Mo Yan and the cruel circle between dog and death

A few years ago I read the novel "The Red Sorghum" by Mo Yan, Chinese novelist and Nobel Prize for literature of 2012. I read it with the purpose of understanding a little more the Chinese soul, because, as a Western I am, I declare myself an ignorant of that worldview. I am an admirer of the Tao and through it I have endeavoured to understand the dynamics of this giant, China, an empire threatening to grow. And little by little we get their culture. I am not referring to Chinese food or products manufactured by their cheap labour, but to the way their social relations are built; how they reproduce biologically and ideologically; to his indolent and indifferent notion to the motivations of the universe. How they float in pain and joy at the same time. How they get drunk. How they make love. How they clutter each other, which mammals we are all. But at a tiring pace that becomes geological, as if it were a huge pachyderm that takes time to gloat and turn around to continue sleeping.

Speaking of mammals, the relationship between dog and man is very present in all cultures. Mo Yan's book brings it out with tones of cruelty and perhaps vulgarity to Western eyes like mine. As a first mention, the most folkloric myth in the Western mind about the Chinese diet is revealed through my reading: the Chinese people eat dogs. Yu Zhan’ao, the grandfather of the narrator savors a head of this animal and I feel provoked by the description of the eyes and white fangs of the cooked dog; highlighting the red of boiled meat. On the other hand, the skins torn from these dead mammals served as makeshift, and not so much, vests. It becomes a glitz to hang them outside the house to dry in the sun. So far so good, while talking about exotic diets and curious clothes. After all, the dog is a mammal and can be nutritious for a surviving people like the Chinese. But there is more to Mo Yan's first book.

The text narrates the adventures of a peasant family, owner of a sorghum plantation, during the invasion of Japan to China, before the Second World War. Sorghum is a versatile cereal that among several qualities produces a splendid wine that brought a lot of abundance to this family. However, peace and abundance are interrupted by the Japanese invasion and the subsequent organization of the improvised Chinese resistance guerrilla and its factions. Many scenes of violence abound in the book. The violence is not concentrated only in the battles between soldiers of each side. Japanese reprisals directly impact villages. Villages with families and the elderly. Villages with children. And also with dogs.

Yu Zhan’ao achieves a Pyrrhic victory over the Japanese by raiding a bridge. Days later the village is sacked by the Japanese and the slaughter is diabolical ... That last adjective is totally personal. Absolutely western. But I talk to you now about my book, based on my experience with this red novel. And in no case do I intend to save you reading pages.

Returning to ours: the survivors of the killing are few: Yu Zhan’ao, his son and a few others. The bodies abound and there is no possibility of burying them. In titanic task the bodies are transported to the sorghum field. Here is a first loose end. Another one was missing to generate a loop. Then, dogs without a master go wild and wander aimlessly through the hills: here is the second loose end. How was the Alexander who untied this Gordian knot?

And the wheel between the dogs and the man begins to turn: the wild and hungry dogs, forgetting the canons of domesticity, turn to the sorghum field to devour the human corpses. Surviving children, less than half a dozen, organize to hunt dogs and feed the diminished village. And this is when the Chinese survivors feed on dogs well fed with human flesh. Transitively, the Chinese end up devouring themselves. And the author of the book mentions it lacking any moral observation. As indifferent as the universe, because "for the universe we are a straw doll ready for sacrifice," as the Tao says.

Why as a Western observer I am so shocked? Isn't the cycle of life just the holistic need to recycle and recover the proteins and carbon molecules that make it possible? In other words, don't we devour each other and in our recursive and masochistic eagerness like the snake that bites its tail? Oriental thought becomes so strange to me, precisely because of this indifference of the observer. This possibility of disconnecting metaphysical cables and contemplating nature without judgments or blinders. Is it possible, however, to observe without altering what is observed? Finally, Western language traps lead to confusion difficult to solve. Is it possible to observe from the conceptual vacuum? Or is it simply another way to connect the cables of the scanning machine you observe? By the uncertainty principle: the observer modifies the observed. Mo Yan observes his narration from the scepticism caused by the war. Observe the ecosystem of dogs and man as a foreign flow of which he does not want to participate, but which a result is nevertheless: Mo Yan is the grandson of the protagonist Yu Zhan’ao (at least metaphorically). The book "The Red Sorghum" is almost the construction of a personal mythology composed of severe, cold and unconscious gods. It is the whimsical spinning, from the prejudice about the existence of a blind, deaf and mute universe and that nevertheless intones its deep song there in the cosmic background radiation: distant and archaically indifferent. Deep in all the conceptual vessels created by man lies a plain of absolute faith upside down. Perhaps this is what unites us to all men: we cannot close our mouths or our thoughts, for words vibrate through generations. Mentally speaking we cannot be mute. To say "words", however, is to give sovereign importance to poetry, which does. But it could be music, images, and symbols. And the most powerful symbol in this food cycle between man and dog is the circle. As Emerson said, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon that forms, the second; in all nature, this primary figure is repeated infinitely. It is the highest emblem of the world class. ” And the red circle of the Japanese flag terrifies our protagonists, spilling over the Chinese subcontinent; contagious this one and finally dying the communist red.

