Mo Yan: Red Sorghum (Book Review)
Red Sorghum: A Novel of China is Mo Yan's famous 1986 fiction about his ancestral township in Shandong province. The book is portrayed as a gift to Mo Yan's ancestral spirits, an offering from an "unfilial" son who migrated to the big city and abandoned the family's traditional home. The book is regarded as one of modern China's greatest pieces of literature.
I started reading Mo Yan after finishing several non-fiction works on China. In China's current mood of stifling oppression and friction with the rest of the world, I was hoping to find in Red Sorghum a more humanized and endearing view of the Chinese people. Engaging with a nation's literature normally leads to greater understanding and affection for the people and culture. However, that was not what happened in my experience reading Red Sorghum. This is a persistent problem for China, as the Chinese government itself has pointed out in recent years. Modern China lacks a voice in the world, it has very little soft power and produces almost no cultural output that the rest of the world appreciates. This is shocking for a country with a population four times larger than the United States, especially because China's cultural output seems to be declining as the country develops. Unlike Japan, with its internationally beloved cultural contributions, China often looks like a communist cultural wasteland. People in China often share this perception as they struggle to bypass the Communist Party's Great Firewall that blocks them from interacting with the outside world. Xi Jinping has consistently advocated "telling the Chinese story to the world" as he recognizes China's inability to present an appealing humanized face.
Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, however, is not a step in the right direction. It seems obvious to me that Mo Yan intentionally dehumanizes Chinese people. A whole section of his book parallels the exploits and conflicts of a pack of corpse eating dogs with those of all the book's human characters. The clear message is that humans are just as debased and animalistic as stray dogs. Mo Yan's entire book is dehumanizing. He goes into detail describing his characters in disgusting degrading ways. His weird obsession with describing his characters defecating and urinating contributes to the reader's perception of them as little more than animals. The book begins with the narrator describing himself as a boy "pissing furiously" on the grave of his ancestor while singing. This should probably be interpreted as commentary on the author's relationship with his family, but the descriptions of urination become considerably less justifiable as the book goes on, and they extend to include precise details of the sounds produced when a random prisoner pees into a bucket. The narrator's family brewery acquires considerable fame when its sorghum wine is accidentally enhanced by Grandad urinating into a wine jar which is later found to be especially aromatic and delicious. The entirety of the local township, therefore, is constantly intoxicated by the drinking of urine. Maybe there's some deeper meaning, but who's going to dwell on such a gross question?
No review of Red Sorghum would be complete without mentioning the extreme violence and grotesque sexual encounters that seem to be among its primary themes. The violence is so excessive and random that it's hard to find purpose in it. Why, for example, do so many people's intestines fall out? Why are there so many descriptions of human heads being blown apart by projectiles? The sexual encounters aren't even pornographic as much as just vile. After the narrator's father has one of his testicles ripped off by the family dog, his female friend attempts to arouse his mutilated pus oozing genitals after being told by her older mentor to try it. Later on, the graphic description of Japanese soldiers gang raping a pregnant woman concentrates on the soldiers slobbering on her face and chewing her lips while impaling her young daughter on a bayonet. This brief summery doesn't even come close to encompassing the non-stop violence committed by almost every character. While it's important to remember the suffering of history's victims, Mo Yan seems to revel in this degraded material to such an extent that I felt desensitized to it by the time I'd finished reading.
None of Mo Yan's characters in Red Sorghum can be much sympathized with. Most of them are developmentally flat, and their emotions are inspired by animalistic instinct, nonsensical weirdness, and actual insanity. The main protagonist of the book is the narrator's grandfather (Grandad), and he's completely immoral and has no redeeming qualities except testosterone. Despite the novel allegedly being about the Chinese war of resistance against Japanese invasion, the characters all end up killing far more Chinese people than invading soldiers. By the end of the book, so much killing has occurred that the reader is left wondering how the township hasn't been completely depopulated. Despite Grandad's endless sins, he still thinks Heaven owes him something because he's a good guy. In an especially deluded scene, he claims Heaven has no eyes because he experiences some bad luck following years of leading a bandit gang, but then when he learns that his son is still able to reproduce and carry on the family line after losing a testicle, he screams out "Heaven has eyes!" apparently in the belief that Heaven is rewarding his good behavior. How can he really believe this? He's a terrible person who does almost nothing in the entire novel except murder, loot, steal, kill, curse, get drunk, commit adultery, and brutally beat his wife. As the narrator explains several times, Grandad believes that vengeance is the chief virtue and the reason to remain alive. The Japanese invasion is little more than an excuse for the characters to extract revenge upon fellow Chinese people. The pettiness of the characters is so extreme, and their lack of self-awareness is astonishing. Their parochialism, ignorance, and lack of perspective is also unnerving.
