thinking and Being,” in Three Major Struggles on China’s Philosophical Front (1949–64) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), p. 39 (“makes a mess of things,” quoting Yang Hsien-chen).

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capitalism that cynicism serves to block. Žižek’s Lacanian paradoxicism posing as “communist” theory “works” for capitalist ideology as “consummate acts of the metacynical political imaginary” which, in a “display of enlightened false consciousness, sinks us more deeply into cynical reason as he dissolves the ground of class struggle on which a transformative politics stands.”45 But Žižek’s work is not my main line of inquiry here. The question is now, how does Mo Yan Thought work to “construct” itself as an absence of “ground,”46 as a “nothingness”47 of class disinterestedness in the “lack” of ideology? As his “father always said,” Mo portrays himself as “the son of a farmer” and thus an “humble person.”48 For the writer as an humble person, “[s]eeking change is the pursuit of artistic creation,” and since “[t]here is no writer who does not change,” he says that the “key is a writer’s thoughts deep in his heart” which are “beyond” ideology.49 From these deep thoughts in his heart, Mo envisions his changefulness (i.e., indeterminacy, uncertainty) by relying on a sophistic rhetoric that locates his pursuit of artistic creation within a mysterious realm somewhere between his valiantly humble decree: on the one hand, it is “a lie to say a writer can produce great work under complete freedom,” while on the other hand it is “also false to say that a writer can produce great work under a restricted environment.”50 The sophistry of “his petty-bourgeois point of view,” as Marx says, “is made up of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand.”51 “This is so,” Marx continues, in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions [my emphasis] and develop them according to circumstances into

45 Ebert, “Globalization,” pp. 402, 407. 46 See Hegel, Science of Logic, Book I, §§ 89–105; and Book II, §§ 964–1032; see also Marx and Engels, German Ideology, pp. 39–52. 47 See Hegel, Science of Logic, Book II, §§ 823–34, 1034, 1060; see also V.I. Lenin, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Book II, p. 133 (commenting on Hegel’s §§ 835–836, 847 and 1084): “Movements ‘to nothing’ occur in nature and in life. Only there are certainly none ‘from nothing.’ Always from something.” 48 Mo quoted in Diao Ying, Mei Jia and Xu Wei, “Mo Muses on New Celebrity Chapter in His Life,” China Daily (7 Dec. 2012). 49 Diao, Mei and Xu, “Mo Muses,” quoting Mo. 50 Diao, Mei and Xu, “Mo Muses,” quoting Mo. 51 Karl Marx, “Letter to J.B. Schweizer ‘On Proudhon,’” in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 2 (1865).

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striking, ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes [my emphasis]… There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day.52

Thus in “seeking change in the pursuit of artistic creation,” Mo Yan Thought tells readers and other writers that the “true” pursuit is that “[t]he key to producing a great piece of work … is whether a writer can go beyond class and politics, and be compassionate.”53 In “Narration Is Everything,” the afterword to Pow! (Forty-One Bombs, as Shelley Chan translates the title), Mo tells us that “the story line”—“if I were forced to make a story out of this novel”—is one which “isn’t all that meaningful”54 but at the same time “had a comforting effect”55 insofar as “[n]arration can bring satisfaction to all the unsatisfying aspects of real life, and that fact has provided me with considerable solace.”56 A little further on, he momentarily entertains the question, “What about ideology?” His answer, in a sense, is to (re)articulate the illusory, ironicizing “logic” of his own name, “Mo Yan,” which of course playfully means “don’t speak.” On the question of “What about ideology?” the vainly paradoxical subject-as-nebulous-storyteller merely declares: About that I have nothing to say. I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.57

In other words, Moism is an ideological blank, an un-ideological emptiness of “thoughts deep in his heart” devoid of “class and politics.” While Pow! “may seem” to be the story of Luo Xiaotong, the narrator within the story, “prattling away with his tale” in the “desire to stop growing [which] is rooted in a fear of the adult world, of growing old and feeble, of dying and of the passage of time,” the story is “in reality,” says Mo, one in which “I have employed this ‘narration’ to create my own childhood, as a way to hold on to it” “[l]ike a drowning man grasping at straws, … desperate to keep from sinking” but knowing “that my attempt must end in failure.”58 Yet this narration is proudly “free” of ideology by virtue of a “lack,” a hollowed emptiness of the un-ideological. Thus, while writing “about” it here, ideology is understood as “prattled away” by “narration” that becomes the tale of “desire” “rooted in fear” and which says that he has “nothing to say” about 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Marx, “Letter to J.B. Schweizer.” Diao, Mei and Xu, “Mo Muses,” paraphrasing Mo. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 385. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 385–86. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 385.

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ideology. Narration is “everything,” and ideology is outside; meanwhile, inside the prattling “passage of time” of desire within the ideology-“free” zone of the storyteller—and the story, presumably—there is only the “lack” of ideology. Moism is the proud writing of an “humble person” who realizes “a comforting effect” or “solace” that transcends and “lacks” class interests. But this tranquil solace in the lack of ideology—to “go beyond” class and politics in the “pursuit of artistic creation”—is, as Lenin argues, a “wrong idea”59 of the un-ideological so long as class contradictions really exist in the so-called “adult world.” For Lenin, the only path to the “lack” of ideology is through the dialectical materialist critique of ideology as those “narratives” in “social phrases” that prattle on in the mystified class interests of blocking the development of class consciousness by the working class. Marxist class consciousness is the real social and cultural struggle to “lack” bourgeois ideology (if one might put it this way), not by the imaginary fantasy of artistic creation “beyond” class and politics, but by exposing and oppositionally contesting ideology as class mystification that normalizes and legitimizes the capitalist mode of production and the social relations of production—social relations which include and produce “culture” and the socially situated subjectivities with “imagination.” Any other “lack” of ideology in the historical “passage of time” of capitalist social relations is, as Marx says, “false!”60 I just suggested the notion of class struggle in the realm of ideology as a protracted struggle to “lack” capitalistic ideology. This is what Lenin is arguing when he speaks of the proletariat “becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society.”61 Mao also stresses the need for the “remoulding” of one’s thinking in his Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art and also in his work of 1957, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.62 Particularly in this latter text, Mao points out that some people ask, “if remoulding is necessary, why isn’t it necessary for the working class?” He explains that the “opinions” (assumptions) reflected in this question are distorted and objectively incorrect. Mao argues:

59 Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 14, 73–74 (also translated as “false notion”). 60 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook V. 61 Lenin, “Three Sources,” p. 28, emphasis added. See also Mao in Talks at the Yenan Forum, remarking that people can “rid themselves” of the influences of the bourgeoisie, in part, by “modestly study[ing] Marxism-Leninism” (Talks, p. 74). 62 See Mao, Talks, p. 73; and Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. V (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), pp. 402–06.

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In the building of a socialist society, everybody needs remoulding—the exploiters and also the working people. Who says it isn’t necessary for the working class? … The working class remoulds the whole of society in class struggle and in the struggle against nature, and in the process it remoulds itself. It must ceaselessly learn in the course of work, gradually overcome its shortcomings and never stop doing so… For myself, I used to have all sorts of non-Marxist ideas, and it was only later that I embraced Marxism. I learned a little Marxism from books and took the first steps in remoulding my ideology, but it was mainly through taking part in class struggle over the years that I came to be remoulded. And if I am to make further progress, I must continue to learn, otherwise I shall lag behind.63

Mao’s explicit example of himself (“myself ” to “make further progress”) runs directly counter to Mo’s own example of himself in the acts of his writing (“always taken pride in my lack of ideology”). Mo’s playful “pride” (he is also “humble”) stands for the post-ideological argument—which Mo is unable and unwilling to make because a coherent “argument” would jeopardize his “nebulous” literariness—that his position is “beyond” class and therefore “beyond” and above (“transcending”) any need for “remoulding” and any critique of the class ideology that teaches readers to deny, as Mao says, the historical necessity to “ceaselessly learn in the course of work.” As Pow! exploits a surplusage of narration to “prattle about” itself, Mo Yan Thought is “at bottom false” in the sense that it articulates the “chatter” of a state of “happy confusion”: “altogether false and childish.”64 The “spiritual point d’honneur” of Moist “enthusiasm” in the illusory being of a “lack” of ideology—its “moral sanction,” its “logic in popular form,” and its sticky-sweet aura of “consolation and justification” obtained through this bombastic representation—is a “fantastic realization” in bourgeois avant-garde writing.65 Its purpose is to relegitimize the attempt to “delay the struggles”66 for collective human emancipation from capitalism’s “adult world.” Moist “lack” of ideology is “belletristic phrases” 63 Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions,” pp. 402–03. 64 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebooks IV, III, VI. 65 Karl Marx, “Toward a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 46, emphasis added. Marx writes: “Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality” (p. 46). 66 Teresa L. Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking’ as the Interpretive Logic of the Popular,” Textual Practice, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2014), p. 29.

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for a neobelletrism of “post”-ideological narrative pleasure that “expresses commonplaces in a paradoxical way” in the flux it regards as its own “great show of rhetoric.”67 The class politics of this “lack” is an explosive (“pow!,” “bombs”) diversionary strategy that deploys “sophistry”68 as a sublime succession that “[t]otally abstracts away the essential [social] relations” in order “to cleanse it of contradictions.”69 Behind its playful essencelessness, Pow! is a polemical rejuvenation of the ludic postmodern imagination. Through the “zingy” withdrawal into the “work of demented and subversive genius”70 of “my imagination,” it attempts to obliterate “the principle,” as Liu Ching writes in The Builders, that “labour created the world.”71 Exactly in the mould of Liu’s character named “Blabbermouth,” Mo and his own character Luo Xiaotong “make a joke of other people’s troubles.”72

Everything Swings “In My Imagination” In Chapter One of Pow!, Mo sets about to “instil into the minds”73 of readers the proudly un-ideological “desire” of narrative prattle. The main structure of narration is centered in the “giving way” to the writing of “an improvisation that swings between reality and illusion.”74 The most concentrated articulation of this “swing” occurs in the insistence of the narrator’s “imagination” as the allencompassing consciousness of a world suspended in the fluidity of an uncertain in-between-ness of “reality” fusing with “illusion.” This is Mo’s “talent” and “excellence” in the pursuit of “that nebulous terrain” of storytelling as an entertaining show of improvisational psycho-aesthetics (belletrism). But what this tale suppresses—precisely because it is a bourgeois ideological narrative that valorizes a nebulous sensibility of eternal and causeless uncertainty while blocking out a searching understanding of the conflictual structure of “reality” in class society and culture—is its basic contradictory relation with the revolutionary socialist viewpoint of developing “realism” for the class consciousness enabled to refuse

67 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebooks III, VII. 68 Lenin, “Conspectus,” Book II, p. 146. 69 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV. 70 Hector Tobar, “Mo Yan’s ‘Pow!’ Packs a Punch, However Veiled,” Los Angeles Times (14 Dec. 2012). 71 Liu Ching, The Builders (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2001), p. 532. 72 Liu, The Builders, p. 45. 73 Lenin, State and Revolution, p. 14. 74 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386.

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and contest the “illusions” of the ruling class capitalist ideology and its sovereign individual endowed with autonomous “imagination.” In Mao’s words, the revolutionary forces in existing society must come to understand their own class interest in the necessity to “cast away illusions” and prepare for struggle. The illusions of the dominant class ideology, whether in the “imagined” texts of literature or in the discourses of “theory,” produce and engender a matrix of interwoven effects of subjection which are necessary for the continuation and maintenance of the international capitalist system as a social totality: (1) to mystify the dominant regime of labor relations; (2) to suppress and divert critical thought from its historical task of developing the ability to recognize and boldly critique bourgeois ideology’s varying and ever-developing modes; and (3) as a general rule, to “work” for the perpetual (re)legitimization of capital’s domination over labor.75 When illusions become the objects of theoretical critique, the underlying realities of the capitalist system begin to lose their hegemonic grip on the “imaginations” of the working class because “imagination” itself is de-idealized and transformatively reunderstood through the study of materialist dialectics: “imagination” becomes re-integrated within the social totality, not merely as a playfully “shifting” zone of pleasures in “transcendent” storytelling, but instead as a highly varied, ongoing site of material sociocultural struggle whereby conflicting class subject positions make sense (or trivialize sense-making into nonsense-making, as in Moist narration) of what Marx and Engels call the “material surroundings”76 of nature and the social relations of production. Looking at the following series of examples from Pow!, one may notice that “imagination” is rendered through a spectrum from the more obvious or simple to more complex and internally confused forms. The various permutations, nonetheless, all revolve around the Moist flux of sophistry in “imagination” which tries to resolve the socially existing contradictoriness of reality/illusion by making this contradiction seem ultimately and timelessly irresolvable, thereby “improvising” the infusion of reality and illusion within the ludic imaginary of “swings between” one and the other. The swinginess of the grand imagination is a 75 See Mao Zedong, “Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for Struggle,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), pp. 425–32; Mao, “Foolish Old Man,” pp. 271–74; and Mao, “On Contradiction,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. I (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 340–41 (“eternal charm,” quoting Karl Marx, “Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” [Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976], pp. 44–45). 76 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 41.

