Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature: Essays on Mo Yan and His Novels in China 9819906652, 9789819906659

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Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature Essays on Mo Yan and His Novels in China Edited by Lin Jiang

Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature

Lin Jiang Editor

Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature Essays on Mo Yan and His Novels in China

Editor Lin Jiang Sichuan International Studies University Chongqing, China

ISBN 978-981-99-0665-9 ISBN 978-981-99-0666-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6 Translation from the Chinese language edition: “Chinese Perspectives: Essays on Mo Yan’s Novels” by Lin Jiang, © Qsinghua University Press 2016. Published by Qsinghua University Press. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

On 11 October 2012, the Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 was awarded to Mo Yan ‘who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary’. Mo Yan was the first winner who writes in Chinese with the Chinese nationality in the Chinese history. As a source of national pride, he became widely read and discussed in China. Gradually, a large body of criticism has formed, and literary study of his works has become not only acceptable but expected. Due to language barrier, few of Western readers had the opportunity to learn how the Chinese academic community had argued about Mo Yan and his writing styles, subject matters, or relation to the long canon of Chinese literature before and after the award he received. It was one of the major reasons I decided to publish a collection of this kind. I chose eighteen of the most critical essays on Mo Yan and his novels in the collection. The essays were originally written in Chinese by scholars and critics from Mainland China, Chinese Macao, and Taiwan. The Chinese collection was published by China Social Sciences Press in 2014. A year later, I organised a translation team, including my colleagues at Zhejiang Normal University such as Yan Li, Jianxin Xia, Fangrong Chen, and Yanfang Tang. Considering the length of the translated collection and some other factors, I decided to translate fourteen essays of them. From September 2014 onward, all the members of the team worked hard on the translation project. Though we encountered many problems, we succeeded in finishing all the translations by the end of May 2015. v

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In order to ensure fluid and accurate translations, I invited Patrick D. Murphy, former director of the English Department at the University of Central Florida, to help review and edit some parts of the English version. I am grateful for Mr. Murphy and all the Chinese contributors of the essays. My thanks also go to the members of the translation team. Without their full devotion and dedication to the work, this translation project would not have been completed. The 14 essays in the translated collection present us with the most enlightening research findings on Mo Yan and his novels. The contributors are famous scholars and critics like Jingze Li, vice-president of Chinese Writers Association, Jie Guo, doctoral supervisor and vicepresident of South China Normal University, and Guangwei Cheng, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Renmin University of China, etc. They have discussed such a large range of topics as Mo Yan and the Chinese spirit, the revelation of Mo Yan, hallucination and localisation, and folkness in The Transparent Carrot, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, Red Sorghum Clan, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, The Republic of Wine, Sandalwood Death, and Frog, etc. It should be noted that the translated collection—the first of its kind in English at that time—was published by Tsinghua University Press in 2016. And as far as the current version is concerned, I have made some major modifications in terms of its readability of translations and the specification of citations. I believe that this collection with more accurate and fluent translations will shed much light on the international academic community and bring the readers outside China a Chinese sensibility and critical analysis of Mo Yan and his novels. Chongqing, China

Lin Jiang

Contents

Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit Jingze Li

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Originality and Transcendence: What Mo Yan Has Enlightened Us Jie Guo

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Hallucination, Localisation, and Folk Narrative Tradition: Mo Yan and Literary Criticism Guangwei Cheng

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Folkness and Literature: The Chinese Experience in Mo Yan’s Narratives Ning Zhang

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Mnemonics: Intergenerational Metaphor, Ideological Fantasy, and Memory Field: A Reading of Mo Yan’s The Transparent Carrot Min Wang Childhood Narrative: The Richness of Meaning in Reinterpretation of Mo Yan’s The Transparent Carrot Yusong Wang

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CONTENTS

Samsara, Violence, and Satire: A Discussion of the Absurd Narration in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out Gabriel Wu

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The Carnivalesque Narrative of the Devil Dance: Mo Yan’s Narrative Characteristics in Red Sorghum Clan Guoxing Ding and Haiquan Chen

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The History of the Image: A Discussion of Gains and Losses in Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Clan Chun Jiang

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Is Big Breasts and Wide Hips an ‘Almost Reactionary Work’? Comments on the Conceptions and Methods of Mr. He Guorui’s Literary Criticism Zhuxian Yi and Guo’en Chen

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The Fact and Fable in The Republic of Wine: About Mo Yan’s Narrative Strategies Yingxiong Zhou

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Elegy of History and the Swan Song of Life: A Discussion of Mo Yan’s New Novel Sandalwood Death Chen Han

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‘Biopolitics’ and Historical Writing: A Discussion of Mo Yan’s Frog Songrui Li

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Mo Yan and William Faulkner: Construction and Interpretation of Folk Mythology Yingfeng Li

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Appendix: Partial Lists of Mo Yan’s Works in Both Chinese and English

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Index

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Editors and Contributors

About the Editor Lin Jiang Ph.D. in Translation from Nanjing University, is currently a professor and master’s supervisor at Sichuan International Studies University. He has been awarded a number of professional titles such as ‘The New-Century 151 Excellent Talent’ granted by Zhejiang Provincial Government, and ‘Distinguished Scholar’ granted by Jishou University, and among others. In addition, he serves as the vice president of Zhejiang Translators Association, an expert member of Translators Association of China, the executive vice president of International Association for Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Research, and the editor-in-chief of Asia-Pacific Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. His academic interest lies in translation theory and practice. He has conducted a number of high-level research projects, published over 20 books (including two monographs, seven translated works and 12 textbooks) and more than 60 academic articles, and edited four book series, such as ‘Translation Series of Ecological Literary Criticism’ published by China Social Sciences Press, ‘The National Textbook Series for Undergraduates Majoring in Translation and Interpreting’ published by Tsinghua University Press, ‘Wuling Series of Research and Translation’ and ‘Textbook Series of College English Test (Band Four)’ published by Nanjing University Press.

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Due to his outstanding academic achievements, he has been awarded many honors. His two monographs entitled A Study of Liang Qichao’s ‘Random Translation Method’ and A Study of Translation from Multidimensional Perspectives won the third prize of excellent achievements in Philosophy and Social Sciences of Zhejiang Province and the third prize of excellent achievements of Hunan Provincial Social Sciences Federation respectively. As a translator, he has published so far a number of translated articles and works with a total of more than 2.5 million words.

Contributors Guo’en Chen is a professor and doctoral advisor of the College of Chinese Language and Literature at Wuhan University. He is also Director of the Chinese Society for Wen Yiduo Studies, vice director of the Cross-straits Society for Liang Shiqiu Studies and deputy general secretary of the Chinese Society for Lu Xun Studies. In addition, he has authored fifteen monographs, including Romanticism and 20th-Century Chinese Literature and Transmission and Acceptance of Soviet Literature in China; published more than two hundred papers and completed several national and provincial research projects. In addition, he won some academic awards from Zhejiang and Hubei governments. Haiquan Chen was born in Xingguo County, Jiangxi Province, in August 1979. From 2000 to 2004, he majored in Chinese and Literature at the Department of Chinese, Journalism and Communication at Gannan Normal University. Now he teaches Chinese at the Shangyou Middle School in Jiangxi Province. Guangwei Cheng Ph.D. in Literature, is a professor and doctoral advisor at the Renmin University of China. He is also vice director of the Association of Contemporary Chinese Literature. He focuses his studies on the history of contemporary Chinese literature. He has published more than two hundred papers in academic journals, such as Literary Review and Literature and Art Studies, and authored more than ten monographs, such as Biography of Ai Qing, History of Modern Chinese Literature, and Literary Imagination and Literary Country. He has also edited more than ten collections, such as Studies on Culture and Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Collection of Studies on the 1980s.

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Guoxing Ding, born in 1951, is an associate professor at the College of Journalism and Communication at Gannan Normal University. He focuses his studies on modern and contemporary Chinese literature. He has published some books and academic articles. Jie Guo Ph.D. in Literature, is a professor and doctoral advisor at Shenzhen University. He is also vice director of the China Society for the Study of Songs, the China Society for Qu Yuan Studies, and Guangdong Chinese Literature Association. He was a visiting scholar at Cornell University and former vice president at South China Normal University. He has authored Ancient Thoughts and Poetry, New Theories on Qu Yuan, and edited History of Chinese Literature. Chen Han, Ph.D. in Literature, is a professor at the College of Chinese Literature at Qingdao University. His research area includes Chinese movies and modern Chinese literature. He published several novels and papers in periodicals such as Tianya and Literature and Art Review. His principal works include publications on memories of the post-revolutionary era, new women, etc. Chun Jiang was born in 1943 in Yixing City, Jiangsu Province, China. In 1966, after graduating from the Chinese Department at Yangzhou University, he worked as a professor of art and calligraphy at Shandong Youth University of Political Science and is now retired. He has published more than seventy papers on aesthetics, literature, art, and calligraphy in Literature and Art Studies and Qilu Journal; in addition, he has authored one monograph, edited two books, and published several calligraphic works. Jingze Li, a graduate of Peking University, is the Party Secretary of the China Writers Association. He worked as an editor for the Fiction Monthly and chief editor for People’s Literature. Since the 1990s, he has been one of China’s most active literary critics, and his criticism enjoys a high reputation both within the literary circle and among readers. He has authored several essays and literary criticism, and his latest prose collection entitled A Quiet Heart was published in 2012. Songrui Li Ph.D. in Literature, graduated in 2013 from Peking University. Now, he works at the Chinese National Academy of Arts. He focuses his studies on modern Chinese literature, criticism of contemporary Chinese literature, film and drama, and cultural studies. He has

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already published more than twenty papers in academic periodicals, such as Modern Chinese Literature Studies, Contemporary Cinema, Art Criticism, Soochow Academic and Router: A Journal of Cultural Studies. In addition, he has compiled the anthology entitled Selected Novels of the Sun Society. Yingfeng Li a graduate of the Chinese Language Department at Henan University, was a professor, graduate advisor and head of the Teaching and Research Section at the Chinese Department at PLA University of Foreign Languages. Later on, she moved to the PLA Academy of Art, a professor at the Literature and Art Research Center and chief editor of the Journal of the PLA Academy of Art. She mainly focuses her studies on comparative studies of contemporary Chinese novels. She has published a monograph and more than fifty academic papers in Literature and Art Studies, Foreign Literature Studies, and Comparative Literature in China. Min Wang Ph.D. in Literature, is a professor and doctoral advisor at Xinjiang University and director of Xinjiang Cultural Development Research Center. She focuses her studies on ethnic literature as well as media and culture. She has published more than 150 literary and artistic reviews in periodicals, such as World Literature and Newspaper of Literary Theory; more than forty academic papers in the journal Literature and Art Forum; and the novels April 5th and Reed Flowers and Red Pods. She has also published four monographs. Yusong Wang earned his B.A. from the College of Chinese Language and Literature at Wuhan University and his M.A. from the Department of Philosophy at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. He is now an associate professor of the School of Journalism and Cultural Communication at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. He teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature, foreign language literature, and language and literature. He has published papers in Jianghan Tribune, Hubei Social Sciences and Journal of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law. Gabriel Wu earned his B.A., B.A. (Honors), and M.A. degrees in Chinese Studies from the National University of Singapore and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle. He first taught at the National University of Singapore. He later moved to Hong Kong to work as an assistant professor in the Chinese, Translation & Linguistics Department at the City University of Hong Kong. He

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focuses his studies on modern and contemporary Chinese literature. His academic publications include articles in journals of China and an edited book entitled Contemporary Literature and Humanist Ecology. In creative writing, he has published five books on fiction and poetry, and the latest one titled ‘A Half Existence’ won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2010. Zhuxian Yi is a professor at the College of Chinese Language and Literature at Wuhan University and a member of the China Writers Association. He has published several monographs, including Studies on Lu Xun’s Thoughts, Biography of Hu Shi, Hu Shi and the Modern Chinese Culture, etc. He has also published many papers. He was awarded several prizes at both the provincial and national levels. Ning Zhang is a professor and doctoral advisor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University and director of the Research Center for Contemporary Chinese New Poetry. His research areas cover Chinese literature of the 20th century, contemporary Chinese popular culture, and Chinese folk literature. He has published fourteen monographs, including Wisdom in Narration, The Dusk of Land (revised edition), and Cretaceous Literature Memorandum. He is also a deputy editor-in-chief of Chinese Literature Today. This periodical has grown out of cooperation between the Oklahoma University periodical World Literature Today and the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Beijing Normal University. Yingxiong Zhou earned his Ph.D. at University of California in San Diego and is an emeritus professor at National Chiao Tung University. His research area includes literary theories, comparative studies on Eastern and Western novels, and Irish literature. In recent years, his research focus consists of Gothic and uncanny literature. He has authored five books and edited several collections and periodicals.

Notes on Translators

Lin Jiang received his Ph.D. degree in Translation at Nanjing University, and he is currently a professor at Sichuan Foreign Studies University in Southwestern Chongqing, China. He published two monographs, seven translated works, 12 textbooks, and more than 60 articles in scholarly journals. See more details in ‘Editors and Contributors’ in the book. Luobin Jin, M.A. in English Language and Literature, is a lecturer at Shaoxing University, has published an academic paper in Foreign Theoretical Trends, an influential journal in China, hosted three projects and participated in eleven projects at the national, provincial, and ministerial level. She has also edited six textbooks and six translations, such as Ecological Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy (2013) and The Product Manager’s Handbook (Fourth Edition) (2017). Yan Li, a Ph.D. candidate at Beijing International Studies University, is an English teacher at Zhejiang Normal University. She started her translation practice in early 2000 and has published several translated books, such as The Civil War (2014) and Sichuan Opera in China (2015). Jianxin Xia, M.A. in English Language and Literature, is now an associate professor at Zhejiang Normal University offering lectures on English reading and writing, computer-aided English teaching and research, and

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English translation of Chinese classics. His translation endeavours mainly include Selected Stories of Li Yu (2011) and String Puppetry of Quanzhou (2015). Fangrong Chen, associate professor of the College of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang Normal University, is also the deputy dean of the Translation and Interpreting Department. She earned her M.A. in Translation Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. She developed her research interests in the Chinese-English translation of intangible cultural heritage and modern Chinese literature to the English world. She has authored several papers on translation studies, and her latest translation work entitled The Chinese Writing Brush was published in 2014. Yanfang Tang is a (co-)translator of quite a few works, including the Chinese translation of some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories (2003) and Thomas A. Angelo et al.’s Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (2006) and the English translation of Selections of Li Yu’s Stories (2011). With a Ph.D. degree in English Language and Literature, he is currently a professor at Jiaxing University, Zhejiang Province, China. However, his academic interest lies in classical Chinese literature in English translation.

Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit Jingze Li

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The Monumental Significance of the Win

Mo Yan has been ‘canonized’. His huge appetite and tremendous energy, his joy and ruthlessness, his broad horizon and glamorous variety, and even his eccentricity have been the most important spectacles in the past two decades of modern literature written in the Chinese language. Although he has enjoyed perhaps the highest literary renown and undergone repeated interpretation, sometimes even over-interpretation, he is not among the most favoured or detested writers. In China, a reader may detest Wang Shuo1 for his offensiveness; or he/she might show his/her unrestrained admiration for Wang Anyi2 for she has offered them a way to visualise their experience and existence. However, it seems 1 Wang Shuo (1958–) is a Beijing-based Chinese writer. His works are noted for the presentation of rebellious behaviours on the part of the culturally confused generation after the ‘Cultural Revolution’. 2 Wang Anyi (1954–) is a Shanghai-based Chinese female writer. She usually gives vivid and detailed descriptions of ordinary city dwellers in her works.

Source: Fiction Review, 2003(1): pp. 72–76 J. Li (B) China Writers Association, Beijing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_1

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quite unlikely that they would treat Mo Yan with similar passions. It is true that Mo Yan, born in an era of intense cultural conflicts, has been encountering prejudice, misunderstanding, and determined opposition. But it is hard, for either his protesters or his admirers, to adopt a simple and consistent attitude towards him. Mo Yan’s broad horizon makes any definition elusive. We somewhat restructure our world outlook and define ourselves through admiring or detesting some writers. In this sense, a writer helps to build a society’s self-awareness, and they will be definitely classified and revised by social consciousness. It is like a Borgesian scene: books are produced one after another and piled up in a vast, dim library where librarians scurry like apparitions, shredding most of them after a glance and shelving the rest through a labyrinth of corridors. Hence the question: where should we shelve Mo Yan’s works? This supposed question indicates the complicated relationship between Mo Yan and his time, between his contemporary readers and literature.

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Bizarre Plots and Fantastic Imagination: Originality in Mo Yan’s Literary Creation

Mo Yan rarely expresses his views on his era directly. His novella Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to catch a contemporary event, which ends up with a failure. In the story, the old laid-off worker has to make a living in an ironic manner, running a small trysting place in the backwoods for dating lovers. This plot construction implicitly transforms the social issue of unemployment into a comedy of desire—excreting (a pay toilet inspired the idea of the love tryst), peeping (Shifu kept watch outside the hut, glancing), flesh and cash (the two reinforce each other), centre versus border (to protest at the municipal hall or to survive on the outskirts), and lawful versus illegal (the love tryst may be illegal as it encourages illegitimate desires; it may be licensed, through the bribery of some expensive cigarettes). This series of subplots show that ‘Shifu tends to do anything for a laugh’ as the title of the novella suggests. The novella is, after all, of Mo Yan’s own making. Society has its schedule, and so does a writer. Mo Yan wilfully drives the train of his story onto his track. He is often arbitrary and wilful. Nevertheless, he has the self-confidence to handle everything under whatever circumstances. However, in the case of Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, although

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Mo Yan has grasped with ease all the major points, he fails to develop them. It is as if he were unfortunately trapped in a narrow world and had to squeeze through it to hastily bring his writing to a close. This feeble story is a rare specimen of Mo Yan’s works. A writer’s weakness usually constitutes the lower limit of his power. Once Mo Yan steps out of the love tryst and turns back at the end of a certain century, walking all the way towards the fields and the past, his strength will be regained. I am not talking about his subject matter, but pointing out the fact that Mo Yan’s innate, artistic building is of a lofty nature; his vision is an integrated and panoramic one. He is capable of perceiving what is happening but not why it happens. Such a writer is not to be evaluated in isolation. He needs to be grudgingly given the freedom of ethical and aesthetic judgement. All the human weaknesses, perceptions, and experiences come and go like grass in a cycle of flourishing and withering, like the bursts of thunder and lightning, rain and dew. All human beings share the equal existence of glory and defy any outside judgement. Therefore, although Mo Yan is best known for Red Sorghum, he has prepared all the building blocks of his world in his earlier work The Transparent Carrot . The novella was seen as a sort of scandal by the mainstream literary circles at that time, but a bold challenge or a raid by the writer and his supporters. Today, the story presents its tenderness and beauty to us. Only when we know the boy wandering in the field needs no justification can we realise the danger the story’s truth posed at its appearance—a spirit needs no justification at all. Similarly, the characters in Red Sorghum and The Way of Dog do not think; they perceive and act. Their worlds are presented but not interpreted or judged. The Japanese soldiers in Red Sorghum may still be deemed as ‘evil’ in some historical contexts. In The Way of Dog , ‘evil’ is just one of the forces and attributes of nature. The way of the dog is the way of heaven; the way of heaven is the way of human beings. No justification is needed for humanity’s struggling and fighting. Such an ‘everything-is-equal’ perspective reached its deepest level in A Long Race Thirty Years Ago. In the novel, a group of ‘rightists’ took great delight in a race as if they were taking part in a carnival. Their ideology was distilled by the past thirty years, and they became country legends. Each of them became a fictional character from Creation of the Gods, equipped with unique craftsmanship and temperament. A comparison between this tale and the then prevalent narratives about those

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categorised as ‘rightists’ or the ones about the ‘Cultural Revolution’ will reveal that in the latter, there is a presumed historical logic that accounts for each character’s action and provides a meaningful interpretation, although such interpretation cannot always be applied to each character. We may have to understand the exaggeration, sentimentality, and simplification in those dominant narratives. Nevertheless, the persistent attempt to justify a person’s action in some historical context indicates and reinforces some bias in the Chinese spirit: ‘A hero is the one who has succeeded while a villain is the one who has failed’. The startling joy and hodge-podge in A Long Race Thirty Years Ago demonstrates Mo Yan’s protest against history’s domination over life. Although finally the ‘history’ interferes with this long-distance race—the police come and take some of the racers—it is more like one of the incidents recurring in life, an ‘accident’, or a wonderful surprise, or a revelation of some secret. Even ‘history’ cannot deprive us of life, joy, rich experiences, and vitality, in which Mo Yan has placed a trust as immense as the great earth. In this sense, Mo Yan is our Whitman, who, with a huge appetite and a great stomach, seems capable of digesting everything. Mo’s vigorous, blunt, and far-reaching writings demonstrate the broader side of the Chinese spirit—one of experience, perception, and flesh as well as of something transcendental and ultimate, beyond one’s ego and the logic of history. In Joy, a young villager, who has failed the College Entrance Examination several times, roams in a field. He is, of course, greatly depressed and exhausted. We may well take his case for an investigation into society, history, or his personality. The story can be seen as a psychological file on the interaction between the Chinese examination system and an educated country youth. However, in Mo Yan’s world, a character’s destiny maps itself onto the wild richness and decay of nature, and vice versa. Such projection is not only a poetic metaphor but also a definite judgement— whether alive or dead, one must accept or give up everything. This is the truth of life as well as the order of nature. In Mo Yan’s world, self-pity is the last emotion a person would resort to. So, our Whitman does have his own limitations. He is, after all, a writer of myths, although ‘myth’ was a derogatory term in his time. In essence, Mo Yan’s work presents the vast self-images of the Chinese people, which is hard to judge if the term ‘myth’ is positive or negative; perhaps Mo Yan does not care. What matters is the transcendence of the anxiety caused by

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modernity and history. The Chinese people, while mentally fatigued from such anxiety, can achieve a kind of freedom in these works. Freedom is intended for good, for evil, and for whatever is in between. Therefore, Mo Yan is incapable of handling themes like unemployment, as it implies moral problems involving various boundaries that modern urban dwellers are confronted with, such as trivialisation, complexity, and ambiguity of their time. Although he makes an arbitrary attempt to impose his schedule in Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh; Mo Yan is doomed to fail when he begins to make a descriptive analysis of the hero’s situation, as it brings a world of diverse ‘justifications’ that blow like dust, baffling people’s understanding. This is too much for him. He can digest everything except dust.

3 To Go Beyond Phenomenon and Have an Outlook on Life: The Transcendence in Mo Yan’s Literary Creation Sandalwood Death is a great masterpiece. I am fully aware of the weight the word ‘great’ carries and have begrudged all the living Chinese writers the word. Nevertheless, I will put aside my principle and follow my judgement. Sandalwood Death will not crumble under the word. The novel’s first sentence seems inadequate: ‘That morning it never occurred to my father-in-law that he would be killed by me in seven days’. It echoes too closely the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude. We can see it, and so could the writer. But Mo Yan deliberately put down the sentence as if he were recommending himself by foregrounding his connection with hallucinatory realism, which is a sign of homage as well as a farewell to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. From the second sentence to the very last, Mo Yan withdrew himself as far as 1,000 kilometres; and, on a startling scale and in a revolutionary determination, he brought his narration back to his hometown Gaomi to the ears and lips of the Chinese people, and the horizon of our great classical and rural tradition as well. Sandalwood Death is the one of major Chinese novels of the twentyfirst century, embodying the beautiful symmetry of history. The twentieth century witnessed the modernisation of Chinese stories in which Chinese writers learned to think, experience, and narrate against a global background. At the same time, either joyfully or painfully, they paid the price—they cut their roots and abandoned their tradition, silencing a

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voice that had echoed for thousands of years. Sandalwood Death indicates a significant turn. Also, against the global background, Chinese writers begin to implant themselves onto their roots, recovering their tradition, and redefining their everlasting cultural characteristics. Mo Yan claimed that he had written about voices—the voices of the train and Maoqiang arias3 of the local Gaomi opera. Sandalwood Death is also a voice of history. The story took place in 1900 when the EightPower Allied Forces4 invaded Beijing. The ancient Chinese civilisation faced the greatest crisis of modernisation known in Chinese history. In Shandong Province, the German garrison crushed the Boxer Movement5 with the help of the new army of the Qing Dynasty, equipped with Western weapons. In the Movement, a vast, appalling execution platform was set up before thousands of villagers; the scene resembles a drama. In effect, it is a drama. For Chinese people, history is drama, and drama is reality. Let us shut our eyes and listen to the voice of the year 1900—a voice loud, enraged, desperate, miserable, vicious, cold, penetrating, and resounding. It is the voice of China. It pierces the hundred years like a sharp dagger. Mo Yan is no longer a novelist or a ‘talent’ indulging in an ‘artist’s saga’. Instead, he becomes a storyteller, a colleague who has told tales to the audience in storytelling houses since the Tang and Song dynasties. It is not because of some classical structures Mo Yan has adopted in the novel such as ‘phoenix head’ (an intriguing beginning of an article to arouse readers’ interests), ‘pork belly’ (the main body of the article with rich content), and ‘leopard tail’ (a forceful ending), but because of its narrative principles. In Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan tries to resort straight to the ear, allowing voices from the noblest and the humblest to share the same pitch and volume; to resort straight to the narrative, allowing an infinite difference for the plot to develop; and to resort straight to readers’ attention, with exaggeration, vulgarity, spectacle, and gorgeousness (even the ritualised execution becomes a spectacle to revel in collectively). All these are what China’s folk aesthetics advocates—a great famous writer rarely writes something vulgar. 3 Maoqiang is a local melody sung in the eastern part of Shandong Province, China. 4 They refer to those countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy,

Austria-Hungary, the United States, Russia, and Japan. 5 The Boxer Movement was an anti-foreigner uprising in late Qing China, which took place from November of 1899 through to September of 1901.

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Every storyteller needs training. It is much harder to be an oldfashioned storyteller than a modern novelist as the latter can indulge himself, paying no attention to the fact that their works might scare or infuriate readers. But the highest principle in the storyteller’s ethics is the audience’s presence, without a single absence. Mo Yan demonstrates his masterly narrative skills in Sandalwood Death. Here, I’m not flattering Mo Yan. In China, a novelist always thinks of himself/herself as a master writer. But the fact is that many of them are not skilled at all. They are at best clever or very clever and even unable to write characters with distinctly different voices. They consider story writing a private business, beginning with ‘I’, and ending with ‘I’. Once Mo Yan begins to mimic storytellers, he returns to the original ideal of the art of fiction—a novelist does not possess a story or a voice; they have to tell a story as if it had occurred and were known to everybody. The voice in the story is the world’s voice, contained in the narration and awaiting a pair of lips to blow it far and wide. The ways we think of the art of fiction and our own situation in this globalised world will change. The change manifests itself in the surge of social, cultural, and literary incidents; Sandalwood Death will serve as a solid drive to clarify the obscure and amplify the muffled. What it presents is our history. Meanwhile, it will become part of the future cultural and literary history.

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Profound Exploration of the Complexity of Human Nature: The Duty of Literature

Just two years later, I felt some words in the notes were not clear, for example, ‘voice of history’, ‘history is drama and drama is reality’, etc. In the notes, the concept of ‘history’ was not examined or defined. I took history for granted as a thing in itself. Now I must clarify that ‘history’ must be said. All that has not been said is not history. It is through ‘saying’ that we can figure out and come to believe some historical logic. The discourse surrounding Sandalwood Death is filled with heated debates, bargains, and reluctant compromises. The Boxer Movement may be interpreted as a desperate struggle for survival and a rebellion against imperialism on the part of a nation and a civilisation. It can also be considered as a backward reaction to the progression of ‘history’, a fight against modernisation. On this same event, one takes different stands as well as

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different judgements. The former view on the Boxer Movement is historically justified while the latter, on a historical scale, is not. If we suppose there is logic in history, we will be faced with a predicament—it is very hard for us to reach a unified judgement on the significance of the event. We have to accept conflicting ideas. The Boxer Movement is a long-standing wound of the Chinese spirit. The modern nation of China was founded and developed in the bloody pool of this wound, which still festers and hurts. We are torn between two self-images: one is the impotence and anger resulting from a sense of being offended and deprived; the other is the belief of accepting the logic of the invader and the depriver, which will finally remove our impotence. The two images are, in effect, derived from each other. The anxiety for ‘competence’ lies in both images. But between the two there is always a space of confusion and suspicion—the desire for competence will give rise to strength which will affirm and reinforce impotence. The premise for any dreamt competence is to endure impotence. The circularity of the statements above reveals that what we confront is not a question of how to comprehend and follow the historical logic, act in line with the goal, or engineering calculation and game strategy, but a vast mental puzzle. Like the boy in Thumb Cuff , we are confined to the tree of ‘history’, having no choice but to continue aspiring for freedom. In Grandma’s Incisor, the ‘competence’ shifts between Grandma and the mother, but we cannot tell who the strong person is or the weak person is. The reader is also left wondering if the Grandma and the mother can be both strong and weak. Therefore, although the bloody yet magnificent spectacle of dismemberment in Sandalwood Death might discomfort some readers, the work is a great myth of the modern Chinese spirit. It reveals on a human body the tangled and conflicting paths of the ‘competence’ labyrinth. ‘Competence’ comes from outside or is self-imposed. It is fragile but strong, a humble death but a noble redemption; it is hard law but sweet sentiment to emotion, a tradition but decline of it, a history but against it. In Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan must choose a narrative point of view as detached as the great earth, putting aside his voice, even his point of view. Before then, the field, memory, and children had altogether constituted the tripod for his narration. Then, through memory and the children’s eyes, he could open a broader world. In other words, children’s eyes would reject any choice while remembering, with the help of time, would equalise everything between heaven and earth. But now, he needs

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nothing but the wild fields because no voice or point of view can sufficiently describe the pain, the hardship, the vastness, and the solitude of the Chinese soul. What Mo Yan experiences in his life is the key to the complicated relationship between him and his time, between his contemporary readers and literature. He presents a vision that we find very hard to face—a vision that we try to forget. Yet, this vision is the foundation of our world, a world obscured jointly by ‘history’, by society, by our earnest daily life and everyday experience, and by our literature. Thus, Mo Yan is detached from as well as much connected to his time.

Originality and Transcendence: What Mo Yan Has Enlightened Us Jie Guo

Chinese writer Mo Yan received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is an event of profound and far-reaching significance for the winner, Chinese literature, and cultural exchange and convergence between the East and the West. It is worth our serious consideration.

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The Monumental Significance of the Win

The Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace was named after the renowned Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) and is funded by his legacy. Since its establishment in 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been presented to over 100 highly accomplished and influential writers from various countries.1 Although 1 The award ceremony of the Nobel Prize in Literature was not held in 1914, 1918, 1935, 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1943. Two laureates jointly received the award in 1904, 1917, 1966, and 1974.

Source: Journal of South China Normal University (Social Science Edition), 2012(6): pp. 63–66. J. Guo (B) Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_2

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the award has had its controversies, particularly over the eligibility of some works and laureates, the Nobel Prize continues to be acknowledged as one of the highest honours in world literature. Yet it is a pity that, until 11 October 2012, for various reasons, Chinese writers had been excluded from this world-renowned literary honour.2 Although this fact does not answer for the advancement and achievements of China’s new literary tradition over almost 100 years, it indeed indicates the ignorance of the outside world of Chinese literature and writers. It had been a distressing yet unbridgeable gap for both. The situation was much improved when the Swedish Academy announced on 11 October 2012 that the award went to Chinese writer Mo Yan, which is of monumental significance as a historical change occurred. At the winner’s announcement and the winner’s claiming of the prize, Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, commented that Mo Yan’s ‘hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary’. The academy’s news report reads: ‘Mo Yan has made a mixture of fantasy and reality from historical and social perspectives, a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings’. Göran Malmqvists, a judge of the Nobel Prize in Literature and sinologist, said in an interview that Mo Yan is an excellent writer, his works are very imaginative and humorous, he is good at storytelling, and the event will boost the popularity of Chinese literature around the world.3 The above-mentioned ‘monumental significance’ of the win is taken for granted first in the literary sense. Mo Yan is quite active in contemporary Chinese literature, known for his diligence, prolificacy, uniqueness, creativity, and imagination. Since 1985, when he gained notoriety by publishing the novella The Transparent Carrot in the magazine Chinese Writers, Mo Yan has published over ten novels, several novellas, and short stories. The novels include Red Sorghum Clan, The Garlic Ballads , Thirteen Steps , The Herbivorous Family, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts

2 Among the previous Nobel laureates, Pearl S. Buck, an American writer who received the award in 1938, wrote about China but in English; Gao Xingjian, a winner of the award in 2000 who wrote about China sometimes in Chinese, is a Chinese-born French writer. So, in this sense, no Chinese who not only writes in Chinese but also has Chinese nationality has ever received the Nobel Prize in Literature before. 3 http://news.xinhuanet.com/photo/2012-10/11/c_l23811951.htm [October 11th, 2012].

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and Wide Hips , Red Forest , Sandalwood Death, Pow!, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out , and Frog . The multiplicity of the works bears ample evidence of the writer’s diligence. His works are noted for their consistent idiosyncrasy, remarkable originality, and fantastic imagination. His ‘hallucinatory’ realist writing style has ranked him among the best of numerous contemporary Chinese writers and won him many major awards, including the top Chinese literary honour, i.e., the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Moreover, his works have been translated into over twenty languages, widening his influence across the world. In the light of this, Mo Yan is completely deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although the award is based exclusively on literary considerations and intended for the individual, we should not ignore the fact that the event is a result of the advancement that has occurred in Chinese literary tradition, particularly over the last century. Its monumental significance is more salient from this perspective. The 112th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature witnessed the completion of near a century’s cycle of metamorphosis and rebirth of China’s new literary tradition starting from the ‘May Fourth Movement’ in 1919. The essence of this new literary tradition is to employ China’s ancient vernacular style and combine it with what has been achieved from the modern eastward spread of Western learning to present an accurate and insightful picture of people’s minds and souls in contemporary social life. As there were the two interwoven tasks of ‘saving the country’ and ‘enlightening the people’, the old literary notion of focusing on moral improvement and seeking practical social aims had been deeply rooted in this new literary tradition and wields a powerful influence. As a result, the transcendent role of literature to rise above political or historical events has been implicitly ignored in its active intervention with and advancing of social life. Nevertheless, the frail yet continuous thread of transcendence finally grows strong in a modern climate of free-thinking after adopting the policy of reform and opening up since 1978. Moreover, the essential characteristics of literary creation, such as individuality, originality, and imagination, have enjoyed significant growth in an atmosphere of tolerance and encouragement. The French art historian Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828–1893) argued in The Philosophy of Art that only when an artist is in a forest filled with the era’s spirit formed by numerous contemporary artists can he make remarkable achievements as massive as a towering tree. Mo Yan’s success is an individual presentation of the whole spiritual atmosphere of the time, which embodies the spiritual pursuit of not one but several

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generations. In general terms, this single case demonstrates the natural outcome and the current situation of almost a century’s development of China’s new literary tradition. Of course, the win itself does not yield such significance, but it prompts more significant insightful consideration of and careful attention to this issue. In the current wave of globalisation, various new events—unprecedented and far-reaching ones—took place during China’s historic rise. Mo Yan’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature was one of these events. The win will help boost Chinese writers’ confidence, arouse Chinese society’s attention to literature, and promote communication between Chinese literature and that of the world. Additionally, it will significantly narrow the gap between the Nobel Prize in Literature and Chinese writers and the general public, which means the attention from 1.3 billion Chinese will infuse new vigour into the world-renowned literary honour.

2

Bizarre Plots and Fantastic Imagination: Originality in Mo Yan’s Literary Creation

Mo Yan is a successful writer, and his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature is the result of his success and his work across over ten novels. So, what is the key to his success? In the essay ‘In Defense of the Dignity of Novels’, an art manifesto of sorts, Mo Yan writes, ‘The length, density, and difficulty are the marks of the novel as well as the dignity of this great genre’. In addition, ‘The so-called length refers, of course, to the number of words in a novel. The necessary dignity is absent in a specimen of fewer than 200,000 words’. Moreover, ‘The key to a writer’s capacity of creating a novel, or a good novel, lies in a “vision for great length”. Such a version contains great melancholy, great mercy, great aspiration, great unrestrained and vigorous mind, and great comprehension of a worldly existence of emptiness and void’. Beyond that, ‘The density of a novel means the density of incidents, of characters, and ideas’. And, finally, ‘The difficulty of a novel signifies artistic originality. Originality always means something strange… It also means the difficulty of structure, of language, and of ideas’.4

4 Mo Yan. ‘In Defense of the Dignity of Novels’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2006(1).

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His remarks, which differ from those of critics or theorists, are based not merely on some logical reasoning for a theoretical framework but also on a summarisation of his own writing practice. They are the artistic and aesthetic cream skimmed from his rich experience of fiction writing. His major works are permeated by and consistent with these ideas. They are the summary and outcome of his writing practice as well as his genuine confession of the key to his success in fiction writing. Specifically speaking, the first meeting point of the three factors— length, density, and difficulty—and the key to his successful fiction writing is none other than his personal artistic originality in his works. Originality is one of the essential revelations of his writing. ‘I always believe that a good writer should be an original one and originality should certainly be present in good novels’, he has asserted.5 The originality of his novels manifests itself through an elaborate construction of bizarre plots. Therefore, the elaborate construction of bizarre plots is the magic weapon for his originality and artistic success. Göran Malmqvist once commented that Mo Yan is good at storytelling. Nearly all his novels embrace strange, unique, fantastic, and bizarre plots as if they were shrouded with changing, odd-shaped clouds behind which loomed a heavenly dragon. Mo Yan’s unique plots always render his novels unpredictable and inconceivable, earning his writing the name ‘hallucinatory realism’. Without unique, fantastic, surrealistic, and individualised imagination, undoubtedly these effects are unlikely to be achieved as pointed out by Hegel in his Aesthetics: ‘In terms of skill, the most remarkable of artistic skills is imagination’.6 A writer should give full play to his imagination to figure out some fantastic yet capricious plots (actions) as if they were veiled in mystery so that the development and outcome are always beyond readers’ anticipation. As a result, the readers must retain their curiosity and eagerness, follow the unfolding plot, and predict all possible occurrences. During this process, driven by their curiosity and enthusiasm, they will unintentionally allow their imagination to take wing, thus completing an artistic remaking of the story as claimed by Mo Yan himself: ‘The capacity

5 Mo Yan. ‘Why I Wrote Red Sorghum Clan’. Red Sorghum. Guangzhou: Huacheng Press, 2011: p. 150. 6 Hegel, W. F. Aesthetics (Vol. 1). Trans. Zhu Guangqian. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1984: p. 375.

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of storytelling just means the capacity for imagination. A person is capable of telling a vivid story just because he enjoys a powerful imagination’.7 For example, the novel Red Sorghum adapted into a movie won the Golden Bear Award at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival. The narrator’s voice, a boy, alternates between the ambush of a Japanese convoy on the part of ‘my grandpa’—who was leading a gang of bandits— and the unusual love of the boy’s grandparents. The novel is known for the two intricately intertwined strands, bizarre plots, solemn and stirring scenes, varying points of view, successful stream-of-consciousness technique, and especially, the narration focused on the protagonist’s subjective perception and sensation. The animated, graphic depictions of the boy’s experiences present themselves in rapid succession, attaining a unique realm of novelty and even mystery, a realm beyond the reach of adults and city dwellers. Mo Yan’s unique artistic style was thus established, which he followed in later works. His style is increasingly significant and reaches perfection in more recent works. Frog , published in 2009, was awarded the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011. The work is a blending of five letters to a Japanese writer, four long narratives, and one drama script, supposedly written by playwright Kedou (meaning ‘tadpole’). It has dramatically extended the horizon of fictional art and made a significant genre innovation and revolution in China’s new literary history, which is impossible without personal originality and fantastic imagination. Therefore, it is safe to say that Mo Yan’s bizarre plots, infused with notable idiosyncrasy and fantastic imagination, are the magic weapon for his fiction writing and artistic achievements. We are in an era calling for innovation and originality, not only in literature, but in all walks of life. In this regard, Mo Yan’s success has set an enlightening example worthy of our deep reflection and reference.

7 Mo Yan. ‘A Talk with Liu Ting from Journal of Literature and Art ’. Red Sorghum. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2011: p. 171.

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To Go Beyond Phenomenon and Have an Outlook on Life: Transcendence in Mo Yan’s Literary Creation

Another secret of Mo Yan’s success is his ability to transcend practical boundaries and reject the simplified dichotomy of good and evil to make a deep exploration of the complexity of human nature and to reach for transcendence by means of art. He once remarked, ‘Only when a writer can face the evil of mankind, realize the evil of ego, and has depicted a miserable fate caused by invincible human weaknesses and abnormal personality is he capable of writing a true tragedy, attaining the depth and strength in “the quest for the soul”, and extending the genuine “great mercy”’.8 Mo Yan’s characters are of human nature (i.e., the capability of ‘great mercy’) and combine good and evil, beset by diverse fate. It is his profound exploration into human nature rather than simple moralisation that has the most significant impact on his readers. For instance, Big Breasts and Wide Hips has reached a new height in the early period of his literary career and is acclaimed as a successful attempt at folk epic composition. The protagonist Shangguan Jintong (meaning ‘Golden Child’), a love child of his mother and a Swedish missionary, is a vulnerable boy with breast mania. Incapable of living by himself, he must stay close to female breasts. As his mother marries a sterile husband, her eight children are all fathered by men other than her legal husband. The diverse cases of adultery violate all codes of ethics, whether at home or abroad or in ancient or modern times. All these are unprecedented in Chinese literary tradition. We cannot help but ask the question: what is the meaning of this novel? A careful examination of the text will reveal that the story shows hidden human nature through extraordinary symbolic representation. ‘Wide hips’ and ‘big breasts’ are artistic symbols infused with imagination and metaphor—the former stands for reproduction while the latter stands for nurture. They are the embodiment of maternal affection, the greatest quality of human nature inherent only in females. Everybody— whether male or female, old or young—has a physical existence with physical needs, which gives rise to diverse desires as well as criteria for

8 Mo Yan. ‘In Defense of the Dignity of Novels’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2006(1).

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what is good, evil, beautiful, or ugly. These desires and criteria are of mixed and intricate composition, rendering human nature complicated. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) pointed out, ‘According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life. This again is of a twofold character; one is the production of the means of subsistence, namely food, clothing, dwellings, and tools necessary for that production; the other is the production of human beings themselves and the propagation of the species’.9 So, in terms of human nature, during ‘the production of human beings themselves and the propagation of the species,’ the deepest affection among mankind, that is, the best side of human nature, is more likely to be inspired. It will manifest itself either in the form of love between genders or between parents and children—especially maternal affection. Love and maternal affection have been an eternal motif for literary expression from ancient to modern times. Big Breasts and Wide Hips is just a profound representation of this motif—the great and selfless maternal affection. The transcendence in Mo Yan’s works—to go beyond phenomenon and have an outlook on life—is characterised by symbolism, alienation, and variation. Symbolism means the deployment of concrete images to represent some profound life experience to further the quest to understand human nature. Alienation offers readers a detached point of view to observe the situation of human existence, and to experience life’s dilemmas and miseries, usually through black humour or satire. Variation refers to the shift of one point of view to another, which allows the narrative to unfold without restraint. All these techniques are closely related to Mo Yan’s innocent nature, which has been retained throughout his life. The heroine in Sandalwood Death is characterised in this manner: Having lived up till then among a performing troupe, Sun Meiniang knew all the acrobatic movements for the opera stage, and she had never been schooled in the traditional feminine imperatives of ‘three obediences’ - to obey her father before marriage, and her husband during married life, and 9 Engels, F. The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Trans. Central Compilation & Translation Bureau. Beijing: People’s Press, 1972: pp. 3–4.

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her sons in widowhood - and the ‘four virtues’ of fidelity, physical charm, propriety in speech, and efficiency in needlework. She was, not surprisingly, an untamed young woman...10

This passage is a self-portrait of Mo Yan himself. Born to a peasant family in Gaomi, Shandong Province, Mo Yan has retained his rustic simplicity and wisdom, with a free heart unbounded by rituals, rules, and conventions, which naturally brings about an abundant and unrestrained imagination. Unfettered by decayed moral dogma, he is capable of interacting with life with a humorous attitude. Instead of involving himself in abstract reasoning or in a painful quest for some ultimate object, he preserves his innocence and simplicity throughout and seeks spiritual freedom to go beyond daily existence and find his own way. At last, he enters a brand-new world. So, Mo Yan’s transcendence may well be another secret of his successful writing as well as another enlightening lesson he has offered us.

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Profound Exploration of the Complexity of Human Nature: The Duty of Literature

Mo Yan did not obtain his success in fiction writing through luck. Due to his many published works, their translated versions worldwide, and numerous awards, he has received intense attention and gained popularity at home and abroad before he received the Nobel Prize. Moreover, the renowned Japanese writer Kenzaburo O¯e, in his Nobel lecture on 7 December 1994, spoke highly of Mo Yan when he mentioned the literary tradition and image system he had inherited: The image system made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-center region of the peripheral, marginal, off-center country, Japan. Starting from such a background I do not represent Asia as a new economic power but an Asia impregnated with ever-lasting poverty and a mixed-up fertility. By sharing old, familiar yet living metaphors I align

10 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: People’s Press, 2012: p. 120.

