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Patrick Kilian

Dr. Shelly Chan

CHIN 330C

10 May 2010

Re-humanizing China: Animal Imagery in Mo Yan as a Response to Lu Xun

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.- Animal Farm

The Father of modern Chinese literature, one Lu Xun, the pen name of Zhou Shuren,

once said:

Suppose there were an iron room with no windows or doors, a room it would be virtually impossible to break out of. And suppose you had some people inside that room who were sound asleep. Before long they would all suffocate. In other words, they would slip peacefully from a deep slumber into oblivion, spared the anguish of being conscious of their impending doom. Now let’s say that you came along and stirred up a big racket that awakened some of the lighter sleepers. In that case, they would go to a certain death fully conscious of what was going to happen to them. Would you say that you had done those people a favor? (Preface 27)

The iron house Lu Xun refers to here represents the state of the hearts and minds of the Chinese

people at the time of his writing, which he himself dates December 3, 1922. His notion and

purpose for writing his plethora of works hinges on this idea; the idea that through the written

word he and contemporaries could “wake up” the Chinese population, which he viewed as

suffering from a crippling apathy and immovably backward and self-destructive culture. Across

his works, Lu Xun utilizes animal imagery, the comparison between animal and Chinese person

having the general effect of displaying the dehumanized state of the Chinese people as a whole.

Years later, prolific author Mo Yan, pen name of one Guan Moye, also includes droves of animal

descriptions – metaphors, pure images, even principal characters, yet does so with an entirely

different intent than his illustrious predecessor. Though both animal and human are treated with

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Mo Yan’s violent and disturbing pen, his animals serve to re-humanize his human characters by

removing a sense of judgment and, in so doing, attempt to heal his nation from its decades upon

decades of suffering.

Lu Xun’s first and most famous short story, “Diary of a Madman,” begins this dialogue.

It starts in the mad man’s very first entry with the sentence, “Otherwise, how do you explain

those dirty looks the Zhao family’s dog gave me? I’ve got good reason for my fears” (Diary of a

Madman 30). This initial glimpse of animal usage sets up Lu Xun’s argument; the mad man fears

that the dog wants to eat him; ergo the reader understands that animals eat people. When the mad

man later reveals his different understanding of the history book, seeing the words “Eat people”

on every page, Lu Xun links animal behavior to China’s history, arguing that the China has

created a culture that dehumanizes, numbs, and ultimately “self”-sabotages its people.

Structurally, Lu Xun takes a bold step in this piece. Often cited as the first

example of colloquial Chinese language in a piece of literature, the main body, comprised of the

mad man’s journal entries themselves, contains all of these references to animals. The brief

introduction, on the other hand, which is written in the classical Chinese style of terse formality

and lofty intellectual tradition, contains absolutely none. Written by a third party after the mad

man’s reported cure, the introduction reads, “By now, however, he had long since become sound

and fit again; in fact he had already repaired to other parts to await a substantive official

appointment” (Diary of a Madman 29). The mad man, once a visionary appalled with the cultural

cannibalism shown in the pages of Chinese historical thought wherein no dates signify an

indefinite and everlasting period of abuse, in the end reverts to the old ways and becomes a part

of the system itself.

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Following the initial argument comparing humans with dogs (a comparison that Mo Yan

repeats several times in various works discussed later), Lu Xun peppers the imaginings of his

titular mad man with animal thoughts. These thoughts echo and reverberate throughout the piece,

from the mad man’s citing of the cannibalistic incident in Wolf Cub Village to the cryptic

comment, “The Zhao family’s dog has started barking again. Savage as a lion, timid as a rabbit,

crafty as a fox …” (Diary of a Madman 35). While at first glance this quotation attributes itself

the ravings of the crazed man the protagonist appears to be, Lu Xun consistently puts his

message in the mouth of characters on the outside of a societal norm. Here, his process of

deterritorialization should lead the reader back to the initial argument; the Zhao family dog

equates to the wary mob, threatened by the Other it cannot understand. The Chinese people here

possessing the qualities of savagery, see its violent and repeated destruction of itself, timidity,

see its reticence to accept any change to its own perceived cultural superiority, and craft, that is,

the society hides its behavior in insidious ways including Confucian-schooled concepts of filial

piety.

