Cannibalism and the Chinese Body Politic: Hermeneutics and Violence in Cross-Cultural Perception

What u are going to witness here is a fact, don’t get scared !” It’s
Taiwan’s hottest food…” In Taiwan, dead babies or fetuses could be
bought at $50 to $70 from hospitals to meet the high demand for grilled
and barbecued babies … What a sad state of affairs!! (“Fetus”)

These internet rumors began to achieve a modicum of legitimacy in
mid-March, when
the small Malaysian tabloid Warta Perdana fed a growing
international controversy in reporting that a certain Taiwanese restaurant was
serving a dish consisting of the baked flesh of human fetuses. The story
eventually precipitated such an uproar that the CIA and Scotland Yard ultimately
got involved to try to sort things out.

While these allegations of cannibalism were, at a literal level, apocryphal, they
are nevertheless quite instructive. The rumors themselves, together with the
morbid transnational fascination that fed them and allowed them to grow, are
interesting for two reasons. First, these rumors did not spring up in a
vacuum, but rather they are implicitly in dialogue with a rich and multifaceted
discursive tradition of cannibalism in modern, and premodern, China. And,
second, cannibalism itself occupies a rather curious position in our own
(Western) cultural imagination, and the challenge of how to read cannibalism
cross-culturally has important implications for the broader question of what is
at stake, and at risk, in cross-cultural reading and criticism in general.

Cannibalism is a curious thing. In modern Western culture, cannibalism
enjoys a
virtually unparalleled hold on the popular imagination as an act of primal social
violence. It is frequently held up as an almost unthinkable transgression of the
social and moral codes which make us who we are.[1]
At the same time, however, this nearly unthinkable act has consistently, and
somewhat paradoxically, proved to be all-too-thinkable, as evidenced both
by the abundance of cultural representations of cannibalism which exist
in our “own” culture, together with the voyeuristic fascination occasioned
by the
prospect of cannibalistic practice among primitives, deviants, etc., in “other”
cultures.[2] Discourses and fantasies of
cannibalism, therefore, occupy a crucial liminal space where the presumptive
limits of human society are simultaneously challenged and implicitly reaffirmed.[3]

In public comments he made at the time of the performance, Zhu Yu sought
to address the significance of the scandalous nature of the his act, while
at the same time attempting to relativize the social and cultural
assumptions which make it appear scandalous in the first place:

One question that always stymies us–that is, why cannot people eat people?

Is there a commandment in man’s religion in which it is written that we cannot
eat people? In what country is there a law against eating people? It’s simply
morality. But, what is morality? Isn’t morality simply something that man
whimsically changes from time to time based on his/her own so-called needs of
human being in the course of human progress.

From this we might thus conclude:

So long as it can be done in a way that does not commit a crime, eating people is
not forbidden by any of man or societies laws or religions; I herewith announce
my intention and my aim to eat people as a protest against mankind’s moral idea
that he/she cannot eat people. (qtd. in Hua 192)

Despite the universalizing tenor of Zhu Yu’s own remarks, his “Man-Eater”
performance quickly became mired in a rather mundane debate over cultural
and social differences. For instance, by mid-July of 2001, the
R.O.C. [Taiwan] Government Information Office [GIO] had sprung into
action, repeating the explanation that the story and the photographs were
actually derived from Mainlander Zhu Yu’s October performance the
preceding year, rather than from any culinary malfeasance on the part of
the Taiwanese restaurant, and concluded cheerfully that “the GIO wishes to
emphasize that no event of this kind has ever taken place in Taiwan, and
that the serving or eating of such a dish would break an ROC law against
the defiling of human corpses” (Republic). With this rhetorical flourish,
the GIO report succeeded in taking a debate which might have appeared to
center on cultural universals concerning the sanctity of the human body
and adeptly translated it into a rather more provincial debate over
regional mores and secular authority.[4]

First of all, we did not use corpses in a conventional sense, because all of the
human bodies we employed were specimens that had been medically treated. Their
cells had been conditioned by formaldehyde and could no longer rot or be infected
by germs. These so-called bodies are germ-free and had already been turned into
chemical substances. (Wu, Exhibiting 206)

Our intention was not to use these materials to say something. We
want our works to say something. But right now, the audience
doesn’t have the ability to accept something like this is. People haven’t
seen this kind of an exhibition before, where real things are used. The
audience is reacting to the materials. After seeing it more times, then
maybe they will be able to see what’s inside of these works. […] The
result is already pre-determined because these materials, from a certain
perspective[,] are concepts in themselves. So it’s easy for the audience
to think purely about the materials when they see these works. From
another perspective, the materials are an obstacle for us. (Wang,
“Sadistic”)

Eat thy Neighbor

Since it is possible to “exchange sons to eat,” then anything can be exchanged,
anyone can be eaten.