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myself with writers like Kim Ji-ha of Korea, Chon I and Mu Jen (i.e., Mo Yan), both of China.11

Further, in his speech titled ‘A Hope Starting from Despair’, which was delivered to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on 9 September 2006, Kenzaburo O¯e made a definite prediction, ‘I firmly believe that China will soon have its own Nobel laureate. Mr. Mo Yan is a competitive candidate’.12 Six years later, to our great joy, his prophecy came true. There is a Chinese myth about a carp. It is metamorphosed into a giant dragon immediately after it succeeds in jumping through the Dragon’s Gate and soars into the sky to become a celestial saint. Of course, a writer is no carp. Even though he has landed the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mo Yan is by no means assured of an eternal position in literature. In reality, there are some Nobel laureates who have been forgotten by literary history. As for Mo Yan, I am afraid we cannot yet draw the conclusion that he has reached the ultimate, flawless perfection of art. For example, in terms of artistic language, his seems a little unrefined, somewhat lacking in elegance. Now, we might just as well review a speech made by Mr. Qian Zhongshu so that we can take a more reasonable look at the significance of the award. ‘Bernard Shaw has said that Nobel’s establishing the Nobel prizes does more harm to mankind than his invention of dynamite. Sure, Shaw himself later accepted the award. We actually need not attach too much importance to it’, said Qian.13 Talking about the unhappiness on the part of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges for his failure to win the prize, Qian commented, ‘It shows that he does not believe in himself but thinks too much of the judges’.14 Qian’s aloofness towards the award and confidence in Chinese writers deserves our respect. One should have such an attitude, whether the prize goes to Chinese writers or not. His wise remarks surely enlighten us and get us thinking.

11 Kenzaburo Oe. ‘Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself’. T. Frängsmyr (Ed.). The Nobel Prizes in 1994. Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 1995. 12 Ibid. 13 Qian Zhongshu. ‘Qian Zhongshu on the Nobel Prize in Literature’. Newspaper of

Literature and Art. April 5th, 1986. 14 Ibid.

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Nevertheless, both the purport of establishing the prize and the practice of selecting laureates for over a century bear convincing evidence of the excellence of those who have received this special honour. Generally speaking, any writers certainly have something to recommend themselves. An examination of the prize will help us reflect on the meaning of literature. Literature is the art of language. Through the medium of language, its artistic creation brings us new aesthetic experiences, touches us, and stirs us. Good literary works are artistic achievements, whereas great ones go further to provide profound explorations of the complexity of human nature. Great literary works do this by offering answers directly and by moving and elevating readers’ emotions, minds, and hearts. It is evident that the originality and transcendence in a work play a crucial role in this process. After winning the award, Mo Yan said: ‘My works depict the life of Chinese people, unique Chinese culture, and something national. Meanwhile, they are also about human beings in general. I’ve been focusing my writing on human beings from the stance of a human being. I believe such writings will cross the boundaries of region and race’.15 To endeavour to explore the complexity of human nature, to offer a clue to the understanding of the human soul, and to build a bridge for the spiritual communication between persons as well as between civilisations, in virtue of original artistic writing method and with a transcendent attitude towards life, these are the noble duties to be performed by literature. This is how Mo Yan’s writings have enlightened us and, perhaps, the purport of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

15 Xie Zhengyi, et al. ‘Loyalty to the Depicting of Human Being Is the Major Reason for My Win’. Evening News, October 12th, 2012.

Hallucination, Localisation, and Folk Narrative Tradition: Mo Yan and Literary Criticism Guangwei Cheng

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Introduction

Literary criticism on Mo Yan abounds in his over twenty-year writing career. According to Lu, there are at least 350 papers from various scholarly journals and newspapers, excluding those published in the academic journals of universities and colleges, in entertainment magazines, and on the Internet.1 The figure will increase if we include the reviews published before Mo Yan emerged in the Chinese literary arena and foreign critics and sinologists after he earned his fame. When I finished the first reading of these papers or reviews, I had a general idea that no matter what opinion a critic held, they would, from their point of view, pass his judgement on the writer’s writing, which usually included a deliberate or unwitting attempt to locate the writer’s position in Chinese literary history. 1 Lu Xiaobing (Eds.). Research Material on Mo Yan. Jinan: Shandong Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006.

Source: Southern Cultural Forum, 2001(1): pp. 39-46. G. Cheng (B) Renmin University of China, Beijing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_3

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As we all know, from the 1980s to the beginning of the twenty-first century, there had been great social and political changes in China. These changes exerted great impacts on Chinese literary concepts and writing beyond people’s expectations for a literary future. The conflicts in the literary arena brought about disparities in criticism and creation. As a result, the ideas in the criticism on Mo Yan’s writing appear conflicting, varying, and ambiguous. This readily brings to our mind the statement made by Welleck and Warren: The total meaning of a work of art cannot be defined merely in terms of its meaning for the writer and his contemporaries. It is rather the result of a process of accumulation, i.e., the history of its criticism by its many readers in many ages.2

In this sense, a critic who has absorbed his contemporary knowledge, discourse, and point of view can hardly claim that his criticism of Mo Yan is a private judgement, even though he himself believes it to be so. His criticism reflects a public mind on literature, a mind intending to shape and reshape a writer’s image according to changing social needs. Not all writers are willing to accept such defining and redefining. Therefore, all the consensus, debates, and conflicting conclusions in the criticism of Mo Yan are not merely the products of literary critics but also the embodiment of the puzzles, quests, and distress of the era.

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The Topic of ‘Hallucination’ and Red Sorghum Clan

Jeffrey C. Kinkley noted in ‘A Bibliographic Survey of Publications on Chinese Literature in Translation from 1949 to 1999’, ‘Chinese literature since 1949 cared far more about social critique than literary values’.3 This is true. The abrupt introduction of Latin American magical realism into China has generally been considered as a major turning point for

2 Welleck, R. & Warren, A.. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1949: p. 34. 3 Kinkley, J. C. ‘A Bibliographic Survey of Publications on Chinese Literature in Translation from 1949–1999’. In Pang-Yuan Chi & David Der-wei Wang (Eds.). Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000: p. 290.

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Chinese literature to disentangle itself from the interference of cultural and political ideology. However, much of what such criticism tried to clarify is the acknowledgement of the significance of artistic initiative on the part of Chinese writers rather than the ‘social critique’. This probably accounts for why Latin American magical realism was a heated topic in articles published around 1985. In 1985, Chinese Writers, a Chinese literary magazine, invited several writers to hold a seminar with Mo Yan on The Transparent Carrot . They tended to label the story as a work of ‘pure literature’ beyond ‘cultural and political ideology’.4 Mo Yan confessed that the story ‘is somewhat mysterious and hallucinatory’ as well as ‘a little sentimental’,5 and it was conceived first ‘from an image rather than a question or an idea’.6 Those present at the seminar remarked that ‘the writer has deliberately obscured its political settings’ to ‘enter a new realm’ and ‘such defamiliarisation has probably rendered the work “misty”’.7 The earliest critics of Mo Yan tried to guide readers’ attention towards the ‘mysterious’ and ‘hallucinatory’ elements in his work to downplay the definite and practical reading experience from the so-called realistic works prevalent at this time. Critics did this by foregrounding the ‘defamiliarisation’ of his fiction from cultural and political ideology. Other critics had identified, in the ‘hallucinatory realism’ of Mo’s fiction, greater and nobler significance in terms of aesthetic effect, and artistic skills than in the so-called realistic works. Chen Sihe observed that while Feng Deying (the writer of the novel Sochus Oleraceus ) ‘still holds a monist view of history’, the quest, puzzle, doubt, and surmise on the part of the ‘I’ in Mo Yan’s story, ‘narrating in a daydreaming tone’, ‘have offered the reader a special appreciation of formal aesthetics’.8 The title of Chen’s paper, ‘A Dialogue Between History and Present’, indicates Chen’s eagerness to assess Mo Yan in a tense relationship between history and the present.

4 Xu Huaizhong & Mo Yan, et al. ‘In Pursuit of Characteristics: About The Transparent Carrot ’. Chinese Writers, 1985(2). 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Chen Sihe. ‘A Dialogue Between History and Present: On Mo Yan’s New Story

“Rose, Rose, So Fragrant”’. Zhongshan, 1988(1).

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Chen Sihe is not alone. Ji Hongzhen also offers a similar view, writing ‘Mo Yan’s narrative style is one of versatility’. It ‘enframes other narratives’ and ‘presents various images in a displacement of time and space’. It enables the writer ‘to make a more profound quest for and achieve a keen insight into the past and present situation of ethics’.9 By means of intentional deviation from the ‘history’ (political and cultural ideology) and willing approach to ‘present’ (hallucinatory realism), Mo Yan’s works are entitled to a reevaluation in a ‘hallucinatory’ context. He acknowledges his artistic exploration. ‘Only in this sense can we understand the conflict inherent in life itself, the conflict implied by the persistent melancholy in his work’, as well as ‘the flourishing humanity’ in Red Sorghum Clan, which ‘is caught in basic desires but has attained its perfection, so sacred and so glorious’.10 Nevertheless, there are different views on the meaning of ‘hallucinatory realism’. ‘The sober and cool realistic manner evident in Red Sorghum Clan may well be the core and essence of the work’.11 ‘The blending of a real world and a perceived world lends an impressionistic realism to Mo Yan’s writing’.12 Such argument indicates an attempt to revive the ‘contemporary’ realism under the pressure of Latin American magical realism so as to resolve the artistic crisis, one resulting from the stiff imitation of foreign examples prevalent in the literary circle. But there is a question: can the native realism resist the invasion of the foreign hallucinatory realism? It seems difficult to find an answer. The critic Hu Heqing offers a solution by introducing the concepts of ‘gu (style)’, ‘qi (verve)’, and ‘yun (charm)’ from Eastern aesthetics. Hu asserts that ‘the study of the characterisation in the works by Mo Yan or by Ah Cheng entails a synthesized approach specific to Eastern aesthetics’ as well as a modernist perspective, and ‘only in this way can the significance of their uniqueness be fully identified’.13 9 Ji Hongzhen. ‘An Unyielding Soul on a Melancholy Land: The First Essay on Mo Yan’. Literary Review, 1987(6). 10 Ibid. 11 Lei Da. ‘Resurrection of a Wandering Spirit: Criticism on Red Sorghum Clan’. Study

of Literature and Art, 1986(1). 12 Zhu Xiangqian. ‘Devotion to a Little ‘Stamp’: Some Comments on Mo Yan’s Fiction’. People’s Daily. December 8th, 1986. 13 Hu Heqing. ‘The Pursuit of Humanity in Ah Cheng’s and Mo Yan’s Works and the Aesthetic Tradition in the East’. Contemporary Trends of Literature and Art, 1987(5).

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The 1980s witnessed a quest for individuality, which also manifested itself in literary criticism. However, as the critics make highly individualised interpretations of Mo Yan’s works, their conclusions vary. This disparity in reviewing Mo Yan’s works indicates growing freedom in literary criticism after some restraints on contemporary Chinese literature have been removed. Some critics even try to account for Mo Yan’s attempt to hallucinate his stories in terms of ‘physiological deficiency’, ‘sensation of childhood’, and ‘racial degeneration’. The critic Zhou Yingxiong even argues that Red Sorghum Clan is a family saga, ‘which deals with problems concerning humanity in an age of shift from the old to the new in China’.14 But all these interpretations have confused researchers on the ‘linkage’ of Latin American magical realism to various Chinese elements such as political and cultural ideology, humanity, family tradition, physiology and psychology, traditional realism, and Eastern aesthetics, and among others. They feel it very hard to find a salient theme from conflicting and entangled value systems and literary-critical discourses. When ‘root seeking’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘hallucination’, and ‘structural innovation’ have become the catchwords of the era, criticism devoid of them is by no means valued. The validity of criticism depends on the possession and elaboration of the above-mentioned concepts, and literary texts must be put in a presupposed context to develop some new literary convention. Mo Yan is ready to accept such ‘redefinition’. ‘Sometimes critics not only guide readers, but also direct writers’.15 However, he also argues that ‘history is somewhat an accumulation of tales and legends’, and its oral circulation is ‘virtually a process of legendisation, and its details should not all be elevated’.16 China’s over 2,000-year history of literary reading and circulation has offered a very sophisticated literary experience. At times, critics can both be in conflict with criticism and make compromises with it. Doubtless, any creative writing is an attempt to challenge the prevalent literary paradigm and a bold, original emulation of some new paradigm. Throughout literary history, whether at home or abroad, it has been proved that 14 Zhou Yingxiong. ‘Saga of Red Sorghum Clan’. Contemporary Writers Review, 1989(4). 15 Mo Yan & Chen Wei, et al. ‘A Talk with Mo Yan’. Journal of Literature and Art. January 10th & 17th, 1987. 16 Mo Yan. ‘My Hometown and My Novel’. Contemporary Writers Review, 1993(2).

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a literary history not tagged with such words as ‘challenge’ and ‘originality’ will not be accepted as one of any significance. Among the critics mentioned above, those who identify Mo Yan’s writing with hallucinatory realism would seek in his works such elements as ‘narrative’, ‘imagery’, and ‘dimension’. They tend to highlight the unconventional qualities in Mo Yan’s texts. Mo Yan ‘seems to have availed himself of almost all means of perception in modern fiction to bring multi-leveled metaphors and symbols into the reading experience’.17 There are some critics who do not regard Mo Yan as a complete hallucinatory realist and try to foreground the realistic Chinese elements in his works. As has been cited before, Lei Da claims that the ‘sober and cool realistic spirit’ is the core and essence of Red Sorghum Clan.18 Still, others have their reasons for suggesting that Mo Yan is an ‘Eastern hallucinatory realist’. For instance, Hu Heqing found that in The Transparent Carrot , the protagonist’s ‘supernatural power’ lends a rare and mysterious charm to the story, a power also manifesting itself in the protagonist’s grandparents.19 To be consistent with the concept of ‘hallucinatory literature’, many critics have declined the ‘beyond-the-text’ approach to literary analysis and instead have taken the characters’ psychology as the foundation for the dialogue between the present and the past.20 ‘When we examine the life presented by a literary work’, advocates one of the critics, ‘we should not ignore the subjectivity which permeates it. When we concentrate on the plot pattern of the story, we should not ignore the emotional memory associated with personal experience’.21 This should be the very approach to Mo Yan’s stories. Such remarks demonstrate an attempt to mine for the ‘Eastern wisdom’ in the blending of Chinese writers and foreign literary trends.

17 Ji Hongzhen. ‘An Unyielding Soul on a Melancholy Land: The First Essay on Mo Yan’. Literary Review, 1987(6). 18 Lei Da. ‘Resurrection of a Wandering Spirit: Criticism on Red Sorghum Clan’. Study of Literature and Art, 1986(1). 19 Hu Heqing. ‘The Pursuit of Humanity in Ah Cheng’s and Mo Yan’s Works and the Cultural Tradition in the East’. Contemporary Literary and Artistic Trend, 1987(5). 20 Chen Sihe. ‘A Dialogue Between History and Present: On Mo Yan’s New Story “Rose, Rose, So Fragrant”’. Zhongshan, 1988(1). 21 Cheng Depei. ‘A World of Entangled Memory: The Childhood Point of View in Mo Yan’s Writing’. Shanghai Literature, 1986(4).

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The criticism of Mo Yan in the 1980s was well justified in terms of historical logic and knowledge background. At that time, the discontentment with China’s literary development prompted a call for an ideal ‘hero’ in the contemporary literary circle from an undesirable group of writers. Such a call was surely beyond ridicule and doubt. Nevertheless, the arguments mentioned above have left much room for discussion. For one thing, if there is a ‘supernatural power’ in hallucinatory realism, there is also, in its social significance, potentials to destroy the literary order and status quo, even to offend, diminish, and simplify the ‘inside texture’ of literature. Arbitrary may be how we blame ‘modern’ realism for its interference with a writer’s social standing, affection, attitude, and call for ‘the independence of literature’. For instance, Mo Yan’s works have been labelled as ‘stories about rural life’ with a ‘sweet fragrance of soil’, but at the same time they are assigned the task of perfecting ‘image creation’, ‘romanticism’, and ‘realism’, as well as ‘the artistic tradition handed down from the strange anecdotes of the Six Dynasties, romances of the Tang and Song dynasties, and stories of the Ming and Qing dynasties’.22 Li Tuo is not alone in assigning multiple tasks to Mo Yan. However, when some fashionable ‘themes’ have prevailed over individual texts and the tag of ‘hallucinatory realism’ has become a criterion for evaluation as well as a literary standpoint dominating his creative writing, how much space will be left for his artistic imagination and the survival of his writings? This fact also indicates a lamented deficiency of literary interpretive discourse. Literary history ‘deals with verifiable facts’ while literary criticism deals with ‘matters of opinion and faith’.23 This view reminds us of the fact that when literary criticism is undergoing a major historical shift, discourses involving such ‘opinion’ and ‘faith’ can become quite problematic. Literary criticism is engaged in an everlasting dialogue with the ‘present’ and does not care whether the ‘present’ will doubt its own significance during the repeated redefinition of ‘history’. For example, when literature from the May Fourth Movement of the 1910s picked ‘individual discourse’ as its focus of interest, literature in the liberated regions regarded ‘collective discourse’ as a new starting point of literary

22 Li Tuo. ‘Imagery in Modern Fiction: Preface to Mo Yan’s Collection The Transparent Carrot ’. Free Forum of Literature, 1986(1). 23 Welleck, R. & Warren, A. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949: p. 31.

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creation; against this was the rebellion by the vanguard literature24 of the 1980s. Each discourse may be seen as a ‘present’ one in the historical context, and in the never-ending literary torrent, any ‘acute’ criticism is too weak to make a definite presence. Twentieth-century Chinese literature has more than once been trapped in such a paradox. This time, Mo Yan’s fiction is entangled in the debate on the topic of ‘hallucinatory realism’.

3 Big Breasts and Wide Hips: a ‘Localised’ Writing Experience Critics who had placed great expectations on Mo Yan’s writing soon decided on ‘localisation’25 as the next aim of literary development. Given the environment at that time, their expectations were by no means unjustified. Along with social and economic globalisation, foreign literary productions were being dumped into the Chinese literary market, encroaching upon local writers’ territory. While many Chinese passionately welcomed the march towards the world, there was a sudden awareness that our ‘local’ cultural territory was being lost bit by bit. Li Tuo, an avant-garde critic, was aware of this as early as 1986, around the time young Mo Yan came into his vision. He argued that Mo Yan’s novelettes—White Dog and The Swing , Dry River,26 Ball Lightning , and other stories—‘are an unquestionably noteworthy presence in current literary development as they demonstrate the writer’s endeavour to restore some valuable tradition of Chinese classical narrative in the modern literary

24 Vanguard literature is an important literary phenomenon in China’s contemporary history of literature. In the mid- and late 1980s, a small group of writers created some new artistic forms and styles, broke the traditional norms, and wrote about taboo topics in China, thus being called ‘the avantgarde literature’ by some critics. 25 Localisation requires a writer to convert his/her writings based on a certain group of people in a certain region characteristic of local languages and cultures. 26 It’s a short story written by Mo Yan in 1981, which tells the story of a boy called Xiao Hu (Little Tiger) who is not sound in mind and body and is thus often mocked and beaten by others but good at climbing trees. Encouraged by the secretary’s daughter, Xiao Hu bravely climbs up a high white poplar to break off a branch for her, but he falls from the tree together with the branch and crushes the little girl to death unexpectedly. The accident greatly irritates his father, mother, and brother, as well as the secretary, who beat him bitterly in turn. In the end, the boy dies tragically in the dry river in the village.

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arena on a new and elevated base’.27 About ten years later, his argument was well illustrated by Big Breasts and Wide Hips . This novel indicates the writer’s shift towards a localised writing style: Big breasts and wide hips are the most beautiful, sacred, magnificent, as well as simplest matters on the earth, even in the universe. They are from the earth and symbolise the earth. This is why I entitled my novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips .28

According to Mo Yan, ‘earth’ means ‘soil’—the Chinese soil. It indicates that after the passionate quest for ‘hallucinatory realism’ had come to a weary end, the writer longed for his return to his motherland for literary inspiration and resources. However, critics first failed to understand his endeavour to represent the ‘local soil’ with distorted feminine images like big breasts and wide hips. Some of them even suspect the theme of the novel. Some critics said, ‘The title of the novel seems a little frivolous’. ‘A minor flaw to the novel is its shallow title’. ‘The title of the story will invoke some questioning among the readers’. ‘The title does not represent the work properly’.29 Most of the negative criticism is targeted at the offensive descriptions of human desire. The voice of favourable criticism is not muffled, though. Does the appearance of Big Breasts and Wide Hips signal the inevitable decline of ‘hallucinatory realism’? Some critics appreciate Mo Yan’s enthusiasm and devotion in his ‘shift’ by hailing the fiction as ‘one of the greatest novels written in the Chinese language’. Zhang Qinghua asserts that, in the new literature of the twentieth century, ‘few works can match it’ because ‘while the new historical stories of the avant-garde school are trying to evade a direct conflict with history, Mo Yan is so courageous as to face its core’.30 In this manner, Zhang argues, ‘Mo Yan is more serious

27 Li Tuo. ‘Imagery in Modern Fiction: Preface to Mo Yan’s Collection The Transparent Carrot ’. Free Forum of Literature, 1986(1). 28 Mo Yan. ‘An Explanation of Big Breasts and Wide Hips ’. Guangtning Daily. November 22nd, 1995. 29 Zhang Jun. ‘The Ironist Mo Yan: A Reflection on Big Breasts and Wide Hips ’. Literature and Art Forum, 1996(3). 30 Zhang Qinghua. ‘The Limits of Narration: On Mo Yan’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2003(2).

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and faithful in keeping a historical consciousness’.31 ‘In this sense, Mo Yan is our Whitman’, who ‘has placed in our history a trust as immense as the great earth’.32 Does the appearance of Big Breasts and Wide Hips also mark a return to the ‘local soil’ for avant-garde writers after some structural experiments? Wang Dewei seems to think so. He maintains that Mo Yan has unfolded a panoramic picture of the history of Chinese folk literature for us to see a beautiful literary genre devoid of imagination. ‘At last, in the mid-1990s’, ‘after years of unrest’, ‘Mo Yan bases his stories on northeast Gaomi’ and ‘in this way he has presented the most significant historical space of contemporary fiction in Mainland China’. ‘There is a continuous literary tradition of regional nostalgia and utopian fancies passed down from Tao Yuanming, Pu Songling, and Shen Congwen’.33 Such criticism has thus transplanted this novel into a more fertile literary field of regionalism and made a wonderful distinction between this novel and Mo Yan’s previous ones, implying that it enjoys some significance beyond itself—it embodies a new artistic trend in contemporary fiction in Mainland China. To label the novel as an artistic specimen of ‘localised writing’, critics must find reasonable evidence, such as new narrative elements and a logical relationship between character, theme, subject matter, and a sense of homeland and regionalist atmosphere. It is evident in some critical essays that topics like how the local soil is combined with personal perception, how narrative is related to life, and how official discourse interacts with folk storytelling have entered researchers’ vision. Chen Sihe has analysed this, arguing that Mo Yan’s narrative language ‘has become part of the literary tradition written in the Chinese language. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s winning of the Nobel Prize has shed new light on Chinese writers that they can resort to their home literary tradition to write about modernity’.34 After the publication of Big Breasts and Wide Hips , Mo Yan ‘has become aware of the folk narrative tradition implicit in his stories.

31 Ibid. 32 Li Jingze. ‘Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit’. Fiction Review, 2003(1). 33 Wang Dewei. ‘A Thousand Words Do Not Outweigh Silence’. Dushu, 1999(3). 34 Chen Sihe. ‘Folk Narrative in Mo Yan’s Recent Stories: The First Essay on Mo Yan’.

Zhongshan, 2001(5).

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Something alien has been transformed to breed a new but native narrative life’, ‘which is like a homecoming for Mo Yan’.35 Chen Sihe does not think that Mo Yan’s recent change in his writing style is a ‘withdrawal’, but actually ‘an exploitation, an exploration, as well as an elevation of folk cultural tradition’, which is achieving its maturity and self-awareness. There is no such thing as a ‘shift’ from Western hallucinatory realism to localised writing.36 But views on Big Breasts and Wide Hips differ. ‘Localisation’ in Zhang Jun’s sense lacks a cultural and spiritual flavour present in Chen Sihe’s criticism. Zhang’s concept of ‘homeland’ is indefinite, which usually appears in modernistic literature and is beyond any value system. ‘What is history? Is it a war, hunger, resistance against foreign invasion, revolution, or mutual destruction? It can be any of these and none of those’. ‘The war experience of the protagonist’s family is a desperate historical irony: They lost their history when they fled their home (which composes their history). But, when they came back in search of their history, what they saw is a war-stricken home’.37 There are still others who challenge Mo Yan’s endeavour. The critic Li Jianjun is one of them. ‘It’s a failed withdrawal to “pure Chinese style”, as we can see from his narrative manner’. Traditional Chinese stories usually adopt the omniscient third-person point of view, which is ‘an art of chatting, conveying a sense of reliability and familiarity to the readers’.38 However, in Mo Yan’s fiction, the dialogues between characters are ‘heavily Europeanized’ as if they occurred in Faulkner’s works. ‘There are too many indirect speeches and shifts of point of view’. Such style is totally different from that of traditional Chinese stories, and Mo Yan ‘is taking the road which Western writers have travelled and he claims to have rejected’.39 It is beyond doubt that a critic can make a personal judgement on literary works. His criticism reflects his knowledge background, aesthetic 35 Ibid. 36 Chen Sihe. ‘Folk Narrative in Mo Yan’s Recent Stories: The First Essay on Mo Yan’.

Zhongshan, 2001(5). 37 Zhang Jun. ‘The Ironist Mo Yan: A Reflection on Big Breasts and Wide Hips ’. Literature and Art Forum, 1996(3). 38 Li Jianjun. Necessary Objection. Jinan: Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2005: p. 65. 39 Ibid.

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taste, and literary experience and interacts with contemporary literary discourses. In other words, the ever-changing information, cultural topics, and varied potential pressures in the literary circle constantly interfere and sometimes even determine or change a critic’s judgement and choice on literary texts. Therefore, from the perspective of literary history, personal judgement is by no means a reliable form of criticism. However, any dynamic research on literary history will include multiple and contradictory texts on personal criticism and writers’ autobiographical remarks and will define a literary tradition by making a detailed study of them. Sun Ge expresses this point well: ‘When we presume faithful representation of history as the most important quality for the theme of a literary text and employ the so-called “correct concepts” as a starting point for criticism, which is easily obtained through arbitrary summarisation, we can by no means ensure the genuineness of the “faithful presentation”’.40 She then argues to the effect that we have failed to include an issue that should be discussed—on what level should localisation occur? For the past several decades, has there been a fixed concept of idealised and romanticised ‘local soil’? If there are diverse concepts of ‘local soil’ for different critics, how can we account for this diversity? These challenges inevitably involve such questions as ‘In a new social context, what is the “Chinese style”?’ and ‘What is the “Chinese national literature”?’41 As mentioned above, there is a peculiar historical background against which the tag of ‘withdrawal to Chinese style’ is affixed to Mo Yan’s novels. The 1990s witnessed a decline of revolutionary discourse and a rise of market awareness in the country, whether urban or rural. Popular culture began to prevail as the dominant discourse. Or, as a new ‘mainstream’ culture and the dominant discourse, a pop culture began to prevail. The pop culture’s collaboration with other discourses in dominating literary criticism was stopped and was intended to monopolise the historical achievements of ‘reformation’. It eroded the revolutionary discourse and transformed its serious drama into a rapid development of ritualisation, fixed discourse, and superficiality. However, we cannot deny the fact that the nation’s historical memories are being drained by this pop culture, and its worldview has been greatly changed. Over time, 40 Sun Ge. ‘Preface to The Paradox of Takeuchi Yoshimi’. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005. 41 Sun Ge. ‘Preface to The Paradox of Takeuchi Yoshimi’. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005.

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1.3 billion Chinese people have been forced into a global economic and cultural framework. The crisis of the Chinese identity is surely a cultural crisis in the full sense. The rapid and continuous advances in the economy have brought strong but chaotic and occasionally xenophobic surges of nationalism inherent in the Chinese psyche. It seems to me that Mo Yan has emerged at a time when there is a new surge of Chinese nationalistic sentiment. He has taken to the literary stage when the audience is still confused about their cultural identity and their position in history. What historical evidence can justify Mo Yan’s ‘withdrawal’? Where is the ‘local literary soil’ sought after in his novels? Can he find a genuine footing for Chinese literature in a chaotic context? Critics harbour deep suspicions. In this respect, if the critics’ interpretation of ‘localisation’ is thus tentative and uncertain, so is Mo Yan’s ‘withdrawal’ to the then literary environment. This uncertainty is well reflected in the interpretation and criticism of Big Breasts and Wide Hips . In this light, the trouble for the novel is not so much caused by its wild description of breast mania, which has brought moral humiliation upon the critics, but by the difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of the concept of ‘local soil’. This poses an inevitable question for the critics: where is the way out for Chinese literature under globalisation? In my view, this question is closely related to a more significant question: does the ‘withdrawal to local soil’ mean a historical advance? Is it a new dawn for Chinese ‘national literature’? In addition, it is worth noting another literary event coupled with the publication of Big Breasts and Wide Hips . Jia Pingwa, another well-known writer, shocks the literatus with a new, bold novel Qinqiang Opera. Raised among many critics are expectations that Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa would herald a new era for Chinese literature. Some sensible critics might have been aware that subject matters concerning country life are the richest ones for contemporary Chinese literature. While stories about urban life display the nation’s current change, the ones about country life summon and gather the nation’s historical memories, which contain the innermost spiritual conflict and pain of the Chinese people. The ‘present’ writings by Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa have provided ample evidence for it. For over two decades, they have been among the few prolific and creative writers. However, at present, we have some new questions. Is the ‘countryside’ the only ‘local soil’? Do themes on countryside life naturally lead to literary success? In addition to their wise choice of subject matter, are

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there other valuable qualities inherent in these two writers? Do qualities here refer to a unique gift, powerful psychological quality, endurance, and extraordinary vision? Or, do they refer to profound understandings of the multiplicity of the concept ‘homeland’, deep insight into what ‘literature’ is, constant vigilance, resistance, and attempts to transcend what is in vogue? These doubts and questions have failed to prompt an effective response among critics. On the contrary, those writers’ hails, prompts, and preoccupied advocacies will remind us of the queries and controversies in modern Chinese literature. For example, Zhao Shuli’s works seem to have proved that the abstract discussions on nationalisation and popularisation could be applied to fiction writing and literary works with workers, farmers, and soldiers as the heroes, which was said to have been elevated to a higher stage of ingratiating themselves with the public and writing for the general public in 1980s. At that time, ‘folk writing’ and ‘grassroots literature’ appeared to have made a bold reaction against the elite literature and claimed that they were more courageous in confronting the ‘contemporary life’. How can the critics clarify such controversies? Are ‘folk writing’ and ‘grass-roots literature’ a real indicator of literary advances? If the answer to the last question is yes, why has there been a ‘reconsideration’ and ‘criticism’ of such ‘literary advances’ during the 1980s? Further, who can be sure that there will never be a second surge of doubts about ‘folk writing’ and ‘grass-roots literature’? We can clearly see that there are doubts about conceptions such as ‘local soil’ and ‘nationalisation’ in the past century. The reason is that the appearance of those concepts did not justify an automatic clarification. Instead, it has raised a disturbing demand for an explanation. The problems that Mo Yan is confronted with are not necessarily from discussions on ‘local’ topics such as narration, style, language, irony, literary geographical setting, historical theme, peaceful mind, etc. Or they are not necessarily from controversies over and doubts about issues such as ‘world literature vs Chinese literature’, ‘localisation vs globalisation’, etc. However, ‘local soil’ is by no means an invalid topic, and as it has outlined our living situation, it will inevitably inspire a writer’s thinking and writing. To obtain a clearer understanding of the concept of ‘local soil’, we should be fully aware of our limitations and make a careful evaluation of today’s complicated cultural situation.

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4 ‘Folk Narrative Tradition’ Present in Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out While the term ‘localised writing’ seems more like a vague and illusive philosophical concept, as indefinable ambiguities and problems abound in it, the ‘folk narrative tradition’ has made an efficient response to Mo Yan’s shift in fiction writing, providing a sort of justification for his ‘withdrawal’. This ‘withdrawal’ signifies a return to his homeland. In recent years, the phrase ‘folk writing’ has been much favoured by Mo Yan when talking about his writing. He claims that ‘as a writer for the general public’, no matter how he writes, he does not ‘differ fundamentally from other folk craftsmen’.42 ‘I poured a great effort into the structure of Sandalwood Death’,43 he confessed. ‘Precisely speaking, I modeled my story on the rural opera nicknamed Maoqiang arias popular in my native town’. ‘There is a great misunderstanding of what is folk’, he also admitted.44 However, Mo Yan believes that ‘folk writing’ indicates that one should write about something of his own. He asserts that ‘it is actually an individualized writing’.45 ‘Folk narrative art in storytelling and local opera was the origin of fiction writing’.46 ‘Sandalwood Death seems to be a misplaced work in an age when fiction has become something exclusively for the elite’.47 ‘As a wild and passionate fiction, Sandalwood Death serves as an exemplification of new historical novels. Its legend-like folktale has fully demonstrated the writer’s outstanding artistic imagination and skillful narrative individuality’.48 ‘This kind of folk opera derives from the local

42 Mo Yan. ‘Folk Narrative Tradition for Literary Creation: A Speech on the Novelists’ Forum Held in Soochow University’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2002(1). 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Mo Yan & Wang Yao. ‘From Red Sorghum to Sandalwood Death’. Contemporary

Writers Review, 2002(1). 47 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: Writers Publishing House, 2001. 48 Hong Zhigang. Shouwang Xianfeng. Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2005:

p. 280.

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custom, personality and spirit of northeast Gaomi’.49 For those who are familiar with Mo Yan’s stories but anxious about the failure on the part of Chinese literature to make an effective response to the so-called end of history,50 the appearance of Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a holy ritual to ‘honor Chinese literary ancestry as well as the great tradition of Chinese classical stories and folk narratives’. ‘As a genuine nationalized novel as well as a story truly from the public and for the public, it is a reaction against hallucinatory realism and modern Western fiction’.51 According to these reviews, the two novels amount to the herald of another thrilling ‘future’ for modern Chinese literature. The two novels are significant outcomes of two decades of intense exploration and painful lessons in contemporary Chinese literature. They are attempts, on the part of Chinese literature and the writer himself, to make a comprehensive reflection on China’s literary experiment, breakthrough, and struggle. They are a revolt against ‘theoretical symbols’ and ‘writing vogue’, a venture to rescue genuine ‘individualised writing’, as well as a deliberate search for individual experiences that have been hidden in the depths of social life; they have been driven by a passion for a huge and exciting writing resource. This is the most tremendous significance of the two novels. Exploring individual experiences hidden in the depth of social life entails a sharp mind, which is really beyond the phrase ‘folk narrative tradition’. Some critics have noted that Mo Yan’s basic narrative pattern is a polyphonic one. His recent shift of writing style is the result of his discovery, exploration, and elevation of folk narrative tradition, which was immature and unconscious but has become mature and conscious. Others argue that there are four different types of folk narrative tradition, and it will be more effective for us to take an ‘internal-to-external

49 Zhang Xuexin. ‘Regional Culture: An Important Topic in the Reconstruction of Chinese Culture: An Essay Inspired by Reading Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death?’ Writers, 2004(5). 50 Chen Xiaoming. The Anxiety of Expression: Historical Disenchantment and Contemporary Literary Reform. Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press, 2002: p. 394. 51 Cited from the words printed on the back covers of Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out published in Writers Publishing House in 2006.

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and local-to-global approach to examine the aesthetic significance of folk narration’.52 However, those who have advocated ‘folk narrative tradition’ accept such arguments with a grain of salt. They claim that the literatus’ attitude towards the value of folk narrative tradition has not developed out of thin air. There is no need for the value of folk tradition to descend on the folk world and shed light on the latter’s significance. ‘Folk narrative tradition’ is not intended to contain the literatus’ ideal. Instead, the realistic and unrestrained world provides only a background setting for our discussion of ‘folk narrative tradition’. Furthermore, restricting the folk world in literature and literary history can produce new fruit. Therefore, a writer’s work and style can exemplify the literatus’ attitude towards the value of the folk world. At a time when the lively folk culture had been withering because of the oppression and repulsion on the part of elite culture, the argument above offered some reflection on Chinese literary history and some new insights into our understanding of the past. Nevertheless, the debate, by juxtaposing ‘intellectual’ with ‘official’, and ‘folk’ with ‘elite’ as pairs of antonyms in the Chinese linguistic context, and by presenting some single and rare evidence, has simplified some complicated literary issues in the then literary context. Therefore, when discussing an issue free from its original context, we must be cautious of the possibility that our venture may end up confusing concepts and expressions, a frustrating analysis, or an entanglement between the phenomenon to be discussed and the problem itself. Mo Yan was frank on this point: ‘The concept of “folk narrative tradition” has not been clarified. I don’t expect anyone to be capable of summarizing its connotations’. ‘I have never intended my fiction for exposure, for criticism, for advocacy, or for edification’. However, when asked about the significance of returning to the folk narrative tradition, he replied: ‘The significance lies in the awakening of each writer’s personality as well as his individuality’.53 His reply indicates the literatus’ initiative,

52 Wang Guangdong & Yang Weijian. ‘Multiple Expressions of Folk Aesthetic Experience: Reflection on the Relationship Between Chinese Writers and Folk Narration in the 20th Century’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2006(4). 53 Mo Yan & Wang Yao. ‘From Red Sorghum to Sandalwood Death’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2002(1).

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which is just what has been refuted by those advocating ‘folk narrative tradition’. Here lies the confusion: some want to examine folk narrative tradition ‘from the local to the global’ in the light of local experience, while others distrust the literatus’ initiative to shed light on folk narrative tradition, claiming that the significance of folk narrative tradition can only manifest itself in the context of literature and literary history. Still others, in contrast, when claiming to adopt an objective attitude towards literature and to highlight its non-edification function, acknowledge that folk narrative tradition can ‘awaken’ writers’ consciousness of their own identities. It is quite surprising to see that so many diverse and even conflicting views on ‘folk narrative tradition’ have emerged within a few years, which may consequently mean that critics have not offered relevant responses in the same historical context. There is evidence of this suspicion. In one of the discussions about ‘folk narrative tradition’, Gao Yuanbao, a well-known critic, voices his disapproval of Mo Yan’s shift: ‘In his early works such as Gale, Joy, and The Transparent Carrot , Mo Yan seems to have based his narration directly on his own life experience and exercised his narrative talent at will’. ‘Such narrative style cannot be clearly identified with any known tradition’. Because of this, nevertheless, ‘He can write at great ease, which proves more effective in presenting his rich life experience in his writing prime’. ‘In this sense, relatively speaking, I think Mo Yan’s recent writing has degenerated. His narrative style has shifted from a blended one back to a single one—the folk narrative style. He deliberately bases his narration on a tradition other than the Western (European) and Enlightenment one’. Gao Yuanbao even raises an intense question about it: ‘The narrative style Mo Yan adopted (recently) is like the one in storytelling. Has it inspired him or, on the contrary, blocked his genuine, natural, and rich perception and imagination?’54 However, another critic Ge Hongbing tries to defend Mo Yan, arguing that the ‘voice’ in Sandalwood Death is ‘an apparent revolt against the May Fourth Movement’s opposition to and even disgust of folk narrative tradition in storytelling and local opera’. According to him, such a voice

54 Gao Yuanbao & Ge Hongbing. ‘Language, Voice, Chinese Character, and Novel: A Free Dialogue on Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Yan Lianke, and Li Rui’. Master, 2002(4).

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does not belong to Mo Yan. ‘It has developed from our nation’s historical experience over thousands of years, and Mo Yan has rediscovered it’.55 Gao Yuanbao denies this rediscovery, though: ‘We have to be very careful about two concepts. The first one is “folk narrative tradition”. It is a broad concept concerning literary history or philosophy, which cannot be understood only as a form of literary creation. The second one is what Mo Yan has termed as “Chinese style”, which is both dangerous and demagogic’. Gao is worried. ‘At a time when some critics and scholars are calling for a response to “globalisation”, is Chinese literature only capable of making this single response by highlighting the narrative voice and the folk narrative tradition and by advocating “Chinese bearing”?’56 Interestingly, when critics doubt the achievements of these novels, there is a lot of praise from literary forums on the Internet. For instance, the Reading Channel of remarked on 17 July 2006 that Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out provides readers with a chance of ‘experiencing’ the great reform taking place in the modern Chinese countryside through the eyes of the narrator. On the same day, the New Books Promotion Column of offered an editorial entitled ‘An Epoch-making Masterpiece’ to introduce the novel, commending the writer for his ‘bold exploration’. The article also asserts that ‘in the story there appears the familiar voice of “couplet form”’. There are reportedly 39,137 clicks on the column within a short period, which indicates the popularity of the novel among readers. Nevertheless, we assume that in ‘literary criticism’ circles, there have been and will be diverse members as well as diverse views—some from academic scholars, others from the literary circle, and others from individual readers, both online and offline. Therefore, it is no surprise that at different levels of criticism, there will be diverse and even conflicting interpretations of and various literary expectations for the concept of ‘folk narrative tradition’, which implies some competition for a say as far as Mo Yan’s idea of exploration for and artistic experiment on narrative tradition in Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out are concerned. So in a sense, diverse critical voices have pictured diverse images of Mo Yan the writer, rather than we have understood the present writer through these two novels. Or conversely, the writer’s

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

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unique artistic imagination and creativeness have shaped today’s literary criticism of Mo Yan and provided it with a multitude of topics, some of which are even mutually conflicting. A writer and his/her works are under constant encouragement, arouse suspicion, opposition, and approval on the part of literary critics. Both writers (or their works) and the critics are not only rivals but also fellow travellers. They are the two speakers in a conversation, but they are standing on opposite sides of a gap that is difficult to bridge. Such is the complicated situation that every literary researcher faces. However, a writer’s process and the folk narrative experience are never homogeneous, just as they are never heterogeneous. This fact has been revealed by the chaotic vision of what ‘folk writing’ is in twentieth-century Chinese literature, in which artistic advocacy for a ‘Chinese bearing’ may not be a relevant response to the globalised grand narrative. Although a writer can accumulate rich experiences during their writing prime, it does not follow that skilful and unrestricted exercising of their literary talent guarantees an elevation of their works. At present, it is more urgent for a writer to deal with his writing practice rather than the presupposition of some new concepts. He should be on the alert for the possibility that some critical concepts, which once concentrated on ‘folk narrative tradition’ but now on narrative style, might once more undermine or conceal the vigour, vitality, and individualised experience in his writing. In this sense, two questions should claim our attention: (1) how to encourage writers to rediscover the ‘folk’ elements in their life experience and to exploit the potentialities of new narrative patterns, imagination, discourse types, and subject matters from a large amount of storytelling (e.g., Pu Songling’s short stories, native oral tales, etc.)? (2) How to resist the urge to ‘label’ and ‘institutionalize’ these potentialities under the pressure from literary powers or prevalent literary criticism? The following comments made by Gao Yuanbao are of great value: In the evaluation of Mo Yan, it is not so significant to discuss about what his chosen narrative style is as to make a careful examination of the impact on the writer’s perception of his life experience brought about by the introduction of folk narrative tradition. The narrative style that Mo Yan has recently adopted is like the one in storytelling. Has it inspired him or on the contrary, blocked his genuine, natural, and rich perception and imagination?57

57 Gao Yuanbao & Ge Hongbing. ‘Language, Voice, Chinese Character, and Novel: A Free Dialogue on Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Yan Lianke, and Li Rui’. Master, 2002(4).

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Nevertheless, we must precisely define some confusing concepts such as genuine, natural, rich perception and imagination, and narrative tradition. What is most impressive about Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is the writer’s extraordinary ability to allegorise, elevate, and integrate rich traditional resources by enlisting not only his personal gift but also traditional narrative patterns. Mo Yan is bold enough to take a panoramic point of view for the two-family sagas, which cover a century’s history of life in the writer’s rural hometown, and presents the profound changes under way in the Chinese countryside. His boldness is matched only by that of Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi, two novelists whose works also offer comprehensive pictures of rural China. Comparatively, two other well-known writers, Lu Xun58 and Zhao Shuli, focus on shorter, specific periods in their stories. Some critics have noted that there are both heroic and rustic elements in Sandalwood Death and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out —and some of Mo Yan’s early stories59 —and that the writer is not free of vulgarity both in his mind and in his words.60 In a detailed analysis of Mo Yan’s writing, Wu Yiqin observes that many of Mo Yan’s stories are ‘precise and insightful in depicting the era’s spirit’ and that the writer has blended fiction with reality in his narration, which ‘does not distract the reader away from his time and reality’ but instead, gives him a chance of experiencing ‘the extreme complexity of the narrative’.61 Li Jingze praises Mo Yan in this way: ‘Mo Yan is no longer a novelist, a “talent” indulging himself in an artist’s saga. He has become a storyteller, a colleague of those who had told tales to the audience in storytelling houses since the Tang and Song dynasties… The issues addressed in Sandalwood Death are among the historical discourse 58 Lu Xun (1881–1936) was one of the greatest litterateurs, ideologists, and revolutionists in modern China. Through all his life, Lu Xun created over 6 million words of writings, ranging from critical essays, short novels, poems, proses to translations, which have produced a profound and broad influence on Chinese literature after the May Fourth Movement in 1919. His representative works include Call to Arms, Wandering, Old Tales Retold, Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, and Wild Grass, etc. 59 Wang Binggen. ‘Heroic and Rustic: An Examination’. Literature and Art Forum, 1987(4). 60 Chen Sihe. ‘A Dialogue Between History and Present: On Mo Yan’s New Story “Rose, Rose, So Fragrant”’. Zhongshan, 1988(1). 61 Wu Yiqin. ‘There Is a Type of Narrative Style Called “Mo Yan’s Style of Narration”’. Journal of Literature and Art, July 22nd, 2003.

