The Man with the Compound Eyes

I discovered his eyes weren't like human eyes. They were more like compound eyes composed of countless single eyes, the eyes of clouds, mountains, streams, meadowlarks and muntjacs, all arranged together. As I gazed, each little eye seemed to contain a different scene, and those scenes arranged to form a vast panorama the likes of which I had never seen.

I was dismayed when I read an article the other day about the Man Booker International Prize committee's decision to bow to Chinese diplomatic pressure and change the nationality of one of this year's nominees from “Taiwan” to “Taiwan, China” against that author's wishes: if a dissident writer can't rely on some little apolitical literary jury to symbolically back his fight against Chinese expansionism, what does that say about the world today? What power could a Chinese diplomat possibly bring to bear over a literary competition? I couldn't find the nominated title (The Stolen Bicycle) anywhere, but was pleased to discover The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi on a discount table at the book store; 'twas fated. While a sometimes didactic work of enviro-fiction, I was delighted to have made this author's acquaintance through his work and can only stress that, more than anything else, this is a Taiwanese book.

The Man with the Compound Eyes feels equal parts allegory, realism, and eco-warning. It opens on the uncharted Pacific island of Wayo Wayo: a resource-restricted landmass whose primitive population has the good sense to control their numbers by sending second-born sons on suicide missions across the waves when they turn fifteen. Yet, just as one so expelled, Atile'i, finds himself at the limits of his endurance and supplies, his canoe abruptly “lands” on a floating swirl of rubbish – the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, the Giant Garbage Gyre, the “Primeval Plastic Soup” – and he is saved. 

The past few years the government's poured tons of funding into reducing the amount of garbage in the vortex, but it's actually a scam. Think about it. Where is the trash supposed to be buried after it's been cleaned up? All the incinerators, landfills and advanced trash-sorting facilities on the island wouldn't have enough capacity to digest it all. You think Ilan and Taipei will welcome the garbage out of the goodness of their hearts? Dammit! Japan and China have been passing the buck, but garbage is fair, and now the ocean currents have broken the vortex up and everyone's getting what's coming to him.

Meanwhile, on the island of Taiwan, Alice Shih is a professor and writer whose husband and son are long overdue from a mountain-climbing trip, and the only thing that saves her from her despairing thoughts is the helpless kitten that washes up to the window of her seaside home via a rogue wave. The environment is changing in Taiwan – drilling causes earthquakes causes giant waves causes seashore erosion; the summers are increasingly hotter and the typhoon season wetter – and it's the aboriginal people who are feeling these changes the most; traditional fisherman are finding it harder to feed their families and prostitution is often the only option for a young woman new to the city. When a massive tsunami carries part of the trash vortex onto Taiwan's shores, not only does it further degrade the island's fragile environment, but Atile'i is literally deposited on Alice's doorstep; providing the perfect juxtaposition of pastoral innocence against modern dissipation.

Many other characters are introduced, including aboriginal people from different tribes who describe their disappearing traditional ways of life and share their unique folklore (I have no idea if these passages are accurate, but they might represent Wu Ming-Yi's attempts to record Taiwanese traditions before they're gone forever); including a Norse environmentalist whose father insisted on his traditional right to hunt one whale per year until he witnessed the inhumanity of the Newfoundland seal hunt, which turned him into an activist, too; including a German engineer who had been hired to tunnel a highway through a mountain on the island many years before, who now regrets the land-scarring project:

Going through a mountain to get from place to place as quickly as possible is one way of life, while going around is another. We thought we were making a scientific judgment, but actually we were making a lifestyle choice.

I do like this “lifestyle choice” passage as a fitting rebuke against modern excesses, but I often found the environmental bits to be overly long and scolding, and sometimes questionable (I really don't believe that callous and impatient Newfoundlanders skin seals alive, or that they homocidally attack protesters with their hakapiks). And, overall, I had to wonder if something was lost in translation:

“You know very well...” the man says, his ommatidium flickering, his compound eyes like an undertow that would suck you in, drag you down and drown you, “...there's nobody up there, at all. Nobody at all.”

I encountered many words that struck me oddly like “ommatidium” in that quote – words like elytra, columbarium, or comminuted – that while scientifically/literally accurate in translation, would never be the words used by a native English writer; what greater nuance am I missing out on? (For my own satisfaction, I'll retranslate these words as facets, carapace, mausoleum, and splintered.)

The Man with the Compound Eyes is somehow both an imaginative and an informative environmental fable, and while the lessons might have been a bit too unsubtle for my literary tastes, I'm very happy to have now read Wu Ming-Yi and have a bit more perspective on this Taiwanese writer and his points-of-view.

If the above makes the case for Wu Ming-Yi as Taiwanese, "the man with the compound eyes" (who I think is essentially the spirit of the island) explains to Alice's missing husband the nature of writing itself:

The man with the compound eyes said, "Animals like sea hares may not have much episodic or semantic memory, but animals with developed brains have episodic, semantic, and procedural memory, just like people. Migratory birds remember the seacoast, whales remember the boat that harpooned them, and seal pups that manage to avoid annihilation will remember the murderous coat-clad, club-carrying creature that chased them. I kid you not, they'll never forget. But only human beings have invented a tool to record memory... 

"There was thunder just now: this is a fact. And it's a fact that we're talking. But if there's no one to record what just happened in writing, the evidence of its occurrence will exist only in the episodic, semantic, and procedural memory of two people, you and me. But if you represented these memories in writing, you would discover that the mind adds massive amounts of material anytime it weaves an episodic memory. In this way, the world reconstructed in writing approximates even more closely what you call 'the realm of nature.' It's an organism."

As she spends time with Atile'i and learns from his more organic way of living, Alice is finally able to return to her own writing; proving the urgency for nativist writers like Wu Ming-Yi and their efforts to preserve and disseminate truth as only humans can.