Lu Xun, “Diary of a Madman”

As iconoclastic as it might seem at first glance, Zhu Yu’s cannibalistic
performance was also implicitly in dialogue with a variety of other contemporary
and historical discourses of cannibalism in Chinese culture. Some of the most
recent such examples include Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in
Modern China, Zheng Yi’s exposé on the cannibalism practiced
during the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76), as well as Yu Hua’s provocative 1980s
short story
“Classical Love,” in which an errant wanderer falls in love with a beautiful
maiden at a remote inn, who is ultimately killed and dismembered for her meat.
More abstract, but equally graphic, is the Hong Kong director Siu-Tung Ching’s
popular 1988 film, A Chinese Ghost Story, which revolves around a
graphic theme of vampiric cannibalism, with the hermaphroditic tree-spirit
“Laolao’s” preposterously oversized tongue snaking through the
half-real/half-fantasy space of this epistemological hinterland.

Probably the more famous evocation of cannibalism in modern Chinese
literature, however, is Lu Xun’s celebrated 1918 short story, “Diary of a
Madman,” in which a Gogolesque paranoiac becomes convinced that his
neighbors,
and even his immediate relatives, are all scheming to eat his flesh. The story
concludes with the narrator’s conviction that he, too, has unwittingly consumed
human flesh, and as a result will himself become a cannibal, yet still holds out
hope that “the children” may somehow be saved from this vicious cycle of
self-consumption: “Perhaps there are still children who have not yet eaten men.
Save the children….” (18).

Lu Xun’s story is typically read as an allegorical excoriation of the
“cannibalistic” society which China had become–one in which people feed off of
each other’s weaknesses, rather than rallying together to a common cause. The
work itself is also generally held up as marking the symbolic birth of a Chinese
literary modernism, in that it not only constitutes an allegorical critique of
the old society, but furthermore is itself one of the earliest works to be
written in the modern vernacular.

Lu Xun himself is generally recognized as one of the leading figures of the
reformist May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s and 1920s. Following on the
heels of the 1911 fall of China’s last official dynasty, the Qing, the May Fourth
Movement was generally concerned with attempting to strengthen the Chinese nation
by both introducing into China a variety of foreign (primarily Western)
social
ideas, scientific paradigms, and aesthetic trends, as well as identifying and
critiquing those “traditional” tendencies in Chinese society which were perceived
as being responsible for its weakness and inability to “modernize” effectively.
Historian Lin Yü-sheng identifies the May Fourth Movement’s general attitude
as being one of “totalistic anti-traditionalism”: an ostensible wholesale
rejection of the social and ideological legacies of the past, which at the same
time has the ironic effect of partially obscuring the degree to which the
reformists were themselves building pre-existing models of literati
involvement and social critique.

“Diary of a Madman” is the first of the socially motivated stories which
Lu Xun wrote during this May Fourth period, but its metaphor of
cannibalism is one to which he would return in several of his subsequent
writings (as, for instance, with the blood-soaked mantou bun
which is presented, in his story “Medicine,” as an unsuccessful cure for
tuberculosis), and which many other authors would later pick up on and
develop in their own right. At the same time, however, the signifier of
cannibalism in Lu Xun’s work is a richly overdetermined one, in the sense
that it inevitably exceeds the straightforward allegorical reading
outlined above. Cannibalism is an abstract symbol in the story, but is
also a symbol which builds in part on allusions to actual historical
accounts of cannibalism. Part of the narrator’s horror is precipitated by
his gradual realization that many of the references to cannibalism in
familiar historical texts, ranging from the fourth-century B. C. E.
Warring States period to the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty, might
actually be literal references, rather than mere rhetorical expressions.
Therefore, the subtext of the story becomes not only one of critiquing
contemporary societal conditions, but also one of distinguishing between
empty signifiers and actual historical referents. In short, it becomes a
question of how to read, how to make sense of the literal or figurative
dimensions of familiar historical texts.

At another point in the story, Lu Xun relates how the narrator stayed up late one
night rereading the canonical dynastic histories, which were filled on every page
with allusions to the Confucian ideals of “Virtue and Morality.” The madman is
then described as having an epiphany, whereby he suddenly becomes able to
read through the surface meaning of the texts and discern their
implicit, underlying meaning:

Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it. In ancient
times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about
it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all
over each page are the words: “Virtue and Morality.” Since I could not sleep
anyway, I read intently half the night until I began to see the words between
the lines. The whole book was filled with the two words–“Eat
people.” (10)

“Cannibalism,” here, becomes not only a trope for a kind of clarity of
social vision, an ability to perceive the involutive and self-destructive
tendencies of contemporary Chinese society, but also a figure for
a certain kind of hermeneutics, an ability to read a (historical) text
against itself. What is at stake is not merely a simple dialectics
between surface visibility and hidden meaning, but rather the ability to
recognize the (potential) meaning in what was (always) already “visible”
in the first place.