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filled with heated debates, bargains, and reluctant compromises’.62 On the other hand, some critics think that Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is actually ‘a pompous work’, flaunting its writer’s gift as well as its utter inferiority.63 Many critics enjoy and admire the novel’s exquisite account of the lifestyle led by the country’s gentry—a lifestyle totally absent in China at present—and affectionate narration of the innocent joy experienced by the poor and humble ‘country bumpkins’. Readers cannot help but be touched by the perseverance, consideration, and compassion on the part of the major speaker, who, having been transformed into a donkey and then into an ox, narrates human miseries in a melancholic but sympathetic manner. Still, there are critics who voice their disapproval of the novel. ‘The narrative style is too arbitrary… The descriptions of characters’ inner workings and movements are crude, simple, and unreliable… which is quite far from the nation’s traditional narrative style and pattern familiar to Chinese readers’.64 Though somewhat offensive, such criticism is understandable. Throughout the human history, nobody has proven perfect. It is also true with a writer who is experiencing a worldly existence like other mortals. In his ‘Writer’s Note to Sandalwood Death’, Mo Yan is eager to claim his affiliation with ‘folk narrative tradition in storytelling and local opera’. This claim reveals something that would easily invite ‘severe’ criticism. It may be self-awareness or self-image developed from a collapsed ‘encompassing historical outlook’. It also indicates his nostalgia when he is attempting to recover a ‘past’ or a ‘tradition’ that has been oppressed and revised by the ‘encompassing historical outlook’. Phrases such as ‘the voice of the train’, ‘the year 1900’, ‘our village’, ‘local Maoqiang arias’, and ‘a square devoid of people’ disclose the writer’s personal experience and overlapped memories. We can see from these expressions his endeavour to revive and enliven ‘heated debates in a historical discourse’ and to understand human sentiments expressed by such statements as ‘History is drama, drama is reality’. ‘The truth about life is that a person has to shoulder everything in the face of death’, etc. These statements 62 Li Jingze. ‘Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit’. Fiction Review, 2003(1). 63 Shao Yanjun, et al. ‘Frank Comments on Lift and Death Are Wearing Me Out ’.

Journal of Hainan Normal University, 2006(2). 64 Li Jianjun. Necessary Objection. Jinan: Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2005: p. 65.

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not only point to a vast and profound historical dimension but also to the writer’s inner world.65 Literary criticism means an immediate reading of a literary work and a dialogue with its writer. It is a written discourse involving current historical awareness, cultural atmosphere, literary vogue, and personal experience. The present criticism of Mo Yan, apparently, is produced directly from the market economy and pop culture, quite different from that of the 1950s and 1960s, when politics dominated the literary arena, or that of the 1980s when ‘independent literature’ was in vogue. In this sense, the present criticism of Mo Yan is real literary criticism. Literary critics can never be expected to be subordinate to writers; they have their own ambition of constructing history through the interpretation of writers and their works. So, there are critics who project their judgements, presuppositions, and sentiments onto writers and cite literary works as evidence for this ‘history’. Some of them are aware of the changing historical and literary contexts, trying to analyse a writer’s writing practice and observe their possible shifts in style to give an effective evaluation of and judgement on new texts. In this manner, they may feel empathy with the writer and may analyse their works from their perspective. Or, they may count on factors other than the ones from the writer to disprove the writer’s new shift. Other critics, under the spell of a writer’s literary prestige, may make their presence known through the approval or praise of their new writing. It is true that literary criticism can exert its influence on the reading public and vice versa. Readers contribute multiple voices to literary discourses, thus forming part of the literary ecosystem. Although each of the critical voices claims to have made the most genuine, objective, and exact interpretation of a literary text, it has inevitably obscured some aspects of the text while highlighting one. Each voice chooses evidence in favour of its view but downplays some salient merits in the work. We believe this is what criticism is. However, it is beyond doubt that recent years’ criticism of Mo Yan has exerted a great influence on the writing of Chinese literary history, and writers cannot ignore its important argument and reference when they try to make outlines, develop ideas, and reach conclusions.

65 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: Writers Publishing House, 2001.

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On the other hand, literary historians are resisting greater invasions and interference from critical discourses. For instance, when reviewing Big Breasts and Wide Hips , some literary historians have included phrases like ‘a wild, passionate, and marvelous romance’, ‘lush sensation and rich imagination’, ‘a sensational experience’, ‘intense vitality of wilderness’, etc., while rejecting such pompous modifiers as ‘great’, ‘epochmaking’, ‘shocking’, and ‘epic-like’.66 Some others have chosen phrases like ‘memoir of a clan’, ‘the value of the folk tradition’, ‘power of life’, ‘violence’, ‘features of outlaws’, and ‘sexual affection’, and tried to spare excessive elevation of these descriptions at the same time.67 Still others, under the influence of current criticism, have enlarged the introduction to the writer and taken ‘childhood point of view’—a term coined by critics— as the focus of analysis on The Transparent Carrot . However, they do not venture further.68 The instances above show that literary historians are trying to control, filter, correct, or amend the excess of critical discourses while accepting and including what critics have achieved. Literary criticism over the past two decades has resulted in some negative effects on Mo Yan’s works. Critical discourses have found their way into his stories and become the lingering shadow of his artistic imagination. In the meantime, Mo Yan has been resisting and extricating himself from the critics’ attempts to reshape and encroach on his works and has succeeded in removing some negative elements from his texts. For instance, he has resisted the temptation of hallucinatory realism, lifted the encirclement laid by prevailing critical discourses, and made a decisive return to the narrative style of ‘Maoqiang arias’. Although he has expressed his approval of the concept of ‘folk narrative tradition’ and somewhat accepted the evaluation of his works in its light, Mo Yan is quite determined to reject the redefinition and revision that current critical discourses have imposed on him and his works and tries to highlight the sensation and diversity of his stories. Mo Yan’s case will remind us of the repeated interaction between writers and critics throughout China’s long literary history. This is a word 66 Hong Zicheng. Contemporary Chinese Literary History. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999. 67 Chen Sihe. A Course on Contemporary Chinese Literary History. Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1999. 68 Meng Fanhua & Cheng Guangwei. The Development History of Contemporary Chinese Literature. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 2004.

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game for them to play when they are trying to make disputes, refutations, disagreements, cooperation, interpretations, and description. In this game, no one can predict what kind of works will be classified as ‘classics’ or ‘non-classics’, how literary positions of certain works are unexpectedly refilled by other works, how many new writers will make a brief appearance, and how many old ones will fade into obscurity. Nevertheless, literary critics try to locate at one time and relocate at another a writer’s position in literary history, whether they are willing or not. In this way, their remarks may enter a grand historical discourse. In this sense, the so-called history of literary criticism is no more than a collection of synchronic comments on writings made at different periods and a record of the revision, alteration, abridgement, and complement of these comments. The history of a specific writer’s work, when presented to later generations, is always a revised one, as his intentions are under constant revision on the part of critics. This is the rule of literature, a rule known to the Chinese literary circle.

Folkness and Literature: The Chinese Experience in Mo Yan’s Narratives Ning Zhang

The appearance of the two novelettes ‘Joy’1 and ‘Red Grasshopper’2 in 1987 marked the maturity of Mo Yan’s individualised style. However, the two works met harsh criticism instead of warm applause such as the one showered on The Transparent Carrot . Mo Yan’s stories of this period, including ‘ Sin’, ‘Airship’, ‘Food Supplies’, ‘First Love’, ‘Road Construction’, and among others, no longer offer the usual, familiar, aesthetic fantasies for readers, but an experience of survival closely related to tragedy—one involves sense and body and combines joy and sorrow. Precisely speaking, it is ‘an experience on the part of the stomach’, unrefined but powerful. It contains qualities that are not usually present in literature or aesthetics. It has rendered all the previous art experiences and interpretations ineffective.

1 Mo Yan. ‘Joy’. People’s Literature, 1987(3): pp. 6–42. 2 Mo Yan. ‘Red Grasshopper’. Harvest, 1987(3).

Source: Southern Cultural Forum, 2001(1): pp. 39–46. N. Zhang (B) Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_4

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It is said that when a person has suffered excessive hunger for a long time, their sense of starvation will cease to exist, and he/she will begin to experience delirium. Mo Yan’s narration just releases readers from some aesthetic illusions and leads them into the awareness of their own ‘stomach’. During the years of food shortage caused by a famine due to the drought from 1959 to 1961, people had to stuff their stomachs with chaff, grass, leaf, and even clay. When there is something wrong with the stomach, it will reject the stuff it receives, but it will never cease its function. The stomach dwells on the border between human beings and nature. It is both serious and funny, absurd and reasonable. It suffers so much but never yields. Time and distress cannot conquer it. Nor can intimidation, authority, morality, or amenity stop its function. It can unite the material with the spiritual, of the eulogy as well as criticism, and even rebellion. The moral principles of this ‘stomach’ are not intended for vulgarity, but for abstract ideals, for the dichotomy that has separated the body from the soul, and for the knowledge that has been cut from its source. There is no suitable place for this ‘stomach’ in the established coordinate system of knowledge and philosophy. It is a ‘folk’ stomach, not yet tamed by the established knowledge system. The ‘folkness’ of the stomach is significant in a rural community, as it has not degraded into a complete individualism, but still retains a close relationship with nature and a ‘conventional society’. In modern times, especially in an age of commerce and law, it will be quickly reduced to something detached from nature, something completely individualised, or something physiological. Hence, the ‘folkness’ is more naturally associated with rural life. Concepts such as ‘rural community’ and ‘great earth’ can be defined as elements of folkness only when they are associated with something concrete, rich, multiple, and indefinite, which involves the ‘body-material’ relationship. However, in the eyes of many theorists, these rich concepts are no more than something taken for granted and static, just like a metaphor or symbol with a ‘noble’ attribute pre-attached. In this manner, folkness has become an instrument of politics and commodity, a temporal substitute for the ‘ultimate value’, which some critics have failed to achieve. Throughout Mo Yan’s writing career, ‘folkness’ manifests itself in a rich, complex, and impressive manner, which seems to have presented before readers a huge ‘stomach’ rejoicing in its chewing movements, like the stomach of a donkey (or a mule, bull, horse, etc.)—those beasts

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appear now and again in his stories. They vividly show the process of rumination through a lavish display of these chewing movements. In this process, a person makes a reunion with nature, with his native land, and with other people—a reunion sometimes painful, sometimes desperate, and sometimes joyful. Six ‘folk’ approaches to narrative will be discussed below.

1

Verbal Abuse

When I talk about the ‘folk world’, I make a point of highlighting the concept of ‘folkness’. It is widely known that there is not a geographical ‘folk world’. Power, violence, determinism, teleology, evolutionism, logos—things incompatible with ‘folkness’—are not only present in the royal court and among the ruling class, but also in rural communities, such as the ones in northeast Gaomi, a fictional township where Mo Yan has set many of his stories. In these communities, there is ‘folkness’ as well as ‘non-folkness’. The two are interwoven and entangled with each other. We cannot deny one without rejecting the other. The man-made boundary between life and death, between good and evil, or between destruction and regenesis is blurred here. This tendency is also evident in the verbal abuses that are intended to give vent to hatred and anger. For instance, in ‘Joy’, the veteran Gao Datong launches a verbal assault when he is being humiliated: You are ogres born of toads, rabbits, and bastards! Monsters and demons crossbred from the donkey-head bastard and donkeys! You have power, huh?… How malicious you are! It’s you that had seduced my wife… You gonna get away from me? No way! If you run into the rat’s hole, I’ll set a rattrap at the mouth of it! If you hide in the ear of a pig, I’ll seal it with beewax! If you withdraw into your mother’s cunt, I’ll fuck your mother! Ha-ha-ha-ha!… plots and tricks, flowery talks and cunning words, curses and oaths, bribery and hook, whores and johns, sea cucumbers and bird’s nests, camel hoofs and bear paws, cucumbers and eggplants… I, Gao Datong, a bumpkin, just value my life as light as a feather… You’re only an ugly bug in the whore’s den! Your face is even much filthier than their assholes!…3

3 Mo Yan. ‘Joy’. People’s Literature, 1987(3): pp. 6–42.

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There is no doubt that the persons he is cursing are either those powerful ones in a community or those scoundrels connected with the powerful. They are backed by a powerful social mechanism. Mo Yan expresses his admiration for so ‘folk’ a verbal abuse in the following passage: Gao Datong’s eloquent ‘bloody verbal abuse’ flutters like a colorful ribbon. It gently sweeps every corner of our hearts, healing our deep wounds. In his curses we can see the last glow of unaffected quality and humanity.4

Mo Yan calls it ‘bloody verbal abuse’ to indicate that it is closely related to our physical body, shared by the curser and the cursed. It is not an abstract, qualitative judgement. There is similar condemnation in Wild Mule, such as the mother’s curses against the father and the wild mule, like ‘lewd mule’, ‘slut’, and ‘The mule will fuck you to death!’, and the curses on the part of a woman against her mother-in-law, etc.5 Such verbal abuses come from a genuine folk world and differ from those made from an elevated point of view and intended to preach against or condemn the cursed ones exclusively. The cursers, in the latter case, are alien and terrifying. They have completely detached themselves from the condemnation. Three distinct features characterise the ‘folk’ verbal abuses, such as those made by Gao Datong. Firstly, the cursed one is degraded to some insignificant, easy-to-handle low creature, such as toad, bug, and pest. When his curse involves a more advanced animal (such as ox, horse, and donkey), the cursed person will be degraded to its genital organ or another insignificant part of its body. Secondly, the curser will also degrade himself while degrading the cursed one, which amounts to announcing: Let’s cease our existence together. Let’s just be an animal or insect. Finally, all considerations of decency are put aside. Things generally too sensitive to be mentioned, such as genitals, sex, or faeces, will rush to the curser’s lips without scruples. All these things are familiar and frequent in their daily life. Verbal abuse is the most radical manner of manifesting ‘folkness’. However, by reducing human beings to insignificant creatures, it actually 4 Ibid. 5 Mo Yan. ‘Wild Mule’. Harvest, 1999(5).

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‘familiarises’ those that have been ‘alienated’ by power and violence; by resorting to our physical sensations, it materialises the abstractions (such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’); by activating our physiological experiences, it ‘vulgarizes’ those that have been otherwise elevated (such as ‘ideal’ and ‘revolution’). In this way, the characters in Mo Yan’s stories can transcend the terrible burden imposed on them by the society (such as ‘heaven’, ‘hell’, and ‘social mechanism’) and keep themselves and the cursed ones to a familiar, controllable environment and existence, rather than to a terrible abyss or lofty heaven. Such verbal abuses blur the boundaries between life and death, the superior and the inferior, the powerful and the powerless, in which lies one of the everlasting and elementary strengths of ‘folkness’. As a result, readers will feel amused, instead of angry or disgusted, when they come across such verbal abuses, just like one who watches the performance of a clown during an interlude. The clown usually degrades himself and always ‘unwittingly’ presents his idiocy before the audience. The ‘heroic’ manner, in this ‘folk’ sense, presents itself as something funny, a laughing-stock, which becomes part of a joyful world of ‘folkness’. The laughing-stock is something physical, rather than spiritual—something positive, rather than negative. The world of ‘folkness’ rejects those unilateral and spiritual judgements but embraces derision related to the vulgarity of something physical and materialistic. One will quickly establish a spiritual relationship with it.

2

The Power of Forgetting

The materialisation and degradation in ‘folk’ verbal abuses are actually a way to solace the speaker himself/herself (such as the mother in ‘Wild Mule’) as well as to forget. Memory, in a ‘folk’ sense, is not something abstract, as defined by philosophers. A ‘folk’ memory is always concrete and closely connected to the physical senses. When a judgement based on a particular value system does not go along with a person’s physical experience, his/her body will stage a revolt. When writers of ‘pseudo-folkness’ blindly eulogise ‘a green land’, Qi Wendong, the starved and exhausted village teenager in ‘Joy’, protests in a different voice:

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You chew the tasteless grass, like a mule, a horse, a donkey or an ox… You utter a soundless yell in anger: ‘I will not eulogize the land. Who eulogizes it will be my deadly foe! I hate green. Who eulogizes green will be a coldblooded slaughter!’… You think the green land that has been eulogized is awfully dirty. It is the headquarter of all the filthy and the evil. It is like the tank storing swine semen in the township’s boar station.6

This is a genuine memory, a disgusting one about nature, land, and green grass. As has been proved by the most ancient psychological research, experiences that have caused the bitterest physical pain will be well stored in human memory. To remember is to undergo the pain. Civilisation has corrupted the human sense of taste and coated the human tongue so that human beings have to frequently taste a disgusting bitterness. The physiological response from the corrupted sense of taste and coated tongue has been named ‘the bitter memory’ by literatus. As a result, we keep remembering the bitterness while creating bitterness. Throughout the history of human civilisation, what is securely stored in our memory is usually sorrow rather than happiness. Therefore, as long as we are faithful to our physical experiences, what we remember will be hatred. More often than not, we tend to store bitter experiences that we try to dispel. However, the real recollection, or the art of recalling, is a kind of ability. Fei Xiaotong7 mentions in his sociological masterpiece Earthbound China that members of a rustic community tend to reject their own recollection as it is a ‘bitter memory’.8 The only way out for them is to forget. Forgetting is the precondition for members of ‘the world of folkness’ to experience happiness and joy. In On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche has discussed in detail the function of forgetfulness: Forgetfulness is not a merevis interiae [a force of inertia], as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense. We can ascribe to forgetfulness while we are digesting what we live through, experience and then absorb (we might call the process mental ingestion [Einverseeling]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the thousandfold process which our

6 Mo Yan. ‘Joy’. People’s Literature, 1987(3): pp. 6–42. 7 Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) was one of the most renowned sociologists in China. 8 Fei Xiaotong. Earthbound China. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1948.

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bodily nourishment goes through (the so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut from time to time, so that it stays undisturbed from the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps them working for and against one another… If forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present… Forgetfulness is present as a force, as a form of strong health.9

When it is thought to be necessary to store some memory, there will be violence, blood, torture, and sacrifice. This is a game favoured by those with power. We are quite familiar with the saying ‘To forget is to betray’. It tells us to keep some memories, to keep those that are likely to be forgotten in our subconsciousness. It even imposes the memories on us through terror or moral judgement (such as the label of ‘betrayal’). This fact implies that the power of forgetfulness is great. In fact, this power manifests itself so particularly in ‘the world of folkness’ that it even characterises the latter. Since pain is most effective in keeping human memory, it is a punishment that can activate a person’s memory of forgetfulness, reminding them of something that they do not want to store in their mind, of something disgusting. Such examples abound in northeast Gaomi, the fictional township in Mo Yan’s stories. An interesting one can be found in the episode about the congregation for ‘the past miseries so as to cherish the present happiness’ in ‘Airship’. Such congregations were in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s. It consisted of two sessions, which were two types of punishment intended for different classes. The first part was a condemnation. A former local VIP would be selected as the target of condemnation. Attendants would elaborate on the past wrongs against this VIP in the ‘old society’ and condemn him, sometimes with violence, which symbolised a punishment for the ruling class, reminding them of their past wrongdoings. During the second session, attendants would have a special meal—‘a taste of past miseries’ (a hodge-podge of low-quality grains, husk, wild vegetable, etc.)—which was a penalty intended for the potential forgetfulness on the part of the attendants.

9 Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006: pp. 35–36.

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However, in the township of Gaomi depicted by Mo Yan, such a congregation has turned into a farce: I am eagerly looking forward to those congregations for ‘past miseries’, which is among the several greatest joys I had in my boyhood. To tell the truth, every congregation has turned out to be a joyous party and every ‘taste of past miseries’ became a carnival for all the villagers. The reason is that such a meal is much superior to our daily meal the so-called ‘a bite of present happiness’ - at home. Before the meal, the head of the farming team would invite the old granny of the Fangs to deliver a speech on the past miserable life and she usually begins in this way: ‘My dear fellow villagers, I haven’t had a square meal since I married Mr. Fang. Several years ago, I could still collect a full basket of dried sweet potatoes within half a day on my yearly begging tour in the southern villages. But now I can hardly fill half the basket… There are too many beggars nowadays. Those little bastards! They would rush into the villages and reap the offerings…’ ‘Aunt, you should talk about incidents before liberation’, demanded the head of the farming team. ‘Which incident, then? Let me think for a moment. One day before liberation, I made a begging tour to the southern villages…’10

She then would relate the story she repeated so many times: how she delivered a baby in a mill on the trip. She told every detail of the story with an increasing zest and passion until she herself was moved to tears. At this point, the team head would shout a slogan at the top of his voice: ‘Don’t forget the miseries of the laboring class and do remember the sufferings incurred by the ruling class! … Take a rest, Aunt. We’ll have the meal after it.’ ‘I am not longing for the moon or for the stars. I come here just for the meal!’ asserted the wife of Mr. Fang with a side glance.11

Hunger and craving for food are firmly rooted in the old granny’s recollections, so is the experience of childbirth. Such recollections are a matter of physical body—as they are not chronological, they are free of ideological or artistic orientation. They are fragments of memory. She does 10 Mo Yan. ‘Airship’. Beijing Literature, 1987(12). 11 Ibid.

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not always bear them in mind. The recollections of the past are imposed upon her by her craving for food. What has been activated is her sense of taste but not her consciousness. The activated sense of taste functions as a doorkeeper to prevent such recollections from slipping out of the memory hall. As the congregation of ‘reflecting on past miseries so as to cherish present happiness’ is closely related to food, it itself has turned into a joyous festival. Any kind of festival is essentially an enemy of remembering. Whatever the historical background is, folkness can retain its vitality through its ‘forgetfulness’, which tends to defy any civilised, religious, and ideological framework. All of these—power, violence, control, reign, education, preaching, etc., including psychological therapies via physical punishment—reinforce a person’s memory rather than his discarding of an experience. An experience retained can be utilised while one discarded cannot. In this light, we can see that through forgetting, one can free himself from ideological influence. In this sense, the power of forgetting is a positive one.

3

Farce: A Carnival or an Impulsion

Memory tries to turn the past into the present, just as imagination turns the future into the present. Forgetting is independent of the past or the future for it does not intend to appease the present with something from the past, nor with something ideal and otherworldly from the future. He (forgetting) binds himself with the present (including his physical body and the outside world). He strives, endures, cries, smiles, and rejoices. For him, life has become a farcical and absurd game, a festival to celebrate himself. Dominated by food (the stomach) and childbirth (the uterus), people from northeast Gaomi are not only capable of transforming the congregation of ‘reflecting on past miseries so as to cherish present happiness’ into a feast, but also successful in staging a farce to ridicule memory. Tragedy occurs when a long-standing revel is suddenly reduced to a great terror, a typical feature of modern urban life. It seems that the bustling, nightless streets are free of terrors, but something evil—such as death—is always lurking until it presents itself before people like a sudden burglar. In the country, death closely connects with life—the graves of the beloved ones are just behind the living dwelling. However, for the city dwellers, the dead ones have to be cremated on the outskirts so that

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the living can forget the sad memory of death. So what they need most is memory. In contrast, when a long-standing burden or terror has suddenly turned into a revel, there comes a farce or parody, which is the typical feature of a rural community, where the distinction between daylight and night, labour and leisure, daily routine and festival, is clear-cut. The burden of labour comes in the daylight and the black terror at night, coupled with various strict surveillance and intimidation on the part of social organisations, with disasters, hunger, and cold from nature. What they need is to forget, revel, riot, and whim, as if they were dancing before death and terror. Such a casual riot would convert an experience into something opposite to the experience itself (for instance, the narration by the wife of Mr. Fang has turned something serious into a jovial buffoonery), or something deliberate into something meaningless, or something compulsory into something voluntary. In this manner, a person can free himself from his age-old horror and anxiety, from the tyranny of mandatory, deliberate, and terrible experiences. In the northeast Gaomi depicted by Mo Yan, such an impulsive riot and its ensuing farce, ridicule, and fun can occur everywhere, even on a serious official occasion. Impulsion features typical narratives by Mo Yan. As the critic Chen Sihe puts it, impulsion is ‘the implicit structure’ of Mo Yan’s stories. It dwells on the border between physical experience and willpower, narration and sentiment, and lodges the writer’s heart. Experience, in such a free, arbitrary, and impulsive flow of narration, explodes like a barrel of dynamite, sending sparkling fragments of experience into the air. Those fragments will be transformed during the explosion. This is well illustrated by the following episode from Red Grasshopper: I’ve inherited the confused philosophy of this huge yet chaotic clan where evils abound. I reflect on how the Fourth Lord and the Ninth Lord had rivaled for the girl in red, on the thrush and the zebra. When the sun delivers its first crimson glow to the northeast corner of the wild expanse, my legs give an impulsive spring. The confusion in my mind disappears, and makes the noise in my lungs. Standing in the wilderness of my home village, I feel secure as if I were sleeping in the uterus of my mother. Our clan has its unique way of venting sentiments. We are very grieved to learn that our beautiful language has been condemned as

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vulgar, dirty, and offensive both to the ears and eyes. We eulogise feces and the happiness we have enjoyed when we expel the excrement. We are even more grieved to learn that those with rusted anuses also condemn us as dirty and mean people. Our feces are as beautiful as labeled bananas. Why can’t we honor them? When we are shitting we always associate them with the most glorified form of love, even with some lofty religious ceremony. Why can’t we honor them? The sun has made half of its appearance over the horizon, shedding golden light and crimson beams over the grass… The sunshine, like a powerful, colossal arm, sweeps away the dust in the air. The sky, clearing up and without any trace of cloud, looks like the azure ocean heaving with crystal waves. The wild grassland, where I grazed cattle and expelled beautiful feces, is withering… Suddenly and unexpectedly, a long and unprepared sentence flashes into my mind: In the reddish mud in northeast Gaomi are buried the past, present and future of a beautiful, colossal, and chaotic clan with odorless feces; and the mud is the accumulation of a unique culture and a mixture of reddish grasshoppers, network shit, animal corpses, and human sexual secretion.12

It seems that this narrative manner is quite funny and absurd. The arbitrariness and instantaneousness of perception interrupt the continuous flow of thinking. Free and impulsive recollections of past experiences swarm up, reducing the diachronic experiences to segments; not in the process of calm and careful reasoning, the experience joins the flow of time to conform to some purpose. This bold and free discourse has transcended the status quo and posed a challenge to the internal rules and structure of the literary world. It is similar to what Bakhtin termed ‘carnivalesque’ when he talks about Francois Rabelais’ works. The ‘entertainment’ principle in fiction shares a great similarity and an internal structure with the ‘joy-oriented’ principle of life and the firmly-established principle of fun in ‘folkness’. But it is worth mentioning that the carnivalesque world in Mo Yan’s narratives, or the one in northeast Gaomi, differs from its medieval and renaissance counterpart depicted by Bakhtin or Rabelais. In Rabelais’ story, all the settings and props are readymade: there are so many smiling faces, multiple delicious foods, drinks and beverages, and an army of servants and maids at service. Rabelais stages comedies of feast and carnival by employing those settings and props. 12 Mo Yan. Red Grasshopper. Beijing: The Ethnic Publishing House, 2004.

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But what is Mo Yan’s northeast Gaomi like? A barren land, where even the rabbits would loathe excreting. Nothing would grow there, except violence and power, as well as some unruly grass. In what can it revel? Where can festivals and feasts be held? However, even in such an impossible situation, ‘carnivalesque’ is realised from Mo Yan’s pen! The ‘folkness’ in his works is a genuine one—realistic, radical, and unswerving. Here the celestial beings, who live on breeze and dew, have been reduced to ordinary mortals, who live on flesh and have to dispel excrement; while the mortals have been reduced to vegetarian animals such as cattle, horses, and donkeys and have to strive for survival along with the unconquerable wild grass. Mo Yan takes pains to honour this ‘vegetarian clan’ in his hometown and laments its bygone golden age. He nurses a great hatred against the socalled advanced creatures that live on the flesh instead of grass. What he has described is a distressing, degraded joy (revel): on the brutal ‘festival’, villagers from northeast Gaomi balanced the stomach and the passion of blood with grass and leaves. This is not the idealism of the Renaissance but the absurd realism of the twentieth century. In this manner, Mo Yan’s impulsive narrative has neatly interwoven the folk imagination with reality, joy with sorrow, noble with humility, forgetfulness with memory, and condemnation with admiration. Whereas Rabelais magnifies his characters to an unbelievable size (both Gargantua and Pantagruel are giants), Mo Yan reduces his characters to some small animals and, in the end, to vegetarian grasshoppers. Compared with Rabelais’ ideal humanism, it seems that Mo Yan favours more an ‘anti-memory’ historicism—a schizophrenic one. However, we can discover between the lines of his narration a fierce intention lurking underneath: he wishes that the huge legion of red grasshoppers could devour everything (grass roots, leaves, especially the disgusting carnivores), and even ‘history’ itself, on this dirty land! That would really be a doomsday feast, a festival, or a binge.

4

Criticism: The Price of a Corporal Realism

The term ‘irony’ has been abased to a rhetoric device, a purposeful tool, or even a trick to flaunt or a skill for satire and ridicule. Such is a degenerated form of irony, which is said to have been a major approach to deconstructing history and ideology by Chinese writers. However, the so-called deconstruction has been ambiguous and dull. Moreover, it has

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become as serious as the official discourses. Serious discourses (with their tones, postures, etc.) doubtlessly constitute part of the total ideology. The irony, a humorous device with folk qualities, has become something serious and official. ‘The demon of harvest has been castrated’, Bakhtin describes this situation. I will touch upon the topic of genuine seriousness later. Mo Yan’s writing is intended to deconstruct such seriousness. By virtue of folk humour and jocosity, which is a quality of ‘corporal realism’, he tries to dismantle the dichotomous structure of power and put a distorted and ugly mask over the face of power. Two features of this ‘corporal realism’ can be identified: comic language and humorous corporal metaphor. Below are some instances of comic language: Liu, the vice director, is still lecturing, ‘… to follow the example of Dazhai. Irrigation is the bloodline of agriculture. Water is one of the characters in the Eight-Character Guideline. Waterless agriculture is like a motherless child, or a child with a milkless mother, or a child whose mother loses the ability to secrete milk. The child cannot survive without milk If it could survive, and it would be like that Heihai.13

Colonel Xu from the 43rd Regiment of the garrison is delivering a speech: I’ve never seen soldiers like the ones from your unit… They piss behind the line of hollies. The other morning on my walk around I found a pile of shit there. I had studied it for half an hour before I reached a firm conclusion that it was expelled by a human being rather than a dog… It must have been done by one from your unit, because none of my soldiers in the regiment enjoys an anus that wide… Why are you laughing, my dear comrades?14

The theme of the speech is certainly serious and so is the speaker’s tone. However, as the similes or metaphors involved the physical body (which is quite irrelevant to the abstract and serious topic), especially some taboo words (like ‘anus’), the seriousness of the speeches can no longer contain itself, thus producing an ironic or comic effect. In terms of fiction writing, such a narrative approach does possess a deconstructing power that can 13 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 14 Mo Yan. The Fly, The Incisor. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing

House, 2000.

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dismantle the building of authority. However, in terms of real life, the situation will become complicated. The ‘folkness’ contained in the lecturers’ tone may be compulsive or deliberate. Although the language of the speeches is quite rustic, the tone and the speakers’ appearance are quite official, which confuses their real identities. The audience, in their confusion, thus identify themselves with the authoritative speakers. Because of this, we have to develop a keen awareness of the limitations of language. Bakhtin claims that the folk language (such as four-letter words) is capable of dismantling the building of authority, and so is inebriation. But what if inebriation ends? Familiarisation is transient while alienation persists. Without the latter, a serious effect will never be achieved. Some lecturers are adept in employing folk language to please the audience (a typical way to associate an artistic form with nation, public, folkness, and ideology) so as to manipulate them. As they come from folk communities, they are capable of understanding the folk audience and thus are good at making the most of folkness. They know when to be humorous and when to be serious. It is a matter of seconds for them to shift from humorous to serious. The village chiefs and township heads depicted by Mo Yan are such kind of persons. As a result, neither irony nor humour functions as a rhetorical device in his narration. Each is a profound presentation of the essence of the corporal experience, a mock of the serious and the authoritative, a craving for revel and freedom, a restraint on despotism and the sentiment against revel, and a rude experientialism to retrieve the corporal experience from various abstractions. In such a case, the corporal experience has to pay a price—to be frequently degraded and vulgarised. So farce and humour are more essential than language itself. In them is embodied the corporal experience. When Colonel Xu was delivering his speech in a stern manner, he happened to hit a wire on which were perched numerous flies. In a flurry the flies take wing and swarm in the dining hall, raving angrily with their buzz… Xu has to duck down to dodge them… So humbly does he keep himself in such a posture. I can see his legs shivering…15

15 Mo Yan. The Fly, The Incisor. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2000.

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In another story ‘Wild Mule’, Mo Yan describes the village chief Old Lan as ‘a tall and strong-muscle man’ who is capable of bullying any of his fellow villagers. He even dares to piss before the public. However, he is overwhelmed by an ox. ‘Finally Old Lan has to swallow his pride and flees with a cry of bravado’.16 Fierce as Colonel Xu and Old Lan are, they are overwhelmed by a swarm of flies or an ox, respectively. Mo Yan had been in the army for twenty years and took military exercises every day. He understands well the relationship between body language and power. A well-exercised body is a symbol of power and authority—it moves majestically and dauntlessly in goose step (every step). Individually, such a body conveys a sense of dignity. Collectively, such bodies will breathe violence and terror of war (like fighting, killing, revolution, etc., ‘The Battle in the Alamo Woods’17 is a work to deconstruct such violence). In an incomplete world, the natural unification of a sound personality and a healthy physique no longer exists. The separation of a strong physique from a healthy natural environment has resulted in a situation where such a body is usually endowed with an evil personality. In ‘Red Sorghum’, Grandma’s yelling at heaven seems to be the last cry of a healthy body: I loved strength, I loved beauty; it was my body, and I used it as I thought fitting. Sin doesn’t frighten me, nor does punishment. I’m not afraid of your eighteen levels of hell…18

After the appearance of ‘Red Sorghum’, Mo Yan seldom writes about the physical body as an embodiment of power. Even when he touches upon it, it usually belongs to a member of evil force. In ‘Son’s Foe’, the body of a martyred young soldier has been glorified like this: ‘He is like a boy in a dream of love that a breeze of melody could arouse him’.19 In contrast, there often appear characters with deformed bodies: Heihai is not like a human being; rather, he is a monkey [‘The Transparent Carrot’]; the pure girl is legless [‘Butcher’s Daughter’]; the Old Monkey, who is a skilled worker as well as a capable storyteller of funny stories,

16 Mo Yan. ‘Wild Mule’. Harvest, 1999(5). 17 Mo Yan. ‘Battle in the Alamo Woods’. Beijing Literature, 1998(8): pp. 4–10. 18 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36. 19 Mo Yan. ‘Son’s Foe’. Tianya, 1999(10): pp. 48–57.

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has a pockmarked face, while Zhang Dali, whose build looks like that of a soldier, has got a leper as his father [‘Leper’s Son’]; Zhang Guoliang, nicknamed ‘Dog’, is quite tall, but with an ugly face, and is a well-known idiot [‘Pattern and Prototype’]; the craftsman Mr. Zhu is hunchbacked [‘A Long Race Thirty Years Ago’]; Yu Zhan’ao is well-built, but his son Dou Guan has one testicle bitten off by a dog [‘Red Sorghum’]. In contrast to bodily deformity, there is physical excessiveness, i.e., a disproportionately large part of the body. For instance, Wang Shiqian has a pair of giant ears [‘Red Ear’]; the girl classmate sitting beside the speaker in ‘First Love’ has six toes and a sole as broad as a palm leaf fan; the Iron Boy’s teeth are so strong that he can bite iron [‘Iron Boy’]; the villagers in northeast Gaomi enjoy a strong stomach that can easily digest grass roots and barks [‘Red Grasshopper’]; Yanyan is winged [‘Soaring Away’]; the character nicknamed Jingangzuan has got a very sharp olfactory sense [‘The Republic of Wine’]. These examples show that both bodily excessiveness and deformity are a ruthless response to the real world as well as to the natural world. Most of Mo Yan’s characters have nicknames such as ‘Brown Hair’, ‘Uncle Pockmark’, ‘Old Liu the Hunchback’, ‘Giant Gold Tooth’, ‘Wang the Lame’, ‘Gao the Scarred’, ‘Wild Mule’, ‘Little Wheel’, ‘Nie the Fish Head’, ‘Fourth the Phtisis’, and ‘Pigtail Shaft’. Each of these nicknames is a demonstration of some physical deformity or mental foible. They seldom address each other by a person’s full name, except when they are in a bad mood or a serious situation. For instance, in ‘Joy’, the village director warned: ‘Don’t make me do it the hard way, Qi Wenliang!’.20 None of the villagers has ever addressed ‘Dog’ by his real name. If someone does, he must be a policeman, which means the ‘Dog’ is in trouble. Everybody addresses the head of the police station as ‘Wu the Old Piss’… When the junior city students come to the country, they will be soon marked by something quite folk: nicknames, such as ‘Song the Demon’, ‘Tea Kettle Lid’, etc. [‘Pattern and Prototype’].21 Bakhtin claims in Rabelais and His World that a name will sanctify a person, but a nickname will blemish him. So a nickname is usually used

20 Mo Yan. ‘Joy’. People’s Literature, 1987(3): pp. 6–42. 21 Mo Yan. Collected Works of Mo Yan. Beijing: China Writers Publishing House, 1994.

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behind his back. A name summons a person while a nickname dispels them.22 However, in the Chinese folk world, the opposite is true. A person’s nickname does not necessarily blemish him; instead, as a token of closeness and acceptance, it is usually used in public, whereas to address his full name is meant to isolate, dispel, discriminate, or even punish him. Mo Yan has endowed these deformed characters in the folk world with many virtuous qualities. But he does not honour them in a simple, direct manner. Instead, he has drawn them with humorous and funny touches combined with serious ones. Characters such as the middle school teacher Zhu Zongren in ‘A Long Race Thirty Years Ago’, Zhang Dali in ‘Leper’s Son’ and ‘Aunt’s Treasured Knife’, and the blind folk singer Zhang Kou in’The Garlic Ballads’ are all funny as well as serious. Let’s read a passage about Zhang Kou: Eyelashes buried in his sunken sockets fluttered… Zhang Kou’s erhu wept, but the sound was soft and gentle, glossy and smooth, like silken strands flowing into his listeners’ hearts, driving the accumulated filth on it, and into their muscles and flesh, ridding them of their earthly dust. With eyes glued to Zhang Kou’s mouth, they listened as a hoarse yet sonorous lyric flowed from the gaping mouth in his face: ‘What I’m saying is’—the word ‘is’ soared upward, then settled slowly, languidly… and his audience, though enraptured by the music, also quietly laughed at him. The source of their mirth was his gaping mouth… Zhang Kou, the blind folk singer, is chanting the following ballad on Blackstone Avenue in the county seat: The townsfolk planted garlic for family fortune, Angering the covetous tyrants of hate, Who sent out hordes of tax collectors To oppress the masses, bewailing their fate…23

Zhang Kou’s seriousness is rooted more in an absurd existence than in jocular folklore. When such a ludicrous existence connects with a ridiculous corporal body, it will add to the cruel reality an obsessive sensation, both gentle and fierce. In Mo Yan’s narratives, jocularity is not used for the physically deformed, but for persons with an average 22 Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. 23 Mo Yan. ‘The Garlic Ballads’. October, 1988(1).

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body, such as Colonel Xu and the village chief Old Lan. Strong bodies are ‘perfect’, serious, and authoritative. They meet the norms of modern human bodies, which, as a result, are quite incompatible with the folk world. Though not acceptable among the literatus or on official occasions, the deformed folk bodies are a genuine, corporal reflection of the cruel reality. Therefore, when Mo Yan describes these deformed bodies, he always infuses jocularity and absurdity with a solemnity of real tragedy. Meanwhile, such solemnity is not frightful, nor does it strike a pose of seriousness. It brings neither terror nor anger. It is combined with jocularity and absurdity. Jocularity and solemnity complement each other so as to prevent genuine seriousness from sinking into terror and pure humour into scorn and cunning.

5 Against Lyrical Expressions or Indulgence in Cruel Experience There are many romantic elements in Mo Yan’s writings, such as exaggeration, extravagance, and surrealistic narrative. However, his romantic tales have deviated from simple reality, from a realistic reflection of the static daily life. Instead, they have presented another side of life—its extraordinariness—and broadened the notion of ‘hometown reality’. Some earlier stories, including ‘Fishing in the Night’, ‘Fortuitous Encounter’, ‘A Woman with a Bundle of Flowers’, ‘Soaring Away’, and more recent ones such as ‘A Beauty on a Donkey in Chang’an Avenue’ and ‘Treasure Map’, are typical examples. However, Mo Yan has deserted one essential element of romanticism—lyrical expression. In other words, he has deliberately refrained from using it. Lyrical expression entails integrated rather than fragmented experience. Boyhood and dreams doubtlessly guarantee such integrity while adulthood or worldly bodies are the enemy of an integrated experience. Humans do not use their bodies to express emotions in ways other than dancing, where the corporal experience of earthly existence will be forgotten, and bodily performance will not serve a practical purpose. The integrity of experience is thus preserved. Still, there is an exception— marching in alignment, in which individual corporal experience will also be forgotten. When soldiers march in perfect alignment, there seems to be an emotional and artistic expression. It serves a broader purpose of being against lyrical expressions.

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Gone is the age of personal innocence, just like that of social purity. Although it has not ceased to exist, individual experience has been broken and fragmented to such an irremediable extent that its integrity has been concealed in an obscure corner of the soul. Past romanticists have broadened the notion of reality. However, their present counterparts seem quite out of time, as they ignore the cruelty and absurdity of reality (nature, society, body) and attempt to transform imagined freedom into a force beyond the material, human tears into physiological responses like ‘crocodile tears’, and emotional expression into a habitual reasoning or a stale system of diction and symbol that is detached from human experience. If an emotional expression is related to nature and agriculture, Mo Yan may be a folk romanticist and voice his rural sentiment. The folk world, like nature itself, has been ruined. What has been spared is the fight by mortals for survival on the ruined land. The reasons for Mo Yan’s repeated evasion of sentimental expression are simple—the cruel existence has overwhelmed human sentiments; the integrity of corporal experience has been destroyed, deformed, or made weird; the eyes of emotional expression have been reduced to triviality whereas the importance of mouth and stomach has been highlighted. The villagers used to see me in tears under the giant willow at the village entrance. They would walk away with a sigh ‘Oh, what a pitiable boy!’ I knew that they had misunderstood my tears. I could not dismiss their misconception though, even with my confession that my tears were due to the longing for meat. They would not believe it. They could not understand that a boy’s craving for meat would go so far as to move him to tears.24

The role of tears serves many purposes. However, our stereotyped tastes are so simplified and fixed that the function of tears is to express emotions instead of telling stories. This sort of emotional expression is obsolete and rigid. It is an abstract sentiment, alien to the corporal experience. Never has it been present in the folk world, especially in rural communities. In the folk world, people naturally evade and dread sentimentalism. A strong sense of subjective consciousness of emotional expression would shame them. In the country, the professional narrators of folklore express 24 Mo Yan. ‘Wild Mule’. Harvest, 1999(5).

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emotion, such as the blind folk singer Zhang Kou in ‘The Garlic Ballads’. Folk expression of sentiment usually consists of an experience of or an aspiration for corporal joy. There is seldom any taboo, so their sentimental expression differs from that of those romanticists. While blindly eulogising the object of their admiration, the latter would frequently remove something sensational or corporal from their perception of the object. In contrast, when people in the folk world come across a desirable object, they do not say ‘love’, but ‘enchantment’. And enchantment is associated with the corporal experience. The lyricality in the folk world is narrative in nature. Their narration would represent an experience and then formalise it through tone, beat, and rhythm. What romantic years those were! (The following lines must have been chanted to a folk tune by the hero.) Oh my fair lady Fang Biyu! Your shining forehead is like the cloudless sky. Your eyebrows are like the new moon setting in the west. Your waist is as slender and gentle as a willow twig. Your belly button is as round as a gold coin.

These lines are from a lecherous ballad ‘Eighteen Touches’25 that develops in a manner to make each subsequent touch increasingly intimate.26 There are undoubtedly emotional expressions and eulogy in the beginning. Then, they give way to joyous corporal experience. Such folk sentimentality is the liberation of corporal imprisonment and compensation for the long-standing oppression from society and nature suffered by the physical body. Violence and eroticism are two critical components 25 The ‘Eighteen Touches’ is a traditional Chinese folk song with many variants throughout China. The song is flirtatious, bawdy, and erotic in nature. Considered vulgar and tasteless, it has been banned numerous times. There are male, female, and duet variants. Some versions start with, for example, a touch of the hair followed by nape, with each subsequent touch becoming increasingly intimate. The female versions often feature an attempted seduction, offering to allow a man to touch her in various places, while some male versions a seduction through promising some reward if she allows him to touch a woman there. The duets pair each offered or threatened touch with a consequence, e.g., ‘… I can’t touch you there, if I do, you’ll die of bliss’. 26 Mo Yan. White Cotton. Beijing: Ethnic Publishing House, 2004.