Is it possible to go more and more out of oneself to observe and observe without creating new universes and with it new languages ​​and understandings? Nietzsche has said that music is the language of will, however music has been atomized and culturally mathematized. At such a level that it is possible to make it a universal language. Music is imprisoned within a mathematics, but poetry is not, which has a rhythm of geological reach. The charm of poetry is slower, it is the way the meta-man learns to live and survives in the habitat of a new language. Poetry is not heard as if we can intuit the vibration of the flutter of an insect. We can intuit the growth of a mountain, but not how they are eaten by ice or erosion. Taking all this into account, what way of looking can shed light on this myth between man and dog? Who devours who? Is the domestic dog authentically a being independent of man? Or how domesticated beast is an extension of humanity and its desire to turn and turn, like a spinning top that devours and furrows the earth at the same time, in this case to sow sorghum?

The myth of dog and man comes to us too. It is not necessary to go so far to bring it up. Chile is a land of wines and keeps its cruel recipes like sorghum culture. It is said that when a wine is too acidic, or it has been spoiled, during the process of its elaboration, it is customary to throw a dead dog into the barrel to absorb its acidity. How many times will we have drunk the essence of a dead dog when we enjoy our splendid wines? And commenting on this matter with my father-in-law, he told me a story that would come to close the cycle and complete the myth of our lands: On one occasion a man who worked in a big water tank that was located in Recoleta disappeared. After searching for days, people ended up forgetting the matter and returned to their usual tasks. It will have been ten years or maybe more, and the water tank needed urgent cleaning and maintenance. When the tank was emptied, the bones of the long-lost man appeared. No remnants of clothes nor meat. Only their naked bones were preserved. It turned out that half Recoleta drank the man day by day without knowing it. Quenching his thirst and at the same time cannibalizing and taking advantage of the stray operator's proteins. How many times without knowing it will we have devoured ourselves? Does ignorance set us free? And other issues come up: the mice and rats of the flour mills. How much bread will we have eaten flavoured with mice and rodent dregs? Or the tomato sauce flavoured by motley filth? And so and so the cycle of cannibalism, scavenging and exploitation has no end. Like the deliberate use of the urine that Yu Zhan’ao used for the better sorghum wine. The big secret that no client knew and perhaps didn't want to find out either.

And where does all this lead us? What is the limit of culture once it makes us blind to obvious and rude details that for some reason we simply stop seeing? And if we consider that oriental maxim that says that everything is united, that we are part of a whole, as if the universe were a cosmic web that connects to what we don't like. That atomism and borders are only apparent. That our individuality, our self, is only an apparent ideal. Very western, very temporary. Like a whimsical stake stuck in space-time, which just mentioned dissipates carrying memory, conscience and guilt. And that: the rude, the dirty, the dead, the dog is also us. For we dwell in what dies and even in the dead. That is part of the universe. That is being the universe. However, in our eagerness, our will to live makes us affirm our individuality, which we know will finally disintegrate, anyway. To remain part of the universe. From this cold and indifferent universe.

This is why poetry is so important. Only the creation of images, beauty, can save us from the temptation to let ourselves be devoured by the universe. This nihilism is the most dangerous of all. This is the great mouth that is formed by the spinning of proteins around the cruel cycle of dogs and men. The vortex of this whirlpool expels heat, breaking second to second the home of the universe that will be extinguished as the law of entropy has dictated. This is why the western myth of the fight is so successful. It is our evolutionary advantage! But perhaps it is time to reconcile the old structural thinking. It may be necessary to dislocate the language a bit and learn to breathe once the conceptual throat is broken. Being dying makes us great. Being part of the whirlwind that devours itself makes us great. We can still observe the universe that curls as if it were our own navel. Every man has the power to do it.

Once the sorghum ceremony in China is broken, according to Mo Yan, the good wine is over and the hybrid sorghum appropriated the fields. The universe never stays the same. This does not mean being guilty, however we live the sacrifice mentioned by the Tao: straw dolls thrown into the sun and wind. That is why we care so much to live full and beautiful lives, and to keep our lives that sooner or later go out sooner or less. And after that? The universe will continue. I can't prove it, but I have faith that it is so.