Lu Xun died somewhat prematurely in 1936, at the age of 55. Although he
was actively involved with the League of Left-Wing Writers during the last decade
or so of his life, he made a point of never formally joining the Chinese
Communist Party. Chairman Mao Zedong nevertheless subsequently lauded Lu Xun as
“the major leader in the Chinese cultural revolution. He was not only a great
writer, but also a great thinker and a great revolutionary” (372). In
spite of this
unconditional accolade, it nevertheless remains very questionable to what extent
the acerbically critical Lu Xun would have approved of the subsequent Maoist
regime. Nevertheless, under the P.R.C. Lu Xun was elevated to the pinnacle of
the Chinese literary canon (thanks, in no small part, to Mao’s own unreserved
endorsement of Lu Xun’s revolutionary credentials). Speaking metaphorically,
therefore, we could say that his writings and legacy were subsequently consumed
and incorporated by the Maoist socio-political orthodoxy, as, for instance, in
the case of his celebrated condemnation of the “human-eating old society,” which
ultimately became monumentalized within the post-1949 ideological rhetoric of the
Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, this rhetorical incorporation on the
part of the Party also involves an important process of misreading, an
attempt cannibalistically to make a part of itself a position of ideological
critique which, otherwise, might have potentially constituted one of its
strongest challenges.

I would take this conclusion and carry it a step further, arguing that the
problematic posed by cannibalism (under this latter, more abstract understanding
of the concept) is not only one of reading history, or of reading historically,
but rather it is one of “reading” in general. The physical act of cannibalism is
only meaningful when positioned at the interstices of identity and alterity (in
that it is an act of consuming the non-Self with whom one has strong,
categorical
ties), and is grounded on the ways in which we make sense of the complex social
tapestry which the cannibalistic act itself simultaneously negates and
reaffirms. Furthermore, the act of cannibalism is itself grounded on a complex
hermeneutics of identity, of how we understand and imagine our relationship with
a variety of social Others. In the following section, I will pursue this reading
to its logical conclusion, looking not at the consumption, but rather at the
constitution of human flesh, and the way in which the human body itself has been
imagined as a complex mass of incommensurable elements, lacking a preconceived
identity, and instead actively constituted through the immune system’s continual
hermeneutic process of “reading” patterns of identity and alterity.

Devouring Oneself from Within

Pre-eminently a twentieth-century object, the immune system is a map drawn to
guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of
Western biopolitics.

Donna Haraway,

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Lu Xun’s allegorical encounters with cannibalism mark an important turning
point in his own intellectual development. It is well known that Lu Xun
initially studied medicine in Japan, and that he later claimed that it was
the perceived need to get to the root of the spiritual and social ills
which afflicted contemporary China which led him to abandon his medical
studies and instead devote himself to healing not the bodies of his
compatriots but rather their spirits. His critical description of China
as a cannibalistic society in “Diary of a Madman” became one of the
rallying points of his generation and has continued to echo throughout
the twentieth century. At the same time, even as his earlier interest in
corporal healing was effectively sublimated, that same medicinal
orientation was making an uncanny return in many of his later writings, as
well as those of his contemporaries.

For instance, in an essay entitled “Random Thoughts #38” and published
under Lu Xun’s name in 1918,[7]
the same year of “Diary of a Madman,” there is an explicit parallel drawn
between the contagion of the human bloodstream by syphilis bacteria and
the ideological “confusion” of the social corpus resulting from the
influence of “Confucians, Taoists, and Buddhist monks”: “Even though we
might now want to become real people, it is uncertain whether or not we
will [be able to avoid being] confounded by the dark and confused elements
in our blood-stream” (389). The essay expresses concern, furthermore,
that this ideological disease not reach the nadir of syphilis and
concludes with the hope that science may discover some magic
cultural/ideological panacea, a so-called “707,” based on the recently
discovered treatment for syphilis (arsphenamine, conventionally known at
the time as “606”). The image of harmful reactionary ideological elements
flowing through society’s bloodstream is evocative in and of itself, but
the specific allusion to syphilis makes the metaphor even more compelling,
in that the tissue damage from syphilis results, at least in part, from
white blood cells’ attacking previously healthy tissue. The result is a
cannibalistic extravaganza ironically reminiscent of “The Diary of a
Madman” from a few months earlier.

While the connection between the immune system and “cannibalism” is
admittedly somewhat indirect in this 1918 essay, it is nevertheless developed
much more explicitly in several other reformist essays published during the same
general period. In the following discussion, I will consider three of these
essays, all of which were published between 1915 and 1918 in the same journal,
New Youth, which also published not only “Diary of a Madman” but
also the 1918 “Random Thoughts” essay as well. In particular, I will focus on
the ways in which each of these essays develops an increasingly elaborate double
metaphor, whereby the metaphoric “cannibalism” on the part of the immune system’s
white blood cells itself becomes a model for the ways in which different elements
within Chinese society feed upon each other.