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of corporal freedom. Strange is that those who have been to the country to collect folklore are keen on removing folk elements from folk narratives and cutting them to fit some literary standards. Those old-fashioned literatus only keep features they deem beautiful, lyrical, and ‘clean’ while their modern counterparts are enthusing over violent ones. However, to refrain from romantic ‘lyricality’ does not mean being devoid of passion. Mo Yan is among the best contemporary, lyrical writers. He has planted his writing in the black soil of his homeland. ‘The black soil is infertile for crops but fertile for human sentiments’, he thus claims in his preface to ‘Unrestrained Chat’. In Mo Yan’s narratives, the carrier for folk sentiments is the image of mothers. Although his writings are full of absurdities—jocularity, forgetfulness, deconstruction, condemnation, deterioration—they all seem to contribute to the ‘attire’ of a mother: the Fourth Aunt in ‘Red Grasshopper’, Grandma in ‘Red Sorghum’, Aunt Sun in ‘Aunt’s Treasured Knife’, Meisheng’s Mom in ‘Food Supplies’, the mother in ‘Wild Mule’, the Elder Aunt in ‘Commander’s Woman’, and the mother in Big Breasts and Wide Hips . These female characters have been depicted as symbols of great vitality and sound reproduction. Their image is not an individual one but a collective one. Their manner of existence is lyrical. However, they are not the people who make emotional expressions. Instead, they present their sentiments with their natural bodies. In the folk world, it is not a theoretical issue to abandon expressing sentiments, but a moral one, especially in times of war or famine. The narrative tone in ‘Food Supplies’ is a cool one, but with a clear trace of tragedy. During the great famine, Meisheng’s Mom secretly swallowed some beans from the production team’s food store and vomited them at home to feed her children: She finally arrived home, found a pottery basin, and poured some water into it. She then picked a few chopsticks, lowered her head and bent down. When the chopsticks reached deep into her throat with a stir, the beans, together with some gastric juice, rushed out of her mouth and trailed down into the basin. Exhausted, she fell to the ground like a dead serpent, contented at the view of her children struggling for the beans around the basin.27

27 Mo Yan. ‘Food Supplies’. Reader, 2003.

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This passage conveys much the same sentiment as presented by the episode of childbirth in Big Breasts and Wide Hips . The theft and vomit on the part of Meisheng’s Mom are like the process of reproduction, which transforms death into life. Throughout the incident, she has surrendered her dignity (to be sexually harassed by Wang the Lame and converted her decaying stomach into a sort of uterus to keep her three children and mother-in-law alive). It is in this transformation of the physical body that lies the fantastic combination of narrative with sentiment. The characterisation of the natural body and its lyricality also manifest themselves in Qi Wendong’s mother in ‘Joy’. Therefore, in the characterisation of mothers, ‘lyricality’ is presented in a unique, even absurd manner specific to the folk world. The physical body has been made an objective carrier to contain narrative elements, including beauty and evil, reproduction and destruction, growth as well as decay, nobleness, and humbleness. However, it can be very lyrical. Such emotional expressions in the narrative have concealed lyricality in the narrative form. The existence of those mothers reveals this hidden quality. They are the stomach and the uterus—a unique physical being that has combined birth with burial, decay with growth, getting rid of the stale while taking in the fresh. Just as the barren land has linked the cradle with the grave, it conceives eternal folk motifs, everlasting history and the power of joy. The strength of mothers’ decaying bodies—the strength of survival and love—is unmatched. However, a good writer can only gain access to something much nobler and vaster when he has transcended their sentiments and determinedly dispelled old idols from his mind. In Mo Yan’s writing, the image of a decaying mother has become a new seed on the infertile land in his hometown, a seed with redemptive power.

6

Death and Resurrection, Joy and Faith

On the whole, Mo Yan’s style is a joyous one, ‘growing’ in a genuine soil of folkness. His narration and presentation of folk miseries are not a bitter complaint or grudge-bearing curse but a strength full of unique joy. Mo Yan once gave the title Thirteen Chapters of Joy to one collection of stories about miseries. It seems that every farmer in his hometown is pursuing joy despite hunger, stress, humiliation, or terror. They drink, toil, fight, quarrel, curse, defy village leaders, cry, laugh, feast, trade, flirt,

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commit adultery, have children, bury the dead, afflict each other, and rival each other. All these ordinary or extraordinary activities have become carnivals in Mo Yan’s writings. Moreover, they interweave with daily life and farm work, which occurs every day, not just on holidays. In ‘Joy’, Mo Yan first describes such unique joy, which occurs at a particular moment when the hero Qi Wendong was spraying pesticide on crops. Before, village leaders had taken Qi Wendong’s brother and sisterin-law, and his mother had just received a good beating. The sensation of such joy came as he toiled along. It was a frantic sensation produced by frustrated passion. This vehement response leads to a frenzy on the part of human instinct under great stress, which indicates the mood of those oppressed people. In Mo Yan’s later works, such joy is formalised into a more touching, powerful, and dauntless style. I call it ‘the joy style’, which manifests well in Mo Yan’s more recent stories, such as ‘Commander’s Woman’, ‘Wild Mule’, and ‘My Uncle the Seventh’. In ‘Commander’s Woman’, Mo Yan adopts a four-character syntactic pattern, similar to that in The Book of Songs 28 for the narration. This pattern and its rhythm have formalised human sentiments. While the story itself is tragic, its narrative rhythm is comic. The essence of formalisation conveys the spirit of the game. A genuine formalised pattern can display the cruelty and absurdity of life and dismantle its gloominess and staleness or its false seriousness. In this manner, the joyous spirit inherent in the ‘folkness’ is fully demonstrated. Bakhtin considers carnival (carnivalesque) as the ultimate demonstration of folk culture, whose derision, humour, and humiliation have converged into a ceaseless, joyous river. There are two major subtexts in Bakhtin’s conception of folk culture. The first one is the folk culture of comedy, associated with ‘body or material’. Its literary and stylistic manifestation is a ‘grotesque realism’. The other is the setting and background indispensable to this ‘grotesque realism’ or comic culture—a utopia-like social institution, with multiple folk festivals, the most typical of which is a carnival with its squares, streets, banquets, and kitchens. Bakhtin tries to depict each of the various folk festivities as a carnival-like event. It is utopian and romantic of him to characterise folk festivals as carnivals. He argues that the development of the folk festival into the carnival differs from country to country, or from city to city. According to him, such

28 The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of Chinese poetry edited by Confucius.

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developments occurred in different manners at different stages of history. The completion occurred first in Rome and Paris, followed by Nuremberg and Cologne. But it never happened in Russia, where there had never been any prevalent form like the West European carnival.29 He also dwells on the subject in the essay titled Rabelais and Gogol. It seems that Bakhtin has attached too much importance to festivals, which are special days in life. He admires that the yearly carnival in major medieval cities would last as long as three months. In his imagination, he has defamiliarised and abnormalised daily life with the ideal festivities. Moreover, he thinks that carnival (carnivalesque) is an excellent social institution or cultural form and that its literary counterpart is grotesque realism. His idea amounts to this: the writings by Rabelais or Gogol have directly presented that ideal social institution. He declares that it is pleasing and joyous for human beings to encounter nature via food as food digestion will erase the boundary between man and nature. However, Bakhtin’s utopian theory is actually an idealised supposition, which is contrary to folkness. Transforming daily life into festivals or carnivals is the essential function of folkness. However, I have to clarify that the idealised festival spirit has not been formalised in many folk cultural forms. The boundary between it and daily life is blurred. There is no carnival-like folk festival in China. Why do we have to discuss the festival form in its narrow sense? Is it possible to realise the festival spirit when we discuss the festival in this way? Bakhtin is too keen to ignore these questions. He has devoted one chapter from The Dialogic Imagination,30 entitled ‘The Chronotope31 of Pastoral Poems in the Novel’, to discuss daily life chronotope in rustic novels. However, his focus is on how a natural social life can develop into a plot, which, although in lyrical language, is not closely related to the radical folkness (carnivalesque) advocated in Rabelais and His World.

29 Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. 30 Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin and London: University of Texas

Press, 1981. 31 The word ‘chronotope’ literally means ‘time space’ and is defined by Bakhtin as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’. For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organising categories of the real world in which he lives. For this reason, ‘chronotope’ is a concept that engages reality.

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The strength of folkness comes from nature—land, body, cycles of death and resurrection or growth and decay—as well as individuals who regard themselves as part of the land or community. Such individuals do not need festivals—in the narrow sense—because they can turn their daily life into festivities, their burdensome existence into a ‘game’. Generation by generation, they have frequently transformed their existence into games and paid the price for such transformation. They have resorted to the approaches discussed above: anti-heroic (degradation), forgetting (anti-chronological history, anti-evolution), impulsion (whims, natural rhythm), respect for corporal experience, narration instead of lyricality, etc. While Rabelais’s approach is ‘grotesque realism’, as Bakhtin has claimed, Mo Yan’s approach can be called ‘cruel realism’. Mo Yan does not intend to dwell joyfully on the grotesqueness of the body. What concerns him more is the basis for the cruelty of those grotesque bodies. Rabelais’ carnivalisation depends on monstrous life (a carnival spirit), whereas Mo Yan’s joy is a ‘cruel joy’ based on realistic daily life. It does not simply mean ‘gladness’ or ‘merriment’. It has combined the opposite elements of ‘gladness’ and ‘merriment’. It is, as mentioned above, a type of ‘distressful joy’. Indeed, Mo Yan’s writings coincide somewhat with some details of Bakhtin’s theoretical elaboration. On the whole, however, the two are opposite. For Mo Yan, grotesque realism (and its corresponding ‘materialbody’ image) is not a literary mode or style but a manifestation of a social institution and folk culture (or the background for his ‘cruel realism’). Similarly, carnivalisation (carnival spirit) as a utopian ideal, whether from the realistic perspective or the presupposed one, for Mo Yan, is not a social institution or cultural mode, but a literary mode, style, or language. What I am attempting to clarify is that it is quite natural for grotesque realism to occur based on a carnivalesque cultural background and social institution. Still, it is very profound for a joyful style to come into being based on a cruel, realistic cultural experience or social institution. The latter carries the genuine spirit of folkness. Such ‘rebel-like’ practice has contributed to Mo Yan’s originality in writing, narrative form, and artistic experience. More importantly, Mo Yan, with his original style, has transcended the following aspects such as a rustic ‘homeland’ in a narrow sense, the simple naturalism of the daily life in his hometown, the trivial, transient, hollow, and meaningless characters as well as the material form of a grotesque reality and the blind optimism or pessimism about history. Moreover, he has infused them with genuine folk spirit, belief, and significance.

Mnemonics: Intergenerational Metaphor, Ideological Fantasy, and Memory Field: A Reading of Mo Yan’s The Transparent Carrot Min Wang

At the end of 1984, Mo Yan finished writing ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Since its publication in People’s Literature in 1985, readers have responded enthusiastically. Thought of highly by the writer and readers, this novella earned Mo Yan a reputation in Chinese contemporary literary history and has been regarded as an essential text for studying Mo Yan’s works. In contrast to many researchers who have interest in exploring the language style, characters, and the topic of nostalgia in the novel, I prefer to focus on the literary construction related to memory framework and would like to share some of my observations about reading by analysing the formation of this framework. ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is more like a guiding principle for Mo Yan’s memory than literary works, which simultaneously displays the process of creating memory and reconstructing reminiscence. That is a technique of memorising. Moreover, by

Source: Literature and Art Forum, 2012(8): pp. 20–25. M. Wang (B) College of Humanities, Xinjiang University, Ürümqi, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_5

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rhetorically dealing with the three unobservable memorial elements in the text, Mo Yan makes his memory and the collective memory of that era observable. Therefore, when regarding ‘The Transparent Carrot’ as the guiding principle for Mo Yan’s memory and its creation as one of his mnemonics, the three main elements for the textual construction are provided with the direction of interpretation and knowledge connotation different from those before.

1 The Adult-Like Child: Intergenerational Metaphor ‘The transparent carrot’ is the carrot in the eyes of Heihai, a boy of ten years old and full of scars all over his body. In the novel, Heihai first appears together with the young stonemason. With thick hair, tidy, handsome, and cheerful, he is in sharp contrast to Heihai, who is gloomy, thin, bareheaded, and barefoot. Such a contrast gradually pressures Heihai in the subsequent development of the plot, subjecting him to a complicated recognition of the correct, undisputed, and valuable adult world represented by the young stonemason, during which his uncomfortable feeling and resistance mingle together. At the same time, his longing and hope also exist side by side. So handsome the young stonemason looks with dark eyebrows and white teeth that they set his appearance off to heroic bearing. With a gentle shaking of his head, a lock of hair falling down over his forehead is tossed upward… The child does not say a word, but stares straight at the captain with his two dark and bright eyes. Big as his head is, his neck is long and thin, which seems to risk breaking any time under the weight of such a big head. The child slowly moves to the young stonemason and pulls the edge of his jacket, while the latter friendly pats him on the bare gourd-like head, saying, ‘Go back and ask for a hammer from your stepmother, and I will be waiting for you at the bridgehead’.1

The stonemason takes Heihai into the adult world, into the highly intensive work of constructing the flood detention gate. The adult world is a society of interest for which Heihai, at his age, longs for, yet doesn’t fully 1 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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understand. Although he willingly goes there with the young stonemason, he does not possess the communicative skills to match the adult world. We might describe this as a kind of intergenerational pressure. In the novel, Mo Yan depicts a scene where Heihai runs away from home—the childhood base in a person’s memory—and follows the young stonemason to the flood detention gate—the worksite of adults in the collective memory: Heihai stares at the young stonemason who is wearing a pair of denims and denim jacket, in which there is a fiery red sport shirt with the collar turned up so strikingly that the child’s eyes are set on it as if he were staring at a fire. ‘Why are you looking at me?’ The young stonemason gently rubs the child on the head, which waggles like a rattle-drum. ‘Alas’, the former says, ‘you have been beaten silly by your stepmother.’ He is whistling, with fingers tapping on Heihai’s head lightly, as they together go on the nine-archway bridge. Heihai goes carefully, trying to keep his head at the place most suitable for the stonemason’s tapping. For his bulky joints, the stonemason’s fingers are as stiff as wooden clubs, and the tapping on the bare head makes Heihai painful; however, he puts up with it, without uttering a word, only leaving his mouth corner curved up slightly.2

To a large extent, these paragraphs start the classical model of how Heihai will get along with others at the flood detention gate and begins his various conscious actions while living in the adult world, choosing the ‘adult-like’ means that he can endure to the end. As for him, after arriving at the flood detention gate, he ponders how he can keep pace with the adult world and how he can show that the intelligence system has tamed him, so he can be ‘counted as a person’ by Liu the Vice Director. It coincides with his consideration of proactively stretching his head to a certain angle where the stonemason can tap on it without causing too much pain. Confronted with the intergenerational difference that emerges from the adult world, Maurice Halbwachs reminds us that the individual needs to separate from himself and requires people to observe modes of community for him so that he can acclimate to the environment of collective

2 Ibid.

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activity and thus connect with the historical context.3 For Heihai, a ‘needless’ person of effective labour and a child breaking into the world of adults, how he tries to ‘separate from himself’ and prove that he is already an adult is to exercise all kinds of endurances that are beyond his age, thus accomplishing the adult ceremony of his own. Therefore, while looking back again at the various behaviours that Heihai has adopted to do with his physical pains, we are not only observing a child’s innocent and ignorant behaviour under oppression but also watching a kind of complex ritual in which a child positively strives forward to obtain a psychological transition for the identification of the adult group when faced with the huge intergenerational gap. The most evident example in the novel is the scene where the young blacksmith asks Heihai to pick up the piping hot iron drill in the forge: Drooping his head, Heihai went to the drill, and little by little, he bent down to reach out for it. He heard his hand sizzling, like a cicada clasped in it, while his nose was greeted by the smell of frying pork. The drill fell heavily to the floor with a bang.4

Suppose Heihai’s choice to pick up the scalding iron drill mentioned above can be regarded as a trick that the young blacksmith plays on him, with an order that he must follow. In that case, it then shows a sense of ceremony that he announces himself an adult to the young blacksmith when he takes the initiative to pick up the hot iron drill, which is achieved using engraving the event on the mind: He seized the iron drill. Trembling and clenching his bottom with the left hand, he constrained himself to go back composedly. On seeing yellow smoke rising from within Heihai’s hand, the young blacksmith cried, and his eyes squinted like a paralyzed patient, ‘Drop, drop it!’ His voice turned into meowing, ‘Drop it, you little shit!’5

3 Halbwachs, M. ‘Collective Memory and Historical Memory’. In Erll, A. & Feng Yalin (Eds.). The Readings of Cultural Memory Theories. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012: p. 77. 4 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 5 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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By careful analysis, it is evident that Heihai physically suffers more than the blacksmith in this scene. Yet, it is not much different from when he voluntarily turns his head towards the stonemason for his drumming. As for the former incident where Heihai seized the drill, it witnesses his success in winning the ticket towards the adults’ working place, while for the latter, it shows his qualification for an adult to become the pupil of the blacksmith by remembering the skill of forging by measuring the temperature of the drill with his bare hand. Just like what Nietzsche said, ‘It can be remembered what has been branded’.6 To witness the moment he turns into an adult, Heihai has it inscribed on his body. By ignoring his physical suffering and cutting the memory onto his body, Heihai heals from the pressure to get on with the older generation and shares the common memory of collective life. Readers may find this story more believable or trustworthy if it were narrated by an adult disguised as a child, rather than a child. On this, I can’t entirely agree with the critics who argue that ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is about dealing with the rural experience from a child’s point of view, as it does not account for perspective multiplicity and memory duality.7 Suppose ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is regarded as a process of recollection recorded from the angle of an adult disguised as a child. In that case, Heihai could never be a pure incarnation of Mo Yan’s experience in his childhood. Still, a metaphorical intergenerational signal, by various ‘bar mitzvahs’ inscribed on the body, has encountered unknown events that do not match his age, made up all kinds of pressure in getting on with the adults after entering the collective space of adults, and involves himself in the public events noted by the times. His ‘out-of-self’ silence and tolerance, together with the collective image of a great many ‘physically and mentally handicapped’, ‘deaf-mute’, and ‘dull-witted’ people portrayed in China’s seeking-for-roots and vanguard novels, construct the

6 Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 7 The criticism supporting this view includes: Liu Yan’s ‘On the Winning Point of “The

Transparent Carrot”’ [Literary Circles, 2011(8): p. 8], Yang Jianlong, et al.’s ‘The Magnificence in Image Construction: Rereading Mo Yan’s “The Transparent Carrot”’. [Criticism and Creation, 2010(2): p58], and Cheng Depei’s ‘A World of Entangled Memory: The Childhood Point of View in Mo Yan’s Writing’ [Quoted from Yang. Research Materials on Mo Yan. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 2005: pp. 130–131].

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intergenerational metaphor and memorial imitation of the specified historical period.8 In summary, in ‘The Transparent Carrot’, Mo Yan displays not only his own innocent childhood experience but an exploration of the intergenerational experience—a piece of collective memory taking the place of an individual one, an adult perspective hidden in that of a child’s, and a public discourse collected by the private one.

2

‘The Transparent Carrot’: Illusion of Consciousness

Cheng Guangwei, in an article analysing the image of Heihai, states ‘As the humblest person who is at the bottom of the status ladder in such a small village, and the weak of the era, he is not strong enough to resist or change his “rearranged” life by others. However, he quietly rearranges himself another life with strange feelings’.9 In my opinion, one can convert such a statement into another topic of discussion; that is, Heihai’s ‘another life’ is in fact the moment of individual memory that he is indulged in while faced with the collective memory (the public memory of collective work at the flood detention gate) under the intergenerational pressure of the adult world. In other words, Heihai’s individual memory and his ‘other life’ are always kept when he can’t concentrate and has to let his mind wander. If ever the collective memory of working together with the adult group at the flood detention gate should require a physical branding to be remembered, a ten-year-old boy’s memory at the flood detention gate would ask soul memory for help. In other words, for Heihai, the collective memory of working at the flood detention gate as an intergenerational metaphor needs to be stored via physical exhaustion and pain. At the same time, the illusion of consciousness would call on his memory about life at the flood detention gate in his soul. Undoubtedly, ‘the transparent carrot’ is the most potent image in the illusion of consciousness. However, before this typical conscious image appears, Heihai has experienced three short moments of illusion as follows.

8 Cheng Guangwei. ‘Reversal of the Countryside: Rereading Mo Yan’s “The Transparent Carrot”’. Contemporary Literary Criticism, 2011(5): p. 19. 9 Cheng Guangwei. ‘Reversal of the Countryside: Rereading Mo Yan’s “The Transparent Carrot”’. Contemporary Literary Criticism, 2011(5): p. 19.

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The first one happens when he listens to Liu’s admonitory talk on his arrival at the flood detention gate. After that, Heihai leaves his mind wandering: He heard birdsong-like music and musical singing of autumn insects in jute fields. The deafening noise is made when the escaping vapor knocks against the jute leaves and the deep-red or light-green stems; the locusts flapped their wings sounding like the train rattling across the iron bridge. He once in his dream saw a train, a single-eyed monster, running with its four feet on the ground, but faster than a horse. What if it stood up and ran? Regretfully in that dream he was just seeing the train standing straight when he was spanked awoken by his stepmother with a whisk broom in the hand.10

The second moment is when he strikes the stone with the claw hammer for the first time when he hears a strange sound spreading from above the river, so he once again sets his mind free: He saw luminous gas rippling and rising over the river, with the sound hiding in the gas.11

The third time, while everyone is listening to the old blacksmith singing in front of the fire, Heihai gazes at the carrot on the drill, and finally sees the core image in his illusion of consciousness—a golden and transparent carrot: He saw a unique and beautiful picture: a smooth drill, glistening in green and blue. On it was a golden carrot, of which the shape and size are similar to a round yellow pear, trailing a tail behind, with root hair on the tail like golden wool. The carrot was crystal clear and exquisitely shaped. Under the covering of the golden scarfskin was budded and bred active silver fluid. The carrot was in graceful and elegant lines, and from its beautiful curve a circle of golden rays was glowing, among which some were long and others short, whether as long as wheat awns or as short as eyelashes, all in golden colour.12

10 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 11 Ibid. 12 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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It seems that Heihai can see the illusion of consciousness that he wants to see only when ‘his mind is wandering’. Yet what interrupts him are always the disturbances from the adult world asking him to go back to reality. Thus, for example, he was awoken by other adult workers striking stones and by his stepmother in his dream on the first occasion, on the second occasion by pains of his physical injuries on duty, and the third occasion by the young blacksmith. All the above indicates that in competing with all the collective memory he has participated in, Heihai’s memory can only occupy a short period. Furthermore, it can only be displayed through an imaginary form. Slavoj Žižek’s apprehension about illusion is helpful for us to make a more helpful analysis of this phenomenon. In his opinion, an illusion is an illusion because it can never be explained but only be passed through. Therefore, all we can do is to experience why there is nothing behind it and how the illusion has disguised such nothingness.13 According to Žižek, an illusion cannot be interpreted. Yet, it can outline our desired vision and tell us ‘how to desire’. In the novel, Heihai’s illusion is visible: a train moving freely and quickly, a kind of sound, and a golden carrot. In his reveries, the existence of these images not only conceals their absence but also reveals Heihai’s desire. Perhaps it is understandable why recapping what has been covered for generations is more significant than requesting what it implies if combined with Mo Yan’s personal experience. In fact, in his real life, Heihai’s illusion gradually becomes the truth of life that can be mastered by Mo Yan. In 1976, Mo Yan left northeast Gaomi in a pickup truck after enlisting in the army. In 1980, he began his literary journey. In the winter of 1984, Mo Yan first wrote about northeast Gaomi in a novel titled ‘White Dog and the Swing’. By the end of the same year, he wrote ‘The Transparent Carrot’ about his experience as a thirteen-year-old odd-job labourer who blew the bellows in a smithy. By reviewing Žižek’s ideas about illusion and describing Mo Yan’s life, it can be seen that, concerning ‘The Transparent Carrot’, it would be more meaningful to ask Heihai what makes him desire rather than what he desires. Mo Yan has possessed all of Heihai’s desires, making it meaningless to explain Heihai’s illusion of consciousness. On the contrary, it

13 See Zizek’s analysis of illusion and omen in The Noble Object of Ideology (Trans. Ji Guangmao. Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, 2002: p. 176).

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would be involved in a cycle of interpretation, thus making it purposeless and redundant. ‘The transparent carrot’ is not to call us on to interpret Heihai’s illusion of consciousness but to transcend his illusion of consciousness and summon a period of hidden personal memory. The moments in the novel when his ‘mind is wandering’ parallel his working time. The memory created this time decides the value of the novel, stretching into the future and looking back at the past. I would make a further definition by comparing the ending of ‘The Transparent Carrot’ and Mo Yan’s personal experience in the carrot field. Heihai pulls out all the carrots from the field by the end of the novel, but he cannot find his imaginary, golden transparent carrot. Consequently, at the request of the plot’s caretaker, he is stripped of clothes and left naked. In contrast to this literary memory, the real memory is that Mo Yan was not only caught by the carrot’s watchman, and left shoeless, but ordered to face Chairman Mao’s picture and admit his sin in public. What’s worse, he was brought home by his elder brother and received punishment from his parents.14 Obviously, Mo Yan has concealed in his novel such an unknown memory, such a memory about stealing because of his intolerable desire—hunger—which has tactfully turned into Heihai’s ‘obscure and unintelligible’ illusion of consciousness. Handling like this involves literary reflection on constructing a memory about desire and the cultural reflection on whether to give in while confronted with the basic desire. In other words, we expect that there should always be a moment in the future when we may recall the old days and ask whether our desire has been satisfied in the current moment or how the desire may be constructed by memory. The ‘transparent golden carrot’ is a conscious image that can help Mo Yan write the past at present, reconstructing the memory of bygone days and looking into the future of his home country from his memory.

3

The Flood Detention Gate: Memory Field

In ‘The Transparent Carrot’, the flood detention gate is always the centre of a rural cooperation place, composed of a quarry, a bridge, and a smithy in the arch of the bridge, and surrounded by the jute fields and the vegetable plots of the neighbouring village. In the novel, it exists as a 14 Mo Yan. ‘Mythical Japan and My Literary Journey: The Off-the-Cuff Remarks in Komazawa University in Japan’. Writers, 2000(7): p. 72.

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memory field, gathering every kind of aggregate memory. It is also a location for conferring traditional and modern memories, condensing the unique moments of history. What’s more, it is the spot where history is speeding up in memory. According to Jan Assmann, we certainly can take it as a set memory resembling a cultural phenomenon.15 As for Heihai, whether his adult-like disguise is indispensable for his collective memory or his illusion of consciousness is required by his memory, they can only be worthwhile when kept in the set memory network. In the meantime, they must compete in this memory network to decide which memory would become the more authoritative one. Therefore, understanding this memory field is the key to understanding the duality of Heihai’s memory. In a certain sense, the dual nature of Heihai’s memory is related to the duality of the cultural memory of the smallscale peasant economy and the commune economy in the development of the memory field itself. In the novel, at the flood detention gate in the mainstream memory regarding the commune economy, there were left considerable remnants of the small-scale peasant economic and cultural memory. This is reflected in both the old blacksmith and Heihai. For instance, the verse of libretto that the old blacksmith likes to sing now and then is not only a mirror of his mind that he cannot cope losing with age, but also a passionate recalling of human, social, and interpersonal relations with family at the core during the small-scale peasant economy period: You totally forget the three harmonious years living with me, but regard my heart as dung and dirt. I fanned you at summer nights, warmed your feet in winter evenings. I have been a perfume bag on your chest and a warmer on your stomach… You are now entrenched in a high position, galloping the fine horse, owning a hundred acres of good land. You have abandoned me to be married into the chancellor’s mansion as his son-in-law, Oh how pitiful I am!16

15 Erll, A. ‘Literature as a Media of Collective Memory’. In Erll, A. & Feng Yalin (Eds.). The Readings of Cultural Memory Theories. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012: p. 228. In the article, while distinguishing the set memory and collective memory, Astrid Erll pointed out, ‘Jan Assmann takes the former as memory about a kind of cultural phenomenon, and the latter as a culture of a kind of memory phenomenon’. 16 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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In the torrent of history, both the old blacksmith living in a rural society of traditional ethical order and the young blacksmith actively serving the country’s political power at the grass-roots level during the period of commune economy have no traditional master-apprentice affection, for the traditional interpersonal relationship of mutual benefit among individuals in the rural society has long been replaced by the administrative duty on mutually serving the country’s state-owned economy. Compared with the young blacksmith’s attitude towards the older one, the libretto inevitably arouses a sense of lamenting that people are indifferent to each other under national justice, which also foreshadows the old blacksmith’s decision to leave. The remnants of small-scale peasant economic and cultural memory are also reflected in Heihai himself. For example, it’s mentioned many times in the novel that Heihai would grab up some loess to lay on his wounds whenever he breaks his nail or has a patch of skin rubbed off. Such extremely unsanitary behaviour in the eyes of other people at the quarry is an underlying revelation about Heihai’s memory of his home village in his grown-up experience. Undoubtedly, the psychological comfort from curing the wound with loess is more or less rooted in peasants’ deep connection to the land. Mo Yan has his personal experience, as he recalled in the article ‘My Hometown and My Novel’: ‘When I was newly born, I fell on a pile of dry dust, for people of my hometown believe that “everything is born from the soil”. Hence as soon as a child gets out of the mother’s womb, they would fall in the dust swept from the street, and is expected to have a good prospect like a seed falling into fertile soil’.17 Also, this recollection is beyond doubt a reasonable explanation for Heihai frequently treating his wounds with loess. What is interesting is that ‘the nostalgia act’ of Heihai and the old blacksmith out of the impression of the traditional culture has more or less influenced others, like Juzi, a girl whom Mo Yan depicts twice in ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Firstly, Juzi consciously covered the wound with loess after being bitten by Heihai; the other is that Juzi was immediately struck with sadness and began to empathise with the old blacksmith after hearing his libretto.

17 Mo Yan. ‘My Hometown and My Novel’. Contemporary Writers Review, 1993(2): p. 37.

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So sharp were Heihai’s teeth that on Juzi’s wrist there were two rows of deep tooth mark. What’s worse, his two pointed canine teeth cut two small bleeding holes on it. On seeing this, the young stonemason went forward with concern and drew out a piece of wrinkled handkerchief, trying to bind the wound. However, she pushed him aside without giving him a glance, and bent down to catch a handful of loess on the ground and pressed it on the wound. Kept in high suspense and her mouth open, the girl looked directly without batting an eyelid at the old blacksmith’s very expressive face that was slightly lifted and his Adam’s apple on his slender neck that was moving agilely up and down like a droplet of mercury. The whining and plaintive melody whipped her heart like the autumn rain in rages blowing the field.18

This phenomenon again discloses the complexity, historical significance, and disequilibria of the memory covered by the flood detention gate as a memory field. In addition, it accords with some scholars’ judgement that the memory field is a kind of memorial site that involves the participation of history, times, and changes.19 It is but a memorial site where a period of history is stated. It is worth pointing out that at least in the era when Mo Yan wrote this novel, the flood detention gate as a memory field led more to the accelerating zone of history during the smoothly operating economic transition, and on the zone what was handed down or rooted in the rural social traditions and conventions have long been washed away by the torrent of history. Both Liu, the Vice Director, and the young blacksmith are daring pioneers on the accelerating zone of history. During that particular period in history, one has to acknowledge that in the competition between all kinds of cultural memory, the cultural memory about commune economy is in good order and of authority, which proclaims its breaking away from the country’s past. Thus, Mo Yan would say, ‘My hometown to me is a distant dreamland, a mawkish sentiment, spiritual sustenance, and also a nest for escaping from real life. Such would always exist, yet my spirit is deemed to wander hither and

18 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 19 Pierre, N. ‘Between History and Memory: Memory Field’. In Erll, A. & Feng Yalin

(Eds.). The Readings of Cultural Memory Theories. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012: p. 107.

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thither’.20 In this sense, ‘The Transparent Carrot’ can ultimately be read as a book about homesickness, in which everything changes with time, and it would set free many undercurrents of memory at the breaking points of history, like the individual memory of the young blacksmith and Heihai and other individuals’ sentiment memory under their influence. Like this, ‘The Transparent Carrot’ can also be regarded as a detailed, set memory of history. Perhaps other implications would be felt if the ‘cultural root-seeking’ craze and ‘knowledge enlightenment’ craze behind the novel is reexamined from this dimension. As the memory field in the novel, the flood detention gate is not just a remaining part of hometown memory or the accelerating zone of historical process; from today’s point of view, it is also a monument to the commune’s economic life. Its complexity lies in that it has included all kinds of memories and has made itself a note-taker, a reporter, and a witness of the historical process. Having finished reading ‘The Transparent Carrot’, I ponder what on earth literature means to Mo Yan. It seems now that the answer should be more distinct than the assumption made at the beginning of the article; a kind of mnemonics adopted to make memory communication and a kind of memory industry where cultural implications can be stored, spread, and carried out. Employing this ‘mnemonics’ or the so-called memory industry, Mo Yan shifts from the future to the past, restates his approach to memory, and develops the memory framework. Here, he can portray ‘self-image, historical imagination or express briefly but vividly values and standards as well as those forgotten and unutterable in memory culture. They can also inquire, deconstruct or make an obvious transformation of the existing account of memory and amend the historical image, the deconstruction of value or the imagination about self and others’.21 Overall, ‘The Transparent Carrot’ establishes a perfectly complete memory framework as such. Firstly, it is a collective memory generated by the flood detention gate as a public working space that Heihai tries to enter as an adult labourer. Secondly, it is an individual memory provided with the illusion of consciousness brought at the moments of idleness 20 Mo Yan. ‘My Hometown and My Novel’. Contemporary Writers Review, 1993(2): p. 39. 21 Pierre, N. ‘Between History and Memory: Memory Field’. In Erll, A. & Feng Yalin (Eds.). The Readings of Cultural Memory Theories. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2012: p. 242.

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when Heihai isolates himself from others in the labouring time. And thirdly, it is a complex memory field created to include various kinds of memories and to coordinate the competition of different memories to grasp the different aspects of history. In this sense, it can be said that ‘The Transparent Carrot’ reflects how Mo Yan interprets the individual memory rather than just describing his own memory, which shows the proficiency of a skilled writer. ‘As a story is not particularly important for a writer and making up a story with intricate plots is not very difficult for a writer, the key point is the way to deal with the story’.22 ‘The Transparent Carrot’ discloses the duality and ideology in which literature stores memory. Mo Yan’s successful historical disguise of his memory, or say, the successful imitation of his recollection, once again makes it evident that literary works are more likely to become the effective media of collective memory than history in certain periods.

22 Zhou Gang & Mo Yan. ‘Finding the Hometown and Expressing the Self: An Interview with Mo Yan’. Fiction Review, 2002(6): p. 37.

Childhood Narrative: The Richness of Meaning in Reinterpretation of Mo Yan’s The Transparent Carrot Yusong Wang

‘The Transparent Carrot’ is Mo Yan’s first well-known work. When it was published in 1985, the China Writers Association held a forum chaired by Feng Mu, the Editor-In-Chief of Chinese Writers. According to Mo Yan’s recollection, most critics in Beijing attended the forum.1 This novel then enjoyed wide attention and was a hit with most readers. Lei Da, a famous critic, said, ‘The critics have risen in swarms, each commenting a specific aspect on it’.2 As for Mo Yan, he was also in favour of the novel, thinking ‘this novel, in fact, greatly increases my confidence and ambition’, and ‘the success of the novel has increased my confidence,

1 Mo Yan & Wang Yao. Dialogues Between Mo Yan and Wang Yao. Suzhou: Soochow University Press, 2003: p. 118. 2 Lei Da. ‘Feng Lisan and His Works’. Newspaper of Literary Theory. June 11th, 1987.

Source: Hubei Social Sciences, 2008(10): pp. 125–128. Y. Wang (B) School of Journalism and Cultural Communication, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_6

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and I began to realize what a good novel is really like’.3 Later, his first collection of stories was named The Transparent Carrot .4 Thus, to some extent, Mo Yan’s success results from him holding ‘the transparent carrot’ in his hands. Li Jingze, a critic, believed that ‘Although Mo Yan is widely known for Red Sorghum, the fundamental elements in his world of novels have already been complete in ‘ The Transparent Carrot’ before’.5 By reviewing Mo Yan’s voluminous writing career over twenty years, it can be found that childhood narrative is one of the main constituent elements in all his writings, including novels and short stories in different stages of his creation. A child’s perspective and the ‘little-boy’ image are also the most powerful elements of his novels. As the starting point of childhood narrative, ‘ The Transparent Carrot’ is thus of inherent value for literature research. This article will first explore the psychological motivation of the writing and analyse the novel’s implications. It will also comment on the studies surrounding the ‘sensory’ narrative style in Mo Yan’s novels and the famous imagery of ‘the transparent carrot’. Readers familiar with Mo Yan’s experiences would associate his works with his personal life and the exciting era in which he lived. They may regard ‘ The Transparent Carrot’ as Mo Yan’s spiritual autobiography of his childhood. The novel indeed originated from a true incident. Mo Yan took part in the construction of the water conservancy works at the age of twelve. Once, several hundreds of people denounced Mo Yan for stealing a carrot. He was forced to kneel before Chairman Mao’s picture to admit his fault and beaten up after going home.6 This experience was a fearful blow to Mo Yan’s spirit, engraved on his bones and soul. After he came to the front, Mo Yan has repeatedly mentioned the misfortune he suffered during his childhood, such as starvation, loneliness, injustice, violence, misunderstandings, and punishment, which haunted him. ‘Everyone has his childhood, which yet becomes especially important if he becomes a writer. I take it as a requirement for this profession. In other words, every writer does have a starting point of his own, which is the threshold 3 Mo Yan & Wang Yao. Dialogues Between Mo Yan and Wang Yao. Suzhou: Soochow University Press, 2003: p. 118. 4 Mo Yan. The Transparent Carrot. Beijing: China Writers Publishing House, 1986. 5 Li Jingze. ‘Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit’. Fiction Review, 2003(1): p. 73. 6 Mo Yan. Mo Yan’s Essays. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 2000: pp. 241–244.

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of life’.7 While addressing Stanford University of the United States in 2000, Mo Yan entitled his speech ‘Starvation and Loneliness Are the Fortune for My Creation of Works’. Thus, it seems that the miserable conditions in living—starvation, loneliness, lack of love, and such injustice as violence, suppression, and discrimination—are used as the central theme and the subject of Mo Yan’s childhood narratives. Besides ‘The Transparent Carrot’, his early works ‘Dry River’ and his latest works ‘Bull’ and ‘Thumb Cuff’ are the most representative. Also, there are remarkable accounts in some chapters of ‘The Republic of Wine’ and ‘Big Breasts and Wide Hips’. ‘Mo Yan’s works not only originate from the inspiration of art but are inseparable from his living experiences like childhood experiences, mental pains, recollections and dreams. These are acquired gradually through such emotional modes as grieving, mourning and recollection that have permeated into blood and life’.8 Mo Yan’s childhood memories irreparably intertwine and interweave throughout his life, which has played a powerful and motivational role in his writing, just like what psychologists called ‘complex’. ‘Personal unconsciousness has an important but interesting specialty, i.e., groups of mental contents can gather together to form a cluster of psychological plexus, which is called “complex” by Jung’.9 Mo Yan points out, ‘When we say someone possesses a complex, we mean that he is too involved in something to withdraw. With the popular saying, he has a kind of “addiction”’.10 According to the analysis above, Mo Yan’s ‘childhood complex’ is approximately composed of ‘mental contents’ like starvation and loneliness, violence and hurt, intolerance and helplessness, and the desire to love and be loved. All the suppressed personal unconsciousness has to be hidden in the depth of his heart, restless and ready for action. When conditions are favourable, it spurts out, losing control. Although Mo Yan began to have his works published in 1981, the possibility for his creation took hold after he was admitted to People’s Liberation Army

7 Mo Yan & Wang Yao. Dialogues Between Mo Yan and Wang Yao. Suzhou: Soochow University Press, 2003: p. 118. 8 Wang Yusong. From Homeland to the World: A Brief Comment on Mo Yan’s Creation. Beijing: Chinese Financial and Economic Publishing House, 2004: p. 185. 9 Hall, C. S. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1987: p. 35. 10 Mo Yan. ‘Soft Rains at Spring Nights’. Lianchi Weekly, 1981(5): p. 36.

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(PLA) Academy of Art, where significant changes took place about the environment for his creation and his artistic perspective. The creation of ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is directly inspired by a dream that Mo Yan had during his study at PLA Academy of Art, in which he ‘saw a patch of carrot field, where the sun was shining on an old man bending and working on the field. Then a girl came, with a harpoon in one hand. She struck a carrot, lifted it and went facing the sun, while the carrot was shining with every hue in the sun. I found the scene especially beautiful just like that in a film. The hue and the mystical sentiment braced me up with force and spirit’.11 The relationship between the dream and the writer’s creative inspiration is an exciting topic and an unavoidable one to literary psychologists. Like Freud (1856–1939), some extreme researchers assimilate art to psychoneurosis and refer to writers as daydreamers.12 In criticism of Freud, Terry Eagleton said in Contemporary Western Literary Theories, ‘The image of artists as mental patients is indeed rather simple, just like a cartoon painted by a rigid citizen for delirious and crackbrained romantic artists’.13 However, Eagleton does not deny the significant role Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have played in literary research. On the contrary, he attaches great importance to Freud’s masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams, believing it to be more enlightening in studying psychoanalytic literary theories. By imitating Freud’s research about the generative mechanism of dreams, Eagleton proposes that ‘literary criticism can do something similar: by paying attention to those conditions that seem to dodge, to make psychological conflicts or to highlight an idea, including those unspoken, or what has been said exceeding the normal times, or repetitions or skips, it can cut through the recorrected levels and disclose the so-called “the sub-original text” or something hidden in the works while also displayed by it just like the unconscious desire’.14

11 Mo Yan. ‘Where There Is Pursuit, There Is Specialty: A Dialogue About The Transparent Carrot ’. Chinese Writers, 1985(2). 12 Wu Lifu. Selected Works of Modern Western Literary Theories. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1983. 13 Eagleton, T. Contemporary Western Literary Theories. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1986: p. 262. 14 Eagleton, T. Contemporary Western Literary Theories. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1986: p. 262.

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According to Freud’s distinction between ‘manifest dream content’ and ‘latent dream thought’, the dream Mo Yan depicts falls into the category of ‘manifest dream content’, which is ‘only a substitute in disguise’.15 As a result of Mo Yan’s ‘concealing’ and ‘amending’, the subconscious content of the dream is all about uncertain, and it is inappropriate to make a presumptuous conjecture, for ‘it is an adventure to make psychoanalysis of the writer’,16 which may be trapped into ‘intentional fallacy’. To be sure, there is deep-seated internal communication between Mo Yan’s memory of childhood and dream and his novel writing. His ‘dream’ of going back to his hometown is not only his unconscious revelation of a childhood complex, triggering his creative inspiration, but also provides his novel with the story background and the character frame. Like ‘processing’ the childhood complex in his dream (manifest dream content), the novel also ‘recorrects’ real life. As Wellek points out, ‘Literary works do not give so much expression to a writer’s real life as to the writer’s dream’; in other words, the artistic works can be considered as the ‘mask’ or ‘anti-self’ covering the writer’s real face, or it can also be said to be a picture about life, while the life in the picture is what the writer tries to escape’.17 In ‘The Transparent Carrot’, the realistic narrative tone merges with the hallucinatory realist technique, and the romantic expression reflects the evolutionary process of artistic style in Mo Yan’s novels. While revealing life’s hardships and sufferings, it also displays the austerity and heaviness of the rural land (through the old blacksmith) and the tenacity and perseverance of life (through Heihai). It is Mo Yan’s ‘dream’ of life and his ‘dream’ of art. This ‘life picture’ carries all of Mo Yan’s sufferings and joy, and ‘the life in the picture’ is what Mo Yan has been trying hard to escape, while it is also what he can hardly forget and be sentimentally attached to. Mo Yan’s love and hatred towards his childhood and his memory of the countryside diffuse between the lines in the novel. Less than a year after ‘The Transparent Carrot’ was published, Mo Yan successively published over ten short stories and novelettes such as ‘White Dog and the Swing’, ‘Old Gun’, ‘Autumn Flood’, ‘Gale’, ‘Dry 15 Freud, S. Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1984: p. 83. 16 Eagleton, T. Contemporary Western Literary Theories. Beijing: China Social Sciences

Press, 1988: p. 258. 17 Wellek, R & A. Warren. Theory of Literature (Revised Edition). Nanjing: Jiangsu Educational Press, 2005: pp. 78–80.