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“storyline” that celebrates a variety of successive acts of the idealistic agnosticism, often veering into solipsism, that Hegel called “illusory being.”77 In Hegel’s abstractions, this is consciousness of and in “nothingness or the essenceless” whose privileged state of “being is its own equality with itself,”78 revealed and prattled on in the flow of “moments of illusory being.”79 (A) IN MY IMAGINATION. The narrator Luo Xiaotong manufactures the story of how his “father ran off with his slut,”80 Aunty Wild Mule, from the hometown village. In my imagination, the faces of Father and Aunty Wild Mule reflected the burning fire, as if coated with a red glaze. (3, emphasis added)

Throughout Luo’s prattle, one of the signatures of Moist writing appears over and over again, namely, the (re)semblancing drift of hallucinatory similarities and imagistic associations constructed with light, momentary linkages of “like,” “as if,” and “as … as.” Here, for instance, the faces of Father and Aunty Wild Mule are first imagined as themselves “reflecting” a burning fire; at the same time, this imagined reflecting of faces and fire passes over into the “as if ” of a red glaze. Thus what is initially presented from “in my imagination” gives way to another imagined layer of “as if.” In the same paragraph: “In my imagination, Aunty Wild Mule’s eyes sparkled, like black onyx, in the light of the cow-chip fire” (4, emphasis added). And again in the same paragraph: “In my imagination, they both hold a fatty dog’s leg in one hand and a glass of strong liquor in the other, and alternate between [my emphasis] drinking and eating, their cheeks bulging like oily little balls … of course [this ellipsis is in the story itself], I also think about [my emphasis] what happens after the eating and drinking, how they wrap their arms round each other and do you know what—The Wise Monk’s eyes flash and his mouth twitches just before he laughs out loud” (4). The bourgeois ideological cause of the novel—that is, the class objective to which its “narration” is committed as the “everything”— is the reproduction of the consumptive reader of nebulously overflowing, “imaginative” aesthetics, a reading subject who haplessly unthinks (“lacks”) the

77 Hegel, Science of Logic, Book II, Chap. 1. 78 Hegel, Science of Logic, Book II, § 837. 79 Hegel, Science of Logic, Book II, § 828. 80 Mo, Pow!, p. 3. Hereinafter, all references to this novel will be given parenthetically in the text, preceded where necessary by the abbreviation “P.” Because I am following Goldblatt’s translation of the novel, my quotations from it will retain the italics, which are also in the 2003 original Chinese text.

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continuously developing class knowledge Marx calls a “relentless criticism of all existing conditions”81 and, instead, gives “free play” to readerly experientialism with amused pleasure at such typically “fun” turns of phrases as “you know what.” Here the storyline of prattle “in my imagination” presented in standard, nonitalic script flows within the same sentence in the same paragraph into the parallel storyline presented in italic script. The italic storyline allows Luo Xiaotong to tell the present-tense story of what’s happening in the Wutong Temple in the year 2000 where he sits with Wise Monk Lan to tell his story: “relating the episodes from the lives of my parents makes me feel as if I’m talking about the ancients” (5), “telling you everything, holding back nothing” (7), and “spewing out my life story for his benefit” (22). As the two tracks of the two stories “swing between” and weave in and out of each other in the “merging” style of “hallucinatory realism,” the italic storyline also includes the drift of imagination. Luo is suddenly dumbstruck as the Wise Monk’s laughter “stops abruptly, the lingering echo sounding like the tinny reverberation from a struck gong” (4). Luo becomes “momentarily dazed, unable to determine” (4) the meaning of the Monk’s “bizarre laugh” (4), whether he should “continue speaking honestly or stop” (4). Being “momentarily dazed” provides a pretext for another shift of stream-of-consciousness to the mysterious “woman in green” (4)—a “woman in a green overcoat” who, as we are told on the first page of Chapter One, “sprawls through a breach in the temple wall” (1). Now she is still “sprawled in the same place” (4) with no apparent purpose other than forming another micro-episode in the phenomenal flux whereby Luo becomes “momentarily dazed” in contemplating and speculating as “unable to determine.” Then it turns out, however, that the woman in green is playing, much like Luo himself. He is led to “imagine” the fluid substance of her play. She’s playing a little game with her spittle, easing bubbles out between her lips until they burst in the sunlight. I try to imagine what those little bubbles taste like—“Go on.” (4)

To put it differently, what Luo tries to imagine “in my imagination” is whatever in a bubbly whatever-world. Whatever he imagines serves to daze his sensuously playful senses and is, in its essence, the “essenceless” reality of “moments” that he is “unable to determine.” Mo’s “lack” here becomes the sublime attempt to imagine what a bubble of spit “tastes like.” To rephrase this episode in popular American slang: “Luo Xiaotong was like, ‘I wonder what the bubbles taste like?’” Deep Thoughts in Mo Yan Thought, and indeed according to Mo, he believes he is 81 Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” in Karl Marx: The Essential Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Frederic L. Bender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), p. 41, emphasis in original.

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“unlocking the sacred door of fiction.”82 The mode of sacred fictual narrative that he is actually unlocking and “giving way” to, however, is the bourgeois ideological writing that Mas’ud Zavarzadeh theorizes and critiques as “pun(k)deconstruction,” which is “constitutively ludic” and translates the heavily institutionalized discourses of classic poststructuralist thinking “into a ‘hip’ and more aggressively anticonceptual … ‘fun’ activity” so that its more “speculative” philosophical meditations become immediately “lived” through a “paradiscursive experience.”83 The class point of its fun(niness) is the “defense of the imagination” in the “unique individual” as the mystified “ideological construct for reproducing the sovereign individual” whose uncanny flow of knowing-that-he-knows-nothing serves to reinforce—in the realm of “global” literariness—the elaborate “severing [of] knowledge from class struggle”84 that capitalism requires. In today’s China where, according to sociologists Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, the level of economic inequality (the “rich-poor gap”) in 2012–2013 ranked “among the highest in the world”—marking the Gini coefficient in the range of 0.53– 0.55—Mo’s all-out glorification of the “post”-ideological “imagination” must surely come, in his words, as a “considerable solace” for the well-off and those who dream of transcending the class polarization that pervades everyday life: as Xie and Zhou put it, “[o]rdinary persons in China know about this increase [of inequality], as they have personally experienced it in their own lives” and “recognize it as a social problem.”85 But it is the class politics of this “knowing” about economic and social inequality that is also a crucial “social problem” at the level of ideological struggle. As Kimberly DeFazio argues, inequality is not merely a flaw in the fabric of an otherwise harmonious “community” but rather is “an effect of the deepening division of the world into those who own the means of production (factories, land, natural resources, technologies), thereby compelling

82 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 83 Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “Pun(k)deconstruction and the Postmodern Political Imaginary,” Cultural Critique, No. 22 (Autumn 1992), pp. 31, 33. 84 Zavarzadeh, “Pun(k)deconstruction,” pp. 37, 33, 44. 85 Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, “Income Inequality in Today’s China,” PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America), Vol. 111, No. 19 (13 May 2014), p. 6928. See also Robert Weil, “City of Youth: Shenzhen, China,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 2 (June 2008), examining Shenzhen as “a model for the capitalistic ‘market reforms’ and ‘opening to the world’ initiated in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping”; and Weil, “Conditions of the Working Classes in China,” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Vol. 58, No. 2 (June 2006), noting the “emergence of a full-blown Chinese capitalism.”

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others to work for them to create profit, and those who, owning nothing but their labor power, are forced to work for the owners to survive.”86 (B) IN MY MIND. “I imagined his hands [Father’s dark hands] as wild and savage, like those of a marauder, squeezing her buttocks and breasts dry [Aunty Wild Mule’s “pale buttocks and breasts”]. She’d moan, her eyes and her mouth expelling light; Father’s too. […] Four hands groping and roaming, four lips pressing and crushing, four legs slithering and entwining … until both bodies gave off a luminescent glint, like a pair of enormous, scaly, glittery, deadly serpents coiled in an embrace. […] I sneak a look at the Wise Monk to see the effect, if any, of my slightly erotic description” (5). “Then,” says Luo, “in my mind, wolves—a whole pack, not just one—came, drawn by the smell of meat. The children ran off ”; they had come from “out of the darkness” (5). “But the wolves [“in my mind”] remained, squatting outside the yurt. […] I was afraid they’d rip open the yurt and tear down the log cabin, pounce on my father and his woman and have them for dinner. But no, …” (5–6). Luo Xiaotong, in other words, becomes afraid of the wolves that have been imagined “in my mind.” His subjective affects are themselves “affected” effects of imagination, as Mo suggests: “The affected tone of the narrator’s prattling makes it possible for the ‘unreal’ to become ‘real,’” and for a storyteller with “talent” to be able to “exhibit that ‘affected tone,’” he says, “is the key to unlocking the sacred door of fiction.”87 The imagination of narration “in my mind” leads to the “sacred” realm of fiction. Fiction is an exhibition of inner-worldly theology whereby the “unreal” becomes “real.”88 In this “swing” of sacred writing, Mo Yan Thought abandons the possibility of even using the words “unreal” and “real” without playfully placing them within scare quotes. He is afraid of words “in my mind,” and scare quotes

86 Kimberly DeFazio, “The Commune, NOT the Common,” in Human, All Too (Post) Human: The Humanities After Humanism, eds. Jennifer Cotter et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, Kindle edition, 2016); see also in Human, All Too (Post)Human, Robert Faivre, “Posthumanist Metaphysics and the Necessity of Dialectics”: “inequality is produced by the exploitative relation of class; it is an effect of the monopolization of social resources by the few.” 87 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 88 Compare e.g. Jennifer Kavanagh, A Little Book of Unknowing (Alresford, UK: Christian Alternative Books, 2015); Pierre Lacout, God is Silence, trans. John Kay (London: Quaker Books, 1993); and Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2010).

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make them more “glittery” in a “luminescent glint.” This is pure subjectivism, a “swing between” agnosticism and solipsism “in my mind.” While teasingly asserting his “lack of ideology” on the thick pretext of affected tones of layer upon layer of self-consciousness, the crude truth is that Mo imagines himself as a “sacred” God-writer of avant-garde storytelling. The sacredness he activates is an absurdist meta-perspectivism of God-like staring, melancholy, and amused indifference shrouded in a “steady flow of sensations,” an unending “passion for intensity” amidst a “mirage of hope,”89 as Donald Morton described Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction four decades ago. His version of bourgeois avantgardism is the luminescence of avant-garden narration.90 The reading “experience” is an immersion in the eternal Lightness and Darkness of Good and Evil, “swinging between” one and the other in “slithering” and “entwining” pleasures like “deadly serpents” coiled in the fluidity of desire. Its class “desire” is to recruit the subject of imaginary pleasures for a “lack” of understanding and concern for the ideological contradictions of real social relations in worldliness: to relegitimize the “aloof ” (non)positionality of classlessness. It is worth keeping in mind that the tale of Pow! is twaddled out from inside a temple. The preaching of “my” lack of ideology is itself “the means to exhibit that ‘affected tone.’”91 However, this extravagant exhibition of affectation is not a “lack” of ideology but is, in the “wily” mode of cynical self-consciousness of self-contradictoriness, an updated ideological strategy to dissolve the boundary of contradictions between political thinking and the glinty “splendour and fullness”92 of “happy confusion.”93 It is a narrative, in short, of “everything” as a nebulous terrain of new-agey, quasi-religious mystification. The “swing between” is the “sacred door” to temple life in “illusory being” as “essenceless” moments of 89 Donald Morton, Vladimir Nabokov (New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1974), p. 12. 90 See Ebert, “Hegel’s ‘Picture-Thinking,’” pp. 16–19. “Picture-thinking as [a] mode of knowing produces a ‘false consciousness’ in which the individual grasps Absolute Spirit as an individual, natural relationship between father and son and understands history as a garden narrative” (p. 17). In religion as well as in the “popular logic” of novels, Ebert argues, the subjectivity produced “is an inverted consciousness in which totality is turned upside down into tangible particularity and the suprasensuous (whether Spirit or the imperceptible structure of social relations) is made sensuous—the ‘Word made flesh’—and consequently the knowledge of essence (social relations) is made into an understanding of appearance” (p. 17). 91 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 92 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. 93 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook III.