The first of these essays appeared in the 1915 inaugural issue of New
Youth. There, the editor of the journal, Chen Duxiu, published an
influential article entitled “Call to Youth,” where he explicitly elaborates a
metaphorical correspondence between individuals in society and cells in the human
body:

Youth have the same relationship to society that the new and lively cells
have with respect to the human body. In the metabolic process, the old
and rotten cells are constantly being weeded out, and openings are thus
created which are promptly filled with fresh and lively cells. If this
metabolic process functions correctly, the organism will be healthy; but
if the old and rotten cells are allowed to accumulate, however, the
organism will die. If this metabolic process functions properly at a
social level, society will flourish; but if the old and corrupt elements
are allowed to accumulate, society will be destroyed. (Chen 1)

In this essay, the references to metabolic processes and cell replenishment
represent an interesting synthesis of Western medical metaphors, on the one hand,
and of the longstanding tradition, in Chinese writings, of elaborating
metaphorical parallels between the human body and the social “body politic,” on
the other.[8]

The biomedical underpinning of the corporal metaphor is elaborated in more
detail in “The Thought of Two Modern Scientists,” an essay Chen Duxiu
wrote the following year, on the occasion of the death of Russian
biologist Elie Metchnikoff (1843[5?]-1916). In the second section of this
essay, Chen addresses Metchnikoff’s work and its relevance to human
longevity.[9] In particular, he stresses
Metchnikoff’s discovery of the significance of white blood cells in the
immune system, and specifically their ability to engulf and absorb harmful
microbes. To describe these white blood cells, Metchnikoff coined the term
“phagocyte,” derived from Greek terms “phago” (“to eat”) and “kyto”
(“tool”), and which Chen translated into Chinese as “shijun xibao,” or
“bacterium-eating cell.” The obvious question to ask next, Chen writes,
is whether the white blood cells can be seen as acting out of a sense of
duty to the larger body, or whether they are simply pursuing a narrow
course of individual self-interest. The answer is clear, he writes in
response to his own rhetorical question: they are simply acting in their
own self-interest, to feed themselves. This explains the apparent paradox
which Metchnikoff observes, whereby as the body ages and loses its vigor,
the white blood cells, by contrast, may become overly active,
attacking elements of the body itself (from the nervous system to the
cells responsible for hair pigment), “mistakenly” regarding them as
foreign pathogens. After a further discussion of the role played by
intestinal bacteria in the aging process, Chen concludes that once a way
is found to control (or even eliminate) these “cannibalistic” white blood
cells, it may be possible to extend human longevitty by a century or more
(49).

More than the specifically medical implications of Metchnikoff’s model, Chen was
apparently fascinated by the question of the social implications which this model
of phagocytes and their relationship to the larger body (politic), and of how
they might enable us to rethink the relationship between “altruism” and
“individualism.” Chen concludes the essay by applying some of these same
questions of altruism vs. individualism to his Metchnikoff himself:

Although Metchnikoff advocates individualism, nonetheless the principles by which
he lived out his life were definitely not ones of absolute individualism.
Although he did not take benevolence and altruism to be ultimate ends, his
actions were nonetheless compatible with these general principles (51).

What we see here, therefore, is Chen’s attempt to use biological metaphors to
provide a model for a position of constructive social criticism, one which avoids
the dual dangers of self-effacing conformism and “altruism,” on the one hand, as
well as that of “absolute individualism” (e.g., the white blood cells which
destroy the body itself), on the other.

In 1918 fellow reformist Hu Shi developed this same immune system
metaphor in the lead article of a New Youth special issue on Ibsen.
Hu Shi concludes the article with a medical metaphor inspired by the figure of
Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s play, “Enemy of the People”:

It is as if [Ibsen] were saying, “People’s bodies all rely on the innumerable
white blood cells in their bloodstream to be perpetually battling the harmful
microbes that enter the body, and to make certain that they are all completely
eliminated. Only then can the body be healthy and the spirit complete.” The
health of the society and of the nation depend completely on these white blood
cells, which are never satisfied, never content, and at every moment are battling
the evil and the filthy elements in society, and only then can there be hope for
social improvement and advancement. (Hu 20)

When we read this essay in conjunction with Chen’s original 1915 one, we realize
that what is implied is that the “evil and filthy elements in society” are
actually not foreign pathogens, but rather they are none other than the
same “old and rotten” cells from the body itself. Therefore, in this essay–almost precisely contemporaneous with Lu Xun’s identification, in “Diary of a
Madman,” of cannibalism as the metaphorical condition from which society must
attempt to extricate itself–we here have instead an implicit argument in
support of figurative cannibalism, a call for social “white blood cells” to
seek out and consume “the evil and filthy elements in society.” An act of
collective self-awakening, therefore, implies a process of self-alienation, a
systematic identification and excision of unprogressive elements.

While Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu were all leading members of the May
Fourth Movement, they nevertheless all occupied quite distinct positions
within Chinese ideology and politics. Chen Duxiu was one of the founders
of the Chinese Communist Party, while Lu Xun made a point of never joining
the party, though he worked closely with several Party leaders during the
1920s and 1930s. Hu Shi, meanwhile, ended up siding with the
Kuomingtang and consequently has been generally reviled in much Mainland
historiography.[10] Despite these
manifest differences in their political and aesthetic orientations, it is
nevertheless striking that they have each come together on this same
medico-political metaphor of the cannibalistic white blood cells.
Somewhat independently of the meaning which they each originally might
have intended the metaphor to convey, this metaphor itself can
nevertheless be read deconstructively, suggesting a body at war with
itself, but the underlying implication being that this condition is, in
fact, part of the status quo. Young and lively cells must, for
the benefit of the whole, seek to eliminate and replace old and tired
ones. The boundary between productive regeneration and cannibalistic
self-consumption, therefore, is an exceedingly tenuous one, largely
contingent on the speaker’s relationship with the elements which are doing
the “consuming.”

The irony inherent in these various white blood cell metaphors is that while
Metchnikoff originally suggested that the elimination of these cells would, in
effect, forestall the aging process, in the metaphorical formulations of many of
these May Fourth reformers, the white blood cells’ ability to feed on ossified
portions of the social Self becomes an asset, rather than a liability. Hu Shi
and company are, in effect, arguing that we must combat social cannibalism
with cannibalism, devouring those reactionary elements of society before
they can succeed in devouring us.

These sorts of physiological metaphors represent a chiasmatic intersection of
objectivity and fantasy. They draw on an increasingly detailed medical
understanding of the structure and function of the human immune system, while at
the same time reducing the imaginary space of the nation to a highly metaphoric
plane. The increased precision with which the function and behavior of these
white blood cells is described goes hand-in-hand with an increased degree of
abstraction in the description of human behavior.

Furthermore, it is highly appropriate that it was specifically the immune system
which provided the May-Fourth-period reformers with one of their favorite
models
in this struggle to define themselves through the mediated gaze of the other,
appropriate in that the immune system is itself essentially a machine of
self-recognition and self-reproduction, one which functions by reducing processes
of identification to the barest heuristic strategies. In fact, the immune system
can even be seen as a quintessential sublimation of the process of
self-identification, whereby the process of “identification” operates essentially
independently of the “self” which it ostensibly presupposes. Accordingly, the
immune-system metaphor provides an ironically apt model of a “pure” form of
cannibalism, as well as an illustration of its theoretical limits. In the case
of the immune system, relations of identity and alterity are explicitly created
in the process of recognition itself.

The coherence of the organism, therefore, is itself premised on a continual
struggle of identity politics at the cellular level. Phagocytotic consumption on
the part of white blood cells represents a conceptual limit-point for our
understanding of cannibalism–it is, in a sense, not “true” cannibalism,
because the cells only devour that which they recognize as “Other.” At the same
time, however, the functioning of these cells illustrates the degree to which
these categories of Self and Other are never a priori givens, but rather are
themselves the product of metaphorical processes of reading itself.

In a critical overview of more recent Western medical models of the immune
system, feminist theorist Donna Haraway suggests that these models come to assume
a notion of “identity” as merely an amorphous, decentered play of difference:

Does the immune system–the fluid, dispersed, networking
techno-organic-textual-mythic system that ties together the more stodgy and
localized centers of the body through its acts of recognition–represent the
ultimate sign of altruistic evolution towards wholeness, in the form of the means
of co-ordination of a coherent self? (219)

“In a word, no,” she writes, in reply to her own rhetorical question. The
notions of “self” presupposed by these immune system models are, instead,
continually contested and always already “under erasure.” While Haraway
posits that this deconstructive turn in immune system models represents a
specifically “post-modern,” late-twentieth-century development, my reading
of these May-Fourth-period texts suggests that many of these
deconstructive implications were latently present in the model all along.

The “Western” medical and hygienic perspectives being introduced into
China during the May Fourth era contributed to a number of radical shifts in
the
understanding of the constitution of not only the human body itself, but also
the social communities and societies which these bodies inhabit. One of the
more prominent examples of Chinese incorporation of Western medical knowledge is
that of these immunological models of social organization. Ironically, however,
one of the implications of these immunological models, as they were developed in
the May Fourth era, involves precisely a recognition of the inherent contingency
of the processes by which corporal or social bodies are differentiated from
“foreign” elements. That is to say, the act of incorporating “Other” (Western)
models ironically resulted in an implicit rethinking of the conceptual basis upon
which the boundaries between “Self” and “Other” are constructed in the first
place.