Red Sorghum has no clear plot. After finishing the book, I skimmed back over the first few chapters and quickly realized they don't make sense in the context of the latter chapters. For example, the old farm hand Uncle Arhat is set up as a secret lover of the narrator's mother, and this is implied in numerous places to be an important plot device. However, by the end of the novel, after covering a decade of story line, and all the characters are either dead or dying, this initial secret is never explored, and the narrator's first few chapters of commentary appear to be incompatible with the later parts of the story. This is difficult to confirm or deny, however, because the latter half of the book is so confused and twisted with random flashbacks that it becomes almost impossible to visualize any timeline for the events. Upon completion, the book feels both tedious and unfinished. Tedious, because the entire plot only ever circles back to horrendous violence and meaningless murder. Unfinished, because big mysterious claims made earlier in the book are never explained, like how Grandad ended up living alone in the mountains of Japan for years.
What is the deeper meaning of Red Sorghum? There are moments in the novel when the author is clearly making a deeper point. The chapters about dogs going to war with each other is a veiled reference to reactionaries, nationalists, and communists vying for power over the Chinese people (the huge dog pack), and the reader is left wondering whether the general chaos and nonsense of the novel is serving up a deeper political message that would have been banned by China's heavy censorship apparatus. The problem, however, is that unless one has privileged knowledge of Mo Yan's deeper meaning, the book just looks like a muddled mess. About halfway through the novel, I started developing an idea that historical materialism was one of the themes, and that the novel was attempting to be ultra-realistic and devoid of idealism. There seemed to be a consistent portrayal of humans as animals and religion as being useless. However, in the very last chapters, this is all reversed. Grandad's second wife is possessed by the spirit of a weasel and goes insane. Then, following her gang rape, the second wife's body is possessed by a ghost and starts screaming curses against the male characters. The ghost uses her corpse to vindictively prophesy the event that opens the novel in which Uncle Arhat is skinned alive and chopped into pieces. Only after a Taoist exorcist performs rituals does the corpse cease to rage. This unexpected turn is followed by the book's sudden ending with the now exercised second wife speaking to the narrator about how he needs to leave the city and re-immerse himself in his ancestral township.
At least one reviewer of Red Sorghum noted that the book's only real theme is the sorghum itself. Mo Yan uses the word "sorghum" more than five times a page for most of the book, and it becomes extremely redundant. It often feels like everything in the novel is just being used to highlight the sorghum. I don't think the entire book is just about sorghum, but the fact that someone could thoughtfully argue that demonstrates just how obsessed Mo Yan is with sorghum. The sorghum has at least one clear meaning. The disappearance of the red strain of sorghum which was grown by the narrator's ancestors is eventually replaced with a green hybrid variety in the narrator's own time (around 1980). This replacement of red with green sorghum represents the destruction and then corruption of China. The rise of New China after 1949 was really the beginning of an entirely new country. The culture, institutions, memories, and worldview of old China were erased after the communists came to power. The narrator thus feels a sense of alienation from his family and ancestral home. The narrator says that the past, defined by red sorghum, contained unspeakably beautiful scenes that can never be recovered. China's extremely rapid development in a single generation, from Maoist subsistence poverty to market oriented middle-income status and the second largest GDP, looks like a miracle, but it has also produced a population that no longer feels any connection to its surroundings. An 80-year-old Chinese alive today, cannot see any practical or cultural connection between his lived experiences in 2023 and those that existed when he was born in 1943. Continuity has been lost. China's history has been broken off. All that remains are eerie memories of a country that no longer exists. Mo Yan, however, appears to accept this as inevitable. The book portrays "old China" as dilapidated and bankrupt; its culture and traditions were corrupted and empty. The main female protagonist, Grandma, is depicted participating in a farcical marriage to a leprous man with rotting skin, and her traditional wedding procession in a sedan chair full of flies and vomit merely gives way to her seduction/rape by the pole bearing peasant Grandad. Grandad then goes off and murders her leprous husband which precipitates Grandma's inheriting an entire brewery estate. Mo Yan seems to be saying that old China was like a rotting traditionalist leper killed off by an invasion of modernist barbarians who then founded a new family/nation on selfish violence. Is Mo Yan secretly condemning New China?
Red Sorghum is ultimately a nihilistic novel written by an author who seems to enjoy casually fantasizing about the vilest aspects of life. The reader can't help but suspect that Mo Yan suffers from psychopathic tendencies and weird sexual fetishes. Mo Yan portrays the Chinese people as violent, dehumanized, and lacking all logic or self-reflection. After reading this book, I felt that my worst fears about China might be true: that its history and people are defined by violent petty resentments, and that contemporary communist China is the logical outcome of a hollow society that had been rotting for a long time. In the end, Mo Yan can't help but admit the truth about China being possessed by demons. The sick violent world he portrays in Red Sorghum is too sinful to be the work of mere humans. Ultimately, the Chinese people will have to turn to God if they ever hope of changing their cyclical destiny of violence and dehumanization.