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asocial “self ”-transcendence. In exactly the same register that Elizabeth Grosz has affirmed the virtues of what she calls “the thinking of Gilles Deleuze,” Moism in the swing of its sovereign imaginary playfulness is the (re)semblancing of “little bombs that … scatter thoughts and images into different linkages,” and “[i]deally,” says Grosz, “they produce unexpected intensities, peculiar sites of indifference”94 that sustain Derrida’s call to “abandoning all depth.”95 If one learns to abandon all depth—“everything” is depthless—and “think” along the rhizomatic surfaces of “different linkages” that ultimately become “peculiar … indifference,” then it is no longer necessary to interrogate the material conditions that determine economic inequality as a “social problem,” to recall Xie and Zhou. Moism plays out the “cheeky” density of cynicism merged with the blissfully selfreflexive savviness of “kynicism.”96 In Mao’s fifth and final section of the 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum, he directly engages and struggles against this very notion of the “thinking of Gilles Deleuze” and others, to use Grosz’s preference, by discussing “styles of work” among producers of literature and art. It should be understood here that Mo—whose great works of “talent” are now “towering” in the world, as Duran and Huang claim— has been a “member” of the Chinese Communist Party since the late 1970s. Mao points out that certain comrades involved in literature and art continue to harbor attractions toward idealism (as opposed to materialism), “empty illusions,” “empty talk,” and “aloofness from the masses.”97 Such comrades, he continues, are still not very clear on the difference between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie. There are many Party members who have joined the Communist Party organizationally but have not yet joined the Party wholly or at all ideologically. Those who have not joined the Party ideologically still carry a great deal of the muck of the exploiting classes in their heads, and

94 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 58. 95 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 285. But see Teresa L. Ebert, The Task of Cultural Critique (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, Kindle edition, 2009), Preface, critiqueing Grosz, among others, for “obscur[ing] the underlying structures of material social relations such as class and instead focus[ing] on the technologies of signs and their concrete surfaces,” thereby converting the human ability to “understand social injustice, class differences, and the violent rule of capital as objective historical reality” into an endless surface (“terrain,” as Mo says) of “effects of oscillating signs that disrupt the formation of meaningful words and coherent statements.” 96 Sloterdijk, Critique, pp. 101–28. 97 Mao, Talks, p. 94.

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have no idea at all of what proletarian ideology, or communism, or the Party is. “Proletarian ideology?” they think. “The same old stuff!” Little do they know that it is no easy matter to acquire this stuff. Some will never have the slightest Communist flavour about them as long as they live… … To put things in order organizationally requires our first doing so ideologically, our launching a struggle of proletarian ideology against non-proletarian ideology… Intellectuals of petty-bourgeois origin always stubbornly try in all sorts of ways, including literary and artistic ways, to project themselves and spread their views, … want[ing] the Party and the world to be remoulded in their own image. In the circumstances [i.e., not “in my imagination/mind” but “in the long period of study and work to come”], it is our duty to jolt these “comrades” and tell them sharply, “That won’t work! The proletariat cannot accommodate itself to you …”98

(C) SPEAKING HONESTLY. While Luo Xiaotong observes the Wise Monk sitting in the lotus position “as serene as a sleeping horse” as he “fingers a string of purple prayer beads” (1), Luo sees flies gathering on the Monk’s ears, singing birds, “cat yowls in the chorus too” (1), and then a “particularly self-satisfied yowl”—that is, a cat’s sound—“enters the temple, followed a mere second later by the pitiful screech of a bird, and then”—and then and then and then—“the flapping of wings as a panicky flock takes to the sky” (2). But Luo also wants us to know that this cascade of sights and sounds of his moments of “real” experience in the temple is simultaneously transpiring in his “swing between” the real and the illusory; this is so we will appreciate his devotion to the ethic of “speaking honestly” because “[h]onesty is always best, I figure,” and so it “seems appropriate” (4) to make a point of how his imagination is continually interceding in what Lenin calls the “cavilling”99 duration of the narrative montage. Hence, the following qualification: “I don’t so much smell the stench of blood as imagine it; I don’t so much see the feathers fly and the blood-stained limbs as conjure up the image” (2). Slightly further on, “I wonder,” he says, if the Monk’s “questions have been figments of my imagination, if I’ve only imagined him snapping his eyes open and emitting that penetrating gaze” (2). The Monk’s “nose hair” in turn “calls to mind an image” (2) of something else, a memory, and so on. This is an example of what Mao means by “empty talk.” It is the word-“stuff ” of the exploiting classes, the “muck” of words—the “muddy stream,” as Mo says—with “no idea” because

98 Mao, Talks, pp. 94–95, 97, emphasis added; also quoted in William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 179. 99 Lenin, Materialism, pp. 84–86.

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the sign-images appeal to pure sensuousness and disconnect the subject from conceptual thinking. (D) COMIC STRIP THOUGHT. The world “in my mind” is a swing of selfsustaining pleasure that “makes me light-headed, as if I am drunk on strong, aged spirits” (6). Luo Xiaotong’s “twaddle,”100 “chattering” and “hash” of “‘complexes of sensations’”101 lead his illusory state of being—as “mind,” spirit, affected affects, “my heart,” “my nose and tears in my eyes” (6), quasi-pure consciousness, in a word, idealized ecstasies—to a comic strip mentality. The estranged thingishness of phenomena, he says, “pass[es] through my field of vision, like a comic strip” (6). On the following page, he declares to the Wise Monk that “my name” itself makes other people’s “eyes flash” with a “strange light” because anything associated with “me and with meat” evokes a “scroll through their heads like a comic strip” (7). He pretends to offer this as an explanation by asking “Why?” and using the word “because”; but what is given as an explanation of what others think of “me” in fact merely resolves itself into the rhetorical imagery of “heads like a comic strip,” the phrase which is then repeated as “tales will scroll through their heads like a comic strip” (7). There is no real answer to “Why?” Instead we are given the (re)semblancing of himself “like a comic strip” of “me” in the irreducible essencelessness of a string of indeterminate words that others “sigh”: “me” is the loveable, pitiful, hateful, respectable, vile, extraordinary, mysterious, impenetrable, “evil son of a bitch” (7). This sigh of the “deep down” (7) is, as Marx argues, the alienated, illusory being of religious “self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he [man] has not found himself or has lost himself again” and thus is “tempted to find only the semblance of himself ” in the “fantastic reality of heaven.”102 Mo Yan Thought swings between religious self-consciousness and cynical irreligiosity, playing with and mocking theological imagery inside the temple of contemplation where the storyline “isn’t all that meaningful.”103 Again as Marx argues in Capital, the comic strip mode of knowing funnily articulates the ideological primacy of the market-world of exchanges between “free” and equal individuals, where “goods” are circulated right along with the 100 Lenin, Materialism, p. 217; see also Lenin, “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), p. 205 (“jaded, hysterical sniveller”). 101 Lenin, Materialism, p. 204, quoting Richard Schubert-Soldern (an “epistemological” solipsist). 102 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” pp. 45–46. 103 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386.

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buying and selling of the workers’ labor power itself, which the regime of capital efficiently constitutes as a special commodity that can easily be calculated into the expected rate of profit for Mr. Moneybags. Comic strip thought is the avantgarden “noisy sphere,” in Marx’s words, “where everything takes place on the surface,” and everything seems to be “a very Eden of the innate rights of man” and the intermingling movement of “free will.”104 For Mo Yan Thought, this is the sphere of “that nebulous terrain.” But far from achieving a supra-class imaginary space that “lacks” ideology, the comic strip mentality is precisely a permutation of capitalist ideology “which furnishes the ‘Free-trader Vulgaris’ with his [hallucinatory] views and [empty] ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages.”105 Still more, the talented and excellent Moist story furnishes his sovereign subject with “an air of importance, smirking” at the “harmony of things … under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence.”106 The comic strip “field of vision” (6) in imaginary thinking “gives way” to a general epistemological agnosticism of unknowability or “post”-knowing. The world talked about is a potentially endless series of game-like tales,107 none of which point to the essence of objective knowledge developed in human practice and critical reflection.108 Instead, as “my gaze passes over” things and things “pass through my line of vision,” the comic strip of temple contemplation finds 104 Marx, Capital, p. 172. 105 Marx, Capital, p. 172, emphasis added. 106 Marx, Capital, p. 172. 107 See Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 60–72 (“paganism”). 108 According to Lyotard in Just Gaming, “What is pagan is the acceptance of the fact that one can play several games, and that each of these games is interesting in itself insofar as the interesting thing is to play moves. And to play moves means precisely to develop ruses, to set the imagination to work” (p. 61). If one asks the pagan imagineer, “Why do you pass from one game to another?,” his reply is that “it does not worry me very much” (p. 61). If one is pagan, Lyotard says, “it is certainly not because one thinks that one game is better than another,” and thus it is “in this way that something like the imagination, or the will, I do not know, could develop” (p. 61). Lyotard’s conception of pagan imaginary work, for which no game is “better” than any other, is rearticulated in Alexa Huang and Angelica Duran’s reading of Moism as “sympathetic and passionate pleas for the characters being ridiculed”—pleas which “preclude any sense of superiority derived from historical hindsight, as if ‘we now know better.’” See Alexa Huang and Angelica Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work and the Politics of Literary Humor,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 155. See below in the section entitled “Critical Criticism at Work.”

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“ghostly white light glinting off” of surfaces with a “subdued aroma” that “tugs at my heart” (6). This “splendour and fullness of a narrative to enrich one’s bland life” performs the ceaseless “lack” of knowledge in essenceless moments for the (ir)religious mystic subject who pretends to “overcome character flaws” through “a time-honoured tradition among writers.”109 Luo Xiaotong’s comic strip imagination swings between reality and illusion so that we “find satisfaction and absolution”110 in a series of “rumours” as (non) knowledge in perpetual uncertainty where, as he says, “we received no reliable news” (3). Thus “[r]umours swirled … like grey birds wheeling in the sky” (3). “Some had it” this way, while “[o]thers claimed” something else, and “[y]et another rumour alleged” (3–4) something different. Strung in between these swirling rumours are the supplementary drifts “in my imagination.” This “process,” of continually “find[ing] satisfaction and absolution”111 from being “unable to determine” (4) things, leads to essencelessness. As Luo says while recounting how “[m]y boyish fingers itched to reach out and touch” Aunty Wild Mule’s naked body, “I’d have liked to know, but I never did touch her. So I never knew” (4–5, emphasis added). Whenever “I” doesn’t know, “I” goes “in my imagination” and “in my mind” so that I try to imagine what those little bubbles taste like … (4)

In Luo’s rapturous prattling of “the holy of holies,” as Marx writes, the “parity of reasoning” is what “constitutes a fantastic and glorified reflexion” of “[b]luff commonsense … with beseeming pathos”112 in “my imagination.” This is not only the self-creative “indignant loutishness”113 of the artistic imagination in a thrasonical state of “freeplay.” It is also and at the same time the class “logic” of the subjective political imaginary of possessing and owning its own superior interior plenitude of images and acts of imaging originating in the “heart” of deep—and deeply cynical—feelings. In other words, “in my imagination” is the articulation of the petty-bourgeois ideological ideal of owning and controlling “in my” little realm

109 110 111 112

Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Karl Marx, “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality: A Polemic Against Karl Heinzen,” in Marx, Selected Essays, ed. David McLellan (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), text reproduced at the European Graduate School website. 113 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6 (1847), text reproduced at the Marxists.org website.

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of freedom: a purely subjective fiefdom of “happy confusion”114 in endless and fortuitous play. Its ideological point is to divert readers and writers away from the conceptual development of revolutionary dialectical materialist imagination to “bombard the headquarters” of bourgeois ideology. But this diverting, just as in Lyotard’s celebration of pagan “gaming” in order to be “interesting” by “playing moves,” is itself not a “lack” of ideology, nor is it the writing of a “free” state of imagineering beyond ideology: on the contrary, it is a “contemporary” expression of the capitalist ideology of liberal pluralism in its “happy,” self-“interesting” state of obscurantism. In Mo Yan Thought, the cavilling “in my imagination” is the hypersubjective reflection of the objective structure of alienated class existence. The extended, flowing traversal of the “storyline” serves a class interest: to inculcate a cynical, neofatalistic “solace” of escapism from the necessity of social revolution centered in the proletariat in possession of its own radical class consciousness, a class “for itself ” in real social struggle to put an end to the possessing and owning of the world by an insignificant minority. As I suggested earlier, it is significant that Luo Xiaotong’s double-track storyline occurs entirely within a temple, where he cleverly and ironically professes to have recognized the “vanity of life” (5). His storylines are, in essence, temple narratives of neoreligious bliss in a sublime retreat from the material world as “vanity.” The temple life promises the contemplative life free from the pains of the real life of “vanity” outside the temple walls. Moism’s characteristic “charm” and ideological thrust, however, is to deploy storytelling in ultra-self-consciousness so that the “vanity” of reality in the worldly world is systematically (re)enfolded within the clever irony and cynicism of illusions prattled out from “in my imagination.” Moism teaches the hapless lesson that the “swing between” these two realms of “vanity” is inevitable and endless. Life is ultimately a tale of “vanity” in which the bombastic hero is also and at the same time an anti-heroic windbag who is the cynical ideal—at once idiotic and, as Mo declares, “no idiot.”115 He is a kind of Nietzschean superman-child who joyously and sentimentally resolves the contradictions between reality and illusion by fusing them into a “dazed” singularity, the one truth of nebulous untruth in which “truths are illusions,” and everything winds up “empty” and “muddy.” In other words, essence is essenceless; essence and essencelessness become one “nothing” of illusory being. As Mao argues in “Cast Away Illusions, Prepare for

114 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook III. 115 Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 385.