The mad man’s meal of fish is a particularly powerful metaphor; the fish with its blank,

lifeless eyes that can do nothing but stare open-mouthed at its devourer mirrors the photographs

of onlookers at executions that Lu Xun found so repulsive. The mad man remarks, “The fish’s

eyes were white and hard. Its mouth was wide open, just like the mouths of those people who

wanted to eat human flesh” (Diary of a Madman 32-33). Those people are no better than dead

fish, he says. In the act of eating this fish, though he immediately vomits it out of his system,

reinforces the idea that all of China has partaken of this blasphemous meal, including the only

soul in the nation who notices the essential wrongness of it.

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Towards the end, when the diary entries become successively shorter and less coherent,

the protagonist questions, “Who’s to say I didn’t eat a few pieces of my younger sister’s flesh

without knowing it? … Although I wasn’t aware of it in the beginning, now that I know I’m

someone with four thousand years’ experience of cannibalism behind me, how hard it is to look

real human beings in the eye!” (Diary of a Madman 41). This passage accomplishes two things:

first, it shows that even non-participants in China’s social trends become caught up in the

cultural norm – an idea peculiar to China’s enormous emphasis on a collective lifestyle and

consciousness. Second, the mad man’s shame at facing “real human beings,” that is, people who

do not practice the metaphorical cannibalism, displays a loss of face felt by the author at seeing

his country so easily dominated by foreign powers of the time, be they Japan, Russia, the United

States, or a myriad of European colonial interests.

Further noteworthy, translator William Lyell remarks in a footnote that “Darwin’s theory

of evolution was immensely important to Chinese intellectuals during Lu Xun’s lifetime and the

common coin of much discourse” (Diary of a Madman 38). From a certain direction, Darwin’s

theories can be used as evidence to indicate that humans evolved from animals and therefore

must have animal qualities; that the human is only as much above the animal as science has

allowed it to become. This Western thought, seen again in the phonetic spelling of “hyena” as

“hai-yi-na,” then indicates an extremely strong advocacy to modernize China’s sciences and

technologies, as these things are a direct path away from animal behavior and away from self-

destructive backwardness (Diary of a Madman 36).

In his 1919 story “Kong Yiji,” Lu Xun creates a character emblematic of the Chinese

intellectual; well versed in the most ancient of classical texts, unable to generate revenue with his

education, resorting to stealing writing supplies from his employers and fencing them to survive,

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and most of all, too proud to accept other forms of work. The character, Kong Yiji, meets with a

sordid and inglorious end, in which the narrator notes:

As he handed [the coppers] to me, I noticed his palm was caked with mud. So he’d dragged himself there on his hands! Before long, he had finished his wine and then, amid the talk and laughter of the other customers, he laboriously hauled himself away on those same muddy hands. (Kong Yiji 47-48)

Kong’s legs have been broken for his thievery and he is therefore forced to crawl in the mud as

would an animal, debasing himself in front of a community he has, for his entire life, believed

himself to be above. At his end, he finds himself literally below the common peasant as well as

being unable to pay his outstanding debts to the low-class bartender. “Kong Yiji” makes a

mockery of this type of stubbornly traditional intellectual, stating that China’s brightest minds

are no better than snakes crawling on their bellies through a mire of antiquated dogmas.