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River’, ‘Baby with Blond Hair’, ‘Ball Lightning’, and ‘Explosion’.18 They not only announced the rising of a new star to the literary circle but also marked the tremendous explosion of emotion stored up over the years, as well as his unconscious spiritual treatment of himself. Through writing, Mo Yan relieves his inner pressure and communicates with others. He who lost love calls on love and eulogises it to soak into his own and others’ wilted hearts. Finally, Mo Yan has found a way to remove loneliness through literature—a kind of starvation in spirit. Since he found fame in 1985, Mo Yan has always been unfaltering, writing for over twenty years, keeping an everlasting propensity for creation. From the psychological point of view, this might be regarded as his consistent endeavour to disengage himself from childhood ‘trauma’. Therefore, to interpret ‘The Transparent Carrot’ from the perspective of biography, it is necessary to notice something related to literary dynamics besides literary genealogy. The year 1985 when ‘The Transparent Carrot’ was published was a significant year in contemporary literary history. Around this year, novelists’ eagerness for innovation increased. At the same time, the ‘root-seeking literature’ and the ‘modernist novels’ appeared successively. Literature was creating a meaningful change in China’s contemporary literary history. Mo Yan, who was a student at PLA Academy of Art at the time, was burning with eagerness for his writing career. He started with a different style from that of his early works. In terms of the way of reflecting the real life, he chose a child’s perspective. He created the image of a ‘little boy’ represented by Heihai and flexibly adopted different figures of speech like symbolism, distortion and synesthesia, and sensory narration. They not only successfully evaded the roughness and straightness of ‘trauma literature’19 and ‘introspective literature’,20 but also endowed the texts with a lasting implicit and profound appeal. 18 It’s a novella written by Mo Yan in 1988 about what happens to a couple when the narrator ‘T’ takes his wife to have an abortion in the hospital. It is a complicatedly organised novella which best illustrates Mo Yan’s own words saying that he is good at ‘linking totally unrelated things like apples and oranges together and integrating them into one’. 19 Trauma literature is a literary phenomenon holding a dominant position in China’s literary world from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It mainly depicts the bitter experience of intellectuals during the ten-year ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1976. 20 Introspective literature is the development of trauma literature, which attempts to trace the historical reasons resulting in the ten-year miserable history during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ instead of displaying the trauma and suffering only.

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‘His writing is a shock to the style formed by an emphasis on structures in contemporary novels’.21 Compared with ‘Dry River’ of the corresponding period, the critical social theme of ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is displayed in a much calmer and more self-controlled manner. Let’s look at a passage at the beginning of the book: An autumn morning, with heavy moisture, a layer of translucent dew was condensed on the weed and tiles. Some leaves had turned light yellow on the pagoda tree, while the rusty iron bell hanging on it was wet with dew. In his padded jacket, the team head strolled toward the bell, with a piece of sorghum pancake in one of his hands and a scallion stripped of the outer covering in the other. When he reached there under the bell, there was nothing in his hands anymore, but his two cheeks bulged like the old mouse carrying provisions in the autumn. He pulled the bell-rope, and the bell was clanging around as the iron hammer hit its inner wall. The old and the young flooded from lanes and gathered together under the bell, looking eagerly at the team head like a group of puppets. Swallowing hard at his food, the head lifted his sleeve and brushed with it his mouth surrounded by whiskers. Everyone stared in unison at his mouth, only to hear insulting words burst out once it opened, ‘Fuck! Those sons of bitches in the commune transfer two tilers this day, and two carpenters the next, taking all the labourers away bit by bit. Listen, you stonemason! The commune is going to have the flood detention gate at the rear of the village broadened, which requires the transfer of one stonemason and one unskilled labourer from each production brigade. There is no one but you to go for it.’ The head spoke to a tall young chap with broad shoulders.22

The power and influence of politics have been vividly transmitted through the ways of the team head gobbling down his food and giving his order to the people. ‘Looking eagerly at the head’ implies everyone’s physical desire (hunger) and mental condition (jealousy), and no one can make one’s own decision. The gloomy atmosphere of the wet and cold autumn sets off the characters’ gloomy mood and lays a foundation of desolation and misery in the novel. In less than 400 words, multiple perspectives from politics, physiology, to psychology are coincided, which is thus considered the unique beginning of Mo Yan’s novelettes. 21 Hong Zicheng. Contemporary Chinese Literary History. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999: p. 330. 22 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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Heihai’s identity as an ‘abandoned child’ is mainly defined from two aspects. In terms of family connection by blood, his birth father left home for good, while his stepmother ‘must be drunk whenever she drinks, and he would be beaten, pinched and bitten once she was drunk’.23 Although the work site is just behind the village, Heihai would rather stay under the arch of the bridge suffering the blowing of chilly wind from all directions than go back home to sleep. When it comes to social relationships, the young and weak boy must constantly encounter dual attacks from the adults’ language and physical violence. Suffering of this kind can be found everywhere in the novelette. Repeated violence and suffering inflicted on a developing child may result in ongoing trauma for much of the child’s life. Some critics have found that ‘while Mo Yan is displaying the concept of “degeneration of species”, he attaches greater importance to the suppression on real life imposed by the inhibition mechanism of civilisation, which is manifested in the restraint of a child’s vitality… A “power structure” does exist between adults and children, and a “father-son” relationship takes the form of “using violence and suffering violence”’.24 In ‘The Transparent Carrot’, it is the group of adults represented by the production brigade leader, Liu the Vice Director of the commune and the little stonemason who exercise the ‘patriarchal power’. When the novel was published, as influenced by the mainstream of ideological discourse in the society of the time, the critics mostly regarded Heihai as the epitome and symbol of a destitute and miserable peasant in China under ultra-left politics.25 To read it from the perspective of sociology will stop critics from seeing through the deep implications of the text. With the passage of time, the novel is now read again and compared with ‘Dry River’, which was also published in 1985. The formation of Heihai’s poor and helpless position is different from that of Xiaohu’s tragic fate in ‘Dry River’. If the death of Xiaohu is a result of the imperious tyranny of authoritative politics, Heihai can be read as the victim of family and adult violence. Such violence would never disappear through politics in reality—Xiaohu’s family background and their spiritual horror were a result of politics. 23 Ibid. 24 Zhang Hong. The Inner Landscape. Guangzhou: Guangzhou Publishing House,

2000: p. 61. 25 Feng Lisan. ‘For the Sake of Saying Good-bye to the Desolate World: Commenting on Mo Yan’s “Dry River” and Others’. Beijing Literature, 1986(2).

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In fact, adult violence and the patriarchy have long penetrated China’s collective unconsciousness as it has been passed on from generation to generation, consequently becoming so ingrained that people rarely question it. Mr. Lu Xun poignantly revealed in his essays ‘How to Be a Father Now’ and ‘An Essay Written Under a Lamp’, as did Mr. Ba Jin in his ‘Family’ and Mr. Cao Yu in his ‘Thunderstorm’. Mo Yan’s expression of the relationship between adults (the abusive) and children (the abused) in the oppressive culture is the focus and stimulus in his creation, in addition to his exploration of ‘violence’ in his childhood narrative. In his early works such as ‘The Transparent Carrot’, ‘Dry River’, and ‘Old Gun’, this central idea is usually tied up with the topic of social criticism, but it is not obviously clear enough to observe. However, in his recent works such as ‘Thumb Cuff’, what is highlighted is the ‘discipline’ and ‘punishment’ imposed on children by the oppressive culture. To children, such ‘violence’ from the adult world is cruel, authoritative, and blind to reason. Mo Yan is inclined to confuse the time-and-space background in his narrative, and he tells readers through cultural context that they are ‘stories of China’. At this point, his childhood narrative has been freed from the control of personal life experience and a certain social reality, and thus promoted to the national cultural fable with profound symbolic implications. ‘Mo Yan’s novels display a style full of sensibility. … He adopts an uncontrollable narrative attitude focusing on sensory nature. In his depiction, with leaping, flowing and associating in mind, all kinds of sensory images overflow, thus creating a complex and colourful sensory world.’26

There is an inkling of such a ‘sensory’ narrative style in ‘The Transparent Carrot’, in which the ‘sensory’ narrative is mainly manifested through Heihai’s perspective, though formally set up in his works including ‘Ball Lightning’, ‘Explosion’, ‘Baby with Blond Hair’, and ‘Red Sorghum’, and culminates in ‘Joy’ and ‘Red Grasshopper’. The childhood’s perspective means that a novel is narrated through the eyes and in the tone of a child, of which the presentation process is provided with the distinctive characteristics of children’s thinking. As American writer Henry James states that although children can neither explain clearly nor make people 26 Hong Zichen. Contemporary Chinese Literature History. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999: p. 330.

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understand, their sense, eyesight, and comprehension are far more abundant, penetrating, and profound than what they can express with words.27 Heihai lost his mother when he was young, which left a dull ache in the depth of his soul that was difficult to heal. His stepmother’s abuse, the pangs of starvation, the bullying from adults, and the meaningless sympathy all turned the boy from ‘speaking as a stone falls to the ground’ to ‘speaking less and less, frequently absent-minded like a small stone statue’.28 Despite the novel’s length of over 10,000 words, Heihai, the protagonist, does not speak. However, while his speech is inhibited, his senses of sight, hearing, and touch are extremely sensitive. Heihai also has an exceptional imagination. He has two ‘black and bright eyes’ that are ‘as clear as water’ and that are ‘glistening’. His ‘two ears look very theatrical’, and they can quiver like a little rabbit. He can see ‘the mist hurriedly getting through the jutes’, and ‘some kind of glowing gas rising over the river’. He can hear ‘the music of birds’ chirping and musical songs of autumn insects’, and ‘the strange sound from the river like a shoal of fish swallowing food’.29 While refusing to communicate with the adult world, Heihai opens his heart to nature. He searches and seizes the sound, light, colour, and smell with his heart and his body, setting up a haunting and marvellous fairy world. The fairy world demonstrates the child’s innate, original ecology of life, displaying the original life experience with universal anthropological significance: It is already late at night, Heihai is gently pulling and pushing the bellows lever, blowing out the wind which sounds like a baby’s snoring. The sound of water from the river is growing clear, as if it has a shape and color that can be not only smelt but seen. Dim outlines can be seen on the riverbank, as if small cubs are chasing each other, treading on the fine sand with tapering claws sounding so subtle as lanugos, with thin and long silver filaments.30

What is as amazing as Heihai’s keen senses is his natural ability to free his imagination and create spiritual visions. The carrot is either staving off hunger or quenching thirst for common people, but in the elf-like boy’s 27 Lodge, D. The Art of Novels. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 1998: p. 29. 28 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 29 Ibid. 30 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203.

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illusion, it is otherwise shining with the strong power to cast a spell on people: The smooth drill gleamed dim turquoise, on which there was placed a golden carrot similar to a big pear in shape and size, but trailing a long tail covered with straggly fibrous roots like golden wool. The skin of the carrot is of golden and crystal colour, under which was a vigorous, silver fluid. The carrot featured smooth and elegant lines, and from the beautiful arc was reflected a circle of golden rays of light, some as long as the awns of wheat, others as short as eyelashes, all in golden color…31

This beautiful and magical ‘image’ of the carrot triggered a heated discussion when it was published. A sociological interpretation refers it to ‘a reflection of Heihai’s unconscious hope to extricate from the dismal situation. It is opposite to reality for sure’.32 Some commentator derives from the concept of ‘illusion’ in Eastern Buddhism that Heihai’s faculty of ‘miraculous transformation’ is in nature a kind of ‘mythical thinking with creativity’, and that ‘the carrot image’ is ‘the sun in a disastrous person’s life, the spirit of their original self and condensation of life’.33 Yet recently someone else strikes out in a new direction, adopting the psychoanalytic criticism to disclose the ‘sexological’ connotation of this image, asserting that ‘the carrot is certainly a metaphor of ‘a small penis’.34 Among the three men deeply attached to Juzi, Heihai is obviously the instigator of the competition and was compelled to attract Juzi’s attention by abusing himself and immersing himself in his narcissistic illusion, reaching a ‘mock orgasm’ from the ‘transparent carrot’. The above different views of commentators respectively start from their own theoretical presupposition and are varied and splendid. The complex metaphorical and symbolic functions of image should reserve a multi-angular and multi-layered space for interpretation. However, if stubbornly stuck to the existing analytical methods in the face of changing circumstances, the insight of criticism would tend to be weakened. Thus, 31 Ibid. 32 Lodge, D. The Art of Novels. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 1998: p. 29. 33 Hu Heqing. ‘The Pursuit of Humanity in Ah Cheng’s and Mo Yan’s Works and the

Cultural Tradition in the East’. Contemporary Literary and Artistic Trend, 1987(5). 34 Zhang Qinghua. About Literature Overseas. Shijiazhuang: Huashan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2004: pp. 236–237.

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I would risk my meagre knowledge, trying to proceed from a slightly different angle, and put forward my own view, though it may be limited and narrow. After the carrot was thrown into the river, Heihai had a ‘swoon’: ‘He fell limply down between the young stonemason and the girl’,35 showing that Heihai suffered great mental shocks. He was later in a trance, yearning for ‘the transparent carrot’ both day and night. He even ran into the river several times, searching, and almost maniacally pulling up a vast expanse of carrots, inspecting them one by one. Nevertheless, he could never find it again. Why is this so? According to Ezra Pound, a poet and theorist of imagism, ‘Image is not reconstruction of pictures, but a presentation of an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, which is a ‘union of radically different concepts’.36 The reason Heihai can never get ‘the transparent carrot’ back is that the ‘instant’ his illusion arose would never come again. Late in autumn, the wild land at night is set with a glimmer of firelight, and the air filled with the aroma of food. In the absolute hush rings out a traditional opera, desolate and high-pitched. The singer belts out skilfully with a silver voice and deep feeling, holding the listeners spellbound. The old and young, men and women, all live in a temporary harmony, which seems to reproduce the primitive living situation with anthropological significance. In such ‘mock family atmosphere’, Heihai’s desire for family love has been unusually satisfied. The ‘image of carrot’ miraculously transformed before his eyes as the symbol of love and coziness, of family, and of a baby sound asleep in the arms of a loving mother. In his subconscious mind, Heihai yearned to become a baby again, to return to the embrace of his own mother. However, he has been separated from his mother and can never return. An abandoned child has no family, so how can he find the ‘transparent carrot’? The end of the novelette is of deep significance: ‘You bastard, which village are you from?’ Heihai’s bewildered eyes were filled with tears. ‘Who asked you to carry on the sabotage?’ Heihai’s eyes were as clear as water. Heihai’s eyes were sparkling. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘What’s your dad’s name?’ 35 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 36 Wellek, R & A. Warren. Theory of Literature (Revised Edition). Nanjing: Jiangsu

Educational Press, 2005: p. 212.

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Two lines of tears streamed down Heihai’s face. … The production leader stripped him of his new jacket, new shoes and underpants, rolled them together and threw them to the corner of walls, saying, ‘Go back to tell your dad and ask him to come for your clothes! Get away!’… Heihai tucked into the jute field, as fish swam into the sea. The jute leaves were rustling in the brightly shining sunlight. Heihai, Heihai.37

The homeless child with no name and no parents could not find somewhere to recount his misery and injustice; the forgiving and benevolent earth (mother) accepted the abandoned child in the human world. Starknaked, Heihai was ‘tucked into the jute field’, as if he had figuratively returned to his mother’s womb. Specifically, Heihai’s sufferings can be regarded as a metaphor for humanity: We are all children kicked out of home, saying goodbye to the innocence of childhood, and cutting off the connection with the earth, the countryside, and the hearth and home as our roots. During the history of civilisation, mankind, on the one hand, has been trying to conquer nature and reform society, while, on the other hand, it observes its ego attentively, examines reason, and transmigrates in bold optimism and doubtful perplexity. On the endless journey of life, we have affectionately recalled on numerous occasions the songs of childhood, the needfire in the country, and the mother’s smile… ‘According to Lacan’s theory, it is what was initially lost—the mother’s body—that gives rise to the narration of our life, and compels us to seek something to replace the lost paradise of this kind in our everlasting metonymic desire’.38 Heihai, who lost his mother’s love when he was young, narrates with his unusual senses and imagination, while Mo Yan who lost his love narrates with a brilliant pen. Literature is like the ongoing narrative process propelled by human being’s own desire. Twenty years ago, when Mo Yan made his debut in the literary world with ‘The Transparent Carrot’, he might have had no clear picture of how significant the childhood narrative should be to his life. However, after a long and arduous journey on the road of literature, Mo Yan has had a

37 Mo Yan. ‘The Transparent Carrot’. Chinese Writers, 1985(5): pp. 179–203. 38 Eagleton, T. Contemporary Western Literary Theories. Beijing: China Social Sciences

Press, 1988: p. 267.

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deep understanding of the value of writing. ‘By virtue of the protagonist in the novel, the adolescent years recurred, acting as a counterweight to the pale life, which is the only cause for pride to work on writing as a profession. All that cannot be satisfied in real life can be so in narration. It is also a way of self-salvation for the writer. It is an everlasting creative phenomenon to make up the paleness of life and the weakness of characteristics with the magnificence and abundance of narration’.39 Luo Xiaotong, the hero of Mo Yan’s recent novel ‘Pow!’, is also a child. ‘He is the head of children in many of my novels written from “childhood perspective”. He has the dam between children and adults swamped with the muddy water of language, and strings together my novels of every type after this one to fuse them into a cohesive whole’.40 This statement with a kind of summary undoubtedly acknowledges the important role of childhood narrative in all Mo Yan’s works, while ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is the foundation of his artistic creation. Many of his later works, in every respect ranging from the characters, themes to structures and perspectives, even to the backgrounds, atmosphere, narrative styles, and narrative languages, are created under the effect of ‘The Transparent Carrot’.

39 Mo Yan. ‘Narration Is Everything’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2003(5): p. 83. 40 Ibid., p. 84.

Samsara, Violence, and Satire: A Discussion of the Absurd Narration in Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out Gabriel Wu

Howard Goldblatt, an American translator who has translated many of Mo Yan’s novels, states, ‘The novelist has no interest in the official history and the recorded “facts”; on the contrary, he is used to adopting the folk belief, odd animal images and different techniques of imaginative narration, with which he merges the historical reality, national and local, official and popular, and creates unique literature’.1 Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out runs to 430,000 words, in which Mo Yan continues his past practice of exploring the depth of the desire for life by writing about northeast Gaomi. At the same time, he undertakes a new experiment dedicated to extending the meaning of life and death through reincarnation by narrating the six metempsychoses of a landlord after being executed during the land reform in 1947. After that, he goes through a half-century of rural reform changes, reexperiencing the cruelty and pain of life. Mo 1 Goldblatt, H. ‘Two Prefaces to the English Versions of Mo Yan’s Works’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2010(2): p. 193.

Source: Dongyue Tribune, 2010(11): pp. 73–78. G. Wu (B) City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_7

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Yan invents the incarnations and creates the plot, which seems to echo the traditional type of Chinese novels with couplet form and carry forward the traditions of classical Chinese novels. However, he prefers to reveal the absurd and ruthless features of history and disclose the predicament of life under suppression. For that purpose, while dealing with life and death, rise and decline in the book, Mo Yan usually depicts them with bloody violence, repeatedly interpreting the image of suffering in the turbulent and tortuous development of the Chinese countryside in the latter half of the twentieth century. Hence, this article will conduct a survey of the absurd narration of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and discuss how Mo Yan combines reincarnation, violence, and satire to force the narrator and readers to return to the same piece of land, attending to the process that collective desire intervenes, teases, and rages in an individual life, pondering and questioning the popular interpretation of historical events, which enables the novel to display a brand-new style and depth in the aspect of inquiring about the meaning of life.

1

The Sufferings of Samsara: Order and Logic

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is about the life and death of three generations in Ximen Village, Shandong Province, covering the land reform in 1947, Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, the beginning of the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, and finally, the start of the new millennium. Ximen Nao of the first generation has inherited the family land from his father and worked his way up to become the richest person in northeast Gaomi by making it three times as vast as his inheritance. He first marries Bai Xing’er, who does not bear a child, and then takes Yingchun, the handmaid, as the elder concubine, who gives birth to a pair of twins, one boy and one girl, named Ximen Jinlong and Ximen Baofeng, respectively. At last, he takes Wu Qiuxiang as the younger concubine, who is yet again unable to have a child with him. In 1947, the underground communist Hong Taiyue orders, in the name of land reform, Huang Tong, a militia captain and son of a tenant peasant, to execute Ximen Nao by shooting him and confiscates all his property and land. After Ximen Nao’s death, his family is broken up, with the result that Yingchun remarries their farmhand Lan Lian and in 1950 gives birth to a boy named Lan Jiefang. At the same time, Wu Qiuxiang remarries Huang Tong and bears twin sisters named Huang Huzhu and Huang Hezuo. In the 1970s, children of the second generation grow

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into adults. Ximen Jinlong and Lan Jiefang respectively marry the twin sisters of the Huang family. Huang Huzhu does not give birth to any child and thus dotes on their adopted son Ximen Huan, whereas Ximen Jinlong has an unlawful daughter Pang Fenghuang, mothered by Pang Kangmei. Huang Hezuo has given birth to the only son Lan Kaifang, but she then starts a new relationship, resulting in her family’s breakdown. Pang Fenghuang and Lan Kaifang of the last generation are blood relations from their same grandmother Yingchun, but they accidentally fall in love and get married. What’s worse, they give birth to a baby with a big head named Lan Qiansui, who catches a strange disease. The fluctuating fortunes of the three generations closely follow the political, economic, and social upheavals in China. The first thirty years from the 1950s to the 1970s witnessed the sharp conflict between the People’s Commune and the peasant family farming on its own after agricultural collectivism. The People’s Commune led by Hong Taiyue has won all other families’ full support in Ximen Village but Lan Lian, who obstinately clings to his 0.26 acres of land and refuses to join in the commune, so he is utterly isolated and suffers all kinds of harassment and humiliation. However, during the last twenty years from the beginning of the 1980s to the end of the 1990s, it can be seen that both the second and third generations are striving to catch up with the development of the market economy. During this time, they are caught up in plots of power, love, and hatred, with each individual pursuing their own desire and getting what they deserve. When it comes to the structure, the whole novel is told from the point of view of the big-head baby Lan Qiansui ‘in a Peking ruffian tone’2 born of Ximen Nao, who returns to the human cycle of rebirth after having been reincarnated five times as various animals. His story is subdivided into five parts, including fifty-three chapters and five sections, with each part being separated by the transmigrated donkey in the 1950s, the ox in the 1960s, the pig in the 1970s and 1980s, and the dog in the 1990s, each accompanied either by Lan Jiefang or his fellow villager Mo Yan, a fictional character with the same name as the writer, who takes the place of the monkey appearing in 2000 and becomes the narrator. They narrate stories of their own and about each other, combined into a book of six

2 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: p. 217.

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reincarnations. What is worth noticing is that the book of six reincarnations starts by displaying a violent scene of the suffering of human beings and ghosts. To begin with, it gives an account of Ximen Nao’s suffering of all kinds of harsh punishment just for his repeated crying about his innocence to Lord Yama that he was wronged and driven to death in his previous life during his two-year stay on the ghost path, ‘I have been put through the severest tortures that are impossible to imagine in my human life’. Then, in order to force him to give in and admit his crime, the ghost attendants torture him with heat and fire, with horrifying descriptions: They subjected me to the most sinister form of torture the Hell had to offer: they flung me into a vat of boiling oil, in which I tumbled and turned and sizzled like a fried chicken for about an hour. Words could not do justice to the agony I experienced until an attendant speared me with a trident and, holding me high, carried me up to the palace steps. On both sides the attendants were screeching, sounding like flocks of vampire bats shrieking together as scalding oil dripped from my body onto the steps of the audience hall, where it sputtered and produced puffs of yellow smoke... Having been fried to a crisp, I knew that even a light tap would turn me to charred slivers. I wavered as my crisp body lay sprawled in a puddle of oil that was still popping and crackling... and my head seemed to be broken from my neck at any time...3

So violent and painful is his torture that it exceeds the limit of what a ghost can endure. However, Mo Yan does not stop here. He turns his writing to the human world, leaving the protagonist to continue his complaints to Lord Yama in great detail about how he has died a tragic death: A compassionate person like me, a person of integrity, a good and decent man, was trussed up like a criminal, marched off to a bridgehead, and shot!... Standing no more than half a foot from me, they fired an old musket filled with half a gourd full of powder and half a bowl full of grapeshot, turning one side of my head into a bloody mess as the explosion shattered the stillness and stained the floor of the bridge and the melonsized white pebbles beneath it.4

3 Ibid., p. 3. 4 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House,

2004: p. 3.

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Whether suffering from the official punishments in the Hell, or the outlawed tortures in the mortal world, the protagonist has gone through the same experiences of having violence inflicted upon him, which must inevitably shock readers. As a result, how can they not anticipate the writer’s further explanation of why the protagonist has been wrongfully executed in the following story? In fact, since Mo Yan uses the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth for the composition of his novel, in his writing all the animals of each former lifetime naturally announce their farewell from life. Otherwise, the next transmigrated life cannot begin. What matters is that one would either die a natural death or a painful one. Take Ximen Nao’s five-time reincarnation in the animal realm for example. It can be found that only the death of Ximen Dog, his fifth life, who is assumed to be an old ‘vegetarian’5 and put into the casket and buried with the senile Lan Lian, can be regarded as an easy and beautiful one. Other than that, the rest are all stricken by unexpected disasters. For example, the second life, Ximen Donkey, is killed and eaten up by the People’s Commune members who share his flesh; the third life, Ximen Ox, is tormented to death by Ximen Jinlong; the fourth life, Ximen Pig, is drowned as he is trying to save a person from a flash flood; and the sixth life, Ximen Monkey, is shot to death by Lan Kaifang, Deputy Director of the local police station. All the reincarnated lives end up with a wrongful and painful death. Mo Yan gives a detailed account of why and how the first two transmigrated animals are killed by groups of people. At the end of the first part, Ximen Donkey recounts that he has proposed to ‘work hard for a few more years for his owner, Lan Lian’, yet he unexpectedly encounters a severe famine in 1959, when ‘after eating all the bark from trees and the edible grass, a gang of them charged into the Ximen estate compound like a pack of starving wolves’, with ‘menacing green light ablaze in their eyes’, and yelling, ‘Take it! Take the independent farmer’s grain stores! Kill! Kill the independent farmer’s crippled donkey!’ In such a critical situation when Lan Lian cannot resist, but only escape in a panic with the

5 Zhang Hong points out that the dogs in Mo Yan’s novels are in most cases carniv-

orous animals, only the old ones would lose the ferocious nature and become almost vegans. In accordance with this statement, the old dogs in both Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and White Dog and the Swing are exceptions. See Zhang Hong. The Realm of Senses: A Research on Narrative Art of Vanguard Novels. Shanghai: Tongji University Press, 2007: pp. 62–63.

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‘sorrowful shouts from his wife and the children’, Ximen Donkey ‘shuddered and knew he was to die’. Suddenly, ‘a heavy blow on the head stunned me and drove my soul right out of my body to hover in the air above and watch the people cut and slice the carcass of a donkey into pieces of meat’.6 Immediately afterwards, the second part of the novel begins, starting not from the birth of Ximen Ox, but having the bighead baby confirm with definite evidence that the ox in his previous life is slaughtered, ‘You were a donkey that was hit over the head by a starving villager. You crashed to the ground, where your body was cut up and eaten by a gang of starving villagers. I saw it with my own eyes’.7 Such a tragedy is verified from two narrative perspectives, namely by the donkey himself and the big-head baby. In doing so, the writer not only shows it really happens that Ximen Donkey is killed by the villagers in daylight but also implies that collective violence is carried out again on the soul of Ximen Nao after the execution on the bridgehead. So, agonising is the memory that it remains for several generations and is still vivid in the mind of Lan Qiansui—the seventh life—as well as the final reincarnation in a new human body, who trembles with terror at the knowledge. In the second part of the novel, reincarnated from a donkey to an ox, Ximen Nao, ploughing and furrowing for Lan Lian, is treated as an enemy of the People’s Commune. Ximen Jinlong, who has joined the People’s Commune and opposed his stepfather Lan Lian, just vents on the ox, which makes it the most public and heart-sinking violence in the book. At first, Ximen Jinlong gave the ox twenty lashes so that the ox ‘lay there, head on the ground, hot tears oozing out of its tightly shut eyes and darkening its face’. Then, ‘with a steady stream of curses on his lips’, he ‘kicked the ox in the head and the face and the belly, over and over again,’8 by alternating his feet. After that, seven or eight plowmen from the commune formed a circle around the ox, and ‘expertly filled the air with loud cracks one after another, as if it were a competition’. The ox’s back was crisscrossed with lash marks. Before long, there were traces of blood, and now that the tips of the whips were bloodied, the cracks were louder and crisper. Harder and harder they came, until its back and belly

6 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: pp. 87–88. 7 Ibid., p. 91. 8 Ibid., pp. 183–186.

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looked like cutting boards covered with chunks of bloody flesh. Eventually, they were tired. Rubbing their sore arms, they walked up and saw that the ox’s eyes were tightly shut. There were open wounds on the side of its face, staining the ground around its head with blood. It was gasping for breath, and there were violent spasms in its belly. However, Ximen Jinlong does not stop there, he ‘led the female Mongol cow up to Ximen Ox, where he tied the rope affixed to the ox’s nose ring to the shaft’, and then, he ‘smacked the rump of the Mongol cow hard’, which makes the cow ‘lurch forward, still quaking. A crisp sound, a pop, marked the splitting of its nose, followed by the thud of its raised head hitting the ground’. At last, with his increasing malice, Ximen Jinlong just ‘ran over to a furrow, scooped up a handful of cornstalks and piled them behind the ox … and lit the stalks’. Out of their expectation, Ximen Ox ‘would rather die than stand up and pull a plow for the People’s Commune’. As a result, ‘it’s hide began to burn, giving off a foul, nauseating odor…It’s face was burrowing into the ground, it’s back was like a trapped snake, writhing and shirking away from the heat’. What’s worse, ‘the charred rear half of its body was too horrible to look at’.9 The ox is abused to death, taking all the suffering that should have been put on Lan Lian, who stubbornly resists the socialist collective production system. Hence, the violent persecution is brought about not so much by the People’s Commune as by the tremendous historical trend of spreading the cooperative production system in full swing. Compared with the former two animals, Mo Yan seems to provide a much briefer description of Ximen Pig and Ximen Monkey in their distress, yet he cannot do without bloody scenes. At the end of the third part, in order to save a child of the village washed away by a flood, Ximen Pig resolutely dived into the river, but unexpectedly, ‘below the surface, where the ice was thick and hard, there was no oxygen’. While pulling the drowning boy and rising, he ‘rammed his head into the ice. Nothing. He did it a second time. Still nothing. So, he turned and swam against the current. When he finally surfaced, he saw red’.10 Then, he died and was incarnated again as a dog in the fourth part. As for Ximen Monkey who plays tricks to earn money for Pang Fenghuang, he ‘leapt so frantically’

9 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: pp. 183–186. 10 Ibid., p. 367.

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at Lan Kaifang who suddenly approached his owner, that Lan Kaifang ‘forgot all about police procedures, forgot just about everything. He drew his pistol and shot the monkey dead, bringing an end to the reincarnation cycle for a soul that had spun on the wheel of life for half a century’.11 The novel is mainly about the six metempsychoses, reborn from human into a donkey, which is the farthest from the human realm, all the way to a monkey, a ‘primate’ that ‘was fairly close to human’,12 and after that reincarnated as a human, showing a logical progression. First, let’s review the animal realm. Among the four incarnations, death is either caused by natural disasters, like great famine and flood, or manufactured calamities, like being killed by a mob or by individuals. Both happen twice in the order that death by natural disasters comes before that of the manufactured one, indicating that both natural and manufactured disasters must follow the natural law and balance of power in the world. For the few words about the monkey’s death, it seems too condensed, but such an arrangement reflects the particular purpose of echoing the wrongful death of Ximen Nao at the beginning of the novel. Although Ximen Nao and Ximen Monkey tread different paths of the human and animal realms, they experience the same fate. They are both suddenly shot by the lawenforcement personnel who ignores the law, one of whom is a militiaman and the other a local policeman. Thus, although Ximen Nao turns into an animal in the cycle of life, and Ximen Monkey turns into a human, they suffer their death and begin their next life in the same manner, accomplishing a process of birth and death from human to animal and human again. Based on this uniform and balanced construction, it can be concluded that the violent narration in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is an artistic achievement developed step by step in a systematic way.

2 Violent Narration About Violence: Evidence and Focus Mo Yan’s ability to represent violence has always been a unique feature of his novels. For example, in Red Sorghum Clan, it is ruthless to see Yu Zhan’ao murder Shan Tingxiu and his son in the little chateau—the sword

11 Ibid., p. 537. 12 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing

House, 2004: p. 513.

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does its work in a second and the corpses are thrown into the river. How frightening it is to read that the Japanese soldiers compel the butcher Sun Wu to peel Liu Luohan’s skin in public, with Liu’s howling so woeful as to shake the heavens.13 In The Herbivorous Family, Secretary Ruan enforces the law violently, ordering the militia to hang Old Gao high in the sky and leave him to fall to his death, while the corpse is cooked to mush in a cauldron and used as fertiliser. In addition, he has the children shot dead immediately who are caught stealing sweet potatoes, peanuts, and radishes to appease their hunger. In addition, the brothers Heaven and Earth kill the eldest grandparents, dismember the seventh grandmother, and bury the seventh grandfather before they are executed. How unscrupulously they behave, as if human life were not worth a straw!14 In Big Breasts and Wide Hips , the soldiers in the seventeenth regiment bomb the church to surround and annihilate the Sima detachment, putting Sima Ku to death; when Shangguan Laidi’s adultery is discovered by her husband Sun Buyan, she knocks him dead with a wooden bench, and then, she is executed summarily, whereas her lover Bird Han is cut in half by a hurtling train while escaping on his way to the site of serving his sentence.15 The whole book is smeared with blood and terrors. When it comes to Sandalwood Death, the writer exaggerates his writing surrounding the executioner carrying out ‘Yama cramp’16 on a little eunuch, or the cutting of the imperial treasury guard in two at the waist for stealing silver, or his slow slicing of Qian Xiongfei, a righteous man who opposes Yuan Shikai, or his putting Sun Bin to ‘sandalwood death’.17 All of these are the writer’s pursuit for extreme bloody cruelty, with each word striking a nerve and cutting sense to pieces, making it difficult for 13 Mo Yan. Red Sorghum Clan. Beijing: Peoples Literature Publishing House, 2007: pp. 30–32, 93–98. 14 Mo Yan. The Herbivorous Family. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2005: pp. 276–279, 315–333. 15 Mo Yan. Big Breasts and Wide Hips. Taipei: Hongfan Bookstore, 1996: pp. 250–251, 424–429, 473–478. 16 Yama cramp refers to a special iron hoop strapped on the head of a person to be executed, with only his eyes revealed through two holes in the iron. By stretching the cowhide rope attached to the iron, the iron hoop was gradually pressed into the persons head until the skull was crushed, while the eyes protruded from the two holes until the eyeballs fell out of the iron. 17 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001: pp. 58– 65, 117–120, 252–270.

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people to finish reading. For those violent narrations that challenge the readers’ tolerance, Mo Yan explains: We lived in an era full of violence, which not only referred to physical assaults, like people’s butchering each other, but also indicated violence on the soul and in language. For my part, I took on the ‘Cultural Revolution’ as a social turmoil that set the whole society in unrest, during which physical assaults had truly happened, such as criticizing and denouncing one at a public meeting for his errors which were usually fabricated, and resorting to fist-fighting or armed violence. However, the most violent of all in my mind was a kind of psychic violence, of language violence. In reviewing newspapers and editorials during the ‘Cultural Revolution’, including many of our leaders’ speeches and the artistic works, we could find they were all filled with such an aggressive violent language. Therefore, why we described violence in our works was virtually decided by life, or by our personal life experiences.18

His words emphasise that a violent era would bring a violent narration. In other words, if there would be no cruel history, how would such violent words of mutilation ever appear? Mo Yan further points out another key factor that has contributed to the violent narration of modern literature: the unique Chinese onlooker tradition. Mr. Lu Xu criticizes this onlooker culture in his novels. For instance, he depicts, in his Medicine and The True Story of Ah Q , the scenes of executing people that attract so many onlookers surrounding and watching... As for me, I look on this kind of onlooker culture in the feudal Chinese society as a three-in-one play, one being the executioner, the second the executed criminal and the third the onlookers. None of the three should be absent, for the executioner and the executed both are performers and the more exciting their performance is, the more satisfied the audience would be. In fact, among thousands of common people staring, almost all are kind-hearted. However, why at this moment does everyone enjoy greatly watching such a scene? When we talk about the ‘Cultural Revolution’, people at my age all know that whoever is going to be executed is first publicly displayed in front of a great gathering of thousands of people, and taken on a pickup car, paraded through streets and exposed to the masses around all townships of a county, upon which the purpose, just as that in the feudal society, is to warn common people, or to 18 See http://www.lgqn.cn/whmrbg/2008/0610/content_18530.html.

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terrify them, stopping them from committing a crime. The characteristic of penalty during the feudal age is that the more important the criminal is, the less possible he dies an easy death. On the contrary, the process of execution is extended as long as possible, during which the criminal is subjected to the utmost suffering.19

Under such double conditions, appealing to violence not only is the distinct symbol of that era, but also becomes an indispensable part of Mo Yan’s novels. By comparison, it can be found that Mo Yan shows some restraint from violent narration after his Sandalwood Death. Take Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out for example. Unlike his previous works mentioned above that keep on repeating violence at great length down to the last detail, this entire book describes ‘tragic deaths’ rather than ‘odd deaths’, which were included in his earlier novels. However, readers familiar with Mo Yan’s writing must be clear that with his fluent and free literary writing talent without borders and his extreme overstatements in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out , it is not difficult for him to surpass his earlier works and set a new landmark in this respect. It is obvious that he does not intend to play another word performance for the benefit of readers. In my view, Mo Yan is making an effort to give a violent narration of deep symbolic function, which makes it less critical as to whether he depicts it in detail or not. About Ximen Nao’s sixfold cycling in the wheel of karma, his life ends in disaster for five cycles, winding up with a sudden death over and over again, which is, in fact, a kind of disguised slow slicing of the same victim generation after generation and thereby attempting to extend the process of bloody agony in the long flow of history. Moreover, although Mo Yan points out that violent narration involves the participation of three subjects—the executioner, the executed, and the onlookers—in his earlier works, he writes about extreme, public punishments displayed to have a thrilling effect on both ears and eyes, laying particular emphasis on how rampant and domineering the ‘violent individual’ is, who does whatever he wishes, and how indifferent the ‘staring’ onlookers are, who surround and watch just for the excitement of it. In contrast, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out tends to

19 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001: pp. 58– 65, 117–120, 252–270.

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emphasise how innocently the ‘abused person’ is wronged, who experiences powerful assaults step-by-step both physically and mentally. Besides, the most important part of the audience is added to the list of onlookers: Ximen Nao, having him helplessly watch himself die a violent death time and again, seemingly rubs salt into his wounds. Repeated suffering, each time witnessed by the sufferer himself, reflects the writer’s purpose of matching the narration of reincarnation, implying that like the endless repetition of life, the agony of life is repeated again and again, and indicating that suffering has long been predestined which cannot be escaped or avoided in history.

3

As Absurd as a Play: History and Destiny

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, a land reform policy was implemented, and land was reallotted—many peasants benefited from this policy, and it is highly praised in Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River.20 However, some activists awaited the chance to have their chutzpah, resulting in the deaths of a large group of innocent landlords with their families ruined, about which Zhang Ailing21 employs sharp, sarcastic, and ridiculous comments in The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth. During the years of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ from 1958 to 1960, of the ‘Great Famine’ from 1959 to 1961, and of the ten-year ‘Cultural Revolution’ from 1966 to 1976, all kinds of criticism, either in written works or in violent fights, challenged selfishness and revisionism, while educated urban youths nationwide were called on to work in the countryside or mountainous areas. In those days, mass violence permeated all levels of society, which has been particularly reflected upon in ‘trauma literature’ and ‘root-seeking literature’22 in the 1980s, both forming a sharp contrast with each other. However, it seems that the

20 Ding Ling (1904–1986) is a famous writer and social activist of contemporary China. Her representative works include Miss Sophie’s Diary and The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River. 21 Zhang Ailing (1920–1995) wrote a great number of literary works in her life, including novels, essays, and film scripts, such as The Golden Cangue, Love in a Fallen City, Eighteen Springs and Red Rose and White Rose. 22 Root-seeking literature is, as the name suggests, a literary form of ‘seeking the root of culture’. It became popular from the mid-1980s when writers were dedicated to the exploration of traditional consciousness and national cultural psychology.

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writers at the time did not reflect on and state all these narrations in their works by arranging the relevant history in the structure of life and death reincarnation. In this sense, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out has its own unique attraction. Such views would naturally be a little superficial if the difference between Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and the former lay only in the use of magical realism. Although in this book suffering is accepted as predestined, and on the title page The Sutra of Eightfold Enlightenment is cited, suggesting that greed is the root of weary life and death,23 no real points throughout the book have been clarified about Buddhist karma that match metempsychosis. Let’s look at the beginning of the novel. Ximen Nao repeatedly pleads not guilty to Lord Yama, claiming that ‘in his thirty years in the land of mortals he loved manual labour and was a good and thrifty family man. He repaired bridges and repaved roads and was charitable to all’, whereas he is suddenly bound and shot to death. To restore such injustice, he begs Lord Yama to return him to the human world, so that he can ‘ask those people to their face’ what crime he had committed that made him die such a violent death. Here, to ‘ask those people’ is in fact to hurl the question at Lord Yama to pursue justice. Lord Yama responds, ‘All right, Ximen Nao, we accept your claim of innocence. Many people in the world who deserve to die somehow live on while those who deserve to live die off. Those are facts about which I can do nothing’.24 From the protestation above, it is clear that one who is fated to die did not, and vice versa—even the lord of Hell in charge of life and death in the mortal world has no choice but to admit there is no clarity about what is right or wrong; good and evil are in a muddle as well. All life and death, good and bad luck are not decided by karma, but by the discretion of a constantly changing historical reality. Before his death, Ximen Nao 23 Chen Sihe traced the cause of greed from the life and death fatigue of the first generation in Ximen Village and deduced the pitiful result from the greedy desire of the second and third generations, regarding the life and death fatigue coming from greed, and the most hidden theme of the novel was less greed, non-action, freeing both body and mind. See Chen Sihe. ‘The Narrative Structure and Significance of Hybrid of Human and Animal, Coexistence of Yin and Yang: A Tentative Study on the Folk Narration of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (II).’ In Chen Sihe (Ed.). Five Ways of Reading Contemporary Novels. Hongkong: Joint Publishing Company, 2009: pp. 222–229. 24 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: p. 4.

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had done many philanthropic deeds, such as adopting and raising the little boy Lan Lian who was almost frozen to death in Guandi Temple, and then employing him as a farm labourer. Conversely, after his death, he repeatedly reincarnates only to become Lan Lian’s or the Lan family’s ‘domestic servant’. He not only works hard for his master, but also loses his life. Such arrangements in developing the plot do not tally with the logic that good would be rewarded with good, and evil with evil. It is therefore clear that the violent narration in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is but a writing strategy, whereas the text really focuses on a denunciation of the absurdity of history. In the first two parts of the novel, while confronted with the surging historical waves of socialist development in China, the two brothers Ximen Jinlong and Lan Jiefang successively make a clean break with their father Lan Lian, respond to the call of the Party, and join in the People’s Commune, and take an active part in collective production under the leadership of the branch Party secretary, Hong Taiyue, of Ximen Village production brigade, ‘vigorously raising pigs on a large scale’ so as to ‘show their loyalty to Chairman Mao’.25 Nevertheless, in the third part, with the death of Chairman Mao and the downfall of the ‘Gang of Four’, the situation develops in the reverse direction. ‘The production brigade broke up and the People’s Commune existed in name only. Agricultural reform entered the land-parceling phase, and the land was distributed to individual farmers, who could decide on their own whether to plant mulberries or wheat’.26 However, such changes are a bolt from the blue to Hong Taiyue, for he is forced to retire. When the ‘contract responsibility system’ led to the phase of a system of ‘household responsibility for production’, he stood alongside Lan Lian’s plot of land and flew into a rage, cursing, ‘Shit, are they really giving up on the People’s Commune?’ Yet when the household contract responsibility system went into effect, Hong got roaring drunk and came up to Lan Lian’s land, wailing and cursing angrily: ‘This household contract responsibility system is nothing but independent farming, isn’t it? After thirty hard demanding years, we’re right back to the days before liberation’.27 For that reason, he

25 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: p. 195. 26 Ibid., p. 327. 27 Ibid., pp. 337–338.