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Struggle,” the dictum of this ideology for “middle-of-the-roaders” is “wait and see.”116 The temple imaginary teaches the imagining away of class struggle.

The Class Imagination of “Combine Two Into One” The Moist tale playfully prattles on in the spontaneously flowing semblance of “post”-structuralist storytelling. The structural contradiction between “reality” and “illusion” constitutes the “binary”117 opposition (true/false, real/fake, sincere/ pretentious, etc.) that is persistently reduced to what seems to be the “irreducible” flux of phenomenalism, a streaming “I” and “me” of “experience” rendered in sensuously erotic wording and cleverly ironic turns of phrases and phrases about phrases (“rumours”). In the middle of the story, for example, Luo Xiaotong bombastically extols the superiority of his ludic worldview—“I fight to keep going, muddling along with my tale … someone who can talk and talk and talk” (197)—by essentially “deconstructing” his homeroom teacher’s exasperated criticism of “‘that perverse logic of yours’” (201). In Luo’s mind, his “perverse logic” is beyond Ms. Cai’s understanding: it makes her so angry that she could “burst” (201), which makes Luo feel “proud” and “special” (200). According to Luo, she fails to realize that existing society is itself a perversity of unregulated and uncontrollable desires in “an age of ‘primitive accumulation’” (199), ironically quoting Marx’s historical critique of capitalism’s “genesis”118 in order to make this “logic” seem to be the “secrets of nature” (203–04) in the present. A comment I’d once heard popped into my head: Big fish eat little fish, little fish eat shrimps, shrimps eat silt. The only way to keep from being eaten is to be bigger than others. I sensed that I was already one of the big ones, though not big enough. (201, emphasis added)

His “perverse logic,” so he imagines, is the cutting edge way of living and thinking. It brings out the smiles and laughter of his “dimwitted classmates” (199) against the “dimwitted teacher” (199) with her merely “logical” (non-perverse) teaching that has to do with meeting the needs of all by rationally ordering the social division of labor and dividing-up the products of labor in an egalitarian way.119 116 Mao, “Cast Away Illusions,” p. 427. 117 See Barbara Johnson, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (London: Continuum, 2004), pp. ix-xviii. 118 See Marx, Capital, pp. 667–715. 119 See also the very similar classroom scene in Mo’s Change novella involving He Zhiwu, whose “trick” is “blowing little bubbles” (Change, pp. 6–14). The narrator is “so juiced”

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But no, perverse logic feels himself to be “beyond” this pedagogy. He regards its teaching as utterly ludicrous and, “dripp[ing] with sarcasm and arrogance” (199), leads the “dimwitted” classmates in laughing at the teacher and reducing her to tears as “glittering objects” (201). When Ms. Cai cries, she is mystically “experienced” in Luo’s perversity as something less than or other than human, and her tears provide objects of pleasure. However, Luo’s vague familiarity with “primitive accumulation” is not only a “perverse logic”—the teacher’s critique which he cynically turns to his own advantage with “pride”—but is itself a bourgeois ideological inversion of Marxist theory. For Marx and Engels, Luo’s “perverse logic” is symptomatic of the essential “illusion of the epoch.”120 It is the essencelessness of existing “human nature” unleashed from the constraints of social “reason” and “rationality” which are reflected in the teacher’s attempt to teach the elementary principles—“maths,” as Luo puts it, “which invariably put me to sleep” (198)— necessary for a planned economy of basic equality. For Luo Xiaotong, “[w]ritten words were a stranger to me, but I was no stranger to them, at least that’s how it felt to me” (200, emphasis added). The opening chapter of Pow! lays the illusory ideological groundwork for the celebration of “perverse logic.” Its mechanism is the enticing of the reader’s attention to and participation in the loosening pleasure of aporia and blissful “misreading” beyond which there is no “correct” reading. This is the realm of speculative cobwebs which “wonderfully” increase the sale of the bombastic Moist imagination: a “talent” for flowery rhetoric that hisses about cock hairs and cinders floating down “like” fluff in a sickly sentiment emanating a sorry “eternal truth” of a subtle, timeless aura that embodies a hidden flirtation. As Derrida says in his neo-Nietzschean version of “radical” liberal pluralism, “truth is plural”121—in other words, essenceless. Perverse logic is “plural” in its cunning ridicule and denial of the teacher’s attempt to produce the knowledge of truth through rational calculations and determinations. Derridian-styled pluralism is translated in the Moist text as “improvisation” through “swings between” subtly differing and deferring versions of “truth” beyond certainty or verifiability—above all in Pow!, the continuation of prattling. But this is what seems to be going on. What is actually going on, as in all poststructuralist meditations of (p)reaching “beyond” binary oppositions, is the by He’s funny antics, “actually shredding his textbook,” “squashing the teacher under his feet,” “like a bird leaving its cage, free” (pp. 12–13). 120 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, pp. 57–68. 121 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 103.

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ideological production of a mystified “new” binary that denies being binary. The new binary is the occulted binary opposed to the recognition of the contradiction between “reality” and “illusion.” The necessary intellectual movement of knowing and proving the oppositionality of reality and illusion through theory and human action in the world, is dissolved in the prattling “solace” of Moist narrative. The dialectical contradictoriness of the two sides is rendered as one muddled “side” which obscures any other-sidedness at all. Mo views this as “that muddy stream of language” within which “the story is the conveyor of language and a byproduct of it.”122 The story is not about human language as the “actuality of thought”123 reflecting a real human society in which there exists a socially developing struggle between reality and illusion—the two points of a developing contradiction. Instead, for Moism, the story is the restoration of one: it is its own aboutness, its own content, and its own form of lofty literary figurality of “that muddy stream of language” serving “imagination” and being imagination as its own conveyor-belt and its own byproduct. For the Marxist worldview, however, “reality” and “illusion” are one contradiction dividing into two, not two combining into one, which is the reactionary, illusory philosophy of class reconciliation underwriting Mo Yan Thought in Pow! “Between the opposites in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle,” Mao explains, “and it is this that impels things to move and change.”124 This “Marxist world outlook means regarding all things as the unity of opposites” and “means using this law to know and change the world” by actively learning and using this “dialectical method of analysis,” which “Lenin described … as ‘the splitting in two of a single whole’” and Mao termed “one divides into two.”125 By contrast with the dialectical materialist theory of “one divides into two,”

122 123 124 125

Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, p. 118. Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions,” p. 392. Hsueh Li, “The Theory of Two Points,” Peking Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (14 Jan. 1972), p. 9, emphasis added. See also Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” p. 357; and Hongqi’s Correspondent, “New Polemic on the Philosophical Front: Report on the Discussion Concerning Yang Hsien-chen’s Concept That ‘Two Combine Into One,’” Peking Review, Vol. 7, No. 37 (11 Sept. 1964), pp. 9–12. Lenin writes in “On the Question of Dialectics”: “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts … is the essence (one of the ‘essentials,’ one of the principal, if not the principal, characteristics or features) of dialectics” (p. 357). Idealism “leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes)” (p. 361).

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[t]he core of the theory “combine two into one” lies in merging contradictions [my emphasis], liquidating struggle, opposing revolution, “combining” the proletariat with the bourgeoisie [my emphasis], “combining” Marxism with revisionism, “combining” socialism with imperialism and social-imperialism. This out-and-out reactionary bourgeois idealist and metaphysical world outlook is diametrically opposed to the world outlook of one divides into two.126

Mo Yan Thought super-exploits the bourgeois idealist common sense of “imagination” to subtly and obscurely convert the “splitting in two of a single whole” into the “tranquil”127 doctrine of the “combining” or “merging” or “swinging” of two into the single whole—the “combining of two into one.” His story, in which he uses language to “convey” the hyperidealist illusion of the Idea that “Narration Is Everything,” is represented as the “muddy stream of language.” It is merely supposed to be the display of language about language as its own “byproduct,” not the “byproduct” of human labor in the intellectual production of “storytelling” that necessarily uses “language” as the “actuality of thought.” Reality and illusion are combined as one “muddy stream” of “imagination” that “swings between” the two and thereby produces this “swing” as “a subtle, timeless aura” (2). The idea of “narration is everything”128 is an idealist master narrative that “plays with its own contradictions.”129 Everything is equated with narration as an imaginary conjuring of eternal aporias of “happy confusion”130 beyond class struggle. Narration itself is viewed as a metanarrative of narrative totality: an enclosed intermingling of “neutralized”131 signs, according to Lyotard, where “[p]hrasing takes place in the lack of being of that about which there is a phrase,”132 a “paradox” of “dialogue” in “poetical and rhetorical agonistics.”133 In this Lyo-

126 Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “The Theory of ‘Combine Two Into One’ is a Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism,” in Three Major Struggles on China’s Philosophical Front (1949–64) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), p. 53. 127 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 159. 128 Derrida’s classic poststructuralist declaration is “nothing outside of the text” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, Corrected edition, 1997], p. 158). 129 Marx, “Letter to J.B. Schweizer.” 130 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook III. 131 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 9. 132 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 22. 133 Lyotard, The Differend, pp. 26–28.

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tardian postmodern vision, “class struggle” is “a referent for cognitive phrases.”134 Since “any of these dreams of emancipation” (e.g., from poverty, despotism, ignorance) under the sign of the Enlightenment have “now run [their] course” and “no longer” organize the horizon of art or philosophy, “today, one no longer feels guilty about being ignorant.”135 The aim of “narration is everything” is to normalize “narration” as an acausal space of flux where “the dying-out of class struggle”136 secures the human subject’s docile acceptance of finding mystical “splendour and fullness,” “solace” and “absolution” in living the life of a “living contradiction” of paradoxes. This constructs the subject of fideism (clerical obscurantism) for the “temple” world as a robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, a neotranscendental robe of “imagination” that prattles on through forty-one fluxual chapters and 384 pages. It is a “byproduct” of the petty-bourgeois philistine imagination for sale in the U.S. “free market” at $16.00 in English translation ($27.50 according to Seagull Books) and a mere 16 RMB in mainland China in Chinese. The playful pride of “lack” as a nebulous absence and beyondness of ideology is an attempt to deny the contradictoriness of reality in the real world of two classes—the few who own the means of production, and the many who own nothing but their ability to work for the few. His “adult world” is in fact a material reality of capitalist social relations in which the “muddy stream” of language “swings between” the two in order to obscure the revolutionary conceptual understanding of this existing reality by intermingling it with “illusion,” thereby producing the ideological “muddy stream” of one mystified state of prattling consciousness in which “lack” is itself the illusory realism of “my lack of ideology.” In reality, this “lack” is the lack of class consciousness. It is the “writing” of a subjectivistic “bubble” of seemingly asocial fantasies for relegitimizing and normalizing, as Marx says of Proudhon’s “living contradiction” in sophistry, “the vanity of the subject”;137 this is a “muddy” means of reconciling and accommodating the “self ” with the rule of capital. It is a class unconsciousness conveyed in the “muddy stream of language” which is not a “byproduct” of itself but is instead a determined effect of the existing structure of social relations. As 134 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 171. 135 Jean-François Lyotard and Bernard Blistène, “Les Immatériaux: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” Flash Art, No. 121 (Mar. 1985), pp. 4, 6–7. 136 Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “The Theory of ‘Combine Two Into One,’” p. 64. 137 Marx, “Letter to J.B. Schweizer.”