Journeys into the Interior

Mo Yan Sir Mo Yan Sir what’s wrong please wake up This guy wrote Red
Sorghum but he’s a fledgling with alcohol can’t hold his liquor but comes
to Liquorland to stir up trouble take him to the hospital bring a car over first
give him some carp broth to sober him up carp promotes lactation don’t tell me he
just had a baby a meat boy set it in a big gilded platter […]

Mo Yan, The Republic of Wine

The preceding May Fourth-era explorations into “cannibalistic” practices deep
within the human body are ironically mirrored by the allegorical investigation of
cannibalistic allegations deep within China’s own geographic interior in the 1993
novel The Republic of Wine by one of contemporary China’s most
pre-eminent writers, Mo Yan. Born into a peasant family in 1955 and
raised in
rural Northern China, Mo Yan began publishing short stories and novels in
the
mid-1980s. Though he is sometimes grouped with the experimental writers who came
of age in the 1980s (including figures such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Can Xue, etc.), Mo
Yan’s early fiction tends to emphasize conventional storytelling and rural
subject matter more than these other authors, and as such would be more
accurately categorized as a “native soil” author. The events associated with the
4 June 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square appear to have had a significant
influence on him, and it was in the latter part of that year that Mo Yan began
writing The Republic of Wine, which perhaps still stands as his most
innovative and unconventional work to date–whereby the social violence of the
Tiananmen military crackdown would almost appear to have been displaced onto the
narrative structure of the novel itself.

Mo Yan is probably best known for his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, on
which the renowned fifth-generation director Zhang Yimou based his
directorial
debut the following year. The earlier work opens with the evocative epigraph,
“[…] As your unfilial son, I am prepared to carve out my heart, marinate it in
sauce, have it minced and placed in three bowls, and lay it out as an offering in
a field of sorghum”; and acts of symbolic cannibalism similarly lie at the heart
of the work itself. For example, the secret recipe of the novel’s trademark
wine is that it is fermented with human urine. Furthermore, later in the novel,
there is an extended description of how, during the Chinese civil war, previously
domesticated dogs gone wild feed on the decaying flesh of the human corpses which
litter the landscape, and how the protagonists themselves have no other recourse
but to feed on this dog flesh, flesh which is only one step away from their own.
In this way, the canine-mediated cannibalism becomes a powerful metaphor for the
internecine warfare in which China found itself in the 1940s following the
withdrawal of the Japanese troops.

The Republic of Wine, which Mo Yan began to write roughly three
years later, builds quite directly on the thematic precedent set by Red
Sorghum–literalizing Red Sorghum‘s attention to
bacchanalian excess and cannibalistic transgression, even as it transposes the
earlier novel’s concerns onto a more self-consciously fictional plane. The
Republic of Wine constitutes not only a journey into the fictional space
of China’s interior hinterland, but furthermore can also be seen as a figurative
journey back into China’s own literary history of cannibalistic metaphors. For
instance, it tropes quite explicitly on one of China’s greatest travel
narratives: the fifteenth-century novel Journey to the West,
whose own assorted
allusions to cannibalistic practice constitute part of the cultural background of
Mo Yan’s development of the topic.[11]
Furthermore, The Republic of
Wine‘s attention to the theme of child cannibalism inevitably finds itself
in dialogue with Lu Xun’s own classic short story on the topic, with Mo Yan’s
novel alluding repeatedly to Lu Xun as an ironic avatar of literary canonicity.

The basic premise of the main The Republic of Wine narrative
concerns a hapless government investigator by the name of Ding Gou’er, who has
been sent to a fictional province deep in the Chinese interior to investigate
allegations of cannibalism, and specifically the consumption of human infants.
When he finally arrives at this “Liquorland,” his hosts treat him to a decadent
banquet, the pièce-de-résistance of which is a dish
consisting of a human boy prepared whole and roasted to a deep shade of brown:

The boy sat cross-legged in the middle of the gilded platter, golden brown
and oozing sweet-smelling oil, a giddy smile frozen on his face. Lovely,
naïve. Around him was spread a garland of green vegetable leaves and
bright red radish blossoms. The stupefied investigator swallowed back the
juices that rumbled up from his stomach as he gawked at the boy. A pair
of limpid eyes gazed back at him, steam puffed out of the boy’s nostrils,
and the lips quivered as if he were about to speak. (75)

Upon seeing this culinary confirmation of his darkest suspicions, Ding
Gou’er–who, by this point, is rather drunk–immediately attempts to
arrest his hosts for practicing cannibalism. His hosts, however,
patiently explain to him that it has all been a misunderstanding, and that
the dish in question is actually merely an elaborate culinary simulacrum,
carefully designed to mimic the shape and texture of a human infant, while
in fact consisting only of mundane comestibles:

“Old Ding, good old Ding, you’re a fine comrade with a strong humanistic bent,
for which I respect you,” Diamond Jin said. “But you’re wrong. You’ve made a
subjective error. Look closely. Is that a little boy?”

His words had the desired effect on Ding Gou’er, who turned to look at
the boy on the platter. He was still smiling, his lips parted slightly, as if he
were about to speak.

“He’s incredibly lifelike!” Ding Gou’er said loudly.

“Right, lifelike,” Diamond Jin repeated. “And why is this fake
child so lifelike? Because the chefs here in Liquorland are extraordinarily
talented, uncanny masters.”