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loudly shouted, ‘I refuse to accept that’. Firstly ‘It will change the nature of our regime we fought for’; secondly, ‘those of us of with unquestionable loyalty have spent thirty years of blood and sweat working hard, only to wind up as losers’; and thirdly, Lan Lian, who once was stubborn and did farm work on his own and was ‘one of history’s obstacles and a man who was left behind’, is now ‘a vanguard and a man of foresight’.28 The three ‘complaints’ exclaimed by Hong Taiyue naturally remind readers of Ximen Nao’s encounter with Lord Yama and his repeatedly shouting ‘I refuse to accept’ at the start of the novel. Both cannot confront the abrupt changes in real life, and both strenuously challenge how history can be so absurd and unpredictable. According to Mo Yan, what makes history absurd is that it is like a ‘trifling matter’; otherwise, the land that is legally accumulated by the landlord should not have been confiscated by force, with his ownership denied. Or the collective social production system that has been put into practice for decades should not have been switched right away, totally wiping out all the achievements previously made by joint efforts and overturning or disappointing people’s devout faith in the ideological sphere for half a century. However, more than that, history is like play-acting with all that is displayed on the stage—or in public spaces—as performance, which is illusory and unreal, and which can be taken to be true only by the audience or the common people, who, either on spot or after leaving the spot, keep on crying and laughing at the stage performance, even at the cost of their lives. After liberation, the Ximen villagers plunge into the mass movement with great passion: When ransacking Ximen Nao’s home, they subject his wife Bai to severe torture during interrogation; when smelting steel and starting construction of water conservancy on a large scale, they force demolition of the gate of Ximen’s compound, remove his ancestral grave, viciously beat his wife Bai, and seize Ximen Donkey by force. In order to wipe out the only self-employed farmer to make Ximen Village become the nationwide model in collective production, they constantly alternate coercion with cajolery and circulate libelous rumours. Even Wu Qiuxiang, Ximen Nao’s younger concubine, slings mud at him, claiming that Ximen Nao ‘has raped her and enslaved her and that she has been abused by Bai every day; what’s worse, she even lifts the front of her clothes in the face of so many men, showing them

28 Ibid.

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the scars on her breast in a meeting she made the amendments for his crimes’29 ; during the ‘Four Clean-ups Movement’, a movement to purify politics, economy, organisation, and ideology from 1963 to 1966, they write big character posters and sing revolutionary songs: ‘A movement is a play-acting where there is fun; when a movement happens, deafening sounds of gongs and drums are heard, colourful buntings dancing in the air, and slogans pasted on the wall; the commune members work in the field in the daytime, and attend the meeting at night’.30 Since the reform and opening-up policy was adopted in 1978, a passion for keeping up with the times in Ximen Village has taken place immediately, as Hong Taiyue says ‘Capitalism has been restored in northeast Gaomi’. Everyone is busy fulfilling one’s desire to climb up the social ladder rapidly. Adhering closely to the Communist Party’s ‘Four Modernisations’ policy, namely revolutionisation, rejuvenation, specialisation, and intellectualisation, Wu Qiuxiang opens a pub; Ximen Jinlong is assigned to take the place of Hong Taiyue as the branch Party secretary, who then not only leads a life of debauchery but also colludes with Pang Kangmei, his mistress as well as the branch Party secretary of the People’s Commune, attempting to develop Ximen Village into a tourist attraction to make excessive profits from it. Lan Jiefang also has a meteoric rise and is transferred to a higher position from Chief of a political work section in the Supply and Marketing Cooperative to Deputy County Director. It seems that such issues should have never happened. The common desire greatly intervened in individual life during the thirty years before China’s reform and opening-up policy. Such events, full of blood and tears in which the common people have participated, pass away like fleeting clouds, leaving no trace of any memory.

29 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2004: pp. 23–24. 30 Ibid., p. 21.

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4 A Satire in Depth: Narration and Deconstruction Whether or not people have no memory or pretend that nothing has happened, both are absurd reactions resulting from the absurdity of history, which Mo Yan always has in mind, so ‘history is always the fundamental force that has motivated his creative works’.31 Hence, what he stresses in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is the necessity to represent those vanished historical memories via different narrators. Thus, for example, in the second part of the novel, Lan Jiefang, who firmly keeps in mind the violent death of Ximen Ox, gives him a detailed account of the event: So abnormal and so malicious, Jinlong delivers to you with ever-increasing intensity all his frustration in politics and his hatred of labouring under guard... You have reincarnated four times after your life ended as an ox. With coming and going through the worlds of life and death, you may have forgotten most of what happened that day, but for me, I have been well remembering the scene in every detail up to now. Supposing what took place that day as a whole was a big tree with luxuriant foliage and spreading branches, I can recall not only the trunk, but also every twig, even every leaf of it. Listen, Ximen Ox, I must say as it has happened, and all that happened is of history, it’s my responsibility to retell history to the person concerned who has already forgotten the details of the events.32

In the third part, by deploying Ximen Pig’s denial of the marriage between the Lan and Huang families in the novel Pole Vaulting to the Moon, Mo Yan, a character in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out , denies the fixed narration about history, ‘Now Diao Xiaosan (the name of the pig) may have reincarnated in Yavadvipa. Even if he were transmigrated as your son, he would not enjoy special favours of nature as I did, entirely cutting myself off from Grandma Meng’s soup, implying what happened in the previous life slips from people’s minds in the next life. Therefore, I am the only authoritative narrator, and what I am narrating is 31 Wang Dewei. ‘A Thousand Words Do Not Outweigh Silence: About Mo Yan’s Novels’. In Wang Dewei (Ed.). After Heteroglossia: Comments on Contemporary Chinese Novels. Taipei: Cornfield Publishing House, 2001: p. 209. 32 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House. 2004: p. 182.

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history, while what I am denying is false history’.33 When such adversarial statements appear in Mo Yan’s other novels, they may, as Zhang Wenying points out, be the imagination and utterance which have arisen from the marginal, anti-centrism,34 whereas in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out , history is looked on as the target, for no matter how the centre would narrate history, its intention and motivation can be guessed, while the fate, tyranny, and cruelty of history itself is unpredictable and cannot be inferred according to logic. For this reason, whether claiming to take the critical mission of retelling every detail of history or regarding himself as the only authoritative narrator of history, the writer does not intend to aim at the centre. On the one hand, the pattern of reincarnation is constructed to bear the predestined process of history. On the other hand, a deep satire is again adopted to criticise the arrangement of plot; that is precisely a display of history’s absurd and paradoxical nature. The deep satire about samsara in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out first refers to the rejection of taking on karma as the theoretical basis of life and death reincarnation, which makes Lord Yama’s permission to arrange the six cycles of incarnation lose its validity. Secondly, further satire is offered through the imbalance of the entire concept of reincarnation as it plays out in practice. Let’s see how Lan Jiefang soothes Ximen Ox, the victim of a false charge: ‘Granted that Jinlong should be your son, it had been a past event before you were reborn as a donkey and an ox. As so many people have eaten their fathers and raped their mothers during the sixfold reincarnation, why are you taking it so seriously?’35 The most ridiculous and unethical arrangement of the plot after Ximen Nao’s reincarnation is nothing more than patricide. Ximen Jinlong is arranged to mistreat Ximen Ox until it kills him and lead the commune members—including Ximen Pig—to wipe out boars; and Lan Kaifang is arranged to shoot Ximen Monkey. Such unfilial deeds of ‘eating father or grandfather’ take place again and again. Besides that, Mo Yan also makes every reborn life in the animal world still ‘remember well’ that the pre-life of all of them is Ximen Nao, and never forget all kinds of 33 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House. 2004: p. 276. 34 Zhang Wenying. Voice from the Margin: The Literature of Mo Yan and Kenzaburo Oe. Beijing: Communication University of China Press, 2007: pp. 146–147. 35 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House. 2004: p. 182.

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causal relations established in the human world. By taking advantage of that, the writer is trying to deny the absolute function of erasing the prelife memory that Grandma Meng’s soup contains, which ‘tastes odd and seems to be decocted with the droppings of bats and pepper’, and to challenge the authority of metempsychosis. In the meantime, he implies that although human beings have experienced the reform for half a century, they just let all that has occurred slip from memory, which makes them even inferior to animals. Nonetheless, Mo Yan embeds his deepest satire in the narration of the behaviour against the historical trend. For instance, when writing that Lan Lian has known the recovery of individual production in the countryside, how confident and assured he is when responding to Hong Taiyue, ‘I am not a sage. That would be Mao Zedong, or Deng Xiaoping… A sage can change heaven and earth. What can I do? I just stick to one firm principle: even brothers will divide up a family’s wealth. So how will it work to throw a bunch of people with different names together? Well, as it turns out, to my surprise, my principle stood the test of time’.36 On writing that Ximen Ox is trying his utmost to stand on his shaky legs upon his death, Mo Yan depicts in the novel, ‘Step by step, Ximen Ox goes toward Lan Lian, leaving out of the land belonging to the People’s Commune and entering the 0.26 acres of land belonging to the last individual farming household in the nation. Once there, he collapsed in a heap. Ximen Ox died on Lan Lian’s land…’37 What he did went a long way towards clearing the minds of people who had become confused and disoriented during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The frame is so sad and emotive that it shakes people’s hearts. Superficially, the narration centres on Lan Lian’s perseverance in farming as an independent farmer who suffers isolation and loneliness before his death, which seems to extol him for his independence, his tenacious defence of principles, and his lack of conviction, as well as for his denouncement of the common people for their blind faith in the historical trend, their insanity and impudence. However, compared with Lan Lian’s response towards Chairman Mao’s death in the third part, it would be clear that the above is not Mo Yan’s real intention for writing like this.

36 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House. 2004: p. 338. 37 Ibid., p. 186.

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All of the Ximen villagers—old and young, men and women—burst out crying at the news of Chairman Mao’s death, except Lan Lian, who keeps silent, ‘sitting alone on the doorstep of his room to the west, honing his rusty scythe with a whetstone’. For Ximen Jinlong’s gnashing his teeth in anger, Lan Lian just utters a sound, answering, ‘He’s dead, but I have to keep on living. There’s millet that needs harvesting’. It is not until Hong Taiyue flayed him that readers can see, ‘Gradually tears begin to flow from Lan Lian’s eyes. With his legs bent, he kneels down on the ground, shouting his grievances, “I love Chairman Mao more than any of you imposters!” Everyone stares terrified, at a loss for words. Lan Lian pounds the ground with his fists, keening, “Chairman Mao, I’m one of your people too, I received my plot of land from you; you gave me the right to be an independent farmer”’.38 Those words seem plain and prosaic, but in fact, the satire implicated in it is incredibly sharp, aiming straight at the most absurd nature of history; both disaster and happiness come from the same source and without any difference. Lan Lian finally sheds tears because he realises that history tortures both individuals and the masses. Lan Lian spends half of his life farming alone, while Hong Taiyue and the others stick to the collective production of the People’s Commune, both of which are regarded in the same light and instigated by the same leader who has played his cards right in politics and economics. No matter how truly Lan Lian declares that he has made the correct choice, no matter how sad but stirring Ximen Ox dares to go through fire and water for the sake of the independent farmer. No matter how down and out Hong Taiyue is after the situation reverses, who at last perishes together with Ximen Jinlong, history brings about destruction to both sides. Either positive or negative, right or wrong, all are deprived of value and significance. Thus, no matter where one has stood in the ups and downs of history, one is unable to escape from the violent treatment of absurdity of history, and for that, they have suffered the price.

38 Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House. 2004: p. 312.

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Conclusion

As Spence claims, ‘Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is not unremittingly hostile to the Communist system’.39 On the contrary, Mo Yan gives such a frequent and specific consideration and imagination of northeast Gaomi, just to cast off the yoke of ideology, thereby exploring the credibility of memory and seek out the real spirit of life. In his writing, Ximen Nao goes on his roundabout trip through the realms of humans, ghosts, and animals. Through the eyes of different narrators and readers, the predestined absurdity and tyranny of history can be witnessed and evaluated. The violent narration in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out might not be as riotous and unusual as in Mo Yan’s earlier works, but in combination with the reincarnation structure and deep satire, it is like a skilled butcher waving the blade at the chopping block to make painstaking and splendid dissections of the fifty-year-long history of the Chinese countryside, in which muscles and skeletons, tendons and vessels are all intertwined with each other.

39 Spence, J. ‘Born Again’ in ‘Sunday Book Review’. The New York Times. May 4th, 2008. Also see Shi Jingqian. ‘Rebirth: Comments on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out’. Network of Contemporary Chinese Literature. September 5th, 2008.

The Carnivalesque Narrative of the Devil Dance: Mo Yan’s Narrative Characteristics in Red Sorghum Clan Guoxing Ding and Haiquan Chen

In contemporary Chinese literature, Mo Yan has undoubtedly become a bright spot not to be ignored. Nurtured by trauma literature, rootseeking literature, introspective literature, and vanguard literature, and other schools of literature that have appeared since 1979 in China, Mo Yan has gone through an arduous journey in China’s literary world. However, he finally found his voice and language in mysterious folk literature after wavering between root-seeking and vanguard literary schools, thus breaking new ground with his vibrant individuality. Mo Yan gained fame and success through his 1985 novel The Transparent Carrot , in which hallucinatory realism, the Latin-American narrative strategy, is employed with Chinese characteristics. The success of this work greatly stimulated his creative desire. So, he produced a series of stories such as ‘Explosion’, ‘Dry River’, and so on in rapid succession, winning him a reputation in the literary circle. But what helped to establish Mo Yan’s status in China was the book Red Sorghum Clan

Source: Jiangxi Social Sciences, 2005(1): pp. 87–91. G. Ding (B) · H. Chen Gannan Normal University, Ganzhou, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_8

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published in 1986. This novel marked the formation of his unique literary style—dark and delightful emotion, mysterious and bizarre imagination, bold and unrestrained ideas, powerful and diverse language, and authentic feeling. It is this unique style that shocks Mo Yan’s readers and arouses their attention. However, they find it challenging to take a clear and selfsatisfied standpoint to evaluate Mo Yan and his works. We maintain that the critics’ predicament should be attributed to the carnivalesque narrative style of Mo Yan, which is the most outstanding feature and contribution of his art of fiction. This essay will analyse Red Sorghum Clan based on the theory of narratology, discussing narrative attitude, language, and structure and his carnivalesque narrative origin and manifestation. Since 1984, after he reflected on the conventional ways of narration, Mo Yan has formed his narrative style—a style of beauty and ugliness, body and soul, mixed and vague values of hero and anti-hero, and an assortment of bold, wild, and diversified language. In my opinion, ‘carnivalesque’ would be the most fitting word to sum up the features of this narrative style. The origin of ‘carnivalesque’ is ‘carnival’ itself, which ‘comes from European ancient myths and rituals, during which people can wear masks, get dressed in strange costumes, parade on the streets and indulge themselves in their primal instinct to their hearts’ content, without having to consider the usual social or class differences between people’.1 Therefore, I think ‘carnival’ has the following features: (1) being classless, that is, everyone is equal without distinctions of wealth or background; (2) being cathartic to free one of burden; (3) being subversive, namely to subvert anything available, thus constructing and realising one’s ideal; (4) being popular, that is, all kinds of roles are involved in the carnival. Given these, we will take Red Sorghum Clan as an example to analyse whether it possesses the four features of ‘carnival’ mentioned above from narratology. Firstly, we analyse the narrative attitude. Narrative attitude refers to the positive or negative attitude the narrator holds towards the narrative object.2 But, since the narration has carnivalesque features, the narrator is not supposed to convey a positive or negative attitude. The object can act according to its independent consciousness in the created world of the

1 Zhu Liyuan. Contemporary Western Literary Theory. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 1997: p. 264. 2 Dong Xiaoying. Narratology. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2001: p. 96.

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novel. Meanwhile, the characters can interact with each other and play their part on an equal basis. To achieve such an effect, the narrator may usually adopt the following two methods: One is to express a complicated and unusual ethical conception by the character’s behavioural sequence itself; the other is to employ contradictory narrative discourses to express attitudes directly. For the application of the first method in Red Sorghum Clan, we will analyse the behavioural sequence of the following three characters in the novel. Firstly, ‘my grandma’, who agrees to have outdoor sex with Commander Yu Zhan’ao—‘my grandpa’—in pursuit of her love and life essence, which helps with her wit and bravery to bring about the alliance between Commander Yu and Detachment Leader Leng in the joint resistance against Japan. However, she drives ‘my second grandma’ (‘my grandpa’’s lover) away for her personal sexual desire, which indirectly results in the tragic death of ‘my second grandma’ and the arrest of ‘my grandpa’.3 However, the fact that she dies in the resistance against Japan makes her an anti-Japanese hero in the end. So ‘my grandma’’s contradictory behaviour is not easy for us to decipher, nor is it likely to use normal ethical and moral standards to judge whether the narrator takes a positive or negative attitude towards ‘my grandma’’s behaviour. Secondly, ‘my grandpa’ is responsible for countless looting and homicides and at the same time he has organised and participated in anti-Japanese battles for many times. ‘My grandpa’ kills a bandit chief, exterminates the Eighth Route Army soldiers, and also kidnaps the Kuomintang detachment leader. As summed up in one sentence in the novel, he is ‘the most beautiful and most repulsive, most heroic and most bastardly’ guy, reflecting a kind of carnivalesque ethics contradictory in form. Let’s look at Pocky Cheng, the third character in the novel. Pocky Cheng leads the way to the village for the Japanese soldiers and causes hundreds of men in the village to be killed. But he also joins the Eighth Route Army and kills many Japanese soldiers. Out of expectation, Pocky Cheng is found to hang himself to death from a tree just after a complete victory in an anti-Japanese battle. Pocky Cheng’s behavioural sequence is also beyond the interpretation of standard ethics and morals. It seems that such simple standards cannot judge many things in this world as being good and evil, 3 The flower lottery is a small-scale form of gambling in which you neither fly too high nor fall too hard, which had captivated the villagers, the women in particular, in that novel.

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beautiful and repulsive, or sacred and corrupt. In Red Sorghum Clan, Mo Yan depicts many other characters by similar behavioural sequences, from which it isn’t easy to discern the writer or the narrator’s attitude. Such unusual behaviours subvert the characters’ conventional behaviour to convey absurd ethical and moral notions. Though the narrator neither affirms nor denies anything in the novel, his/her series of behaviour without intention is nothing but an attitude, and one cannot judge it by the original moral ethics and value norms. Here, the narrator has his/ her own unique set of ethical and value norms while the original norms have been weakened or dispelled—that is, the marginalisation of ethics and morals. The second method is to employ contradictory narrative discourse to express attitudes directly. Generally speaking, the narrator shows their attitude by choosing to use appreciative or derogative words. Still, it is not the case in carnivalesque narrative to subvert that traditional norm and construct its own discourse system: the adoption of contradictory narrative discourse or oxymoron. This rhetoric puts two opposite things in opposite positions or combines two semantically opposite units. This narrative discourse can avoid placing the narrator above the characters, hence freeing the characters to have their own thoughts and activities and show their consciousness independently. Of course, it doesn’t mean that the narrator is free of any rights and lets the characters do whatever they like; instead, he/she still has the right to design the narrative artistically and possess aesthetic ideals. In other words, the narrator provides a platform for their activities. As for how to perform, that is the business of the characters themselves. The reader can find contradictory discourses everywhere in the novel. For example, ‘Northeast Gaomi is undoubtedly the most beautiful and the most repulsive, the most unusual and the most common, the most sacred and the most corrupt, the most heroic and the most bastardly, the hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world’.4 Here the narrator ‘I’ holds a somewhat detached and objective attitude in describing ‘my hometown’ and the characters there. Although such an oxymoron is contradictory in form, it expresses the narrator’s unconventional or carnivalesque ethics. All characters’ behaviours are on the same level in the narrator’s world of values, life consciousness being

4 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36.

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his values. All the original ethics in the world of Red Sorghum Clan are banished from rulers to civilians, where the rulers’ throne is vacant. Thirdly, we analyse the novel’s carnivalesque features from the angle of narrative structure. Many readers agree that one of their first impressions after reading Red Sorghum Clan is its flawed structure, an illusion brought about by the carnivalesque narrative structure, which is a bit similar to Bakhtin’s idea of polyphonic structures. There are two kinds of dialogues with different directions in a novel describing both the characters’ internal dialogues and the dialogues between characters, or ‘double-voiced dialogue’ as coined by Bakhtin. For instance, when ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my father’ return to the village after buying bullets in the town, they happen to see the village besieged by Japanese troops. ‘My father’, when hiding in the sorghum field, uses his Browning automatic pistol to strike a Japanese cavalryman’s horse on the forehead and throws the rider off the saddle. But the moment when ‘my grandpa’ is about to kill the cavalryman, ‘my father’ sees a colour photograph of the soldier’s wife and son and suddenly gets touched by their family love. At that time, ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my father’ have a double-voiced dialogue on killing or not killing the Japanese, thus forming a different narrative structure, where the characters have their own orbits of consciousness intersecting with each other but in no particular order. That is one manifestation of the carnivalesque narrative structure. The other is the braid-like narrative structure running through the whole novel. Conventionally, the narration is in a sequential order, that is, the time order of the narration and the stories conform to each other, probably sometimes combined with foreshadowing or flashback. In contrast, the carnivalesque narration breaks the convention, combining different narrative orders without any particular sequence. Mo Yan exemplifies it in Red Sorghum Clan in which sequential narration, foreshadowing, flashback, and interlude are all employed. Looking at the narrative process carefully, we find that the story is cut into seventeen sections that are then united into a new narrative sequence like a twisted rope. The seventeen sections of the story are in the following order: (1) ‘My grandma’ is betrothed; (2) Shan Tingxiu and his son are killed; (3) Magistrate Cao investigates the murder case; (4) ‘My grandma’ revives the distillery; (5) The love affair of ‘my grandpa’ and Lian’er is disclosed; (6) ‘My second grandma’ is gang-raped; (7) ‘My second grandma’ dies a strange death; (8) ‘My grandpa’’s troop ambushes Japanese around the Black Water River; (9) ‘My grandpa’ and ‘my father’ clear up the

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battlefield; (10) ‘My grandpa’ and ‘my father’ buy bullets in the town to take revenge; (11) They happen to see Japanese troops slaughtering the village when coming back; (12) ‘My grandpa’ and ‘my father’ rescue ‘my mother’; (13) ‘My father’ and ‘my mother’ along with other people shoot the wild dogs; (14) ‘My grandpa’ and ‘my father’ join the Iron Society; (15) ‘My grandma’’s funeral; (16) The Iron Society, the Eighth Route Army, and the Kuomintang Detachment led by Pocky Leng counterattack the Japanese; (17) How Eighteen Stabs Geng dies and ‘I’ go back to the village to worship his ancestors’ graves, and they are cut into the following groups: (1), (2) || (3), (4) ||| (5) |||| (6), (7) | (8), (9) | (10), (11) || (12), (13) ||| (14), (15), (16) |||| (17). But the new narrative sequence turns out to be (8), (1)–(2) | (3)–(4), (9) | (11)–(13), (12) | (15)–(16), (14) | (6)–(7), (17). They are the five chapters in the novel including ‘Red Sorghum’, ‘Sorghum Wine’, ‘The Way of Dog’, ‘Funeral in Sorghum Field’, and ‘Strange Death’. From the analysis above, we know that the narrator employs flashbacks to begin the novel with the story’s middle part: the ambush around the Black Water River. But the narration is interrupted. Instead of following the order of the battle, it shifts to a description of ‘my grandma’’s marriage. Similarly, after finishing the story before Yu Zhan’ao kills the father and the son in the Shans, the narration is broken off again to continue telling the latter part of the story—‘my grandpa’ and ‘my father’ are clearing up the battlefield. Hence, the narration in the whole novel is like a string of rope, with each part of the story being able to act as an independent unit. Such a varied and confusing narrative structure is something impossible in traditional narration. In addition to flashbacks, foreshadowing and interludes are also frequently used in the novel. For example, in the beginning part of Chapter Two entitled ‘Sorghum Wine’, the narrator uses foreshadowing to talk about the brewing technology invented by ‘my grandmas’. On their way to ambush the Japanese, the narrator interposes ‘my father’ recalling Uncle Luohan taking him crabbing on the riverbank. Therefore, one may find that there exist different narrative orders in the novel, making the narrative structure much more carnivalesque. At the same time, this braid-like narration is also conducive to the narrator’s adjustment of narrative intensity. The chapter of ‘The Way of Dog’ is an excellent case in point. Starting with appalling scenes of the Japanese slaughtering the villagers, readers may perceive the narrator’s emotion and resentment towards the Japanese, but the narrator will reduce the hatred because the narration immediately shifts to the war

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between men and dogs, which is far from being consistent with a humanistic conception. The human and dog ways are equal in this man-dog battle, stimulating us to think about the essence of life and gaining inspiration from it. This narrative style reflects again the narrator’s detached and objective attitude, which makes all the characters and events dance in an equal and independent manner. Fourthly, we are to discuss the perspective of carnivalesque narration. Carnivalesque narration requires the narrator to keep a particular narrative distance that is most importantly determined by the choice of narrative perspective. The writer of Red Sorghum Clan is also very particular and creates an entirely new narrative perspective. It is an omniscient first-person point of view, bringing readers a diverse, complicated, and carnivalesque narrative effect for the following two reasons. The first reason is the combination of the first person and the narrator’s indefinite perspective, which helps to produce a very complicated narrative time and space and deconstructs the traditional narrative perspective. Such a combination provides an accessible and wide stage for carnivalesque narration and makes readers feel that the narration is authentic and sincere by using first-person terms such as ‘my grandpa’, ‘my grandma’, and others. Moreover, this first-person narration implies a double perspective: One is that of ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’; the other is that of ‘I’ telling stories of his ancestors from a descendant’s angle, thus forming a polyphonic narrative perspective in which tension is available. As a result, ‘the narrator “I” can go through different experiences of history and reality, truth and allusion, the internal and the external worlds, etc., making history into one’s own inner experience’,5 which produces a brand-new narrative effect that ‘the objective history is rewritten into an object of psychological experience, and reinforces one’s own psychological experience and the lyrical emotion, thus weakening the objectivity of historical events by dividing them more subjectively’.6 It is the ‘I’ narrative perspective that forcibly wedges the family and kinship into the ethnic and class relations in history, disintegrating the novel’s historicity and greatly diluting its historical flavour to make history

5 Sun Xianke. ‘On the Narrative Feature and Consciousness Tendency in New Historical Novels’. Literature and Art Forum, 1999(1). 6 Ibid.

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specific, trivial as well as ‘well-rounded’ without any feelings of its sacredness, solemnity, and objectivity. Hence, the writer’s stage reverberates a three-dimensional and multi-voiced tune performed on an equal footing by the folk voices of ‘my grandpa’, ‘my grandma’, ‘my father’, ‘Detachment Leader Leng’, and ‘Little Foot Jiang’ together with the official voices. The second reason is the marginalisation of the first-person narrator and personalisation of the omniscient viewpoint. Usually, a first-person narrator is supposed to be involved in the story. However, the narrative ‘I’ in Red Sorghum Clan only participates symbolically, mostly standing outside the story while telling stories of others (‘my grandma’ and ‘my grandpa’). This marginalised position not only gives ‘I’ flexibility in the course of narration but also forms a kind of tension between the marginalised ‘I’ and the ‘I’ linked by blood with ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’ to give readers a subjective but not sacred kind of feeling. In addition, ‘I’ can observe all aspects of the story and probe deeply into the character’s inner world due to the narrator’s indefinite perspective and the personalisation of an omniscient viewpoint, which helps to build the story’s sense of reality and objectivity. Such a perspective greatly subverts the narrative tradition, which maintains that the first-person narrator cannot describe something impossible for him to know. However, the first-person narrator in Red Sorghum Clan knows what happened to ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’. Finally, the narrator’s tendency to ‘mental retardation’ also contributes to the manifestation of carnivalesque narration. For example, the childhood narrative perspective of ‘my father’ is a perspective of an innocent child rarely influenced by social ideology, and it reflects the true state of things without filtering. Fifthly, the narrative language is something in which the carnivalesque feature is manifested more prominently and also is most easily perceived by readers. There are mainly two kinds of manifestations of carnivalesque language in Red Sorghum Clan: one is the abnormal rhetoric; the other is a hodgepodge of different linguistic genres. Abnormal rhetoric means it goes against the original grammar and has the following three forms: (1) logically contradictory rhetoric; (2) the apposition and mutual metaphor of contradictory images; (3) extremely exaggerated description. The second form is one of the frequently used figures of speech in Mo Yan’s novels. It makes things go beyond their position of the ethical order and get reduced to a primitive natural state, which can be seen as a kind of respect and affirmation towards the natural norms of things, breaking,

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to a certain extent, the myth that civilisation constructs the order of things. For example, it is common for Mo Yan to put excrement and food together and metaphorise each other like ‘dried road apples left by horses, mules, and donkeys; cow dung like worm-eaten pancakes; and scattered goat pellets like little black beans’. Such a rhetorical device significantly subverts the traditional grammar rules, putting initially opposite images of beauty and ugliness on the same level and awarding them the same status. Mo Yan also uses a highly exaggerated description as another form of abnormal rhetoric, especially in words. Once the narrator indulges himself in such a language, he keeps on nagging and talking to himself without considering others’ feelings as if he has lost his mind. Still, he is venting his feelings and pursuing his extreme happiness, which embodies the spirit of Western wine culture, a bit like the mad language in Goethe’s Faust. Of course, the seemingly crazy language is not redundant. Rather, it most properly expresses the character’s or the narrator’s mental and emotional fluctuation. As some critics put it, sometimes form itself is content. Likewise, the exaggerated description in Red Sorghum Clan is also blended with the characters’ emotions and feelings. The writer depicts ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’’s outdoor sex in the sorghum field: ‘Her soul fluttered as she gazed at his bare chest. A light mist rose from the tips of the sorghum, and all around, she could hear the sound of sorghum’s growth’.7 The writer uses such language, not without romantic appeal, to highly praise ‘my grandpa’ and ‘my grandma’’s sexual relations. He is, in effect, praising the freedom and strength of life, pushing life’s natural existence to the highest position in our lives. When life’s fire flares up, all the established moral norms, life principles and sense of good and evil lose their meaning and become feeble. Here, Mo Yan integrates the narrative form and content into the world of natural life. In addition, the exaggerated language has, to some degree, strengthened the narrative intensity, thus making the folk consciousness and the authoritative consciousness treated equally. The second manifestation of carnivalesque narrative language in Red Sorghum Clan is a hodgepodge of different linguistic genres. This assortment of language is a strict no-no for most writers, but Mo Yan does not care. He considers it a perfect choice to express all his ideas

7 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36.

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completely and to vent all his feelings thoroughly. Moreover, the nature of equality, popularity and subversiveness in the carnivalesque narration is also embodied in the assortment of different linguistic genres just like stage roles of ‘Sheng’, ‘Dan’, ‘Jing’, ‘Mo’, and ‘Chou’8 of Peking opera who perform their parts heartily without differentiation or class division. The language in Red Sorghum Clan is sometimes bold and flowing, ‘The seeds of banditry in northeast Gaomi were planted everywhere: The government produced bandits, poverty produced bandits, committing adultery and murdering for love produced bandits, and even banditry produced bandits’.9 The language used in the novel sometimes sounds bizarre, ‘I used to think Black Eye was a good brave man. That’s why I left home to follow him and do something worthwhile before I got married and settled down’.10 In Red Sorghum Clan, Mo Yan often blends his language with ancient poems, allusions, modern expressions, and wellknown sayings, ‘Our ancestors had a saying: Birds perch on the best wood, while a good horse neighs when it sees a master trainer’. ‘When you’re one of us (a member of the Iron Society), if you can sleep on firewood and drink gall, like the famous King of Yue, you’ll gain everyone’s sympathy and respect’.11 Sometimes the language in the novel is elegant and poetic, ‘The river bends, whose glassy surface reflects half the stars in the sky’. Or, sometimes it is very vulgar and shocking, ‘Impotence. Whether you’re as wispy as a silkworm’s thread or as soft as fluffed cotton, one packet, taken in three portions, and you’ll have a rod of steel that’ll get you through the night’.12 All of the above show a kind of varying and compelling language following no set form, called by some scholars as a language explosion which subverts the norms of literary language and makes Mo Yan’s language more expressive. Mo Yan also blends in the novel with slang, proverbs, curses, doggerel, ballads as well as the formal language, all of which are used on the same level, dispelling class differences of vulgarity and sublimity which are overwhelmed by the various 8 They are the names of different roles in Peking Opera, in which female roles are ‘Dan’, male roles are ‘Sheng’ or ‘Mo’, painted faces are ‘Jing’, and clowns are ‘Chou’. Each role, according to their sex, age, and disposition, is characterised by different designs of facial make-up. 9 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36. 10 Ibid. 11 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36. 12 Ibid.

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compound linguistic genres. A multi-voiced tune, blended with hybrid forms and open structures, can form a typical carnivalesque style. It is both for the sensory organs and for discourses in which boundaries of such value categories as the noble and the humble, body and soul, hero and non-hero, beauty and ugliness, life and death, all get blurred, and the hierarchy of the value system is broken, thus giving birth to an entire life entity in which the value categories and their opposite ones coexist. Finally, a brief discussion of the narrative voice in Red Sorghum Clan is necessary. Narrative voice refers to the degree of the narrator’s involvement, usually by utilising narrative modes and the narrator’s comments. The more the narrator is involved, the stronger the narrative voice is— otherwise, the weaker. In other words, the more the narrative modes are used and the more comments the narrator makes, the stronger the narrative voice becomes and vice versa. Therefore, it is not difficult to conclude that the narrative voice in Red Sorghum Clan is weak, owing to the following reasons. Firstly, the first-person narrator is also a character in the story. Consequently, the narrator’s comments are the character’s voice, which does not exercise control over the voices of other characters since they are performing on the same platform and integrating themselves equally into the world of life. Secondly, the narrator displays more than tells stories so that characters have their independent voices without interference from the narrator. So, in Red Sorghum Clan, Mo Yan weakens the narrator’s voice and places him into the civilian class with an almost primitive narrative mode. As a result, the narrator functions mainly as a story connector. The carnivalesque narrative in Red Sorghum Clan has been fully analysed, and why Mo Yan adopts such a narrative skill is also worth exploring. The most direct reason is undoubtedly the writer’s artistic temperament— broad and brilliant, far and high—as Mo Yan himself says he is best at ‘linking unrelated things like apples and oranges together and integrating them into one’.13 Of course, it has something to do with his life experiences as well. The most fundamental reason lies in Mo Yan’s world outlook, philosophy of life, values, and views of history and literature. Red Sorghum Clan reveals his philosophy of life and values to be a kind of philosophy that life has priority over everything. In an abnormal society, it is neither easy to measure the importance of people’s behaviour by

13 Mo Yan. ‘Ridiculous Thoughts’. PLA Literature and Art, 1985(2).

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conventional ethical and moral norms, nor is it easy to evaluate them by a simple binary standard, so the criterion should be an essential value. That is to say, it is the spirit of life because a person’s survival has become a fundamental issue in such an abnormal society. To them, ordinary ethics, standards of beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, are no longer necessary because they have either declined into anomie or turned out to be the highest standard pursued by the people instead of the most basic one. Consequently, life spirit occupies the most prominent position, and it, reserved in the folk social life, shelters evil things and people that have urged Mo Yan to return to the folk society after suffering from the nastiness in human nature and the withering of vitality in modern urban society. However, he dares not to indulge himself in the folk society where he can also see the ugliness and nastiness, so he maintains a stance of sometimes disassociating from—and occasionally returning to—the folk life. At the same time, Mo Yan conveys his view of history in Red Sorghum Clan, that is, ‘what we are confronted with is neither a question of how to comprehend and follow the historical logic, nor a question of how to attain the goal’. It is not a question of a project or a game play, but a huge mental puzzle. Like the boy in ‘Thumb Cuff’, ‘we are confined to the tree of “history”, having no choice but still aspiring for freedom’.14 He also conveys his view of literature: Literature not only aims to help us understand and follow the historical logic, to interpret its politics, and to tackle a particular problem but, most importantly, to find a tranquil place to settle down for our overwrought and restless heart. Mo Yan has noted this on the novel’s head page, ‘With this book, I respectfully invoke the heroic and aggrieved souls wandering in the boundless bright-red sorghum fields of my hometown’.15 It is because of this kind of drive that Mo Yan naturally adopts the carnivalesque way of narration. Mo Yan’s narrative innovation has made a great contribution to narrative theory and practice. On one hand, his narrative practice provides new materials for study in this field. His innovation on narrative perspective and language also enriches narrative theory, helping it to improve and develop further. In the aspect of narrative attitude, the Chinese traditional

14 Li Jingze. ‘Mo Yan and the Chinese Spirit’, Thumb Cuff , Nanjing: Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House, 2003. 15 Mo Yan. ‘Red Sorghum’. People’s Literature, 1986(4): pp. 4–36.

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view holds that a literary work is written to illustrate truths or doctrines, and that the personality of a writer will manifest itself in his/her writing. It requires the narrator (including the writer) to be involved in the narrative text, interfering with the events and characters in it, and to embody the foundationalism and universalism of grand narrative. However, on the contrary, Red Sorghum Clan is a personalised private narrative that dispels and questions two central humanistic beliefs—ethics and history. In terms of narrative structure, Mo Yan deconstructs the traditional linear narrative and adopts magical polyphonic narration reflecting the postmodern narrative features. And his crazy narrative language is also a prominent artistic feature in his writing. He breaks the traditional linguistic norms, subverts, and even ignores grammatical rules. His is a model of using appropriate language to express thoughts precisely in literature. As for narrative perspective, his omniscient first-person point of view creates a new mode that breaks the taboo in traditional narrative perspective but still seems logical and reasonable. This new mode gives readers a new feeling; the novel’s nervous and variable state of time-space cutting is brought about by the narrator’s vagueness and shifting perspective. In addition, the weakening of narrative voice embodies Mo Yan’s dispelling of the narrator’s egocentrism, thus producing a complete narrative effect. On the other hand, this narrative style expresses Mo Yan’s unique literary thoughts perfectly, thereby establishing his own peculiar literary style and providing readers with a new aesthetic paradigm. His view of literature has postmodern characteristics, i.e., the loss of selfhood, nothingness, counterculture, binary opposition, and decomposition of meaning, returning to the original, and the blurred boundaries of elite literature and popular literature. The carnivalesque narrative style of Mo Yan is the exact and appropriate manifestation of that literary viewpoint and his personality. Furthermore, this carnivalesque narrative text reflects a spirit of deconstruction, conveying a particular aesthetic culture and standard. Using values of egalitarianism and relativism to light up our life and world and dispel the ethical and moral concepts of binary oppositions. Accordingly, such a worldview to deny dichotomy has aroused a popular, fun-loving attitude that gives readers a ‘game-like aesthetic pleasure.

The History of the Image: A Discussion of Gains and Losses in Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Clan Chun Jiang

The novella Red Sorghum has won Mo Yan great fame in today’s literary world. Many critics praise him for his bizarre style and unrestrained ideas, and admire his subtle description of images, claiming that Mo Yan has ‘opened up a new way’ for the ‘style liberation’1 of war literature, and ‘dragged the topic of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression which has baffled writers and bored readers out of dilemma and brought vitality back to it’.2 Furthermore, they commend that he has ‘made the life during wartime full of fantasies, and these fantasies give war a poetic feeling’, and can thus ‘be regarded as a flying signal in the sunny and clear sky of military literature’.3 They also maintain that his aesthetic approach is ‘a revolutionary renewal’,4 about ‘the aestheticisation of historical facts’ 1 ‘A Dialogue on War Literature’. PLA Literature and Art, 1987(1). 2 Wang Guohua & Shi Ting. ‘Mo Yan and Marquez’. Yi Tan, 1987(3). 3 ‘A Dialogue on War Literature’. PLA Literature and Art, 1987(1). 4 Lei Da. ‘Spirituality Activating History’. Shanghai Literature, 1987(1).

Source: Qilu Journal, 1988(4): pp. 11–17. C. Jiang (B) Shandong Youth University of Political Science, Jinan, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_9

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and a kind of ‘aesthetic rebellion’.5 These comments may not be blind praise but are a sincere compliment on Mo Yan’s refreshing new pattern, artistic conception, technique, and language, which is an encouragement to this new literary talent. People do not want to point out the defects in Red Sorghum lest the hard-won writing trend should be inflicted, even though it has both merits and demerits. However, after we have calmed down from the excitement and carefully read some of Mo Yan’s novels, particularly Red Sorghum Clan, and their relevant opinions again, we will naturally question whether we have overrated or praised the merits in Mo Yan’s works and criticised less those defects. In view of this, this essay will analyse the gains and losses in Red Sorghum Clan, trying to make up the partiality in some comments nowadays to seek advice from today’s literary world.

1 Bizarre Anecdote Telling vs. Blurred Historical Facts The most prominent feeling while reading Mo Yan’s novel is his unconventional ‘bizarrerie’, which includes bizarre plots, ideas, and feelings, all of which create a strange and fantastic world of art. In ‘Folk Music’, a beautiful woman accommodates a young blind artist, which causes a stir between soul and flesh in a small town. In ‘White Dog and the Swing’, a white dog takes a young man to the sorghum field to meet its female owner and pay back the love debt, thus unfolding in bitter tragedy. In ‘Baby with Blond Hair’, a company-level People’s Liberation Army officer uses a knife to tear apart the velvet cover on a nude female statue standing not far from the military base, which he dares not look at initially, but later fantasises it to be his wife who lives afar in his hometown. But the lonely and helpless wife has an affair with a blond young man who helps with her farm work. They later have a child together. At the end of the story, the officer finds out the truth and strangles their child. In ‘Old Gun’, a hunter carries an old gun left behind by his parents to shoot wild geese and tries in vain to make it fire. He is unexpectedly killed when his gun barrel explodes. In ‘The Transparent Carrot’, Heihai, a dark-skinned boy who is neither afraid of coldness nor hotness, can see the transparent flowing

5 Zhang Aolie. ‘Skewed Mentality and the Rebuilding of Personality’. Critic Commenter, 1987(3).

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liquid in a golden carrot. Mo Yan uses legendary folklore, exciting anecdotes and bizarre feelings wonderfully in his novels. In Mo Yan’s hands, these subjects form a vivid, magnificent, and strange picture and reveal some life philosophy of history and reality, leaving readers a distinctive, novel, and unique artistic impression and aesthetic feeling. We should say that this is a very prominent aspect of Mo Yan’s unique artistic personality and also the most important reason that his novels can arouse very active responses from readers. Nevertheless, if we are merely content with the bizarre anecdote telling but ignore the typical generalisation of our history, reality, and life, his accurate handling and deep exploration of the characters’ personalities, mentality, and spirit, or if we just rely on some legendary stories and absurd imagination to support the structure of novels but ignore the deep analysis and vivid depiction of the history and the social backgrounds, we are bound to weaken the ideological content and artistic effort in Mo Yan’s novels. His novels may still possess its vividness and readability, but they may lose their historical and ideological implications. Red Sorghum Clan is, by its name, a novel reflecting the history of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression. Still, it only describes once in a direct manner Yu Zhan’ao’s troops ambushing Japanese invaders and the Japanese ransacking the Chinese villagers. Almost all the rest of the novel is about the bandits fighting for women’s favour, as well as annexation, murder, a love triangle involving Yu Zhan’ao, ‘my grandma’, and Lian’er as well as folk customs and anecdotes such as sedan-chair lifting, funeral, settling lawsuits, murder, kidnapping, martial arts competition, and adultery. Many critics appreciate such revolutionary writing of giving war a fantastic poetic and soul purifying flavour instead of a direct description, arguing that this is a magic means to drag war literature out of a difficult position. Of course, I do not hold that we have to write about battles to reflect warfare, nor do I think that writing about customs and legends cannot reflect the true nature of war. But the problem is whether the customs, legends, romance, and anecdotes should indirectly reflect and convey the atmosphere, mentality, and nature of the entire war or era. It is difficult to figure out any connection with that particular era when we read these descriptions such as Yu Zhan’ao’s professional sedanchair lifting and tramples in the dirt,6 his exertion of all strength to carry 6 According to the novel Red Sorghum Clan, when ‘my grandma’ was placed inside the sedan chair on her wedding day, she was carried by four bearers. As the bearers carried

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the coffin, the brave killing of the bandit on the road, passionate lovemaking with ‘my grandma’ in the sorghum field, the sly killing of the bandit chief Spotted Neck, his ruthless fighting with Black Eye, as well as his attendance of ‘my grandma’’s funeral, etc. We do not sense the mass people’s awareness of and vehement resistance against this bitter war or their pain under the Japanese attacks and sorrow of losing their homes. On the contrary, Mo Yan’s detailed account of the skin stripping of Uncle Luohan in Red Sorghum Clan distracts readers’ attention. In the novel, rather than Chinese disasters of being slaughtered and ransacked by the Japanese, what he depicts is the confrontation between a human being and an animal in a damp and dark well and the conflict between the desire to survive and the physical disgust. What is very active and vivid are abnormal and spineless characters like the butcher Sun Five and the barber Pocky Cheng who have entirely lost their humanity and conscience when faced with enemy slaughters. After scanning the whole novel, it is evident that Mo Yan’s central viewpoint and excitement in this work are concentrated on the legendary experience, physical stimulation, and distorted human nature rather than the authentic and typical historical background, characters, and people’s mentality. Some praised this anti-tradition kind of sensory presentation as ‘having the courage to subjectify history’ and ‘activating history with spirituality’.7 They even thought that the writer’s employment of his subjective feeling to write history would make readers feel the history is ‘profoundly true’.8 Here, we find it necessary to doubt whether it is ‘history activating spirituality’ or ‘spirituality activating history’. I believe that history is the objective existence of human beings which will, by no means, become either rich and colourful or pale and weak by any writer’s subjective spiritual activation. If we take history as a little girl to be dressed up by anyone and randomly painted using our personal spirituality, and thus try to ‘conquer, transform, and rebuild’9 the history, to ‘activate’ it and consider the subjective imagination to be the historical truth, then we have reversed the relationship of truth and cognition, and that of life her down the path, their feet left a series of V imprints known as ‘tramples’ in the dirt, which fortified the bearers’ pride of profession. 7 Lei Da. ‘Spirituality Activating History’. Shanghai Literature, 1987(1). 8 Chen Liao. ‘1986: The Writing Trends and Directions of Short Stories and Novellas’.

Contemporary Literary and Artistic Trend, 1987(2). 9 Lei Da. ‘Spirituality Activating History’. Shanghai Literature, 1987(1).