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Marx and Engels put it in their critique of ideology, it is the bombastic philistinism in language that recognizes its calling as the mode of storytelling on behalf of capital’s avant-garde literati in its “freeplay” of imagination that “swings between” with “sorry ‘eternal truths.’” Mo improvises the playfully illusory pretense that “narration” itself dictates that we are all just one in the “swing between,” which “establishes its inertia.”138 This nebulous “its” in “its inertia” is, in the Moist worldview, the anonymous, mystical, hyperalienated subject of storytelling. In the improvisational work of ideology to suppress knowledge of the root contradictions of class realities and the historical role of the working class in overthrowing and superseding these contradictions, his “muddy stream” turns the human use of language (his own use of it, in fact, as his “talent”) into a completely autonomous fluidity beyond causation and beyond the realities of the existing order of labor relations. Look at the muddy phrase “its inertia.” Its inertia is itself a possessive expression of causality. But in Mo Yan Thought there is no real human ownership or materially existing source to cause the “inertia” of narrative prattling on about itself. This “inertia” is the ideological code of non-contradiction. Yet in the improvisation of Moism’s deep incoherence, he proceeds in this very same sentence—in fact immediately after pronouncing “its inertia” as the inertia of narration—to say that it is also “propelling itself forward.”139 Once the narration begins, it establishes its inertia, propelling itself forward, and, in the process, the narrator slowly evolves into a tool of narration. It is not so much him narrating a story as it is a story narrating him.140

Inertia “swings” into self-propulsion. How? … The storyteller as seeker of that nebulous terrain improvises his words so as to make an occult art of “the” narration which begins; “it” establishes “its” inertia; and “it” propels “itself ” forward— despite having begun “once” and having established “its” inertia. “It” turns out to be not so surprising (although Mo seems to believe this is a wonderful idea) that the narrator becomes “a tool of narration” in “a story narrating him.” Mo imagines for himself a new (meta)physics of narrative “inertia” that miraculously transforms itself into its own “propelling.” It propels itself, as Lenin says, “into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism … a sterile flower.”141

138 139 140 141

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Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386, emphasis added. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386. Mo, “Narration Is Everything,” p. 386, emphasis added. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” p. 361.

In the logic of “combine two into one,” narrative inertia (static non-movement) becomes one with its opposite (propelling movement), so that “a story” prattles the subject, just as in the canonic, safely overfamiliarized poststructuralist story of the subject as “constructed” and “deconstructed” in the figurative indeterminacies of rhetoric and discourse. But Mo proclaims pride in his lack of ideology. In “swing” mode, there is nothing outside the imaginary fan ying (反映, reflection) of the narrator Luo Xiaotong. He is the fictual messenger of what Shelley Chan hails as Mo’s “wild imagination, unique employment of language, and an increasingly noticeable playfulness.”142

Critical Criticism at Work Although Chan does not discuss Pow! in her book, A Subversive Voice in China, her broader reading of Mo’s imaginative storytelling is of interest. She points out that as Mo provides readers with “a vast imaginative space,” he does this with “his own imagination,” by which he tries “to ‘establish a republic of literature’” where “he himself ” is “‘of course the sovereign of this republic,’” this “literary kingdom.”143 His own wild imagination, Chan suggests by referring to Mo’s “talk” on Faulkner, is itself in part “a result of stimulation” by Faulkner’s imaginative writings: “After reading Faulkner,” Mo says, “I felt as if I had awakened from a dream. So one could write nonsense like this, so the trifles in the countryside could be used as fiction topics!”144 As Chan puts it later in terms of a “paradoxical nostalgia” in which he simultaneously undertakes an “attack of cultural evil” while also “longing for a return to the (imagined) past,” his “hometown” is a “concept” that he “can transcend freely with his wild imagination.”145 This is a wildly “classless” and “capitalfriendly”146 interpretation of the Moist political imagination. With this reading, as Marx says, we “can at most have the consoling awareness” of “satisfaction” in a “suspended antithesis” where “the complete freedom of the individual is posited … in order to posit the self as end in itself, as dominant and primary.”147 142 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Intro. 143 Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro., quoting Mo. 144 Mo quoted in Chan, Subversive Voice, Intro., my emphasis added. 145 Chan, Subversive Voice, Chap. 2. 146 Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, “The Digital Metaphysics of Cognitive Capitalism: Abandoning Dialectics, the North Atlantic Left Invents a Spontaneous Communism within Capitalism,” International Critical Thought, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2014), p. 398. 147 Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook II.

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To “transcend freely” with his “own” paradoxically wild imagination is the class fantasy logic of “combine two into one.” It is an infantilizing plenitude (“splendour and fullness”) of imaginary oneness “free” from social alienation caused by the “splitting in two” of classes: one of which “owns” the means of production and “owns” the labor power of the other class, which “owns” nothing but its own labor power and “live[s] only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.”148 To “transcend freely” is the imaginary ideological work of “a new class of petty bourgeois … fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society.”149 Chan’s reading does not recognize “wild imagination” with its “paradoxical” wonder as a complex “fluctuating” flux-effect of social contradiction whereby real, human consciousness in class society reflects the dialectical “splitting in two” of objective reality and subjective thinking. Mo’s “wild” imagination is the “vast imaginative space” of the “dying-out of class struggle” (recall Žižek: it “no longer works”) within the reconciliatory moodiness of illusory being. The “sovereign” author(ity) teaches the reader the lesson of the wildly fluxual market of “bubbles”: reading is always already “like public masturbation” for the mind. Writing and reading are one transcendental robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, and steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment. But for Chan, this is the wild imagination of a “subversive.” Like all incarnations of bourgeois postmodernism, the objective aim of its subversiveness is the undermining of the transformative class consciousness of proletarian thinking as the binary dialectics of class struggle. How does Pow! “work” as an imaginative story, according to Mo’s academic comrades-in-arms? To engage this question in detail, I want to turn now to examine the “contextual” commentary on Pow! offered by Alexa Huang and Angelica Duran in Mo Yan in Context. Huang and Duran’s interpretation, like Chan’s, is broadly representative of the “positive,” celebratory embrace of Mo Yan Thought as full of “charm” and indeed “deep” storytelling with grand lessons for all humanity.150 In “Mo Yan’s Work and the Politics of Literary Humor,” Huang and 148 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 39. 149 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 63, emphasis added. 150 See also Steven Moore, “Mo Yan’s ‘POW!’ Review,” The Washington Post (21 Dec. 2012); Andrea Lingenfelter, “Pow! by Mo Yan,” The Quarterly Conversation (3 Dec. 2012); Jason Beerman, “Pow! by Mo Yan: Review,” Toronto Star (4 Jan. 2013); Bisham Sammadar, “The Brutal Genius of Mo Yan: A Sneak Peek Into His Upcoming Novel POW!,” Firstpost.com (12 Oct. 2012); John Freeman, “‘Pow!’ and ‘Sandalwood Death’

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Duran dramatically conclude, for example, with the happy suggestion—touched with a vaguely religious self-awareness—that Mo’s “comic modes” of constructing “alternative narratives” and “revising the affective spectrum of the literary experience”151 will “point us to the source of light.”152 This “source” is not the dark red materialist dialectics of pointing to the internationalist social logic of class struggle to overthrow capitalism, but instead is revealed in their scholarly narrative as the swing of interminable betweenism. The “light” of Moist imagination is not the “lightning of thought” by which “the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy” to “make a revolution which upsets the whole order of things”153—a “break in continuity”154—but is the lightness of literary reformism. Like Pow! itself, it is hard work to take their story seriously. Huang and Duran read Pow! by ignoring the dubious gesture of “my lack of ideology” and, on the contrary, argue that Mo’s “comic visions” involve a wisely smiling “politics of ” literary humor emerging from China’s “literary and cultural tradition in which the serious and comic seek rather than forsake each other.”155 In other words, this tradition of the mutual seeking of the serious and the comically humorous is “combine two into one”—the “one” being a politics that ends up having a “lack” of any definite class character. They demonstrate an analytic anxiety about the fundamental contradiction between socialism and capitalism, which they attempt to cover over with vaguely liberal humanist catchphrases: “a socialist past of idealism and innocence” versus an “unabashed embrace of the postsocialist present of shrewdness.”156 “Capitalism” is a cobweb concept in their discussion; it is the word they “lack” in order to make “postsocialism” seem like something that more or less naturally follows on the heels of the lost “idealism and innocence” of the revolutionary socialist movement of the Mao era. “Postsocialism” is an illusion in the ideological discourse of bourgeois “left” intellectuals. What it actually means is capitalism. For Marxist theory, there is no such thing as “postsocialism.” Rather, communist society is the continuously transforming, dialectical and material development of the socialist overthrow of capitalism. “Postsocialism” is the bourgeois academic’s

151 152 153 154 155 156

by Mo Yan,” The Boston Globe (12 Jan. 2013); and Tobar, “Mo Yan’s ‘Pow!’ Packs a Punch.” Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 162. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 163. Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” pp. 51–52. Lenin, “On the Question of Dialectics,” p. 358. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 153. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 156, emphasis added.

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imaginary wordplay for mystifying the class struggle in the ideological sphere that still exists in socialism and which, therefore, makes it historically possible for the defeated bourgeoisie to reconstruct its own class “shrewdness” with the aim of resurrecting the capitalist mode of production—only calling it something different in order to confuse people. The ideal is to “seek,” not “forsake.” According to Huang and Duran’s “political” reading, Moism “reinvigorates … literary humor in contemporary China with comic yet sympathetic portrayals of individuals in a fragmented world of postsocialist marketization.”157 These are ideological illusions presented as “political” literary criticism. Their objective is to confuse readers by quietly (re)fashioning Dengist anti-Maoist euphemisms (“marketization”) that normalize a soft and empty rhetoric about literary imagination giving voice to “a fragmented world” and its fragmentary subject. This displaces the need for the strong critique of literature such as Moism which subtly relegitimizes the reign of capital in the minds and feelings of real human beings. The “reach” of Mo’s “social commentary,” they tell us, is “not limited to China or to a specific era but rather [reaches out] to all humanity and all times.”158 What this says is that Mo Yan Thought as a politics of humor and “comic visions” may at first seem localized, such as the “abandoned little temple” that is “located between two bustling mid-size cities” (P1, emphasis added); however, what we have, on Huang and Duran’s word, is a totalizing narrative of social commentary that sweeps over “all times” regardless of the concrete social class structures prevailing at any particular “times.” Moism’s “politics” of humorous visionariness is boundless—as Chan suggests, “transcending freely”—and therefore subsumes both “a socialist past” and “the postsocialist present.” The “sovereign” author emerges here as a God-like seer (and seeker) for the benefit of our “social commentary.” What they end up teaching is that the Moist politics of humor is essentially a humorous politics that (de)constructs “politics,” making it a laughing matter of ludic irrationalism and unconceptuality: the “politics of ” humor they celebrate becomes “virtually a religion of humor.”159 It “create[s] a sense of comic absurdity” by “blend[ing] bawdy and humorous modes to construct counternarratives to the grand narrative,” yet all in all with an ethically “sympathetic and passionate” airiness that “preclude[s] any sense of superiority derived from historical hindsight, as if ‘we now know better.’”160

157 158 159 160

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Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 156, emphasis added. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 156, emphasis added. Henry Wells quoted in Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 154. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” pp. 154–55, my emphasis added.

With a virtual religiosity (“like” religion), Mo Yan Thought reinforces the law of shrewd fragmentariness. No one is allowed to ever “know better.” To “know better” would be to have a “sense of superiority.” In this supposed “lack” of ideology as a “politics,” however, what is really superior is the totalization of swingy cynical knowingness. This grand narrative, in the consoling guise of asinine “bombs” of counternarrative, always knows that we can’t ever “know better,” and this is a social commentary good for “all humanity and all times.” In the temple logic of agnostic sovereignty, the subject of the “politics of ” humorous life is a consuming desirer of the passions and sympathies of happy confusion; it “eats up”161 the serious intellectual project of revolutionary class politics with a “complex” laughing politics of liberal pluralist humor. As Huang and Duran say with a light glint of bourgeois academic civility, “Pow! is an acquired taste.”162 Cultivating this taste is to internalize the novel’s “depth and charm.”163 But a failure to do so only leads to the “superior” realization of its depthless “hackneyed hallucinations.” That would be “forsaking” the charm and “interplay.”164 The taste that has to be acquired in order to join in the cynical gamesmanship of enjoying the “literary experience” of comic absurdity is the taste for “combine two into one”: ignorance and knowledge merge in “swings.” Contrary to Žižek’s declamation that “traditional” Marxist ideology critique “no longer works” as an oppositional theoretical movement against this kind of cynical “reasoning,” what actually doesn’t “work” is this thick illusion of liberal humanism that pretends to rise above what it calls “superiority,” but which is itself merely a “complexity” of hypocrisy on behalf of capital-friendly common sense; it “acquires” happy subjectivities for the capitalist market. Of course, this “traditional” critique does not automatically and magically “work,” as Žižek seems to imagine that it should, to immediately “dissolve” cynical ideology for the subject as a passive receptacle of knowledges. But what it does do, as a theoretical opposition to capitalism’s need for compliant “subjects,” is to open up a construct of ideas as “philosophy” and “worldview” that sustains serious pressure for learning that “knowing better” is not only possible but is necessary for collective, transformative social action against capital and its “complex” stories in the ideological

161 Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group, “The Theory of ‘Combine Two Into One,’” pp. 60–61. 162 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 157. 163 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 155. 164 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 155.