The Party Secretary and Mine Director echoed his praise:

“And this isn’t the best that we have to offer! A professor at the
Culinary Academy can make them so that even the eyelashes flutter. No one dares
let his chopsticks touch one of hers.” (77)

What began as a scandal of cannibalism thus becomes, instead, a postmodern
scandal of representation and reference; and as the novel progresses, it remains
ambiguous (and ultimately irrelevant) whether that which the inebriated Ding
Gou’er witnessed was an actual human infant, or merely a culinary facsimile of
one. Furthermore, this radical skepticism towards the boundary between reality
and representation, referent and simulacrum, in turn comes to feed parasitically
on the plot of the actual novel itself, causing it to fold back upon itself, as a
spectral apparition of the author himself ends up falling into the fictional
abyss of the novel that he is attempting to write. To understand what is meant
by this, however, it will be necessary to return briefly to a description of the
structure and contents of the novel.

The core The Republic of Wine narrative, as summarized above, is
embedded within an outer narrative frame, in which a fictional “Mo Yan”
(appearing as a character within his own novel) is portrayed as trying to
complete the Republic manuscript. A central premise of this outer
narrative frame is that the fictional “Mo Yan” finds himself in the position of
being a reluctant cultural icon idolized by enthusiastic fans of Red
Sorghum, and in particular by a certain Li Yidou, a Ph.D. candidate in
liquor studies at the Brewer’s College in Liquorland, whose passion for wine is
rivaled only by his morbid fascination with cannibalism and other dark recesses
of the human soul. In this outer frame of the novel, the fictional “Mo Yan” is
in the process of writing the The Republic of Wine narrative itself,
even as he finds himself in epistolary dialogue with Li Yidou, who asks “Mo Yan”
to use his institutional connections to help him gain a foothold within the
publishing industry. Accordingly, Li Yidou sends “Mo Yan” a series of short
stories, each more outlandish than the last, several of which center around
discussions of children being raised with the express purpose of later being sold to
the slaughterhouse. The fictional “Mo Yan” finds himself in a conundrum over how
to continue to be encouraging in the face of what he increasingly perceives to be
an onslaught of literary drivel, a conundrum which is reinforced by his growing
ambivalence towards his own fiction.

About two thirds of the way through the novel, however, this boundary
between the outer and inner narrative frames begins to dissolve, as “Mo
Yan” ultimately succumbs to writer’s block and abandons the The
Republic of Wine narrative, deciding instead to travel to
“Liquorland” himself to pay Li Yidou a visit. In doing so, he effectively
abandons his presumptive authorial authority and steps into the same
fictional space that he has already condemned to incompleteness, becoming
an ironic Pirandellian character fleeing from his own authorship.

In The Republic of Wine, the act of cannibalism constitutes an
aporia of signification, on the basis of which the rest of the novel’s plot is
structured. The figure cannibalism similarly provides a bridge between Lu Xun’s
arch-canonical 1918 short story and Li Yidou’s own anti-canonical literary
rantings. Understood more metaphorically, the figure of cannibalism could be
seen as a pivot around which regimes of cultural and literary orthodoxy revolve,
whereby the orthodox canon and more “popular” or marginalized culture are seen as
actually being symbiotically dependent on each other, feeding parasitically on
the textual remains which the other has left behind. That is to say,
just as
cannibalism represents a challenge to the conventional boundaries between Self
and Other, individual and collective, similarly Mo Yan’s novel as a whole
interrogates the boundaries between literary orthodoxy and the popular or
transgressive genres against which it defines itself, together with the more
ontological boundary between literary representation and the outer reality which
literature seeks to denote.

To recapitulate briefly, the Zhu Yu controversy foregrounds the way in which the
specter of cannibalism has been, and continues to be, used to reinforce perceived
differences between different ethnic, national, or transnational social groups.
Furthermore, even as the subsequent debates bring attention to issues of social
signification, they also problematize issues of signification in general. That
is to say, a recurrent theme throughout many of the debates has been one of the
limits of reference: to what extent do the photographs actually denote a tangible
reality? And, how does this outer “reality” signified by these texts (be it
“actual” cannibalism, a performative act of cannibalism, or a performative
mimicry of a cannibalistic act, etc.) ultimately impact our understanding of the
implications of the subsequent debates? In the case of Lu Xun’s story, one of
the central issues was the boundary between “history” and “narrative”: what is
the relationship between narrative schemata and the historical “realities” which
they seek to describe? How are we to understand the ultimate “truth value” of
what appear to be metaphorical figures?

With the May Fourth immunological metaphors, a central issue was that of how to
understand the boundaries between “bodies” (either corporal or social bodies) and
the heterogeneous elements (pathogens or contaminants) against which they define
themselves. Finally, Mo Yan’s recent novel The Republic of Wine
brings us back to some key issues concerning the truth-value of (“literary”)
textual production, while at the same time encouraging a rethinking of the
conventional boundaries between orthodox canonicity and the heterogeneous array
of more “popular” or “marginal” discourses against which it seeks to define
itself. Also central to the novel was another version of the semiotic quandary
which we observed in the Zhu Yu debates–namely, the figure of the “perfect”
simulacrum, which stymies attempts to draw meaningful distinctions between
signifier and referent (which is paralleled in the Zhu Yu case by an ambiguity
between signifiers with referents and those without).

