Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

For Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, I want to talk about two things: humor and time.

I do not claim much literary critical skill — my school essays were often torn apart by teachers — so when I read, I care less about fine technique than about what those choices make a reader feel. Technique exists to serve the book’s larger subject.

“People in the 1950s were relatively pure; in the 1960s, fanatical; in the 1970s, fearful; in the 1980s, calculating; in the 1990s, deeply corrupted.”

The first shock the novel gave me was its sense of time. Through six reincarnations Mo Yan spans fifty of modern China’s fastest-changing years: from mud houses to brick, carts to cars, from village innocence to worldly cunning; from communal land to private ownership and the return of personal ambition; from shifting ideals in people’s minds. Fitting that scale into one novel should be nearly impossible. Mo Yan’s move is to cast five animal “lives” — donkey, ox, pig, dog, monkey — as reincarnations of landlord Ximen Nao. The animals keep instinct and also leftover human wit and temperament. Born into the human world yet set apart from it, the protagonist can read human feeling while remaining, bodily, an outsider — a camera recording fifty years of change. From that angle Mo Yan can reveal desire behind closed doors: Blue Liberation’s affair with Pang Chunmiao; Ximen Jinlong’s dealings with Pang Kangmei. As Ximen Nao the man, those scenes would be hard to justify; as animals, they become possible. That imprint of an era on every character is one of the book’s lasting powers.

The second shock is Mo Yan’s humor — the ability to stay funny inside pain and pressure. Unlike Yu Hua, who sometimes keeps humor for the writer and pain for the reader, Mo Yan sends you on a roller coaster between the two. Under that humor is a kind of release: after living through too much, you can still laugh. Across reincarnations Ximen Nao’s rage softens; animal nature takes more space; memory grows quieter. Mo Yan once wrote: the dead cannot live again, and the living must keep living — crying or laughing, it is still living. In Ximen Nao we see a calm toward life’s rises and falls, and a refusal to cling too hard to any single moment. Humor is that attitude made audible: laughing hardest at the hardest times.

This note could end here, but while resting I noticed a reading of the Great Arbiter of Fate from classical poetry: death continues life, and life begins death — a cycle without end. Mo Yan’s view of life and death in this novel sits in that Chinese tradition of treating both with an even mind. David Eagleman’s idea of three deaths — biological, legal, social — also echoes here: social death is being forgotten. Rituals that remember ancestors keep people from vanishing completely; memory itself becomes a kind of reincarnation. Books remember writers; forests remember animals; families remember people.

Wherever the old wind blew, for better or worse — guide the next wind, and keep going with it.

The dead cannot live again, and the living must keep living. Crying or laughing, it is still living. — Mo Yan

“Wine and song — how long is a life?” — Cao Cao