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sphere.165 As Wang Shu-chen argues with great clarity, the “big lesson” of Marxist conceptual learning is that One may not study philosophy, but that doesn’t mean he has no philosophy. The question is what kind of philosophy it is. If it isn’t proletarian philosophy, it must be bourgeois philosophy.166

Žižek works on cynical ideology from the supposedly “superior” angle of Lacan, but Lacan “works” for psychoanalytic obscurantism, which “works” for capital. His own special “lack” theory—the “constant” of the Lacanian Real as the “non-symbolizable traumatic kernel” of “fantasized displacements,” the “trauma around which social reality is structured” in the “fundamental paradox,” which is, he says, “more precisely, … the very lack in the Marxist theory,” and so on and so forth167—works for the tradition of Lacanianism, not for the revolutionary tradition of Marxist dialectical materialism. This is the dialectical splitting in two of what “works,” but Žižek wants what “works” to be an eclectic combination of all materialisms and all idealisms. “There must be formed a sphere of society,” Marx argues, which claims no traditional status but only a human status, … which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, without, therefore, emancipating all these other spheres, which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.168

165 See Wang, “Study Materialist Dialectics,” pp. 15–17; Minette Estevez, “Theorizing Public/Pedagogic Space: Richard Serra’s Critique of Private Property,” Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Jan. 1996); Stephen Tumino, “‘Barneyworld’: The Cultural Imaginary of the Global Factory,” Textual Practice, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2012), pp. 489–518; Ronald Strickland, “Never Grow Old, Never Grow Up: Postmodernity and the Infantilization of American Culture,” in Sailing Uncharted Waters, ed. Elena Crestianicov (Chisinau: University of Moldova Press, 2009), pp. 78–79; Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, “War of the Words: The Battle of (and for) English,” In These Times (28 Oct. 1987), pp. 18–19; Rob Wilkie, “Postmodernism as Usual: ‘Theory’ in the American Academy Today,” Postmodern Culture: Journal of Interdisciplinary Thought on Contemporary Cultures, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Sept. 1995); and Zavarzadeh, “Pun(k)deconstruction,” pp. 20–22, 30–43. 166 Wang, “Study Materialist Dialectics,” p. 16. 167 Slavoj Žižek, “Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. S. Žižek (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 25–26, 29. 168 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 51, emphasis in original.

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(Neo)Grobianism “Caught Uncomfortably Between” How exactly does the Moist grand narrative deal with the politics of humor for “all times”? The “true” counternarrating imagination “swings between” the times of “all humanity” so as to perform demoralization while simultaneously preaching the petty-bourgeois sentiments of the humble son of a farmer. As Huang and Duran put it in the unclass rhetoric of “difference,” the characters “are caught uncomfortably between different modes of existence, between the past and the present” and inside “a new world with a different cultural logic.”169 But this “different” cultural logic in Pow! is the prattling material logic of capitalist contradictions “playing” (“twerking”) with themselves in what Marx described as “that degenerate variety of literature” called grobian.170 Its “swing” is bombastic, bragging, thrasonical, putting on a great show of rude vigour in attack, yet hysterically sensitive to the same quality in others, brandishing the sword with enormous waste of energy, … sentiment and turpitude most absurdly conjoined; … discharging itself in ungovernable breadth with a certain complacent levity; clothing a philistine message in a plebian form; wrestling with the literary language to give it … a purely corporeal character; willingly pointing at the writer’s body in the background, which is itching in every fibre to give a few exhibitions of its strength, … a visionary and a philistine in one person; a loutish form of indignation, a form of indignant loutishness; and suspended like an enveloping cloud over it all, the self-satisfied philistine’s consciousness of his own virtue …171

To put it “differently,” the swingy “high” of Moist neogrobian levity enacts “a form of obscurantism designed to divert attention from the real relations of production and the real division of the surplus created by those who labor.”172 As Hinton argues, this diversionary obscurantism is a “class weapon masquerading as humanitarianism” under a “cross-class cultural banner” as the “way of life.”173 Social consciousness “caught uncomfortably between different modes of existence” is the analytic robe of cobwebs for bourgeois idealist essencelessness: it says things in order to say nothing. In Hegel’s words, the swing of the in-between articulates 169 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 157, emphasis added. 170 Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution.” See also Charles E. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Frank Cass & Co., 2005), pp. 379–98; and Barbara Correll, The End of Conduct: Grobianus and the Renaissance Text of the Subject (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 50–56. 171 Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution,” emphasis added. 172 Hinton, Through a Glass Darkly, p. 186, emphasis added. 173 Hinton, Through a Glass Darkly, p. 186.

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an aestheticist “ego” whose ideas and representations arise “like bubbles.”174 Luo Xiaotong is the neogrobian hooligan (pi zi, 痞子) in the temple who tries to imagine what these bubbles taste like, while Huang and Duran tell us that one must acquire a “taste” for such a “cultural complex.”175 In Huang and Duran’s tastefully unclassed mode of argument, while they are concerned with revealing Mo’s “more subtle” politics of humor, they also hold that there is “plenty in human nature, independent of politics that can serve as the target of humor” for Moism’s “humorous arc.”176 How does this work? … They seem to be saying, very much as Chan argues throughout her Subversive Voice, that the Moist vision of the “politics of ” humor is a politics that takes aim at the humorousness of “human nature,” which, as they assert here quite clearly, includes “plenty” that is “independent of politics.” This is utterly incoherent, yet therein lies its absurd charm of the “complex” in happy twerkiness. A “politics of ” human nature—independent of politics—cannot be “superior” to this plentiness of human nature; it cannot claim that “we now know better”177 except by cavilling this phrase as a phrase of self-ironic cynical wisdom: in Lyotard’s imaginary work, to “play” a move and appear “interesting.” This “politics” views itself humorously as “independent of politics” and also as one with the “plenty” of human nature; naturally, this “plenty” can’t be changed by its “politics” or any other politics. As I suggested earlier, it postulates a humorous politics that “eats up” politics and thereby amuses the wiseass subject by prating about its “lack” of ideology. The politics of humor “works” in the logic of “combine two into one”: humorous politics swings into human nature with “[m]y mind … racing, my thoughts all over the place” (P77), a “scene from a strange yet lively little drama” (77), filled with “myriad feelings welling up inside me” (76), “breaking the heart of someone … —me” (77, emphasis added).178 This is an old world outlook 174 Hegel, Science of Logic, § 825. 175 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 157. 176 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 157, emphasis added. 177 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 155. 178 Very similar “play moves” can be found in Mo’s novel Sandalwood Death, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). In the final chapter, “The Magistrate’s Magnum Opus,” Gaomi County Magistrate Qian Ding tells the story: “My mind was a tangle of confusing thoughts” (p. 369); “I vacillate, I hesitate” (p. 369); “I am a petty, shameless toady” (p. 370); “in my mind, hazy and unreal” (p. 375); “I wavered” (p. 375); “back and forth my thoughts went, from one side to the other, over and over” (p. 379); “my mind with mixed feelings of grief and joy. Why grief? I didn’t know. Why joy? I didn’t know that, either” (p. 395); “again I experienced mixed feelings” (p. 396); “I suddenly had the feeling that my heart was

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spun in ludic postmodern phraseology in order to appear visionarily superior while disclaiming all superiority. The “superior” is nothing other than the symptom of class antagonism, and so it must be made to disappear as a “lack.” Huang and Duran’s reading works for the academic legitimization of the Moist politics of humor, the “poignancy of the comic”179 in the new “global” literary canon. They say that we can “learn much” (better?) “about the complexity of laughter and humor by tracing a few moments”180 in Pow! Tracing a moment from Chapter Twelve, they tell us that Luo Xiaotong himself has “learned from his mother that laughter is used as a social control to confirm social mores.”181 Here is their analysis of one such moment of this Moist learning: The laughter of others functions as a deep-seated social control for the narrator [Luo Xiaotong] … He tells of his mother, Yang Yuzhen, dragging him around town shortly after she learns that Aunty Wild Mule has died and left behind a daughter. In the account, observers witness Yang and Luo “obviously puzzled” (77). Luo slows down his account to describe one observer: “The man on the motorbike turned to look at us. What’s so damn interesting about us? I may have hated Mother, but not as much as I hated people who stared. She’d told me that people who laugh at widows and orphans suffer the wrath of Heaven. Which is what happened: He was so busy staring at us that he ran into a poplar tree” (78). In the midst of his nearly two-page-long description of the accident and the man, he describes the driver as “one of my father’s drinking buddies. His name was Han, Han shifu. Father told me to call him Uncle Han” (78).182

This is the end of the moment of learning that Huang and Duran “trace.” They move immediately on to “another case”183 for the tastefully “light” tracing of critical criticism. Their analytic account of the story’s “account” is, as Hegel says, “like bubbles.” While presenting itself as a complex learning from a ludic textual complexity, their reading as “tracing” becomes a momentous moment of “puzzled” quasi-analysis; it subtly explains away its own bourgeois pop-psychology of laughter and humor as “social control.” If this unclassed “critical” account of humor is true, and if we can “learn much” from it, are we not supposed to be humored by the Moist narrative “account” itself? It seems rather obvious, yet Huang

179 180 181 182 183

like a garden” (p. 398); “a fount of myriad feelings” (p. 399); “I was so muddleheaded, blessed or cursed with a soft heart” (p. 399). Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 160. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 158. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 158. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 158, quoting from Pow! with page references; my emphasis added. Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 158.

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and Duran actually say nothing about the “social control” of the Moist “account” itself as a humorous vision. With an “arc” of essencelessness, their reading turns out to be a sort of blank academic stare at the narrative which itself proclaims— in neogrobian spirit—Luo Xiaotong’s thrasonical hatred for “people who stared.” Critical criticism in this way swings between its own “positive” (appreciative) explanation and its own explaining away of that very same “account” of the “account.” The critical project of studying Moist storytelling “in context” is reconciled with a superficial appreciation (the “source of light”) of the self-consciously asinine imagination as “more subtle” humorousness in essenceless cobwebs. To put it a different way, I don’t have the “acquired taste” for their tracing. Rather interestingly, it may be noted in conclusion that Huang and Duran’s tracings ignore the more bombastic neogrobian moment of humor in the first long paragraph of Chapter Twelve. Here Luo Xiaotong gives his vision of the Wise Monk wrapped in a “threadbare robe”: Folding up his body, he takes his penis in his mouth and rolls round on his wide bed like a wind-up toy with a taut spring. (P75)

Surely Huang and Duran didn’t miss this scene of the “politics of ” Moist humor. Later on in Mo Yan in Context, Duran turns to this very scene in her essay with Donald Mitchell. The “account” offered in their narrative has nothing to do with humor but rather with the “roots” of religion growing in Mo Yan Thought, although Mo “is not a religious writer,”184 they assure us. Reflecting on the Monk’s penis scene, “[o]ne wonders,” they speculate, “if Mo Yan is responding here to the new interest in Tantric Buddhism in China”; and if so, this “sexuality represents potency and promise for the future and thus figures for religion itself.”185 It “figures for religion itself,” but Mo is “not a religious writer.” This “account” in critical criticism might be humorous if we didn’t know that Duran and Mitchell are completely serious. Remember, as Huang and Duran put it, the Moist imagination “will point us to the source of light.”186 Behind Duran and Mitchell’s wonder-reading of “potency and promise” is Lyotard’s libidinal visionariness of the “mad segment acting as a matrix” where there is “[o]nly one turn, full of drifting affects” in “aleatory rotation,” “whirls” in a “libidinal jour-

184 Donald Mitchell and Angelica Duran, “A Textbook Case of Comparative Cultural Studies,” in Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, eds. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), p. 197. 185 Mitchell and Duran, “Textbook Case,” p. 209. 186 Huang and Duran, “Mo Yan’s Work,” p. 163.

