The Republic of Wine

The Investigation That Goes Nowhere

Ding Gou’er arrives in Liquorland — a coal-mining city somewhere in the interior of China — with an investigator’s credentials and a specific mandate: to determine whether local officials are truly eating infants prepared as gourmet delicacies. The rumor has reached the Ministry of Justice. Someone must look into it. Ding Gou’er is that someone, and from the moment he arrives he begins to dissolve.

What defeats the investigation is not violence or obstruction in the conventional thriller sense. It is hospitality. The officials of Liquorland are generous hosts. They feed their visitors extraordinary food and pour extraordinary quantities of liquor, and the combination of deference and alcohol makes it impossible to know, at any given moment, whether what Ding Gou’er is eating is what he thinks it is, or whether his horror at the food is drunken fantasy, or whether the distinction matters when everyone around him has already decided it doesn’t. By the time the investigation reaches anything resembling a conclusion, Ding Gou’er has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture he came to expose that the reader cannot be certain he remembers why he came.

This is the novel’s central satirical mechanism: the investigator sent to expose corruption becomes corrupt, not through cowardice or venality but through the sheer social pressure of the world he enters. Mo Yan has always been interested in how systems reproduce themselves through seemingly ordinary human interaction — feasts, toasts, the obligations of hospitality — and The Republic of Wine pushes this interest to its most extreme expression. Liquorland is a place where everything, including moral clarity, is eventually consumed.

Letters and Embedded Stories

Running parallel to the investigation is a correspondence between a character named Mo Yan and an aspiring writer called Li Yidou — a doctoral student in Liquorland who is studying the region’s brewing traditions and sends stories to the famous novelist for comment. The stories appear in the novel in full, interrupting the main narrative with their own fictions. The correspondence itself is a fiction about the making of fiction, and the stories-within-the-novel comment on the investigation-outside-them in ways that are sometimes ironic, sometimes ominous, and occasionally indistinguishable from the main plot.

This three-layer structure — investigation, correspondence, embedded stories — is the formal achievement that separates The Republic of Wine from Mo Yan’s other work. The layers do not stay separate. ‘Mo Yan’ in the correspondence is compromised in ways that mirror Ding Gou’er’s compromise in the main narrative. Li Yidou’s stories begin to contaminate the investigation with their imagery and logic. By the novel’s end the layers have collapsed into each other, and what appeared to be a stable satirical vantage point — the clever author who sees clearly what his characters cannot — has been revealed as another position within the same system.

The meta-fictional game would be merely clever if the satire beneath it were not so genuinely ferocious. Mo Yan was writing about the Reform era’s particular brand of corruption: the combination of Communist Party loyalty, market liberalization, and the culture of official banquets and gift-giving that produced a ruling class that had learned to eat very well indeed. The cannibalism is a metaphor only in the way that Swiftian proposals are metaphors — which is to say, barely.

Rabelais in China

The novel Mo Yan is most frequently compared to is Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, another grotesque, carnivalesque attack on a political system through the medium of the body and its excesses. But The Republic of Wine is in some ways more Rabelaisian than Grass — more interested in the specific pleasures of food and drink, in the way appetite is both human and corruptible, in the comedy that emerges when the digestive and the political are forced into the same sentence.

The Republic of Wine was written in 1992, before Red Sorghum was Mo Yan’s best-known work internationally, and it represents the most formally ambitious moment in a career that is notable for formal ambition throughout. Red Sorghum (1987) is more direct in its epic violence; Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1995) is more expansive in its historical scope; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) is more daring in its use of Buddhist reincarnation as a narrative structure. But The Republic of Wine is where Mo Yan most fully uses form itself — the unstable, mutually contaminating layers — as the vehicle of meaning.

The Nobel Prize in 2012 brought Western readers to Mo Yan’s work, and many started with Red Sorghum (aided by the film). The Republic of Wine rewards readers who have already spent time in Northeast Gaomi and want to understand what Mo Yan’s formal range actually encompasses. It is not the beginning, but for those who have followed him far enough, it is essential.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Mo Yan’s most formally ambitious and most darkly funny novel: a Rabelaisian satire of Reform-era Chinese corruption in which the investigator, the author, and the reader are all eventually implicated. Demanding, disorienting, and at its best genuinely brilliant.