In another of his stories, “Upstairs in a Wine Shop,” Lu Xun again berates the thinking

minds of his countrymen (himself included). The character of Lü Weifu says:

When I was a kid, I used to think that bees and flies were absurd and pathetic. I’d watch the way they’d light someplace, get spooked by something, and then fly away. After making a small circle, they’d always come back again and land just exactly where they had been before. Who could have imagined that someday, having made my own small circle, I would fly back too? And who would ever have expected that you would do the same thing? Couldn’t you have managed to fly a little farther away? (Upstairs in a Wine Shop 246)

The metaphor is quite involved. First, the fact that the friend is comparing himself, and by

extension reformist intellectuals and people in general, to insignificant insects shows Lu Xun’s

pessimism and feelings of impotency to affect any great social change. Second, the circular flight

path taken by the fly is an interesting shape: circles have no end and imply cyclical events or

motions. Therefore, Lu Xun implies that China’s attempted social reform is a consistent trend

throughout the ages that never gets very far. Finally, the friend’s ending comments on the

teaching of the Confucian Classics express this same sentiment and display how even the most

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well-meaning individuals fall back into the old and the comfortable. Essentially, Lü Weifu

makes an even more damning metaphor than Kong Yiji. His equates the man to a pestilential

vermin feeding on the already failing society.

The very last words in Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” are a plea to his fellow

countrymen to wake up from the suffocating slumber of the iron house and enact the changes

necessary for China to heal from its destructive past. The mad man writes, “Maybe there are

some children around who still haven’t eaten human flesh. Save the children …” (Diary of a

Madman 41). Mo Yan, who did not arrive on the scene until 1955, embodies writes with the

spirit of this charge in mind. He conjures the most violent and grotesque images possible and yet

after shocking his readership with the horrifying choices and actions of his protagonists and other

characters, leaves an indelible liking for them, as if all forms of judgment have been removed.

Mo Yan’s characters, especially of Red Sorghum, his first published novel, The first

major instance where Mo Yan uses animals in an uncommon way is when Uncle Arhat maims

and kills the two black mules in order to slow down the Japanese road project. Mo Yan

repeatedly personifies the animals in Red Sorghum, most of all the mules and/or donkeys as well

as the dogs. In the aforementioned quote, Uncle Arhat’s thoughts form the sentence, “Time to

free his comrades in suffering,” and as he lames the first mule with a hoe he curses the mule:

“Where’s your arrogance now? You evil ungrateful, parasitic bastard! You ass-kissing,

treacherous son of a bitch!” (Red Sorghum 22-23). The description of Uncle Arhat’s physical

violence against these animals does not differ at all in its treatment from Mo Yan’s description of

violence toward his human characters either, up to and including the level of disturbing detail.

This particular passage ends, “The wounded animal then arched its rump, sending a shower of

hot blood splashing down on Uncle Arhat’s face … The shiny wooden handle [of the hoe] buried

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in the mule’s head pointed to heaven at a jaunty angle” (Red Sorghum 23). In his singular

treatment of both animal and man, Mo Yan elevates the animals to the level of relatable human

characters and at the same time continues Lu Xun’s tradition of equating humans with beasts.

The third chapter of Red Sorghum, entitled “Dog Ways,” . In its opening sentence, Mo

Yan says, “The glorious history of man is filled with legends of dogs and memories of dogs:

despicable dogs, respectable dogs, fearful dogs, pitiful dogs” (Red Sorghum 169). This

comment, while establishing the link between dog, man, and historical action, also indicates that

the “glorious history of man” is full of myths and remembrances of humans. These historical

figures cover all shades of the human emotional spectrum as well as all types of person, from the

best and most worthy of humankind to the lowest and most despicable. History and death, Mo

Yan shows, treat all of them equally. As the youthful Father describes his work re-burying

human and dog skeletons at a mass grave site, he says:

A momentary dizziness came over me, and when it passed I took another look, discovering the skulls of dozens of dogs mixed in with the human heads in the grave. The bottom of the pit was a shallow blur of white, a sort of code revealing that the history of dogs and the history of man are intertwined. (Red Sorghum 204)

Again, Father thinks, “when it came to the large canine skull I hesitated. ‘Toss it in,’ an old man

said, ‘the dogs back then were as good as humans” (Red Sorghum 204). If dogs are as good as

humans, then any mongrel is as good as the phenomenally likeable Grandma and Grandpa

characters of this drama, characters, who to be sure do their share of morally questionable deeds

and yet emerge from them pure and whole.