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ney, being singular … in an ungraspable time.”187 Wealth based on exploitation in the “perverse logic” of capital is good for everyone. The Wise Monk—whose real wonder is that he doesn’t have to “work”—is the “taut” signifying subject of Tantric Capitalism in the temple of desire. Nothing could be more pleasing (“light”) for the cynical ideological imaginary of capital than for “religion itself ” to become, as Marx says, “absurdly conjoined” with the happy confusion of irreligious “complacent levity.” This absurd conjoining is the arc-light of hooligan temple logic as “combine two into one.” Luo Xiaotong is the asinine hero of “perverse” postmodern oneness. His thrasonical “swings” of imagination ultimately devolve into the self-satisfying maxim: “I stare … and wonder what’s going on” (P86). In his light, illusory being, Luo’s class essence is the philistine happy confusion within the grandly fluxual “me” of speculative cobwebs. He is the Moist “ego” ideal who thinks speculatively “like bubbles”: So one could write nonsense like this, says Mo Yan Thought. This is how and why the story “works” ideologically in the “adult world” of contemporary world literature. For this very reason it offers a potentially productive site of intervention for the development of critique as an oppositional reading of a “comrade” storyteller whose neogrobian story is, as Yiyun Li says, “like public masturbation” in “hackneyed hallucinations” devoid of “depth.” This elaborately staged withdrawal of “depth” is itself an illusory-effect of Mo’s bourgeois ideological fantasy that “narration is everything” and, thus, ideology can simply be suspended through the “talent” and “excellence” of storytelling as it “swings” into the holy space of fictuality in the “nebulous terrain.” Mo’s “hackneyed hallucinations” displace the conceptual depth of class knowledge—what Mao calls “the active role of thought” that “arises from social practice and at the same time actively shapes practice”188—with the “happy confusion” of irrationalist “swing.” But in order to change the world instead of “swinging” along, it is necessary for the working class to cast away illusions, prepare for struggle. This is not the “calling of a market.” Rather it is, in Marx’s theory of theory becoming a material force, “a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”189

187 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 15. 188 Mao, “Dialectical Materialism,” Chap. I. 189 Marx, “Toward a Contribution,” p. 46.

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Postface: The Class Attitude [S]ince it ceased … to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious … of representing … Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy. —Marx and Engels1

The nebulous attitude expressed in Mo Yan Thought, now popularly referred to by the Swedish Academy label of “hallucinatory realism,” is the ideological and theoretical opposite of the class attitude of revolutionary Marxist thought and analysis, perhaps especially the radical boldness of Maoism (“Mao Zedong Thought”) and its wide-ranging argument that “at no time must we forget class struggle.”2 Indeed, if one follows the sentimentally merged idealist-agnosticistsolipsistic notions of nebulosity, as I have ventured to do here, now is the time— or as good a time as any—for lacking the theoretical perspective of class struggle. Mo believes that he is no longer a “modern-day storyteller” but rather one who has returned to his “traditions” with the “mixture” that constitutes “innovative fiction.”3 Reading with the nebulous attitude becomes an ideological lesson in the “post”-ideological (re)location of the subject of literary sense-making within the expansively surreal surroundings of the hallucinatory beyondness which is said to be “beyond class and politics.” Thus as Marx and Engels argued, now almost one-hundred-and-seventy years ago, by marking his “innovative fiction” with the nebulosity of classlessness, Mo Yan Thought attempts to articulate the “feeling” of consciousness of humanity “in general,” a humanity which “belongs to no class, has no reality,” and “exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”4 For Mo, the world embraced by “that nebulous terrain” is a limitlessly unfolding “vast territory.”5 For the writer who “gives free rein to his talent,” this vast territory is revealed as a “massively contradictory terrain” where one surpasses 1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, ed. F. Engels (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), pp. 65–66. 2 Mao Zedong quoted in William Hinton, Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 314. 3 Mo Yan, “Storytellers: Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, trans. Howard Goldblatt (7 Dec. 2012), p. 8. 4 Marx and Engels, Manifesto, pp. 65–66. 5 Mo, “Storytellers,” p. 8.

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the “simple terms of right and wrong or good and bad.”6 By achieving such a high state of “real courage,” one may come to “understand true compassion” toward a “more profound understanding of life” in its fluxuality and, of course, also understand the “storytelling” that alone is able to “correctly” describe this “life,” thereby “inevitably transcend[ing] politics.”7 As Mao points out, however, the “reason why” the nebulous attitude has “adopted this attitude is to be found primarily in [its] class limitations,”8 not in its “hallucinatory” mixture of innovative and self-proclaimed “literary excellence”9 as transcendence. The project of developing the class attitude is the activation of the labor of oppositional theorizing through the struggle-thought of critique: to seek out the occulted class nature of the class limits of Mo Yan Thought. Again as Mao puts it very sharply, to (re)claim the intervening force of the class attitude is to take part in the continuing development of the “distinguishing characteristic” of Marxist dialectical materialist philosophy, which is to articulate the “effort to explain clearly the class nature of all social consciousness”—in this context, the “nebulous” consciousness and its allied interpretive practices in the global bourgeois cultural apparatus—and, while doing so, point toward the collective social need for “a resolute struggle between its own proletarian nature and the idealist philosophy of the propertied class.”10 Struggle-thought, as the “other” of Mo Yan Thought, is not a hyperalienated delight in emptiness and the playfulness of silence, as in the gimmicky anecdotalism of “Mo Yan” = “don’t speak” for the artist of storytelling in the misty fantasies of “kaleidoscopic” spectacles of signs for a postclass imaginariness “in a broad sense.”11 Struggle-thinking with class attitude is the outsidedness of critique as Lenin argued: it is “impossible without a revolutionary theory,” it is impossible “without participating, in the measure of one’s powers, in developing and applying that theory,” and it is impossible today “without waging a ruthless struggle.”12

6 Mo, “Storytellers,” p. 8. 7 Mo, “Storytellers,” p. 8. 8 Mao Zedong, “Dialectical Materialism—Notes of Lectures,” in Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. VI (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), Chap. II, emphasis added. 9 Mo, “Storytellers,” p. 8. 10 Mao, “Dialectical Materialism,” Chap. I. 11 Shelley W. Chan, A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan, foreword by Howard Goldblatt (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, Kindle edition, 2011), Intro. 12 V.I. Lenin, “The Voice of an Honest French Socialist,” in Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 354.

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Index of Names A Abrahamsen, Eric 203 Agamben, Giorgio 127, 275 Ahlander, Johan 11, 257 Althusser, Louis 47, 132, 257 Aunty Wild Mule 226, 229, 235, 251 Avenarius, Richard 70, 79

Choi, Ching Y. 129, 264 Chu, Po 76, 258 Correll, Barbara 249, 258 Cotter, Jennifer 117, 139, 174, 229, 258, 261, 275 Cox, Chris 216, 258 Culler, Jonathan 143, 145, 146

B Bai, Di 25, 26, 257 Barthes, Roland 20, 180 Barton, Ruth Haley 229, 257 Bataille, Georges 26, 47, 194, 195, 273 Baudelaire, Charles 27–29, 257, 273 Beerman, Jason 244, 257 Bendle, Mervyn F. 210, 257 Berry, Michael 148–150, 275 Blanchot, Maurice 47 Blistène, Bernard 241, 268 Bogdanov, Alexander 70, 79, 166 Brunson, Kendall 163, 257 Burt, Richard 99, 101 Butler, Judith 80, 82–85, 103–106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 118, 257, 258

D Damrosch, David 59, 77–81, 83, 85, 258 DeFazio, Kimberly 139, 228, 229, 258 Deleuze, Gilles 68, 85, 231, 258 Deng, Xiaoping 26, 27, 30, 129, 228, 270 Derrida, Jacques 65–74, 79, 84, 85, 105, 124, 125, 127, 128, 143–147, 150, 151, 181, 182, 184, 187, 189, 195, 201, 205, 207, 208, 231, 237, 238, 240, 259, 264 Diao, Ying 13, 33, 163, 190, 220, 221, 259 Dickens, Charles 27, 203, 261 Diderot, Denis 182, 183 Ding, Gou’er 93, 94 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 38, 39, 260 Dühring, Eugen 41, 75, 110, 111, 116, 158, 174, 183, 189, 261 Du, Lanlan 130–143, 147, 152, 153, 156, 157, 260 Duran, Angelica 59, 60, 62–69, 73–81, 83, 85, 86, 89–92, 97–99, 103, 113, 114, 130, 143, 156, 157, 160, 161, 177, 201, 211, 213, 231, 234, 240, 244–252, 258, 260, 263–265, 271, 275, 276

C Cai, Ms. 237, 238 Callinicos, Alex 19, 49, 58, 61, 123, 126, 258 Carlson, Benjamin 177, 258 Chan, Shelley W. 11, 12, 14, 19–47, 49–58, 94–98, 102, 114–116, 149, 156, 161, 162, 180, 211, 213, 221, 243, 244, 246, 250, 256, 258 Chao, Hui 84, 265 Chen, Thomas 97–106, 108–113, 115, 117, 153, 258

279

E Ebert, Teresa L. 25, 26, 43, 44, 64, 72, 82, 104, 112, 136, 146, 150, 151, 161, 164, 167, 169, 170, 173, 199, 207, 219, 220, 223, 230, 231, 243, 260, 261 Engels, Frederick 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23, 32, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 60–62, 73–75, 78–80, 89, 101, 107–111, 116, 117, 123, 126–128, 136, 137, 140, 158, 164, 166 169, 183–190, 196, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217, 219, 220, 225, 235, 238, 239, 241, 244, 255, 261, 266, 269, 270, 275 English, James 63 Englund, Peter 11, 45, 156 Estevez, Minette 247, 261 Ewald, Oskar 70

G Gamberg, Ruth 77, 78, 262 Gao, Mobo 5, 85, 135, 172, 180, 262 Genet, Jean 195, 196, 271 Gimenez, Martha E. 164, 165, 167, 262 Gladstone, William 187 Goldblatt, Howard 9, 11–13, 19, 27, 33, 37, 40, 42, 82, 89–97, 99, 105, 131, 133, 134, 138, 141, 148, 153, 156, 158, 161, 177, 178, 180, 181, 189, 198, 202, 213, 214, 216, 226, 243, 250, 255, 256, 258, 263, 267, 271, 272 Goldman, William 192, 193, 263 Gorky, Maxim 166, 267 Grandma (Dai Fenglian) 161 Grewal, Inderpal 117 Grosz, Elizabeth 231, 263 Gugu, Aunt 131–135, 137, 138

F Faivre, Robert 229, 261 Fan, Cheh-ju 85 Fang, Kang 24, 261 Fang, Yang 156, 213, 261 Faubion, James 47, 48, 261, 262 Faulkner, William 22, 27, 130, 132, 137, 157, 194–196, 199, 201, 203, 243, 260, 268, 274 Faust, Edwin 202, 261 Ferraris, Maurizio 151, 259 Feuerbach, Ludwig 56, 72, 73, 96, 106, 117, 143, 145, 153, 261, 270 Flood, Alison 38, 261 Foucault, Michel 20, 33, 42–44, 46–55, 80–85, 103–106, 109–123, 135–138, 142, 147, 149, 150, 180, 257, 258, 261, 262, 274 Fromm, Erich 20 Frost, Robert 186, 262 Fu, Wen 142, 262

H Han, Dongping 78, 151, 152, 172, 180, 251, 263 Hao, Dashou 138 Haraway, Donna 139 Harry Potter 163–165, 167, 258, 272 Hayashi, Fumiko 113, 114, 116, 264 He, Chengzhou 142–153, 263 He, Jixian 183, 263 He, Zhiwu 237, 238 Hegel, G.W.F. 61, 107, 118–122, 161, 164, 167, 169, 170, 196, 208, 219, 220, 223, 226, 230, 249, 251, 260, 263, 266, 269, 270 Heidegger, Martin 80, 81, 195, 196, 263 Heinzen, Karl 39, 123, 187, 235, 269 Herford, Charles 249, 263 Hinton, William 14, 24, 30, 32, 77, 158, 181, 218, 219, 232, 249, 255, 262, 264

280

Hongqi’s Correspondent 239, 264 Horiguchi, Noriko J. 113–128, 153, 264 Hsu, Kwang 142, 264 Hsueh, Li 239, 264 Huang, Alexa 234, 244, 264 Huang, Yuhan 59, 60, 62–69, 73–81, 83, 85, 86, 89–92, 97–99, 103, 113, 114, 130, 143, 156, 160, 161, 177, 201, 211, 213, 231, 234, 240, 245–252, 258, 260, 263–265, 271, 275, 276 Hume, David 50 J Jameson, Fredric 20, 22, 169, 264 Janeway, Peter 192 Jay, Paul 32 Johnson, Barbara 231, 237, 259, 264 K Kane, Penny 129, 264 Kant, Immanuel 50, 144 Kaplan, Caren 117, 268 Karmazinov, Semyon 38, 39, 42 Kaufmann, Walter 31, 80, 272 Kavanagh, Jennifer 229, 265 Kavka, Misha 117 Kelsh, Deborah P. 25, 187, 188, 265 Kennedy, Duncan 80–82, 84, 85, 265 Kidd, James 30, 33, 188, 190, 265 Knight, Sabina 156, 177, 265 Kollantai, Alexandra 199 Kristeva, Julia 144, 265, 274 Kung, Chun 84, 265 Kunkel, Benjamin 217, 265 L Lacan, Jacques 47, 105, 106, 217, 248 Laclau, Ernesto 64 Lacout, Pierre 229, 265 Larrain, Jorge 169, 265 Leach, Jim 13, 265