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and creation. Only after we have grasped the truth of history through profound observation, experience, and ‘activated the spirituality’ with the spirit of history turning history into images can we create great works to conform to the historical truth and have subjective spirituality. If we, together with our next generation who has no experience of war, hope to feel, by reading Red Sorghum Clan, the history and atmosphere of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, they might feel lost and disappointed because this novel has devoted too much ink and passion to the description of those romantic anecdotes and legendary experiences. It has blurred the history, the ups and downs of the times and the national mentality, which will weaken the work’s historical depth and ideological strength. Although the war of resistance against Japanese aggression may have different implications for people, or every writer may also have different opinions, options, and styles in writing it, one cannot ignore the fact that the Chinese nation has suffered deep misery under the aggression of Japanese imperialism and has stood up in unity and fought tenaciously in a very optimistic manner. When we read the chapter of ‘Red Sorghum’, a solemn historical passion will be stirred in our hearts from time to time. But the following chapters, like ‘Sorghum Wine’, ‘The Way of Dog’, and ‘Funeral in the Sorghum Field’, seem to be disassociated from the theme even though each is exciting and interesting. This rich red sorghum wine tastes just like having been mixed with a lot of cold water. When we read the chapter ‘Dog Skin’, we feel it even more ridiculous and far-fetched. It fantasised the cruel reality into a spooky play in which ‘my’ robust and lively second grandma Lian’er was turned, without reason, into a sexually active psychiatric patient who took off her clothes as a kind of sacrifice to trade for the Japanese soldiers’ release of her child. And to our surprise, the Japanese invaders have been stunned by her behaviour. This is, indeed, a kind of distortion of the holy war of resistance against Japan, a kind of blasphemy to those who died in the war, and a kind of tease of future generations’ solemn feelings. If we say ‘Red Sorghum’ is a passionate battle song, ‘Dog Skin’, in comparison, is a kind of weird and coarse noise, objectively debased this solemn and thought-provoking topic.

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2 Subtle Image Description vs. Random Subjective Thoughts The second prominent feeling while reading Mo Yan’s novels is his subtle description of images. His having-painting-in-poetry and havingpoetry-in-painting kind of description can create an unforgettable artistic atmosphere that reflects the true reality accurately and delivers the writer’s subjective mind, hence conveying a kind of familiar but strange, novel but natural artistic feeling. As some critics put it, ‘his special artistic feeling often gives life to everything in the universe in a visualised way, captures their different state in a certain moment and creates a living universe full of sound, colour, aroma, taste, and shape through his imagination, development and synesthesia’.10 So we can say that it may be seen as a kind of image, the artistic portrayal of the objective world with the writer’s subjective feeling. It is ‘the complex experience of sense and sensibility in a flash’, and ‘the combination of various fundamentally different concepts’.11 This kind of image is closer to the artistic pursuit of a realm between ‘likeness and unlikeness’ in the traditional Chinese ink painting, in which ‘likeness’ is the foundation and ‘unlikeness’ is to sublime and surpass the former. If we blindly pursue the ‘unlikeness’ without meticulous observation and an accurate grasp of reality, we are likely to slip into a false subjectivity. In Mo Yan’s early novels, reality and imagination have been closely connected because the subjective portrayal was based on precise reality. For instance, in ‘Gale’, Mo Yan describes how ‘my grandpa’ struggles when pushing the cart against the strong wind. It reflects a symbolic meaning of my grandpa’s tenacity and perseverance, but the descriptions of his movement, mentality, language, and environment are all perfectly realistic. In ‘Old Gun’, the leading character’s imagination and feeling of his gun, we can say, are both accurate and decent. And, in ‘The Transparent Carrot’, Heihai’s wonderful imagination of a carrot and his longing for the harmonious scene of the young and old blacksmiths forging iron together are all exquisite and vivid realistic writing, but at the same time contain some implied meanings. Such a subtle description of 10 Zhu Xiangqian. ‘Loving That Small ‘Stamp’: A Discussion on Mo Yan’s Novels’. People’s Daily. December 8th, 1986. 11 Welleck, R. & A. Warren. Theory of Literature. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1984: p. 202.

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image mystifies the customs and anecdotes in Mo Yan’s novels, displaying his fantastic talent for free and unconstrained imagination, brightening his works’ colours as well as enriching their meanings. In chapters ‘Red Sorghum’ and ‘Sorghum Wine’, there are many wonderful and amusing image descriptions. For example, when Douguan (‘my father’s’ name in Red Sorghum Clan) is marching in the sorghum field, about ‘my father’s’ recollection of Uncle Luohan taking him crabbing on the riverbank. Though such fond memories stand in sharp contrast to the tense atmosphere at that time, it is such a sharp and inharmonious contrast that strengthens the solemn and tragic feelings of the battle and the beauty of human relations in the war. At the same time, it conforms to Douguan’s character and physical traits at his age. As a fourteen-year-old boy, his concentration is not long and stable, he loves to recall beautiful memories, and he is also curious and fearless towards the unfamiliar battle. Therefore, that description is friendly and interesting, making readers indulge in a train of thoughts. Of course, we do not have to be oversensitive to think that crabbing has a particular symbolic meaning and that it may indicate their ambushing of Japanese soldiers. However, some critics are quite good at such kind of far-fetched association and discovery. For example, they maintain that the sun in ‘The Transparent Carrot’ is the symbol of ‘absurd politics’ and the young blacksmith is representative of tradition, and that the theme of Mo Yan’s ‘Autumn Flood’ is similar to that of Lu Xun’s ‘Casting Sword’ in that the two novels are about ‘the bloody feud caused by love affairs’.12 They even argue that in ‘Autumn Flood’, the mysterious woman in purple and the man in black have some deep and subtle symbolic meanings. Another good case in point is the image description of ‘my grandma’’s recollection of her colourful life in the past before she dies. It implies not only her sentimental attachment to the red sorghum field, her love and passion with ‘my grandpa’, and her longing for a happy and peaceful life in the future, but also the confession of her open and honest life without any regret, all of which are interwoven into a poetic and colourful picture. When fused with other legendary details of Yu Zhan’ao, a unique image containing a certain historical content is constituted, reflecting Chinese people’s struggle in this brilliant period of history during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression and

12 Ji Hongzhen. ‘An Unyielding Soul on a Melancholy Land: The First Essay on Mo Yan’. Literary Review, 1987(6).

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their national mentality. We should say that such subtle descriptions have certain cognitive and aesthetic significance. However, this kind of image description, coloured by prominent subjective emotion, must satisfy three premises. Firstly, it should be based on reality rather than fancy thoughts without any real base. Secondly, it should be an organic part in the evolution of characters and the development of the whole plot and a catalyst to make characters complete and vivid. Plots should be full of ups and downs within a slim and graceful structure, but not a mysterious and sensational gimmick or a kind of external ornament to show off one’s talent. Thirdly, it should be in harmony and unity with the whole plot to generate the obscure and profound symbolic meanings naturally, otherwise, it is bound to work out in an exactly opposite way. Indeed, there are quite a lot of excellent image descriptions in Red Sorghum Clan, but there’s no lack of superficial and abstract ones simply in pursuit of excitement and pleasure as well. In the chapter ‘Sorghum Wine’, Mo Yan’s paragraph-after-paragraph vivid description of Yu Zhan’ao’s killing, the Shan family has gradually revealed his preference for legend and excitement. It has already shown signs of getting off the subject. And this kind of subjective inclination in the simple pursuit of weirdness, excitement, and horror is even more prominent in the chapter of ‘The Way of Dog’, in which Qian’er (the narrator’s mother in the novel) is placed in the well by her father when the Japanese ransack their village. Mo Yan portrays in detail Qian’er’s physical experience of fear, terror, and disgust caused by the dangerous centipede, the ugly toad, and the cold snake at the dark bottom of the well. Though Qian’er’s predicament in the well is caused by the Japanese’s sweeping through the village, Mo Yan’s lengthy description still reflects an obvious intention to stimulate physical senses and attract readers’ deformed interests. It can reflect one side of the Chinese people’s unrelenting misery brought about by the war, but it seems too coincident and unnatural with too evident artificial traces. What’s more, this single perspective is far from enough to reflect the cruelty of war and it shows a narrow vision without breadth and depth (Qian’er’s disgust and fear towards those animals have far surpassed her fear of the Japanese’s ransacking). In addition, the description is too lengthy and redundant. More ridiculous in this chapter is the description of Douguan and Qian’er’s fierce fight with hundreds of dogs using the precious bullets captured from the Japanese, as well as a bloody battle between two male

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dogs to win a female dog’s favour and to compete for the leading position. Such a description has run counter to the real life, deviated from the war environment, and distorted the theme of the novel. It not only fails to discover some reasonable symbolic meanings in it, but leaves readers an impression of deliberately mystifying the story. Some critics attempt to interpret the symbolic meaning of ‘dog ways’ as ‘animals’ invasion of and their great threat to humans’, saying ‘this kind of dog way is exactly the symbol of the brutal Japanese invaders’.13 However, since the work is based on the factual background of the Japanese sweeping through northeast Gaomi, why does the writer describe the rampant wild dogs to symbolise Japanese brutality? Moreover, the leaders in the dog pack are the three dogs from ‘my family’. They have a kind of ‘collective consciousness’ to ‘exact terrible revenge upon those rulers who have enslaved them for a long time’, which indicates their rebellion against people’s oppression. Isn’t it mechanical application to use rampant wild dogs to symbolise ‘animals’ invasion of humans’ and the brutal Japanese? Suppose the same reasoning is taken to seek some symbolic meanings from the later descriptions of the Eighth Route Army soldiers covering themselves with dogskin to keep warm and disguising as dogs to attack the Japanese, wouldn’t it be more ironic and ridiculous? If it is a realistic description, then such a lengthy one is even more redundant, absurd, and false. Just imagine, on the battlefield of Shandong Province in 1939, 500–700 wild dog packs appeared to attack the local people, and most incredibly, those people used precious bullets and grenades to kill the dogs rather than keep the bullets and grenades to fight the Japanese aggressors. Isn’t it too ridiculous subjective thoughts contrary to reality? When it moves on to the chapter of ‘Dogskin’ (or ‘Strange Death’ in the later edition), the absurdity of image description is even more apparent. Lian’er, ‘my second grandma’, was about to die after six Japanese gang-raped her, but she suddenly sat up and kept screaming and cursing until the use of exorcism finally calmed her down. Although such bizarre hallucinatory writing can find its origin in the plot of old Buendia’s resurrection in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the writer indeed has tried to elaborate it as a myth and legend. However, this kind of mysterious death, except for making the novel fantastical, absurd, and mysterious, can only undermine the tragic

13 Wang Guohua & Shi Ting. ‘Mo Yan and Marquez’. Yi Tan, 1987(3).

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meaning of the Chinese nation’s sufferings reflected from my second grandma’s death and reduce or transfer the exposure, condemnation, and castigation of the Japanese invaders, brutish nature. By using such an indifferent, ridiculing, and even bantering tone to portray a young Chinese woman gang-raped to death, the writer unexpectedly believes that ‘her thoughts are liberal, dignified, richly resilient, yet serene and firm’. It is unconventional indeed, but what does the writer intend to express? Probably he cannot give a satisfactory explanation. The gist of hallucinatory realism is to include fabulous and fantastical events in a narrative but maintain the reliable tone of the realistic objective report. Nevertheless, if the narrative turns reality into a fantasy that reads unreliably, it is an awkward imitation that will produce the opposite effect.

3 Modern Narrative Art Interspersed with Flashbacks vs. Pursuit of Mystifying Forms The third prominent feature in Mo Yan’s novels is his smooth, changing, and multi-perspective narrative technique and his easy control of a structural art with time and space crisscross, reversed timing, and narrative interposed with flashbacks. The traditional realistic approach, featuring chronological order and first-person narrative, was evident in his early novels such as ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Cotton-selling Road’. Still, it was gradually replaced by modern techniques of multi-perspective, shifting narrative person, stereoscopic time and space, stream of consciousness, exaggeration and transformation, and cutting and restructuring in his later novels like The Transparent Carrot and Ball Lightning . And these modern blended techniques have become so quickly and maturely employed in Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Clan that it presents a bizarre, fantastic, and changing colour, which is an essential factor to make his novels full of charm. Take Red Sorghum Clan as a case in point. The story describes Yu Zhan’ao’s troop ambushing the Japanese as the central plot. From there, other plots are interposed and interwoven about the fertile land in northeast Gaomi and its unyielding but straightforward customs, the legendary experience of Yu Zhan’ao, his extraordinary martial arts skills and romantic love affair with ‘my grandma’, together with the tragic love between Adjutant Ren and Lingzi, etc. These plots are interspersed into the stressful war life, forming a colourful artistic picture of an organic whole involving history, reality, and legend.

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What’s more, the novel reads smoothly and naturally, with coherent and harmonious plots. However, sometimes there are shifts from the major line, linking all kinds of details and various characters with a time of up to two decades together. Nevertheless, an artistic framework is constructed with a coordinated atmosphere, consistent characters, and sharp contrast. However, just like any novel-writing approach that becomes dull after being repeated too many times, these popular modern techniques should be employed with restraint. Suppose they are used on all occasions without taking different objects and requirements into consideration, in that case, the repeated pattern will inevitably lead to an awkward situation of duplication, leaving readers the impression that every work is similarly pieced together and has been going from bad to worse. Red Sorghum Clan, as a novel, should have a grand and organic structure. Still, at present, it is pieced together by some separated and independent novellas, weakly connected by the plot of Yu Zhan’ao’s troop ambushing the Japanese. Vertically speaking, all the chapters lack a strict logical connection, and horizontally, the plots are mingled together without reasonable and natural focus. The relationship between the whole novel and its separate parts, not being very harmonious, appears to be loose and random. The chapter of ‘Sorghum Wine’ can only be seen as an extension of ‘Red Sorghum’ because their structure and content are similar and the former merely supplements some plots not fully developed in the latter, such as Yu Zhan’ao’s killing of Shan Tingxiu and his son, Yu’s rude and unreasonable behaviour in the sorghum distillery and his killing of Spotted Neck by strategy. These details, having no necessary connection with the development of the plots, are so random that they can be altered at will with other information in the later chapters like Yu’s fight with Black Eye and his confrontation with Magistrate Cao without much influence on the whole novel. In ‘Red Sorghum’ when ‘my grandma’ is dying, she looks at her son’s exquisite face, and some scenes are interposed to describe vivid images of the past days passing her eyes like racehorses. Such details are natural in both the structure and the sense for they not only fit one’s psychology, feeling, and imagination, but add a solemn and charming colour to the character the writer depicts in the novel. Nevertheless, in ‘Sorghum Wine’, after the victory in the ambush, there intersperses a legendary description of Yu Zhan’ao’s winning of power in the sorghum distillery and his killing of Spotted Neck by strategy, which is

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short of inner contextual connection and basis for a stream of consciousness. It seems like a narrative link forced to cut into pieces and then insert some dazzling and intriguing legendary tales into each, eventually making an ‘assorted plate’ with various colours and fragmented parts. It seems that Mo Yan hasn’t considered whether these parts can be moved randomly or coordinate with each other. Take the chapter of ‘Dogskin’ for example. Its basic plot is ‘my second grandma’ being gang-raped to death and her resurrection, which explains and extends a particular sentence in the previous chapter. Though thin in content, the chapter produces many dazzling and hard-to-understand scenes. When it comes to the moment ‘my second grandma’ dies of gang rape in 1947, the writer suddenly turns to the next moment an old antiJapanese soldier dies from starvation in the People’s Commune. Is there any connection between the two? Is there any implicit symbolic meaning? Another moment is ‘my little aunt’s tragic death under the Japanese bayonet; the next is ‘my grandma’’s absurd experience of weighing the dead baby with her special scale only for the sake of winning the flower lottery. Are there any similar feelings or contrast between the two? One moment Pocky Cheng’s behaviour is so abnormal that he behaves like two entirely different men before and after the Japanese’s ransacking of his village, it then turns to the next moment the Eighth Route Army soldiers wear dogskin and bark like dogs when they attack the Japanese aggressors. Are there any symbolic meanings between these two absurd actions and the ‘dogskin’? How can profound meaning be discovered from these descriptions? Putting these far-fetched ‘parts’ together and ‘integrating them into one’14 will inevitably make the chapter difficult for readers to understand. Probably I’m too poor in eyesight or too low in appreciation level to find its structural secret and symbolic meaning. But I still hold that by deliberately cutting the novel into parts and then sticking them together without any rules, logic, or unreasonable disruption and reversion of the narrative order, Mo Yan may probably produce a novel and exciting atmosphere, but he will find it rather difficult to achieve the meaningful aesthetic effect. Although Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature, we do not have to follow suit and let ‘one Marquez disturb the whole Chinese literary world’.15 Otherwise, we are fooled and

14 Mo Yan. ‘Ridiculous Thoughts’. PLA Literature and Art, 1985(2). 15 ‘A Dialogue on War Literature’. PLA Literature and Art, 1987(1).

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disoriented by those sensational and shallow techniques. Mo Yan once said, ‘if I’m obsessed continuously with the old man wearing wings and other odd details like going up to heaven on bed sheets, I’m done’.16 Actually, the depiction of ‘my grandma’’s weighing of dead babies and her encounter with a ghost haunting her body may have the same effect as that of the old man wearing wings.

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Colourful and Vivid Language vs. Non-beauty Tendency of Seeking Ugliness and Novelty

The language in Mo Yan’s novels is full of charm. Its uniqueness is manifested in the exquisite description based on keen observation, vivid representation of images, dynamic rendering of folk customs, the magnificent portrayal of colours, and the employment of authentic colloquial expressions. For example, in ‘Old Gun’, he depicts the bright colours of the sky, the earth, animals, and plants; in ‘Red Sorghum’, he portrays exquisitely Uncle Luohan’s catching crabs on the riverbank; and such beautiful descriptions also appeared from time to time in other works like ‘Dry River’, ‘Ball Lightning’, and ‘Baby with Blond Hair’. All of these have embodied Mo Yan’s artistic talent in emphasising sensibility and presenting spirituality, and at the same time added some attractive colour and aesthetic power to the novel. However, in Red Sorghum Clan, we are more aware of the writer’s non-beauty tendency to excessively pursue exciting and bizarre feelings in the novel and even to regard the exposure of ugliness or filthiness as an ability and to take delight in the elaboration of brutal or miserable scenes. These vivid descriptions merely stimulate readers’ physical senses and ignore the portrayal and disclosure of the characters’ spirits. It is difficult to arouse readers’ aesthetic pleasure or tragic pains. Instead, they will only cause readers extreme disgust and physiological revulsion. In describing ‘death’, outstanding writers prefer to focus on presenting the characters’ spirit, personality, and mentality or the environment, but less on the pattern, process, action, and physical sensation of death. It is precisely the correct choice to pursue the social significance of the work and take into consideration readers’ aesthetic needs. But in Red Sorghum Clan, bloody and filthy scenes are often vividly painted about a dead

16 Mo Yan. ‘Two Scorching Blast Furnaces’. World Literature, 1986(3).

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body, head, brains, broken arms and legs, and blood. The writer even manages to describe the joy and poetic feeling of killing human beings. For example, when Yu Zhan’ao kills his mother’s adulterer, he unexpectedly feels ‘a flow of lovely warm blood released, soft, and slippery, like the wing feathers of a bird’ and he even smells ‘the delicate fragrance of pear blossoms’. When Uncle Luohan is skinned to death by Sun Five, the writer not only describes in extreme detail the whole brutal process from the young Douguan’s perspective but also appreciates Uncle Luohan’s ‘large, fleshy ear’ which was ‘pale and beautiful’ and ‘twitching sprightly’. And Mo Yan even comments on Sun Five’s flawless knife-work as having ‘produced a perfect pelt’. Such a vivid visual description is so inharmonious to Douguan’s psychological feelings of unbearable anger against Japanese aggressors. How could one be so calm when witnessing their relatives being severely tortured like that? And in the chapter of ‘Dogskin’, when the Japanese aggressors break into ‘my little aunt’s’ room, she, in extreme tension and fear, actually looks at the invaders’ faces so carefully, saying ‘their faces are like sorghum cakes right out of the pan: brown with dark-red edges, warm and beautiful, lovely and inviting’. Is it realistic writing? It is an ugly and reckless invention indeed! When ‘my little aunt’ is stabbed to death by the Japanese, Mo Yan depicts a bizarre scene in ‘the first-person omnipotent perspective’: Like a huge bird flapping its wings, she sailed slowly through the air and landed on the ground in front of the pit. Her little red jacket fell open in the sunlight and began to spread out like a piece of soft, smooth red silk, gradually filling the room with undulating waves.17

Whether it is from the writer’s perspective of objective description or the psychological perception of the ‘omnipotent offspring’, such imagination, feelings, and emotions are incredibly unreasonable and ridiculous. Scholars in ancient China said that ‘we should have limits when pursuing bizarrerie and flowery expressions, trying not to lose the truth and objectivity’.18 Indeed, the pure pursuit of bizarre, mysterious, cruel, novel, and absurd feelings without the ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ can only produce physical stimulation but not aesthetic sense in people’s spiritual world. 17 Mo Yan. Red Sorghum Clan. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 2007: pp. 30–32, pp. 93–98. 18 Quoted from Liu Xie’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

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Of course, aesthetic appreciation in literature does not exclude the expression of ugliness. By exposing, criticising, and ridiculing the ugliness, filthiness, and cruelty, a writer may stimulate healthy, noble, solemn, or painful aesthetic feelings. However, one premise must be satisfied: the writer should hate and disdain such ugly and filthy things. If he cannot tell beauty from ugliness and takes ugliness as beauty instead or even becomes addicted to ugliness with an abnormal aesthetic mentality, the writer cannot produce artistic beauty in his literary works, and cannot arouse a positive response from psychologically healthy readers. In some of Mo Yan’s recent works, his preference for and interest in ugly, filthy, and malicious things, as well as his abnormal mentality, has emerged. For example, Mo Yan repeatedly depicts and compliments on faeces in ‘Red Grasshopper’ and vividly portrays peeing and urine drinking in the prison cell in ‘The Garlic Ballads’. Or, from the perspective of ‘pan-sexualism’ coined by Freud (such as Oedipus complex, physical excitement, and excretion pleasure), he tries to analyse social consciousness, characters’ behaviour, and psychological mentality. All of these shall serve as a grave warning.

Is Big Breasts and Wide Hips an ‘Almost Reactionary Work’? Comments on the Conceptions and Methods of Mr. He Guorui’s Literary Criticism Zhuxian Yi and Guo’en Chen

In his article ‘The Literature in Praise of Revolutionary Violence, Patriotism, and Internationalism: On Nature of Socialist Literature’ published in Wuhan University Journal in 1999, Mr. He Guorui, while associating with the practice of current literary creation, harshly censured Mo Yan’s full-length novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips as an ‘almost reactionary work’. One has seldom seen such criticism of this mode in recent years. However, as a rigid concept and method that was once prevalent, it would be rather damaging if no one makes some comments on it. Thus, the article makes a particular analysis about it. First, the original text is quoted as follows:

Source: Wuhan University Journal (Humanities and Social Sciences), 2000(5): pp. 699–703. Z. Yi (B) · G. Chen College of Chinese Language and Literature, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_10

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Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips does try its best to give false accounts of the true facts, and make the national revolution appear in the worst possible light. Such people are depicted extremely cruel and repulsive as communists like Lu Liren, the poor peasant revolutionary heroes like the dumb Sun Buyan, and the cadres in the people’s government like Shangguan Pandi. In the period of land reform, Lu Liren, the county magistrate, motioned by the ‘big shot’ who went to the countryside in sedan chair to carry out land reform, had Sima Kus two twin daughters under the age of ten shot to death. However, Mo Yan portrays Sima Ting, president of Landlord Preservation Association, and Sima Ku, a landlord and reactionary Kuomintang officer, as heroes of benevolence, integrity, and resoluteness. The dumb brothers slaughtered and ate a big mule of the Sima family, yet Sima Ku awarded them five silver dollars instead of punishing them. Born of the same mother, the fifth sister joined the revolution, whose breasts were thus ‘pretty tough and rough’, ‘just like two tombs’, and whose ‘hair was as thick as horse-hair’. On the contrary, the eldest sister first eloped with Sha Heshang, a bandit and traitor, and then had sexual relations with Sima Ku, her breasts were just graded ‘prime’, ‘delicate and pleasant’, ‘having the moisture gloss of jade’. Surprisingly, such an almost reactionary work was thought highly of by some professors and critics, and awarded 100,000 RMB in a ceremony held in the Great Hall of the People. It is an absolute absurdity beyond comprehension!1

We do not intend to make a thorough comment on Big Breasts and Wide Hips , nor do we think of it as flawless, but just want to point out that Mr. He displays his fallacy when he puts forward his argument and makes his judgement based on the rigid concept. Big Breasts and Wide Hips spans nearly a century, and the main plot centres around a mother, depicting the three generations of the Shangguan family, a family of a dozen members or so, and the different destiny of each one in the ever-changing world from the end of 1930s to the early days of 1990s. One of Mo Yan’s key intentions is to make a breakthrough in the traditional creative mode: human beings are simply divided into good or bad, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary. Meanwhile, he tries to make a full display of the complexity and concreteness of human nature, just as the seventh sister Shangguan Qiudi, who was labelled then as a

1 He Guorui. ‘The Literature in Praise of Revolutionary Violence, Patriotism, and Internationalism: On Nature of Socialist Literature’. Wuhan University Journal, 1999(6).

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rightist in the novel, says, ‘As there are bandits among the poor, so are saints among the rich’. Therefore, it is difficult to mark his characters as good or bad, revolutionary or anti-revolutionary. Sha Yueliang fought the enemy so bravely that he was regarded as an anti-Japanese hero. Yet, he defected to the Japanese troops after several military defeats and became a traitor. Later, to save his daughter Zaohua, he risked his life entering the area of the Communist troops’ ambush and was held captive. He ended up hanged. As for Sima Ku, he poured his homemade spirits on the bridgehead to set fire and fought a hard fight against the Japanese aggressors. Then he organised a troop and became a division leader of the Kuomintang forces. After the victory in the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, he first disarmed a Communist force in his hometown. Still, he later was captured in a surprise attack by the Communist force while he fled under escort. On hearing that his mother-in-law and other relatives were tortured because of him, he surrendered himself from his hideout without any hesitation and was sentenced to death. When it comes to Sima Ting, he used to be the president of the landlord preservation association. At the critical moment when the Japanese invaders were approaching the village, he climbed to a high place to deliver the message, informing his fellow villagers to flee for their lives immediately. Lu Liren, a literati and commissar in the Communist force, changed his family name to Lu in honour of his fallen battle companions. During the land reform, to vent his spite, the poor peasant Blind Xu made up a lie of homicide to blackmail Lu Liren, the then county magistrate, into shooting Sima Ku’s young twin daughters. Lu Liren refused initially, but he finally gave the order of execution against his will to avoid suspicion, for Sima Ku and Sha Yueliang, their wives were sisters. After liberation, Lu Liren suffered a stroke of bad luck in his official career. He was demoted to a farm director during the three-year natural disaster and later died a sudden death in the flood. The fifth sister Shangguan Pandi joined in the revolution during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, who fought with her husband Lu Liren to capture Sha Yueliang and Sima Ku. When Blind Xu pestered Lu with unreasonable demands to shoot Sima Ku’s daughters or her nieces, she was furious yet incapable of doing anything to help. In the period of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, she and her husband were both demoted to a farm where she changed her name to Ma Ruilian. In the farm, she began the ridiculous artificial hybridisation test by crossbreeding the donkey and the pig, the horse and the cattle,

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the sheep and the rabbit to ‘hit the headlines’. Assaulted in the ‘Cultural Revolution’, she committed suicide, leaving her last words, ‘I am Shangguan Pandi, not Ma Ruilian. I have taken part in the revolution for over twenty years, never expecting to end up with such a bad fate. After my death, I beg the revolutionary mass to send my body back to Dalan Township and hand it over to my mother, whose family name is Lu’. Mother Lu raised nine sons and daughters, and among her sons-in-law, some were influential those days. During the Japanese occupation and the puppet regime, Sha Yueliang gained power, while in the Kuomintang regime, Sima Ku was in high favour. After the Communist Party came into power, Lu Liren and Shangguan Pandi both secured an official position. Besides, her third son-in-law, the dumb Sun Buyan, also rendered outstanding services in the revolution. What’s more, her daughters were all unusual, among whom the eldest daughter Laidi first eloped with Sha Yueliang to resist the arranged marriage. After her husband died, she took responsibility for helping her mother take care of her younger brothers and sisters to escape the scourge of war, like an ox carrying a heavy load. When Lu Liren gave words to shoot Sima Feng and Sima Huang, she intended to save the two children by blocking Sun Buyan’s muzzle with her body. Later, against her will, she had to marry her third brother-inlaw, Sun Buyan, who was a veteran of honour with lost legs. However, unable to bear Sun’s crazy sexual abuse, she finally beat him dead and thus was sentenced to death. Mother Lu has nothing to do with political consciousness, but she tolerates her daughters’ mutinous behaviours with her simple feeling and generosity. Moreover, she often refuses her daughters’ care and concern when they are in power, but she holds up a home, a shelter from the storm for them in hard times. She is not a person of perfection. First, morally she does not follow the instructions left by the dead sages of the past. Tormented by her mother-in-law and husband, she is compelled to ‘borrow sperms’ from many men and even beats her mad mother-in-law to death. However, she is indeed a mother out of the common, just like what Mo Yan says in his inscriptions on the book’s back cover, ‘The book is dedicated to Mothers and the Land’. She is not only as plain and unpretentious as the land but also down-trodden. Just as the land has suffered, she is bearing all the hardship in the human world. By introducing these characters, the article aims to contrast Mr. He Guorui’s judgement to see what on earth has gone wrong with him. Mo Yan does not take Lu Liren, Sun Buyan, and Shangguan Pandi as a

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pure abstract signal of ranks while depicting them. Instead, they exist in a bodily form, which cannot be simply equal to ‘the Communist’, ‘the poor peasant revolutionary hero’ or ‘the cadre of people’s government’ in the traditional sense. They attended the revolution and rendered outstanding services, yet they also made many mistakes and were even more or less defective of some kind in personality. Under the specific historical condition, such defects have resulted in quite severe consequences, damaging the revolution and creating tragedies of their own. Such people existed throughout history. For those like Shangguan Pandi who pursue the ideal, but finally return to the original ‘ego’ at the cost of their own lives after alienating themselves in political movements, aren’t they common after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, especially during the period of the ‘Cultural Revolution’? Their fate mirrors the winding road of revolution in China and reflects the heavy price paid in the process of revolution. Some careerists of extremely despicable personality and political quality have sneaked into the ranks of the Communist Party, who later brought calamity to the country and the people. To ‘Communists’ of this kind, who can call them Communists? All historical materialists should be brave enough to acknowledge the complexity of men. Forgetting or deliberately shifting off the lessons taught by history is against history, thus of no good for the current construction of modernisation. However, from Mr. He’s point of view, Lu Liren is ‘the Communist’, Sun Buyan ‘the poor peasant revolutionary hero’, and Shangguan Pandi ‘the cadre of the people’s government’. Moreover, he asserts that the writer depicts them as ‘extremely cruel and hideous’. For this reason, Mr. He ignores the fact that Lu Liren is portrayed as handsome in the novel instead. A fair-complexioned scholar, even Mother Lu is sure that he is far superior to Sha Yueliang in talent, knowledge, and experience. She also predicts with her simple life experiences that he would undoubtedly defeat Sha Yueliang. While giving the order to shoot Sima Ku’s twin daughters, Lu Liren does experience an inner struggle, as his humanistic sympathy fights hard against his distorted class consciousness, which as a whole can only imply human complexity. Lu Liren is indeed a revolutionary with a higher level of political consciousness, but he is not flawless. Sometimes he finds it difficult to resist the historical destiny and the pressure from some faulty authority. Let’s take a look at the Cultural Revolution, during which a significant number of careerists, either scheming something big or small, emerged, and many people fell victim to the blind belief in modern times, yet most of them had received

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the Party’s education and had gone through the crucible years of the revolutionary war. With knowledge of that, it is not difficult to realise that humanity is sometimes really the riddle of the Sphinx! So is the dumb Sun Buyan. Due to his congenital physical defect and his lack of family warmth, he could not develop a sane mind since childhood. Brave as he was in fighting the enemy, he was quite cruel, and worst of all, he was a pervert. It is not strange, in fact. Shouldn’t this person in the flesh be there but be portrayed as a handsome and passionate Prince Charming just because he attended the revolution by a stroke of luck and was honoured for his meritorious service? Thus, anyone with a discerning eye can tell what Mr. He implies is that any ‘communists’, ‘poor peasant revolutionary heroes’, and ‘cadres of the people’s government’ portrayed in a novel must be the pink of perfection. Otherwise, it would be the venomous attack upon the Communist Party, the revolution, and the people’s government. At the turn of the century today, such logic still exists, and it is really ‘an absolute absurdity beyond comprehension!’. According to Mr. He, there are still challenging problems to solve, among which the essential one is the difficulty to determine the class status of all these people. Who on earth is Mother Lu? Is she a rich peasant, a poor peasant, a relative of anti-Japanese soldiers, a family member of traitors, the mother of revolutionists, or the grandma of a big embezzler? Her granddaughter Lu Shengli was appointed mayor of a city in the early 1990s but executed for massive corruption. About Lu Liren, can Mr. He guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him in history? Perhaps his brutality or uncertainty is the exposure of his nature. Therefore, hasn’t Mr. He disclosed a hidden class enemy, thus performing a deed of merits to the ‘revolution’? When it comes to the fifth sister, Shangguan Pandi, it is not clear, in Mr. He’s eyes, which of her mother’s roles has influenced her. Probably she inherits her mother’s ‘reactionary’ and ‘improper’ characteristics, joining the revolution to seek personal gains. In that case, it might be proper that her breasts are like ‘two tombs’! She makes a confession to her mother first and then comes to a sticky end. Does this imply that she is not worthy of a better destiny? The dumb Sun Buyan rapes the third sister, and Lu Liren nearly shoots him. Can Mr. He put the label of ‘evil-doer’ on him? Can he yet be counted as ‘a poor peasant revolutionary hero’? The eldest sister Shangguan Laidi, by force of the situation, marries Sun Buyan, and suffers every kind of savage sexual abuse. While her beloved Bird Han is choked to death by the dumb Sun Buyan, she tries to stop him but fails. At this

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critical moment, she kills her husband to save Han. Can it be counted as a legitimate defence so her crime is alleviated? Oh, forget it! All these are nothing more than tricks of crashing boredom to cook up charges and just ‘the reactionary theory of bourgeois bloodlines’, which, however, can be concluded from Mr. He’s logic. Mr. He’s theory is nothing fresh but a recurrence of the theory of ‘a social class, a typical model’, and a revival of the metaphysical theory of ‘essentialism of writing’ at present. According to the theories prevalent over twenty years ago, people must be distinctly divided into good and bad, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary in literary works. The revolutionary is lofty and flawless, while the anti-revolutionary is rotten at the core. In other words, the concrete person is abstracted, and the man as a collection of all social relations is regarded as a symbol of essential qualities of a class, which is similar to the magic bed in the old Greek myth, in which any living person would be cut short or pulled long enough to suit its size. This is also true of characters in literary works, who must measure up to standard. It seems that only by doing so can a writer display their solemn and just position towards a revolution. Yet, whether works of such kind are successful or not, it is easy for anyone who does not suffer from loss of memory to find the answer from China’s contemporary and modern literary history. In addition, we should also point out that the theory mentioned above has deeply influenced Mr. He. Mo Yan depicts in the novel ‘the breasts of the fifth sister who joined in the revolution’ as ‘two tombs’ which are ‘pretty tough and rough’, and the breasts of the eldest sister who first eloped with Sha Heshang, a bandit and traitor, and then had sexual relations with Sima Ku, as ‘prime’, ‘delicate and pleasant’. When he sees such depictions, Mr. He seems filled with righteous indignation. It happens based on the same logic, but undoubtedly his logic tends to be more extreme—the one participating in the revolution should have the first-rate breasts, while the one marrying the scoundrel must have ‘two tomb-like’ breasts. Nevertheless, it seems that Mr. He has not read the novel carefully to make himself understand that when the eldest sister elopes with Sha Heshang, he is not yet a traitor, nor a ‘bandit’. On the contrary, he is the head of the Black-Donkey Fowling Piece Squad—the special detachment of anti-Japanese corps, devoted to fighting the Japanese invaders. Besides, he also accomplished some mighty causes during that period. Just for his manly behaviour then, the eldest sister would elope with him rather than submit to her mother’s arrangement of a marriage with the dumb man

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who is later given the name Sun Buyan by Lu Liren. If someone regards Sha Heshang as a ‘bandit’ just because of the many valuable fur coats he has robbed and sent to the daughter of Shangguan family, it is probable that Mr. He should thus take ‘guilt’ for confusing the class alignments, as evidently, it is the landlords’ families that Sha Yueliang has robbed. Faced with Sha Yueliang’s ‘impressive feat’ as a peasant revolutionary, how can Mr. He depart from his ‘revolutionary’ stand and call it a bandit’s behaviour? The writer depicts the eldest and the fifth sisters’ breasts from their youngest brother Shangguan Jintong’s perspective, who is fond of women all through his life and shows the individual differences between women. After all, there should be no such reasons that ‘good women’ must have beautiful breasts, while ‘bad women’ only deserve ugly ones, let alone the fact that neither the eldest nor the fifth sister is a ‘good woman’ or ‘bad woman’ in the general sense. If deduced further according to Mr. He’s logic, the conclusion might shock anyone who has an idea of it. As Mr. He writes, ‘Such an almost reactionary work was thought highly of by some professors and critics, and awarded 100,000 RMB in a ceremony held in the Great Hall of the People. It is an absolute absurdity beyond comprehension!’2 The claim undoubtedly implies that these professors and critics are surprisingly loud in their praise of such a piece of ‘almost reactionary work’, so they cannot avoid the charge of ‘being near reactionaries’. Furthermore, it should be necessary to investigate relevant administrative departments to see whether they have concealed the ‘near reactionaries’ because they have gone so far as to lend the solemn Great Hall of the People to the organiser for the awarding ceremony. What’s more, the amount of money awarded is as much as 100,000 RMB! They should at least take great political responsibility for it! People have well-known such a way of cooking up charges. Fortunately, the era and social foundation for its existence have already gone. Otherwise, Mr. He’s so-called charges may kill a large group of people. We may make a point here that the old perception, the ossified thinking, the apprehension, and the resistance to historical advances would result in a person’s distorted judgement. There are a great many ways of writing historically about the revolutionary war. In Defending Yan’an, The Red Sun, and the popular 2 He Guorui. ‘The Literature in Praise of Revolutionary Violence, Patriotism, and Internationalism: On Nature of Socialist Literature’. Wuhan University Journal, 1999(6).

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Railway Guerrillas, the writers like Du Pengcheng, Wu Qiang, and Liu Zhixia have adopted the narrative mode of positively depicting the revolt against the enemy, singing praises for heroism, and displaying a bold and generous spirit. Xu Huaizhong has made some breakthroughs in his Anecdotes on The Western Route in the new period from 1978. In the novel, the writer has begun to set the first war of self-defence against Vietnam as the background and laid emphasis on writing about ordinary soldiers’ inner world in the war. In fact, Xu developed the creative style of short stories about war themes in the 1940s represented by Lotus Lake. When Li Cunbao later creates Wreaths at the Foot of the Mountain, he made a further breakthrough in traditional stereotypes of heroes. He successfully portrays such illustrious images as Liang Sanxi and Jin Kailai, the two simple but great heroes. On the contrary, Mo Yan goes a non-traditional way of writing reality in his Red Sorghum Clan and Big Breasts and Wide Hips . He neither displays the process of war nor reveals the heroes in a traditional sense. To a large extent, he interprets his stories as an allegory, subjecting human nature to severe questioning of life to unfold the history of a suffering people soaked with blood and tears. Such a transition of creative style about war and of perspective on heroes accords with the laws of realistic social development and the spirit of historical dialectics. For a writer, to grasp the themes from history, he/she must give expression to contemporary life, and reflect people’s uniqueness by looking at and understanding history under the constraints of the current realistic situation. We can see that the evolution of writing about war is approximately the same in both Chinese and Russian literature. In Russia, Destruction, The Quiet Don, and The Dawns Here Are Quiet represent such writing. The crux of such a transition is to gradually transfer from the positive display of combat heroes to revealing the rich human nature (inevitably showing the human’s class nature). It plays down the war but strengthens the great depth of a human’s inner world. It cannot be said that there is no problem at all—for example, in Big Breasts and Wide Hips , Mo Yan adopts a rather vulgar descriptive style, yet all these problems can be explored and solved. What cannot be done is to repeat the mistakes in history, replacing the academic discussion with political critique and finishing off the writer and his works with one blow by capping them a ‘reactionary’. If only one kind of creative mode about war were allowed to exist, and even if this mode were absolutely politically ‘correct’, it would still be totally wrong. The

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historical experience has proved that allowing only one creative mode to exist would certainly ruin the prospects of socialist literature. In addition, Mo Yan’s novels do not conform to Mr. He’s standards, but evidently, this does not follow that his works are not qualified to belong to the socialist literature, which is expected to contain a variety of styles in vivid and rich content. A good literary work can help people to have a deep understanding of history and humanity, enrich their spiritual life, and purify their emotions. It is still of significance and has a reason for its existence, even though its writer may be an ordinary person all his life. Besides, literature usually plays an indirect social role. It connects the writer and the reader, but there are quite complex psychological process and mechanism between the two. Big and empty words do not necessarily inspire people’s potential, and sentimental works would not always lead one astray. Jolly pieces may not be impressive all along, while a painful one is not necessarily of no value. In most cases, it is just the other way around. In reading a tragedy, people shed tears. Still, their hearts are purified, just like the clearest sky reaching a far distance, realising the brightness of the world, the beauty of life, and the eternity of humanity and justice, which would only inspire them to strive for an even brighter future. In other words, when we evaluate the significance of a piece of literary work, we should base it on the righteous position and the aesthetical standards, taking into account all kinds of complex factors between subjectivity and objectivity, rather than simplifying and dogmatizing them. Therefore, it is necessary to cite a paragraph from Lu Xun again: ‘When it comes to the value of A Dream in Red Mansions, it is virtually unusual in Chinese novels. The key is that the writer dare describe things as they really are without concealing the truth, totally different from the narration in the novels before, depicting a good person as flawless and a bad one the evilest of all. Thus, the characters portrayed in the novel are all real. In general, A Dream in Red Mansions has broken through all traditional ideas and writing styles, yet the romance and lingering emotions in it are less important. However, there are a great many opponents who hold that it has bad influences on the young. They think so just because when reading a novel, most Chinese cannot enjoy it with an attitude of appreciation, but get themselves involved and obstinately try to assume a role in it... What they consider is only gains and losses, so they can see nothing else in it’.3 3 Lu Xun. Complete Works of Lu Xun (Vol. 9). Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1981: p338.

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Of course, Big Breasts and Wide Hips can’t be comparable to A Dream in Red Mansions, but it is really enlightening that Lu Xun points out the disadvantage of modelling in the novels ‘before’ and the advantage of ‘describing things as they are without concealing the truth’, and yet it is even more worthy of careful reflection on the criticism he puts when some Chinese ‘consider only gains and losses’. When we take a comprehensive view of Mr. He’s article, we can see he has a number of problems. Firstly, it is the problem of Mr. He’s subjectivity. He looks at a concrete person as an abstract signal of some type, and measures the characters in Big Breasts and Wide Hips with a prior standard instead of analysing them and studying whether the writer has portrayed the characters successfully or not based on the objective, realistic social relations disclosed in it. Secondly, it is the problem of Mr. He’s one-sidedness. Based on his own needs, he intercepts the characters’ performance during a certain phase of their life in the novel, and misinterprets them by separating them from the specific environment and from their whole life. Thirdly, it is the problem of Mr. He’s dogmatisation. By holding tight to a set of theories that were popular over twenty years ago and replacing the academic criticism of seeking truth from facts with political criticism, even magnifying the characters’ flaws to fix a political label on them, he oversimplifies and absolutises the issue. All three problems are interrelated to each other, and their source of ideology is nothing more than an outdated literary concept that was once popular. It takes on a human being as a means for achieving some kind of political purpose, denies him as a concrete being, and ignores his richness and complexity. In the meantime, literature is looked at as an instrument to serve concrete political purposes, thus obliterating the value and characteristics of literature itself. If a writer creates a literary work with such an instrumental concept of literature, he undoubtedly will make the interesting and full life fade away and the living humans turn into lifeless puppets. Such an instrumental concept of literature will distort a critic’s rational judgement and aesthetic judgement, thus making his conclusions violate the laws of life and art. It is admirable that Mr. He strives for his study. Even after his retirement, he is still engaged in writing, having his works published every now and then. However, from his comments on Big Breasts and Wide Hips , it can be seen that the instrumental literary view has greatly influenced him. In consideration of the bitter historical lessons, we find that under no circumstances can we treat the harm of this theory and

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way of thinking lightly. Therefore, it is put forward seriously to attract people’s attention and lead them to ponder on. One of the most decisive points for overcoming the limitation of this theory and way of thinking is to rally people’s cognition around Deng Xiaoping’s thought of literature and art, which is a Marxist view on literature and art in contemporary times. Mr. Deng Xiaoping insists on keeping literature and art to the socialist orientation, emphasising ‘sticking to the principles of allowing a hundred flowers to blossom, weeding through the old to bring forth the new, adopting foreign things to Chinese use and using the past for the benefit of the present. In artistic creation, a free development with different forms and styles is advocated, and in the artistic theory, a free discussion among different ideas and schools is advocated’. As to writers, ‘What to write and how to write it?’ ‘There should be no arbitrary intervention’. ‘We must guard against and overcome the tendency to be formulistic and abstract, which produces monotonous, stiff mechanical works’.4 What he states not only inherits the essence of Chairman Mao Zedong in his ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’ in 1942, but overcomes some historical limits in it. Today, we encourage the variety of the main theme and style in literary creation, which actually results from our conscious implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s thought of literature and art on the basis of learning from history. Through comparing Deng’s thought of literature and art as well as the literary principle of ‘serving the people and the socialism’ implemented in the new period of the country with Mr. He’s literary criticism in a political way on Big Breasts and Wide Hips , the problems that exist in Mr. He’s literary views and critical methods are quite clear.