Continuing his theme of dogs, Mo Yan’s “White Dog Swing” in large part engages in a

literary dialogue with Lu Xun’s story, “New Year’s Sacrifice”. Mo Yan presents his own version

of the intellectual narrator with his own, also nameless, city-living-elite-come-home, and his own

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depiction of the famous Xianglin Sao in the unfortunate Nuan. The two narrators share a

remarkable amount of characteristics, possibly because Lu Xun and Mo Yan also have them in

common: both are wanderers, they belong neither to their ancestral homes and rural upbringings

nor to their new citified environs, and are wracked, therefore, with bouts of nostalgia. In their

essential characters however, the two are polar opposites, as seen in their respective treatments of

the marginalized “Other” at the ending of each story. Whereas Lu Xun’s intellectual ultimately

relegates Xianglin Sao’s sad tale to the realm of forgetfulness; “All the worries and concerns that

had plagued me from morning till night the day before had been totally swept away by the happy

atmosphere of the New Year,” Mo Yan’s narrator remains a sympathetic and caring individual

(New Year’s Sacrifice 241).

In the final two pages of “White Dog Swing”, Mo Yan makes use of over twenty ellipses,

up to and including ending the story with their associated pause. This hesitation in the writing

and dialogue displays the narrator’s guilt over the events of ten years ago when he inadvertently

caused Nuan’s scarring injury. This narrator even explains, “I looked at the desperate expression

on her face and was choked with emotion: ‘Of course I would have [married you], of course I

would’” (Mo Yan, 23). This level of compassion in an intellectual character, completely alien to

Lu Xun’s works, suggests that the people that Lu Xun sought to wake from the stupor of the Iron

House are slowly rousing themselves. Their world and society is fraught with inequities and

hardships, true, but there is a subtle growth evidenced here that is difficult to ignore.

In another novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the central figure, Mother, once again

equates human and animal. She says, “Humans and animals are so much alike … Malory nodded

in agreement” (Big Breasts and Wide Hips 94). The opening chapter, the parallel births of the

mule and Mother’s eighth and ninth children, bears significantly on this case. All three offspring

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are “bastard offspring” in the sense of being half-breeds: the young mule is the sterile child of a

donkey and a horse, while Yunü and Jintong, Mother’s eighth daughter and the male narrator

respectively, are the multi-racial children of Shangguan Lu, the strong central figure of the

Chinese woman, and Pastor Malory the foreign Swede (Big Breasts and Wide Hips 94).

Of further significance, Shangguan Lü, or Mother’s mother-in-law, places the donkey’s

birthing before her own family line! Not only that, but Mother seems to understand this

hierarchy: “’You go on Mother,’ Shangguan Lu said emotionally, ‘Lord in Heaven, keep the

Shangguan family’s black donkey safe, let her foal without incident …” (Big Breasts and Wide

Hips 7). In effect, this simultaneous birthing that comprises the entire first act of Mo Yan’s

family saga places all potential blame for the characters’ poor treatment of each other on the

various systems that operated in their lives. Specifically, Shangguan Lü’s care for the donkey

over her daughter-in-law condemns the Chinese preoccupation with producing a son in order to

carry on the family name. Jintong, the eventual son, becomes a grotesque mockery of a man

while his mother, Shangguan Lu maintains her position as a bastion of strength and support for

multiple generations of her family and the community. Social and political pressures operate on

this Jintong and warp him from birth into a subhuman creature that can barely survive in the

modern world, and once again,

Finally, in his novel Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, Mo Yan performs a more overt

association between animal and human: the main character begins the story dead and

subsequently is reincarnated six times as progressively more “human-like” animals; first a

donkey, then an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and finally as a boy with an enormous head. While

still a dead soul in King Yama’s underworld, the protagonist, Ximen Nao, refuses to forget his

past life in exchange for a better new one, saying, “I want to hold on to my suffering, worries,

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and hostility. Otherwise, returning to that world is meaningless” (Life and Death 6). The grudges

that Ximen Nao holds against those who betrayed and executed him play out over these six lives.