Lenin, V.I. 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 30–34, 40, 41, 45, 46, 50, 54, 57, 61–63, 86–70, 76, 77, 79, 81, 86, 97, 104, 106–113, 117, 118, 128, 136, 153, 155, 159, 162, 164–169, 171–174, 182, 183, 185, 186, 190, 196, 200, 203–205, 208, 210, 211, 215, 216, 218–220, 222, 224, 232, 233, 239, 242, 245, 256, 265–267, 276 Levy, Tom (Babe) 192 Li, Yiyun 216, 253, 267 Lim, Louisa 155, 267 Lingenfelter, Andrea 90, 244, 267 Little Lion 131–135, 137 Liu, Ching 119, 127, 152, 224, 267 Liu, Wie 203, 267 Lukacs, Georg 162, 276 Lu, Liren 34 Lu, Yu-lan 142 Luo, Xiaotong 213, 221, 224, 226, 227, 229, 232, 233, 235–238, 243, 249, 251–253 Lurie, Susan 117, 268 Lyotard, Jean-François 214, 234, 236, 240, 241, 250, 252, 268 M Mach, Ernst 70, 79 MacInnis, Donald E. 166, 268 MacLeod, Calum 203, 207, 268 Makinen, Julie 129, 268 Mao, Zedong 9, 12–14, 20–27, 30, 36, 55–59, 83, 114, 129, 135, 140, 142, 152, 155, 158, 162, 166, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 200, 206, 209–211, 215, 217, 219, 222, 223, 225, 231, 232, 236, 237, 239, 245, 253, 255, 256, 262, 268–270, 273 Márquez, Gabriel Garcia 27 Marx, Karl 13, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 37, 39, 42–45, 47–49, 52, 56, 281

60–62, 68, 70, 72–74, 78, 80, 86, 89, 96, 100–103, 106, 107, 112, 118–128, 130, 137, 139, 143, 145, 152, 153, 162, 164–167, 169, 170, 172–174, 184–190, 193, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 205–211, 213–215, 217–225, 227, 230, 233–241, 243–245, 248, 249, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262, 266, 269, 270, 276 McKinnon, Andrew M. 164, 167–170, 173, 270 Mei, Jia 13, 33, 163, 190, 220, 221, 259 Meisner, Maurice 24, 26, 27, 30, 158, 172, 270 Mill, John Stuart 210 Mills, C. Wright 157 Mitchell, Donald 156, 157, 252, 271 Molyneux, John 167, 173, 271 Moore, Steven 244, 271 Morton, Donald 14, 67, 68, 143, 164, 195, 196, 230, 248, 271, 277 Mu, Guangzong 129, 272 N Nabokov, Vladimir 230, 271 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20, 31, 32, 34, 50, 72, 80, 81, 84, 103, 105, 144, 149, 150, 238, 259, 262, 263, 272 Nikolajeva, Maria 163, 272 Norris, Christopher 50, 272 Nowlan, Bob 14, 272 O O’Neill, Edward 217, 272 P Pasternak, Boris 21, 272 Patterson, James 192, 272 Pearson, Karl 70 Petzoldt, Joseph 83 Pied Piper of Hamelin 184–187, 190 Plekhanov, Georgi 82, 83, 117, 261, 273 282

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 44, 45, 220, 241, 269 Pyatakov, Y.L. (P. Kievsky) 168 Q Qian, Ding (Magistrate) 45, 197, 206, 207, 250 Qian, Xiongfei 193, 198 R Reed, Evelyn 141, 273 Reich, Robert B. 30 Revolutionary Mass Criticism Writing Group 219, 240, 241, 247, 273 Ruge, Arnold 118, 165, 227, 269 S Sammadar, Bisham 244, 273 Sartre, Jean-Paul 20, 22, 26, 28, 29, 194–196, 199, 200, 202, 206, 273, 274 Saussy, Haun 91 Schopenhauer, Arthur 31, 80, 81, 274 Schubert-Soldern, Richard 233 Schweizer, J.B. 220, 221, 240, 241, 269 Scott, Bon 144, 201, 202 Shaw, Irwin 192 Shen, Congwen 190 Sheridan, Alan 52, 80, 262, 274 Shi, Liwei 191, 274 Sisyphus 125, 126, 281 Sloterdijk, Peter 218, 231, 274 Soong, Ching Ling 142, 274 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 65, 145, 146, 240, 259, 274 Stalin, Joseph V. 98, 99 Stein, Atara 164, 274 Stirner, Max 209 Strelnikov, Antipov 21, 27, 42 Strickland, Ronald 26, 248, 274 Sun, Bing 179, 191, 193, 206, 207

Sun, Meiniang 179, 193, 197 Sun, Yat-sen 21 Sutherland, John 144, 274 Szell, Christian 192 T Tadpole (Xiaopao) 130–135, 137–139, 141, 142 Teresa, Mother 126, 144, 265 Thébaud, Jean-Loup 234, 268 Ting, Hsueh-lei 173, 274 Tobar, Hector 224, 244, 274 Tolstoy, Leo 9, 40, 162, 167, 169, 203–205, 210, 233, 266, 267 Tucker, Robert C. 48, 49, 274 Tumino, Stephen 129, 139, 174, 247, 275 Turgenev, Ivan 38 U Updike, John 196, 275 V Van Gogh, Vincent 27 Vasvari, Louise 75 Volosinov, V.N. 60, 61, 71, 72, 74, 76, 275 W Wang, Che 158, 215, 275 Wang, Chi-ying Alice 156, 157, 275 Wang, Dan 133 Wang, David Der-wie 20, 115, 116, 121, 123, 148–150, 275 Wang, Jinghui 156, 157, 275 Wang, Shu-chen 158, 215, 247, 248, 275 Weil, Robert 30, 181, 228, 275 Wells, Henry 246

White, Hayden 20, 180 Wickeri, Janice 89, 271 Wilkie, Rob 127, 248, 275 Williams, Brian 72, 162, 276 Wise Monk Lan 213, 226, 227, 229, 232, 233, 252 X Xiaojia 179, 190–192, 198, 207 Xie, Youshun 35, 36 Xie, Yu 228, 231, 276 Xu, Lin 203, 276 Xu, Wei 13, 33, 41, 163, 190, 220, 221, 259 Y Yang, Fenggang 15, 155–163, 165–174, 276 Yang, Hsien-chen 219, 239, 264 Yang, Yuzhen 251 Yanyan 131 Ye, Xiaozhou 203 Yin, Deyi 207 Young, Robin 155, 159, 276 Yuan, Shikai 207 Z Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud 14, 25, 26, 60, 64, 67, 68, 72, 104, 112, 129, 143, 159, 164, 167, 228, 243, 248, 260, 261, 276 Zepetnek, Tötösy de 75 Zhao, Jia 24, 37, 40, 179, 182, 197, 198, 207 Zhivago, Yuri 21, 272 Zhou, Xiang 228, 231, 276 Zhu, De 152 Žižek, Slavoj 159, 214, 216–220, 244, 247, 248, 265, 272, 277

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Literary and Cultural Theory General editor: Wojciech H. Kalaga Vol.

1

Wojciech H. Kalaga: Nebulae of Discourse. Interpretation, Textuality, and the Subject. 1997.

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2

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Memory – Remembering – Forgetting. 1999.

Vol.

3

Piotr Fast: Ideology, Aesthetics, Literary History. Socialist Realism and its Others. 1999.

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4

Ewa Rewers: Language and Space: The Poststructuralist Turn in the Philosophy of Culture. 1999.

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5

Floyd Merrell: Tasking Textuality. 2000.

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6

Tadeusz Rachwał / Tadeusz Slawek (eds.): Organs, Organisms, Organisations. Organic Form in 19th-Century Discourse. 2000.

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7

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał: Signs of Culture: Simulacra and the Real. 2000.

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8

Tadeusz Rachwal: Labours of the Mind. Labour in the Culture of Production. 2001.

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9

Rita Wilson / Carlotta von Maltzan (eds.): Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture in Africa and Beyond. 2001.

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10

Leszek Drong: Masks and Icons. Subjectivity in Post-Nietzschean Autobiography. 2001.

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11

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Exile. Displacements and Misplacements. 2001.

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12

Marta Zajac: The Feminine of Difference. Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and Contempora-ry Critique of the Marquis de Sade. 2002.

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13

Zbigniew Bialas / Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski (eds.): Alchemization of the Mind. Literature and Dissociation. 2003.

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14

Tadeusz Slawek: Revelations of Gloucester. Charles Olsen, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Writing of the Place. 2003.

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15

Carlotta von Maltzan (ed.): Africa and Europe: En/Countering Myths. Essays on Literature and Cultural Politics. 2003.

Vol.

16

Marzena Kubisz: Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture. 2003.

Vol.

17

Ewa Rychter: (Un)Saying the Other. Allegory and Irony in Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethical Language. 2004.

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18

Ewa Borkowska: At the Threshold of Mystery: Poetic Encounters with Other(ness). 2005.

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19

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Feeding Culture: The Pleasures and Perils of Appetite. 2005.

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20

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Tadeusz Rachwał (eds.): Spoiling the Cannibals’ Fun? Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere. 2005.

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21

Katarzyna Ancuta: Where Angels Fear to Hover. Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror. 2005.

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22

Piotr Wilczek: (Mis)translation and (Mis)interpretation: Polish Literature in the Context of Cross-Cultural Communication. 2005.

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23

Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Glebae Adscripti. Troping Place, Region and Nature in America. 2005.

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24

Zbigniew Białas: The Body Wall. Somatics of Travelling and Discursive Practices. 2006.

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25

Katarzyna Nowak: Melancholic Travelers. Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal. 2007.

Vol.

26

Leszek Drong: Disciplining the New Pragmatism. Theory, Rhetoric, and the Ends of Literary Study. 2007.

Vol.

27

Katarzyna Smyczyńska: The World According to Bridget Jones. Discourses of Identity in Chicklit Fictions. 2007.

Vol.

28

Wojciech H. Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Multicultural Dilemmas. Identity, Difference, Otherness. 2008.

Vol.

29

Maria Plochocki: Body, Letter, and Voice. Construction Knowledge in Detective Fiction. 2010.

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30

Rossitsa Terzieva-Artemis: Stories of the Unconscious: Sub-Versions in Freud, Lacan and Kristeva. 2009.

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31

Sonia Front: Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson’s Fiction. 2009.

Vol.

32

Wojciech Kalaga / Jacek Mydla / Katarzyna Ancuta (eds.): Political Correctness. Mouth Wide Shut? 2009.

Vol.

33

Paweł Marcinkiewicz: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A. R. Ammons. 2009.

Vol.

34

Wojciech Małecki: Embodying Pragmatism. Richard Shusterman’s Philosophy and Literary Theory. 2010.

Vol.

35

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz (eds.): Cartographies of Culture. Memory, Space, Representation. 2010.

Vol.

36

Bożena Shallcross / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): The Effect of Pamplisest. Culture, Literature, History. 2011.

Vol.

37

Wojciech Kalaga / Marzena Kubisz / Jacek Mydla (eds.): A Culture of Recycling / Recycling Culture? 2011.

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38

Anna Chromik: Disruptive Fluidity. The Poetics of the Pop Cogito. 2012.

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39

Paweł Wojtas: Translating Gombrowicz´s Liminal Aesthetics. 2014.

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40

Marcin Mazurek: A Sense of Apocalypse. Technology, Textuality, Identity. 2014.

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Charles Russell / Arne Melberg / Jarosław Płuciennik / Michał Wróblewski (eds.): Critical Theory and Critical Genres. Contemporary Perspectives from Poland. 2014.

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42

Marzena Kubisz: Resistance in the Deceleration Lane. Velocentrism, Slow Culture and Everyday Practice. 2014.

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43

Bohumil Fořt: An Introduction to Fictional Worlds Theory. 2016.

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Agata Wilczek: Beyond the Limits of Language. Apophasis and Transgression in Contemporary Theoretical Discourse. 2016.

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Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse I. Origines, Iberia, Slavia et Europa Media. 2016.

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46

Witold Sadowski / Magdalena Kowalska / Magdalena Maria Kubas (eds.): Litanic Verse II. Britannia, Germania et Scandinavia. 2016.

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47

Julia Szołtysek: A Mosaic of Misunderstanding: Occident, Orient, and Facets of Mutual Misconstrual. 2016.

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48

Manyaka Toko Djockoua: Cross-Cultural Affinities. Emersonian Transcendentalism and Senghorian Negritude. 2016.

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49

Ryszard Nycz: The Language of Polish Modernism. Translated by Tul'si Bhambry. 2017.

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50

Alina Silvana Felea: Aspects of Reference in Literary Theory. Poetics, Rhetoric and Literary History. 2017.

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Jerry Xie: Mo Yan Thought. Six Critiques of Hallucinatory Realism. 2017.

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