I will conclude here by returning to the Zhu Yu performance with which I began.
An intriguing detail which none of the published commentaries on the performance
has (to my knowledge) hitherto remarked upon is that, in each of the endlessly
reproduced images of Zhu Yu eating the human infant, he is always positioned in
front of, and below, a large poster containing a representation of what appears
to be an anatomy textbook (see Figure 2). The book is open to a page containing
four dissected
views of a human eye. Easily overlooked by viewers drawn, in horrified
fascination, to the cannibalistic drama unfolding below it, these ocular images
actually provide crucial insight into some of the issues involved in the
production, circulation, and visual consumption of the cannibalistic images
themselves.

These images of the human eye provide an alternate focal point for this
photograph, graphically illustrating the degree to which the primal scene it
depicts gains significance precisely through its process of being exchanged and
viewed by others. Furthermore, these defamiliarizing views of the human eye
constitute a useful reminder that our understanding of the human body, even our
own body, is never “pure” and direct, but rather is necessarily mediated through
different pre-existing orders of knowledge, vision, and experience.

The implications of this autonomous, disembodied gaze for our understanding of
the scene as a whole are multiple. First of all, the human visual system is
dissected and subjected to the cold, disinterested gaze of medical science. The
resulting medical gaze, in turn, provides an ironic counterpoint to the
sensationalistic, morbid gaze which the photographs inevitably elicit. As a
result, these scandalous and endlessly reproduced images are not as transparently
intelligible as one might think and are actually located at the site of multiply
fractured gazes: spectacular, medical, anthropological, political, and
epistemological. My intention in this essay has been to provide additional
perspectives to each of these components of the gaze, and in the process to
suggest that the figure of cannibalism may itself be seen as pointing to a
crucial border region wherein conventional categorical distinctions between Self
and Other, us and them, reality and representation are deconstructed and put on
display.

More generally speaking, last year’s cannibalism “scandal” presents us with a
problem of perception and perspective. On the one hand, a recurrent theme in
most of the ensuing discussions of Zhu Yu’s performance emphasized a sense of
cultural distance, of voyeuristically looking into a cultural space (Asian,
Chinese, Taiwanese, etc.) which is perceived as being either subtly or radically
distant from the socio-political location of the perceiver. On the other hand,
many of the discussions implicitly held this cannibalism up to “their own”
culturally specific standards, and indeed used the transgressive implications of
Zhu Yu’s performance rhetorically to reinforce their own assumptions about the
universality of certain cultural prohibitions.[13]

Under the reading I have outlined above, the figure of cannibalism itself
involves a paradoxical combination of identification and alterity, of violence
and desire. The act of incorporating into oneself flesh of an Other with whom
one shares a categorical identification, implicitly breaks down relations of
alterity, even as it retrospectively reinforces them. Accordingly, this
transcultural perception of cannibalism can itself provide a useful metaphor for
the act of transcultural perception itself. In perceiving “other” cultures, we
seek to understand, to internalize part of their inherent distance, even if only
to reaffirm their inherent distance from “our” own.

This “scandal” of cannibalism, therefore, encapsulates a compelling
problem from the perspective of cross-cultural perception. On the one
hand, many viewers are inclined to view cannibalism in absolute, universal
terms which transcend specific cultural difference. It is simply
unthinkable, according to this common view, that any human society would
knowingly and willing practice cannibalism. On the other hand, to the
extent that anthropologists recognize the possibility that some
societies might practice (or might have previously practiced) cannibalism,
they often proceed to attempt to contextualize these acts of cannibalism
by reducing them entirely to the cultural level–suggesting that
even actual acts of “actual” cannibalism are themselves metaphors for an
underlying symbolic meaning. The question of cannibalism thus
emblematizes, in a particularly graphic way, a problem which plagues all
cross-cultural hermeneutics–namely, how to negotiate the competing
impulses to view cultural alterity by one’s own standards, on the one
hand, or to bracket it as radically “Other,” on the other.

At the same time, I would suggest that the trope of cannibalism also presents a
potential model for how to rethink the possibility of cross-cultural perception
itself. Speaking in abstract terms, cross-cultural perception frequently
contains a dimension of epistemic violence, functioning as an act of symbolic
incorporation which, at the same time, retrospectively constructs and reaffirms
the imaginary boundaries between Self and Other which make such reading
meaningful in the first place. Like the figurative act of cannibalism itself,
cross-cultural perception is typically grounded on a uneasy combination of
epistemic violence and hermeneutic fusion, though the relative weightings of each
of these components will naturally differ according to the specific circumstances
involved. Just as the errant May Fourth white blood cells literally (re)shaped
their own corporal environment through incorporative acts of “reading” alterity,
I would propose a model of cross-cultural perception which is similarly grounded
on acts of scopically and/or intellectually “ingesting” socio-cultural
“alterity,” so as to reinforce, or restructure, the perceiver’s understanding of
epistemic networks by which that notion of “alterity” is produced in the first
place.