Ultimately, Mo Yan’s message indicates that the blame and the hatred that Ximen Nao has in his

heart hold him back. To let them go, to realize that human beings do terrible things and to

forgive those who do leads to the tranquility of the Buddhist saying that serves as the epigraph

for this novel.

As Ximen Donkey, the protagonist rails at his former life and human memories intruding

upon the simplicity of a donkey seeking its mate. He thinks, “Ximen Nao, you goddamned

Ximen Nao, stay out of my business. I am now a donkey with the fires of lust burning inside me.

When Ximen Nao enters the picture, even if it’s only his recollections, the result is a

recapitulation of a bloody, corrupt history” (Life and Death 54). The copulation and resulting

amorous connection between Ximen Donkey and the female, Huahua, makes a mockery of the

human practice of taking concubines with its fidelity and purity, again supported by the repulsive

character of Qiuxiang. Not content there however, Mo Yan redeems even Qiuxiang in her quiet

aid for Lan Lian when he has paint in his eyes.

In “The Strength of an Ox,” Mo Yan criticizes the excesses and quasi-religious

fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution era and the Red Guard. Concerning their chief

representative, Lan Jinlong, his adoptive father Lan Lian remarks, “the blood that flows through

his veins is more lethal than a scorpion’s tail. He’ll do absolutely anything in the name of

‘revolution’” (Life and Death 201). Lan Jiefang, a principal narrator and Jinlong’s half-brother,

fights against Jinlong with every fiber of his being, and yet shows love and compassion for him

when he almost dies of cold, and admiration for him in his eventual desire and act of joining the

commune in order to become a Red Guard. Jinlong, with whom the narrator Jiefang initially had

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a good relationship, drives himself to perform nationalistic semi-atrocities because of his birth

father, the class-enemy and aristocrat Ximen Nao, whom he never even knew. The legacy that he

might have inherited would have placed him at the mercy of the tides of revolution – again the

institution provides the motive for a character’s evils. In the end though, Jinlong suffers the fate

of a counter-revolutionary for accidentally dropping a badge depicting Mao Zedong in a latrine,

reminding the reader that institutions such as the Chinese Communist government are the

antithesis of humanity – they are unthinking, unfeeling things that can destroy even their most

devoted members.

In terms of moral action, animals cannot sin or transgress a moral law of any sort, as they

act purely on instinct. Hence argues Mo Yan’s overarching thought, if human beings act purely

according to their desires, at the end of the day, moral blame cannot fall on the heads of the

individual person but rather can only fall on a system imposed on him or her. Therefore,

communism, socialism, capitalism, government, war, filial piety, marriage, starvation, ideology,

religion, and any other far-reaching social category – these are the agents of misery in human

affairs. The people themselves, each individual human being, in an absence of such imposing

forces will act according to his nature, in which case he or she will find peace. Since this is

virtually impossible in any sort of modern society, Mo Yan writes to reinforce the essential

humanity of every person, and make it possible, not to forget the carnage of China’s history, but

forgive it and move on into a better tomorrow.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "What Is a Minor Literature?" Mississippi Review 11.3

(1983): 13-33. JSTOR. Web. 5 May 2010.

<http://moodle.wittenberg.edu/mod/resource/view.php?id=53107>.

Lu Xun. "Diary of a Madman." 1918. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of

Hawaii, 1990. 29-41. Print.

Lu Xun. "Kong Yiji." 1919. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of Hawaii, 1990.

42-48. Print.

Lu, Xun. "New Year's Sacrifice." 1924. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of

Hawaii, 1990. 219-41. Print.

Lu Xun. "Preface." 1922. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of Hawaii, 1990. 21-

28. Print.

Lu Xun. "Upstairs in a Wineshop." 1924. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. University of

Hawaii, 1990. 242-54. Print.

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<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1973183,00.html>.

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2004. Print.

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