4 Deng Xiaoping. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Vol. 3). Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1983: pp. 182–185.

The Fact and Fable in The Republic of Wine: About Mo Yan’s Narrative Strategies Yingxiong Zhou

Mo Yan is fond of telling stories, not only to his heart’s content but with intricate plots full of exciting and novel ideas. What accounts for it? Besides his ceaseless efforts to find something new beyond the old creations, what would Mo Yan intend to do by telling stories? I would like to talk about my understanding of Mo Yan and his works. What I would conclude might not accord with the objective reality. Yet, it would not be harmful even if I misinterpret him, and whoever reads it might as well regard my way of interpretation as an extra chapter out of The Republic of Wine. Surveys have found that children’s favourite literary form is the story. On the other hand, novels are far livelier than poems and dramas among the three main literary forms in the twentieth century. In other words, telling stories is a human being’s instinct. What’s more, it is also an art form at quite a high level. In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode, a British scholar from Cambridge University, has discussed from religious

Source: Contemporary Writers Review, 1993 (2): pp. 33–36, p. 48. Y. Zhou (B) National Chiao Tung University, Xinzhu City, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_11

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views the motives for telling stories and the structure arranged for doing so. In his opinion, the Bible comes straight to the point with ‘Genesis’, stating how God makes something from nothing, creating such a world of everything in a week. Following ‘Genesis’ are all the sections and chapters of the Old Testament, followed by the New Testament. It is not necessary to go into detail about this. Still, it is worth mentioning the sense of time pressure running through the Bible and the anxiety aroused by it, which might be much more severe than sighing over ‘the passage of time is just like the flow of water’. Frank Kermode makes a further deduction, arguing that Westerners’ sense of original sin perhaps has something to do with the rushing winged-chariot of time. Furthermore, ‘Revelation’, the final chapter of the Bible, foreshadows that the world will end. As a result, it is self-evident how people are terrified about it. Thus, novels emerge in response, through which we are expecting that as long as life endures, we would use our imagination to mould another universe. Yet, such a man-made universe has a beginning and an end that we completely manipulated. That is the philosophical foundation of Western novels. Kermode’s theory is indeed insightful, yet it seems so unrealistic and out of tune with discussing novels on the metaphysical level. On the one hand, novels are the epic of ordinary people, and do not necessarily accord with the ultimate meaning of metaphysics. On the other hand, novels are concerned more with worldly affairs than spiritual ones. Therefore, it could be of no help even if it would be reasonable to consider a novel’s beginning and structure with Christianity’s timeline. In addition, the stories told by Mo Yan might be more closely related to the social system in which he is living. In my opinion, the key motivation for Mo Yan to tell stories is nothing but to exercise all chaos and corruption around him through the media of all kinds of artistic means. According to psychoanalysis, if one tells all things in disorder one by one, he/she will wash away anything worrisome. For that reason, Mo Yan’s story in his writing might as well be regarded as a kind of language therapy. In addition, just for that reason, what Mo Yan chooses to portray in his novels is everything but metaphysical whys and wherefores of life. For instance, in The Republic of Wine, while writing about those corrupted cadres eating the braised baby, the writer just describes how this famous dish is pleasing to the eyes and pleasant to the palate. Even though cooking is incredibly miraculous, there is nothing unusual or peculiar compared with A Journey to the West. As we all know, in A Journey to

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the West, a Taoist named Zhenyuanzi, living in Wuzhuang Temple on Longevity Hill, planted ginseng, which bore fruits once in 3,000 years, and only thirty fruits for 10,000 years. Furthermore, the fruits looked like three-day-old babies, with four limbs and well-developed features. Anyone catching the sweet smell of the fruits could live for 360 years, and whoever ate one would live for 47,000 years. In contrast, Mo Yan’s fleshy babies are so common, incapable of producing any magical effect. However, as for Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine, no such place exists in the real world. Though Mo Yan might be categorised as a writer inclined to realistic writing—different from modernists like Can Xue and Ma Yuan—he often exerts a force on realistic writing, distorting and deforming it. Scholes put forward a dichotomy in novel writing—a comparatively traditional writing style, emphasising realistic writing, while the other is relatively new, based on fabulation. Jameson also claimed that in most cases, what is written in modern literature in developing countries is not personal experience but a national allegory. If their opinions are considered, it would be a little troublesome to classify Mo Yan. His writing style is neither realistic nor allegoric, and what he depicts is neither purely individual nor entirely about the country or nation. Only by reading through various threads in The Republic of Wine can we find it is a writing style of fable complementary to the fact that Mo Yan tries every means to deal with it. Yet before the writing style of the fable complementary to the fact is discussed, it is necessary to look at the world created by Mo Yan, know the difference between his world and ours, and get to the inner logic of his world. Only by doing so can Mo Yan’s behaviour and motive be understood, and so can the advantages and disadvantages of his writing style. Just as its name implies, The Republic of Wine writes about wine. Hence, wine can be found almost everywhere, in the human body, in nature, on the ground, and even in space. On the other hand, virtually all significant events in China’s history have something to do with wine. For example, the main reason for Qu Yuan, the greatest poet in the Warring States period, to write the greatest masterpiece Li Sao was that no wine was supplied for his meal. It is also well-known to us Chinese that good wine deserves famous dishes on the table, but without wine, thus various famous dishes emerge naturally in Mo Yan’s works, among which the dish most worth mentioning is the full banquet of donkey. At such a banquet, twelve cold dishes are served on the table, followed by over twenty dishes, respectively made of donkey encephalon, eye, rib, tongue, tendon, throat,

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tail, intestine, hoof, liver, and so on. Yet, it is unknown how the other dishes are attractive to the eyes and appealing to the taste. Anyway, in response to Li Yidou and his friend’s begging, Yu Yichi had dish patterns reduced in his restaurant. However, an ‘immoral dish’ named ‘Dragon and Phoenix Bringing Prosperity’, which was still greatly welcomed, was made of male and female sexual organs of donkeys. Everyone around the table picked it with chopsticks and ate it up as quickly as the wind sweeps the clouds away. As a self-employed worker cooked the full banquet of donkey meat, the portions were sufficiently large, though the quality was not necessarily good. Indeed, ‘Dragon and Phoenix Bringing Prosperity’ was immoral, but it did nothing ruthless and devoid of human feelings. Nevertheless, when it comes to the feast for bureaucrats, problems occurred. Old bureaucrats made special efforts to find placentas to eat, hoping to tune their ageing organs with it. As a result, the female driver had to undergo five abortions so as to provide the placentas for those corrupted bureaucrats to enjoy. This is not all; some bureaucrats even began to eat human beings, specialising in braised baby. They went out of their way to search for babies and set up a special food research centre at University of Brewage, imparting methods of how to prepare this famous dish (including how to kill babies and drain their blood). Undoubtedly things of this kind were illegal, so Ding Gou’er was assigned to make an investigation into the case. What’s frustrating was that all kinds of setbacks were put forward and stopped the investigator from going further about the case, and eventually he himself was trapped in an awkward predicament, losing his life in a latrine pit. In other words, it is true that drinking too much wine would easily have one lose his self-control, but it is also one of the important catalysts for human beings to stride from nature into civilisation. What’s more, wine can even be taken on as the ultimate achievement of human civilisation. While as far as eating is concerned, unexpected results have cropped up. The Chinese people have racked their wits conducting research on the art of eating for several thousand years, but they never even dreamed of committing so many great offences against the course of nature and law, such as cutting out the flesh from a living donkey and braising babies. As to how Chinese gastronomy culture has been reflected in The Republic of Wine, it would not be discussed here because a wide range of aspects is involved. As an old saying goes, the desire for food and sex is a part of human nature. Hence, where there is food, there must be sex. However, Mo Yan is likely to say that food and sex are inversely proportional to each other,

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that is, if feasts are held more often, sexual affairs would decrease. In a strict sense, there are not many descriptions about sex in The Republic of Wine, seemingly only three of them. Firstly, Ding Gou’er has an extramarital love affair with the female driver. Secondly, Li Yidou has an incestuous relationship with his mother-in-law. Finally, there is psycholagny in Li Yidou’s parents-in-law: the father-in-law takes on wine as his wife, while the mother-in-law frees herself from sexual desire by drinking ‘Ximenqing wine’. Despite that, sex seems more important than food, and through sex, people can establish self-consciousness. After marriage, a person turns into a father or mother. Unfortunately, characters in The Republic of Wine more often than not lose themselves while confronted with sexual affairs. When Ding Gou’er is making love with the woman driver for the first time, he was caught on the spot by Jin Gangzuan, the woman driver’s husband. Later, while the two went to Yichi Hotel, Ding’s newly married wife, turned into Yu Yichi’s ninth mistress. Unbearable to the amour between the woman driver and Yu Yichi, Ding Gou’er shot them to death. Such a change of positions fully shows the close relationship between sex and self-consciousness. As to self-consciousness, the deliberately highlighted feature in The Republic of Wine is the difference between the self and the other, which Mo Yan has thoroughly discussed in his Thirteen Steps . However, in Thirteen Steps , the relationship among characters was comparatively neat, only concerning two families next to each other. In the underhanded attempt of the funeral home’s makeup artist, the head of the dead was installed onto that of a living one, thus resulting in a farce by the dreadful error. On the other hand, there is undoubtedly a more complex social network in The Republic of Wine, and the riddles in distinguishing the self and the other would be more worthy of a second thought. The affair mentioned above between Ding Gou’er and the woman driver is a good example. When the two met on the road for the first time, the woman driver called herself a saline-alkaline field, while Ding Gou’er claimed powdered fertiliser. As they met by chance, they did nothing but flirt with each other. When they met for the second time, the woman driver took Ding Gou’er back to her house, making Ding see himself as her husband. She so seduced him that he was caught in a passion like dry wood thrown to a blazing fire. It was just then that the woman driver’s husband— who happened to be Jin Gangzuan whom Ding Gou’er specially came to scout—discovered their adultery. It could be said that the two were just like foes meeting face to face, so their eyes blazed with hatred. As the

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plot unfolded, it seemed that eventually, Ding would marry the woman driver. They arrived at Yichi Hotel, where the woman driver gave Ding the lowdown on herself, saying that she was initially the ninth mistress of the dwarf Yu Yichi. Because of this, the relationship between them gradually grew worse. As for Ding Gou’er, he forgot his public duty owing to his private concern, totally banishing any idea of an investigation into the case from his mind. He became intent on exposing the adultery between the woman driver and Yu Yichi. And for this time, it could be said that he took over Jin Gangzuan’s role. Finally, he caught the pair committing adultery. Seeing the woman driver sitting on Yu Yichi’s lap and flirting with him, Ding Gou’er shot the two to death and then fled for his life, ending up with the ultimate tragedy of losing his life in a latrine pit. Indeed, the human relationship varies from time to time. Thus, it is most likely that Ding Gou’er and the woman driver might turn from strangers into lovers and then husband and wife. Such a process is nothing unusual, but the story deliberately gave no account of it. On the contrary, Mo Yan narrates those plots in separate fragments, each of which does not connect to another. By doing so, Mo Yan might not be for the sake of brevity but indicate that the interpersonal relationship undergoes a myriad of changes in an instant. Thus, it is not easy to maintain a constant self-consciousness or control it. As to self-consciousness, there is an inevitable question to ask: what on earth is the relationship between Mo Yan and Li Yidou? Both are writers, and both hope to look at the world and the self through writing. As far as the theme is concerned, both write about wine, for wine would make people reveal their true nature. Be that as it may, the two talk their own talks. Mo Yan tells Ding Gou’er’s story, while Li Yidou writes a legendary story about the Republic of Wine—nine chapters altogether. They are quite different in age, rank, place of residence, and even writing methods. Mo Yan pays close attention to the art of composition, while Li Yidou tends to finish his writing with one stroke after having wined and dined to satiety. However, both know about wine, love it, and have sung the praise of it. What’s more, both Mo Yan’s ‘Sorghum Wine’ and Li Yidou’s ‘The City of Wine’ have been thought highly of by readers; this is the first thing that the two writers have in common. Besides, both Mo Yan and Li Yidou have a passion for literature and know quite well that literature and reality do not necessarily associate. Take ‘Sorghum Wine’ for example. In the story, northeast Gaomi was the place of production of the famous

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wine named ‘Shibali Hong’, but it was registered as a trademark by Daijiu’er’s parents’ family at Shangcai County, Henan Province. Mo Yan could only make a fool of himself, saying that the characters in the story were ‘complete fabrications’; therefore, it was far from clear as to who should own the copyright. In other words, literature is not always closely related to reality. Instead, literature has a closer relationship with wine—both require inspiration. To Mo Yan and Li Yidou, no wine would mean no art at all. However, created in such a free and powerful writing style, the characters in the stories are usually not well under the control of the writers. For example, the elf in red, made up by Li Yidou in his ‘Fleshy Baby’ and ‘Child Prodigy’, unexpectedly escaped from the drain of the cooking school. Instead of obeying the writer’s assignment, he defected from the story and joined Yu Yichi’s dwarf group, working as a service staff in Yichi Hotel. What’s more, Li Yidou says that the characters in a story can even hurt the writer. All above is totally unexpected to a writer at the start of their writing process. As heavy drinkers and literature lovers, Mo Yan and Li Yidou can appreciate each other. In addition to frequent correspondence, Mo Yan finally accepted Li Yidou’s invitation to make a journey to the Republic of Wine and cooperated with Li Yidou to provide a memorial for Yu Yichi. In fact, we may as well say they are like two sides of a coin. However, from the narrative strategies, the stories narrated by Mo Yan are the ones reflecting reality while the stories narrated by Li Yidou are virtual ones. They are complementary to each other, and run through their writings. The two writers not only have paved a new way for contemporary novels in Mainland China, but also have made a difference to realistic literature since the 1930s. We have summarised the stories of the realistic line narrated by Mo Yan, so we do not need to go into more detail about them. As Ding Gou’er was living in a world full of bureaucrats, it goes without saying that he encountered great difficulties in handling the case under orders. Unfortunately, it was the Republic of Wine where he went. Whoever arrived there would just seem to be trapped in a maze, perturbed in mind, and beset with doubts. Ding Gou’er threw himself headlong into this fantastic world, just dealing with a woman, not only forgetting his original task but even meeting his death. Luckily, he found by accident that some persons on the boat were eating braised babies, and because of this, he fell overboard and drowned. Thus, he could be counted as killed in the line of duty. The story starts with reality, with a relatively

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clear outline. It has a magic ending because it is related to the other line of the novel. By comparison, the other line made by Li Yidou is imaginary, which at the very beginning had nothing to do with Mo Yan (Mo Yan was but its reader, who could not see the true essence inside), nor with Ding Gou’er, and even not with the real world. Li Yidou corresponded with Mo Yan, whose letters were successively attached to nine short stories (‘nine’ standing for integers in Chinese culture). Li Yidou asked Mo Yan to help him switch to national literature. Although those articles have not yet been published, we, readers of The Republic of Wine, are so pleasant to have read them first. In addition, we, as much as to say, are unintentionally informed of the private secrets between Mo Yan and Li Yidou and the historical background of the time. Compared with Ding Gou’er’s world, Li Yidou’s is much more illusory. Despite that, the universe created by Li Yidou has quite a broader span than the one where we live. As mentioned above, the story about Ding Gou’er’s investigation into the case was written by Mo Yan mainly in a realistic manner. On the contrary, Li Yidou’s nine short stories were almost imaginary. Mo Yan adopted an abundance of fables, writing about many characters as distant as the young goblin and as close as his parents-in-law. At the moment when Li Yidou was flushed with the joy of wine, he drew on his bold imagination in creating a new world different from ours, and the new one is filled with preternatural phenomena and talents. It is depicted in ‘Alcohol’ Jin Gangzuan, who had the peculiar propensity to smell the bouquet of wine in the distance as far as five kilometres in his childhood. The chapter of ‘Fleshy Baby’ in The Republic of Wine was written in the ‘harsh realistic’ style, describing villagers giving birth to children just to purchase from restaurants; therefore, babies were particular commodities. However, among them, there was one covered with fish scales all over his body, who was an unusual baby. ‘Child Prodigy’ adopted the ‘ghost realistic’ style, writing about the fish-scale boy leading the fleshy babies to rebel and escape the particular food research centre. In the chapter of ‘The Donkey Street’, Li Yidou took us to visit the donkey street and introduced the feast of donkey meat in Yichi Hotel. He told us that people occasionally saw a black donkey walking on the street at midnight and carrying away a little chivalrous person who jumped high in the air and landed on its back. It was suspected that the little person might be the fish-scale boy. When it comes to the chapter of ‘A Dwarf Hero’, it could be said to change the positions of the host and the guest, for it described

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how the dwarf Yu Yichi, who was clear about the way Mo Yan—a character in the novel—conducted himself, saying that he was biting more than he could chew to write The Republic of Wine. It turned out that Yu Yichi was a fish-scale boy who had an excellent capacity for wine in his early years. However, since the wine moth escaped from his belly, he had far less tolerance for wine. Then Yu Yichi told a story like ‘Stories About the Republic of Wine’, depicting a boy encountering an extraordinarily talented girl acrobat who was skillful at conjuring tricks. The boy was so infatuated with the girl that he lost all desire for food and drink after returning home. As a result, he shuffled over thousands of miles filled with numerous difficulties and dangers and finally threw himself into her arms. Li Yidou later found a different version of the same story, with relatively similar plots but slightly different endings. Afterwards, the two shared the baby-boy-shaped magic fruit and scrumptious ape wine. We all know the importance of the two details. The former continues the case of eating babies investigated by Ding Gou’er, and the latter gives instructions in advance about Li Yidou’s father-in-law going up a mountain for nectar. ‘Cooking Lessons’ is written in a new realistic manner, which tells that Li Yidou’s parents were in discord, so the father-in-law took wine as his wife. At the same time, the mother-in-law could hardly endure loneliness, yet the story returns to the main topic again, telling the way to cook babies. ‘Collecting Edible Nests of Cliff’ Swallows is about the mother-in-law’s family origin. ‘The Ape Wine’ is again about ‘Stories About the Republic of Wine’, saying that the father-in-law went up a mountain and took a group of monkeys as teachers to learn how to make ape wine. The ninth story, ‘The City of Wine’, is about the history of the Republic of Wine and also about the foundation of profound learning inherited by the family of Yuan Shuangyu, Li Yidou’s father-in-law, which predicted his final success of making ape wine. According to Mo Yan, ‘The City of Wine’ is so well established that it can be regarded as a guidebook to the Republic of Wine. The nine short stories are like the tales of mystery in Wei, Jin, Southern, and Northern dynasties. However, there is also a doctrine to present fables. All nine themes are focused on food and women’s looks, highlighting the negative correlation between them. Yu Yichi had superior talents since childhood, representing justice and opposing bureaucrats. Nonetheless, he lost all his excellent skills for wine. Still, he indulged in women’s looks, promising that he would make love with all the beauties in the Republic of Wine, which was a little different from what was put

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down in ‘Stories about the Republic of Wine’, for the young man in the legend fell heart and soul in love with the girl good at magic. Although experiencing numerous hardships, he was finally united with her, and the two shared the fairy fruit and drank the ape wine. Thus, they had both food and sex. Of course, whether the story is real or not is a question. It is most likely to be Yu Yichi’s forgery, through which the writer projected a utopia in mind that would go beyond his realistic world and the legendary world in the nine short stories created by Li Yidou as well. However, in contrast to Ding Gou’er created by Mo Yan, the former is so inferior to the latter that there is no comparison at all. Mo Yan is a typical man of Shandong Province who devotes most extraordinary efforts while writing, striving to write to his heart’s content for each paragraph and tell what no one else has ever told. Hence, it is unavoidable that the style of writing goes to extremes. Even disgusting plots evolve. However, according to my observation, Mo Yan had no choice but to adopt such a writing style, because after the root-seeking rush in 1985–1986, and after dealing with the marginalised national identity of China impressively, writers in China indeed would find a new path, so some got to the way of contemporary realism—like Wang Shuo and Yu Hua, who wrote about trifles around them. Mo Yan witnessed the reform and the opening-up policy, and the market economy lashing the ingrained bureaucratic system as a country fellow. Therefore, all kinds of weird and strange phenomena unavoidably occurred in society. Mo Yan wrote Red Sorghum Clan using narrating history, depicting the degeneration of species. He also wrote The Garlic Ballads , adopting the style of psychoanalysis, anatomising the cowardice and mercilessness of human nature. What’s more, he tried the method of subject-transposition to write Thirteen Steps , seeing what would be brought about after changing the positions of subject and object. The Republic of Wine can be taken as a masterpiece after the three novels mentioned above, attempting to tell stories and integrate realistic and allegorical writings, compelling us to confront the most fundamental and uncivilised desire in our lives. It is not difficult to write and understand anything purely realistic because both writers and readers know there is a world outside that is roughly connected with the one in the novel. Even if there may be some differences, it is possible to achieve some special effects. On the contrary, anything purely allegorical is comparatively hard to comprehend, as readers may not tackle the language code that the writer has adopted.

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If a writer adopts various kinds of language codes, much more significant problems will surely arise. The Republic of Wine was written of both fact and fable, which thus put forward great difficulties in writing it. On the other hand, the writer and the readers seemed to have a shared sense of accepting the world referred to in the novel. Nevertheless, once reality is given a touch of allegory, the writers’ cognitive world cannot necessarily coincide with the readers’. Still, between them, there will naturally be a stretching force, even contradiction. We can indeed say that the writing style of combining fact and fable has long been adopted in traditional novels. A commonly held literary belief is that the novel can be best when fact and myth complement each other. Yet here, Mo Yan has polarised the two writing styles. In the middle of writing, the story stopped going further. Still, it turned to the introduction of special knowledge about diet, of which the discussion was certainly no less than that about the whaling industry in Melville’s Moby Dick. While a fable, it also goes to extremes. Only Beijing, a location for the story, was real. Other than that, the buildings in the Republic of Wine were built underground. Entering it by taking the lift seemed to enter the underworld. For the stories of Arabian Nights written by Li Yidou, it might be all right to take them as an absurdity. More unique is that Mo Yan merged the two via constantly changing methods and then released them in a completely new construction, which compelled readers to gather all strength while focusing on the magic between chapters and sections. I am so lucky to have read The Republic of Wine first, which has brought me great pleasure, and has offered me both a sense of terror and excellent enjoyment!

Elegy of History and the Swan Song of Life: A Discussion of Mo Yan’s New Novel Sandalwood Death Chen Han

After reading Mo Yan’s new novel Sandalwood Death, I feel it to my heart’s content, and yet I am a little shocked, for all my previous reading experience of Mo Yan’s novels seems inapplicable to this book. I have trouble putting it into words, as the new features contained in the book stop me from interpreting it with my regular train of thought. However, while I manage to go along with the way of thinking mentioned in its postscript, I have gradually gained insight from it, for my hometown is less than 100 miles from Gaomi. Through Sandalwood Death, I think as if I heard the sad and pathetic local Maoqiang arias and the roaring of trains on the Jiaozhou-Jinan railway line. At the same time, I also have a deep impression of the history and am astounded by the spirit the arias and the roaring have brought to that region. I feel a sense of intimacy that is hard to express in words. In that case, I can only talk about what has shocked me and aroused my automatic response in reading this novel

Source: Fiction Review, 2002(1): pp. 58–65. C. Han (B) College of Chinese Literature, Qingdao University, Qingdao, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_12

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since I have lived in almost the same region as the writer. We have the same regional cultural background. If Mo Yan is said to have reviewed, cared, and evaluated the rural society and its past in his novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips —continuously with his self-consciousness as a modern human—in Sandalwood Death, he is strictly acting as a traveller who collects folklore to observe, narrate, and recount the legendary life forms in the fields of North China. The transition of his writing style is his strategic adaptation to the current social, cultural background and his return to human nature. Sandalwood Death is characteristic of the traditional structure in which the whole book can be distinctively marked with ‘phoenix head’, ‘pork belly’, and ‘leopard tail’. Moreover, the novel tallies with folkness and locality in its content based on the folk arts of storytelling. It has even become a complete parody, absorbing the spirit of the local dialect. Thus, this book is formed by including the dramatic narrative of the characters’ self-narrative, which is also called the spoken parts in an opera and reveals the main features of folk literature—famous, legendary, and mythical. Besides, the writer presents a sensational treatment of punishment, the legal form of feudal autocratic violence, which indirectly interprets intellectuals’ view on the history of feudal autocracy as inhuman and androphagous. Developed after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the view is continued by Mo Yan, reaching the embarrassing conclusion that the whole nation exists as an ‘accomplice’ or ‘onlooker’ during this period of history. However, the formal representatives of folk life, such as Sun Bing and Meiniang, show how to survive their life with dignity. Whenever confronted with the restraint of living, they would strive for the free-flying spirits in the melody of Maoqiang arias. Surely from the folk cultural origin, Maoqiang arias may be the lingering charm of primitive Manitou ceremony in northeast Gaomi. At the same time, sandalwood death may be the replay of a primitive worship scene. All that is done to cope with the unexpected or sudden occurrence of inexplicable disasters, which might be regarded as the internal mental motivation that the complicated, cruel, and dramatic sandalwood death is carried out on the ascension stand. Such a mental motivation (collective unconsciousness) is rooted in the bloodline of folklife, and its rushing out contributes to such a piece of drama—Sandalwood Death—in which every god is insane.

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History: The Voice of Free Speech

History is always the new interpretation by people in the present of what happened in the past. People today often say it is a ‘dialogue between the past and the present’. The so-called dialogue contains two aspects of perspective: Firstly, it refers to the metaphor and confirmation for ‘the present’ by ‘history’; secondly, it is people’s desire to explore the ‘origin’ of history, their suspicion and reinterpretation of a particular view that was made before. Novelists often have a solid hope to liberate history from ancient books and records so that history would be restored to its ‘original’ condition, chaotic and complicated, in the form of literary structure or language game. Their efforts in doing so may result in the critical popularity of the so-called ‘new-history novels’. Since the turn of the 1990s, many ‘vanguard novel’ writers have spontaneously turned to create history-theme novels, of which a common tendency is shown in aspects of the subject matter and the conception of theme. An individual or family’s fate or experience is written with the general background of ‘official history’. However, history is but a spatial carrier, of which the one-dimensional feature has been altered. It carries the event itself that concerns writers from their own or a certain social group, who confirm the significance of human existence while seeking and exploring folk culture and tradition. Under such circumstances, history is no longer the passage of time but a space for representing the writer’s thinking. It is no longer a narration of only one voice but ‘an odd mixing of many voices’. Such ‘new-history novels’ transmitting individual history experiences like lyric poetry subvert the ‘epic characteristics’ of past collective experiences and novels of ‘official history’. A series of creations made by many writers have resulted in the popularity of this type of novel. Among them, the rather distinctive works include To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant written by Yu Hua, Series of the Hometown of Pterocarya Tree and Rice by Su Tong, Night Mooring by Qinhuai River Series by Ye Zhaoyan and Hometown Series by Liu Zhenyun, and so on. We can also place Mo Yan’s novels in this category, like Red Sorghum Clan and Big Breasts and Wide Hips . By the end of the 1990s, the creation of the contemporary historical novel began to decline, but researchers’ interest in it continued to grow. What attracts people’s attention most among writers and their works is Yu Hua’s To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant , while Mo Yan’s new novel Sandalwood Death is a fresh fuel fed to the fire of the researchers’

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interest. It seems that these novels have nothing in common, but from my viewpoint, they are all written with the narrative strategy of returning to the folk—from the purely folk point of view and with the historical attitude of facing the folk. Yu Hua’s Chronicle of a Blood Merchant , published in 1995, is a purely historical fable about the life and the fate of people in villages and towns. When it was republished in 1998 in the Chinese version, Yu Hua wrote in the preface, ‘In this book, I idled about now and then, because I discovered from the very start that the fictional characters had the same sounds as mine. I should respect those sounds and let them find answers in the wind’.1 The sounds are the public’s voice in history, resulting from the writer’s feeling overwhelmed by the voice of freedom that permeates the air of history after abandoning his self-esteem of elite awareness and enlightenment thought. And yet, at present, Mo Yan has also found a voice through the folk historical legend Sandalwood Death and the answer attached to the peasants by their history on the land of northeast Gaomi. In the postscript of Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan explains the inspiration for folk voice, ‘What I have written in this novel is virtually voice. The title of each chapter in both the “phoenix head” part and the “leopard tail” part is named in the fashion that the hero of the narrative speaks, for example, “Zhao Jia Talked Wildly”, “Qian Ding Said Bitterly”, and “Sun Bing Spoke Flippantly”. The “pork belly” part seems to be written from an omnipotent perspective. Still, it recounts legendary history through oral narration or singing, which is, after all, voice’. The folk history appears vividly in the form of free voice, which was the call of the wild, and which was the arrogant and unruly strong sound of life made by the intersection of spirit and flesh, blood and tears, resistance and acceptance, conservation and innovation, survival and death. All of these were woven together with the sounds of the royal court, the restriction of feudal ethical norms to the persistent and plain civil public, the roar of the train, the violent surge of advanced foreign civilisation, and the melody of Maoqiang arias to create the mechanical resistance of the enduring life force in one’s heart. Both Sandalwood Death and To Live are different in the narrative mode from other ‘new-history’ novels. The voice of characters in other ‘newhistory novels’ appears in the presence of ‘the other’, and novelists fix the 1 ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’ is from a song Blowing in the Wind sung in 1962 by Bob Dylan, an American singer.

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history with the identity of ‘otherness’ elsewhere. In this case, in both Sandalwood Death and To Live, the writers use folk voice as the critical tone, and the voice of protagonists appear in a self-existing form, of which the mode is automatically established as the history is expressed in the first person. In To Live, when each space-time scenario changes and transits, the writer always says that Fugui, the protagonist, is ‘telling about himself’ or ‘fond of talking about himself’. Self-narration uses a personal voice to explicitly view history, resulting from the writer’s desire to restore the account. In Sandalwood Death, it is even more apparent that history narrates itself. The characters in the novel head directly onto the stage, talking tirelessly about themselves. Although for its theme, the novel is tragic, the characters and their ways of speaking are all comedy, which can be attributed to ‘folkness’, for folk narrative has its unique and witty comedy style, like such a narrative as ‘Zhao Jia talked wildly’ and ‘Meiniang spoke dissolutely’.2 From my point of view, only the voice of the ordinary people would exist in a text with a free, lively, and straightforward form because it is the pre-existing nature of folk culture that is uncontrolled and ashamed of disguise. It can be imagined that if the history of royal courts or intellectuals could narrate itself, it would still be a deceptive voice. In that case, the self-narrative style chosen in Sandalwood Death can only exist on the premise of telling folk history. Likewise, the voice of free speech can live only in the soil of folklife and folk culture. Mo Yan, a representative writer of folk history, not only depicts the powerful shock resulting from reflection on civil society of important events—which have changed the historical structure of modern times, including the One Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898 led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the Boxer Movement, and German colonisation of Shandong Province in 1898—but also attaches importance to the formidable endurance displayed by the Chinese civil society in fighting with desperation against all kinds of natural and artificial disasters, as well as the brutal aggression from forces of external civilisations. The novel also involves the structure of civil society, common people’s concept of faith, down to blind faith, ignorance, vulgarity, greed, and a carnal desire that is never hidden. Even so, civil society is still a resting place for the writer’s ideal national personality. Furthermore, the novel reflects the gradual decline of governmental culture in contrast to folk culture

2 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001.

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and the intellectuals’ depression of having nothing to do but bow to the government. Like the followers of the six martyrs in the Bourgeois Reform Movement of 1898 led by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, some of the intellectual elite partly embraced civil society either for shelter or for the revolutionary reservation ideas after failing to reform the superstructure. However, in the seemingly vulgar civil society, the intellectuals are faced with great confusion and contradiction: On the one hand, they show contempt for the inelegance, guile, and ignorance filling folklife; on the other hand, they have a passionate primitive vitality and a strong desire to benefit the folk. The tenacious energy is exactly a supplement to the traditional Chinese intellectuals’ naturally weak personality. Being a part of the civil society, and under the control of the ambivalence of resisting while attracted, despising while showing respect to the folk, the intellectuals have fallen into a hesitant position, which has been reflected directly and vividly through Qian Ding, an intellectual and bureaucrat in the novel.

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Maoqiang Arias and the Variation of Trains

In the postscript of Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan says, ‘The origin of constructing and creating this novel yet comes from sound’. The sound has inspired the writer’s creation. The writer himself finally creates the variation of two sounds, that of Maoqiang arias and that of trains, even though the novel’s title implies a sort of punishment. The writer is fascinated with the two sounds, which the inhabitants on both sides of the tracks have heard all through their lives in Gaomi and Jiaozhou. Unfortunately, I can’t summarise the writer’s own experience, but just copy out his words on his engraved memories and obsessive emotions about these sounds: When I first began my career as a writer twenty years ago, two sounds appeared now and then in my mind, like two attractive sirens hounding me, making me always anxious. The first sound is the train’s sound, running on the old railway from Jiaozhou to Jinan for more than a hundred years. The second sound is Maoqiang arias, a local opera spread in the Gaomi area... of which the sweet but sad melody can almost be said to be inherited and grasped but learned by generations of people in northeast Gaomi.

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The square is deserted, while the plaintive melody of Maoqiang arias is interwoven with the shrill whistle raised by the departing train, which fills my mind with a myriad of thoughts and ideas. I feel that the train and Maoqiang arias, the two sounds interwoven in my youth, are just two seeds in my heart, which may someday grow into a vast tree and turn into an essential work of mine.3

The two seeds finally grow in the writer’s gestation into a colossal tree, of which the excellent swaying in the wind is still the melody of Maoqiang arias and the roaring of the train. The novel echoes Mo Yan’s contemplation and memory of history. Sandalwood Death features Maoqiang arias, which are the key to the novel’s distinctive folk characteristics and folk orientation. Maoqiang arias symbolise the flourishing and free life condition full of vigour in common people’s lives with its vivid perceptual form. It is the dwelling in which the spirit and emotions of most farmers live in northeast Gaomi, where people’s enthusiasm for life, artistic feelings, and life ideals are all pinned into the vocal style of Maoqiang arias, excellent both in sound and affection. It is how folk artistic languages and emotional expressions exist and contain the primitive passion full of individuality and vigour coming from the depth of folk soil. It is also the external creative form of the native inhabitants’ collective unconscious in northeast Gaomi, just like mysterious but vigorous songs sung at ancient sacrificial ceremonies. Many characters in Sandalwood Death are so obsessed with the melody of Maoqiang arias that they are unwilling to return to daily life, which is virtually a reflection of carnival and intoxicated scenes in ancient sacrifices. Thus, Maoqiang arias become the intrinsic motivation dominating the characters’ behaviours in the novel and reveals the writer’s enthusiasm for folk history and folklife. Before entertainment is well developed, local operas have become the main form of local people’s enjoyment, recreation, and emotional exchanges. To some extent, Maoqiang arias have become the only means that farmers of northeast Gaomi can engage in and express their affections and their spiritual consolation filled with magic and inducing pleasure. Mo Yan has an inborn intimate connection with Maoqiang arias, which, as the representative form of local, regional culture, has become an essential component of the writer’s traditional cultural accumulation. 3 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001.

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Such artistic forms as Maoqiang arias are the source for Mo Yan’s creation of a unique creative world. As a writer from the countryside who has attached himself to the folk tradition and customs of the countryside, Mo Yan himself displays a different writing style from the one adopted by writers of urban or intellectual life. Generally speaking, because of the complexity of their accumulative perception, scholarly writers often have mixed and ambiguous feelings for tone and sound, which are vague and indistinguishable when given expression in their works. However, Mo Yan possesses an artistic perception to create his unique writing style, influenced by the simple folk culture. His principal works, including Red Sorghum Clan, Big Breasts and Wide Hips , and Sandalwood Death, all have similar artistic characteristics—lively and straightforward tones, dramatic plots, animated language, and folk images. Readers can see folk arts such as lunar New Year’s paintings of Weifang City in these works. In addition, Jiaodong paper cuts and Maoqiang arias have had a significant impact on the writer. When Mo Yan originally started his writing career, he might have intended to change his original identity as a farmer and take the immediate step of becoming one of the writers of vanguard literature. However, even in the vanguard trend, he is still a writer with the most robust folk consciousness and local flavour. His creations in recent years have abided by the routine of returning to the soil, the folk, and the tradition. From Red Sorghum Clan, Thirteen Steps to The Republic of Wine, and from Big Breasts and Wide Hips to Sandalwood Death, Mo Yan has turned from his original favour for humanistic touch and vanguard trend to the combination of the humanistic touch and the folk tone, and to folk arts in the end. One of the outcomes of his shift is represented by Sandalwood Death, a novel revolving around the local genre of Maoqiang arias. The characters Sun Bing and Meiniang in the novel are undoubtedly the incarnations of folk cultures and folklife forms. Sun Bing as a mummer epitomises and speaks for this form of folk art. All through his up-and-down lifetime, he never stops singing. He keeps singing ‘elegies’ one after another for his performance on stage when his wife and children are slaughtered with fellow villagers. While calling on farmers to awaken themselves and rise in revolt, he sings ‘altar incantations’, which can confuse people’s minds. Yet, on his sandalwood death, he sings ‘a common cat crying before a bier’, the miserable and dreary melody of Maoqiang arias. From his point of view, his whole life is a play of Maoqiang arias, through which his joy and sorrow, his pleasure and anger,

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and even his undergoing torture of the sandalwood death, all seem a grand opera with a beginning and an ending. Maoqiang arias are a metaphor for his unique life form and a carrier for his display of individuality. Thus, he can hardly distinguish his daily life and suffering from his performance of Maoqiang arias. As for Sun Bing, energy is equal to the art of singing, which emerges as a projection or sign of vitality, and which must have itself become a form of logic like the primary forms of life. What Maoqiang arias mean to Sun Bing stands for what kind of folk traditional culture means to peasants. His life and death are accompanied by Maoqiang arias. As an external manifestation of local peasants’ and folk feelings about life, the folk traditional culture like Maoqiang arias is not just a temporal and spatial sequence of history, but also a life image in a dream or fantasy. Sun Bing, on the contrary, is an extreme manifestation of the mutual influence of folk culture and folklife. Thus, it would not be difficult to understand why Sun Bing is ready to accept sandalwood death when he can easily escape with his life. For him, the brutal and endless sandalwood death is the ideal ending of his ‘dramatic life’. It is a drama finished with the end of his life and the only way to achieve the ultimate artistic state of ‘forgetting everything’. The process of his torture can be regarded as the perfect display of Sun Bing’s personal life, which also reaches the peak of his artistic life. This drama of life shows a unique rhythm of folk life and incredible talent. Sun Bing, a Maoqiang arias mummer, like Maoqiang arias wandering outside the mainstream culture, possesses his peculiar primordial impulsion and wild posture, which is fresh, unique, and distinctive from his kind just like a blast of wind blowing from the wild. He is endowed with the folk tradition of ethics, morality, faith, and aesthetics. Though having connections with feudal culture, they contain a hefty dose of freedom and maintain an aggressive and free original form. Common people’s ideal of yearning for freedom of life has been incomparably highlighted in folk art. But people with such freedom in daily life are often cynical, contemptuous of authority, and fancy themselves a Bohemian, just as Sun Bing shows his contempt for Li Wu’s lavish praise on the county magistrate’s beard, ‘Listen, pal, go back and pass on words to your master, telling him that his beard is not better than my pubic hair in the crotch’. Sandalwood Death is an oratorio, ‘an odd mixture of numerous sounds’, among which the melody of Maoqiang arias and the roaring of trains are the most outstanding. The intersections and correlations between the two make the main clue and contradiction of the novel.

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Nevertheless, the roaring of trains has hardly been heard in the novel, but it virtually controls the direction of ‘history’ in a latent form and decides the fate of all kinds of characters. Mo Yan intentionally conceals the roaring of trains in the narration, thus reducing the status and strength that it originally had in his earlier draft, as he says, In the fall of 1996, I began to write Sandalwood Death. After about 50,000 words were written about trains, railways and magical myths, I put it aside for a while. Then going through what I had written, I found distinctive features of hallucinatory realism in it. Thus, I gave it up and began to rewrite again. I abandoned many thoughtful details as they seemed a little hallucinatory. At last, I decided to reduce the sounds of railways and trains but highlight the melody of Maoqiang arias. Though doing this would weaken the richness of the book, I have made such sacrifice without any hesitation to keep the rich flavour of the folk and a comparatively pure Chinese style.4

Railways, trains, and the roaring symbolise the enormous influence of modern foreign civilisations in the modern Chinese feudal, patriarchal society. It is a powerful force and manifests itself that nothing can resist historical progress. Although the writer in the text artificially cuts down the sound of trains, it ends up with the absolute advantage of overwhelming the melody of Maoqiang arias. It appears everywhere like a shadow, of which the strength and pressure can constantly be felt in the novel. In the ‘pork belly’ part of the novel, Zhang Haogu’s words can best interpret the irresistibility of the influence, ‘Your palace memorial on behalf of ten-thousand-people’s appeal delivered to the throne has been used by some master as toilet paper! Who do you think you are? Empress Dowager Cixi says herself, “The long Yellow River can change its course, while Jiao-Ji railway would never change its line.”’ It is not the Qing Dynasty’s affirmation and praise of Germans on establishing the Jiao-Ji railway, but just its compromise under irresistible oppression. The German Krupp mountain artillery and Mauser guns shocked Qian Ding, the county magistrate, and with these weapons, the Germans razed Masang township to the ground. These reveal the fiery power of the modern civilisation of foreign countries and the trend that it would sweep away the backward culture. In modern China, as with the invasion

4 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001.

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of Western colonists, industrial civilisation, and modern science seeped rapidly into every corner of the Chinese feudal society. After such a form of culture conquered mainstream society by arms, it marched into folklife. It destroyed the initially stable, accessible, and self-sufficient living style. As a result, the struggle and resistance of common people full of courage, uprightness, and the spirit of rebellion were inevitable. Sun Bing is one of the representatives. I even suppose that the farmers’ concern and their revolts against the train—or alien civilisation—in northeast Gaomi are, in fact, their instinctive horror-inspired when the order of life is intruded upon by strange objects and their automatic struggles while encountering such a horror. Unfortunately, the folk power finally failed in resistance to the colonists, which was a tragedy similar to the story of ‘Jingwei, the mythical bird, filling a sea with pebbles’ because it was nothing labouring in vain. In the battle between the train and Maoqiang arias, the foreign industrial civilisation cuts the throats of Maoqiang arias performers somatically. While Maoqiang arias mummers play the last performance at the execution ground, thousands of common people are saddened by the elegy, expressing their sorrow with tears. At the same time, the song and dance are cast on the will of Heaven and incorporated into the primitive praying to release them from a great void and self-destruction. Thus, the art of Maoqiang arias reaches its peak of perfection while also approaching the brim of a dangerous cliff. At this point, the melody of Maoqiang arias stops abruptly, but the train still roars across the fields of northeast Gaomi. Has it even heard in the depth of the land the plangent melody of Maoqiang arias, laden with sorrow?

3

A Swan Song, a Lament

In the novel, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Qing Dynasty was swaying amid troubles from both home and abroad. Because of the invasion of Western colonial forces, the Qing Dynasty was virtually reduced to a semi-puppet regime. Having throttled the One Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, it is expected to challenge the foreign forces by supporting a folk force, namely, the Boxer Movement. It was a spontaneous struggle against foreign aggressions, full of such folk characteristics as gang membership, wizardry, and divination. Nonetheless, the unprecedented compatibility between the feudal rulers and the folk force led to the invasion of the Eight-Power Allied Forces. Thus, the Qing government had to join hands

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with the imperialist powers and kill the Boxers. The rise and decline of the Boxer Movement was the general historical background of Sandalwood Death, while the resistance led by Sun Bing was but an epitome of the Boxer Movement in northeast Gaomi. The folk force entered the historical arena with an unparalleled scale but immediately collapsed. The culture and political horizon of elite intellectuals from the highest echelons of power were broadened by the surge of the alien civilisation accompanying the gunfire of the colonists. Yet, the feudal dynasty’s ideological and political situation of grand unification was about to crumble. The intellectual elites either sought abroad for effective prescriptions to save the country and its people or slipped into the folk society, converging with the folk culture and life. The old value system collapsed, whereas the establishment of the new political and cultural system did not begin yet. Such a tumultuous social, political, cultural, and ideological order was the time for making heroes and gangsters, in which the instinctive desires free of inhibitions expanded rapidly without restraint. With its promotion, the Chinese social tide raised waves of spray, either resplendent or repulsive. Sheng, Dan, Jing, Mo, and Chou, all kinds of roles in Peking opera, appeared spontaneously. In the last days of the declining dynasty, they were singing their swan songs or sad laments, which made a completely orgiastic scene on doomsday when demons and monsters were dancing in riotous revelry. Arthur Schopenhauer5 once said that human instinct is displayed in such an eternal circulation that he has striven for something and satisfies his desire. Then he strives for something else again, and his passion is satisfied again. In Sandalwood Death, it is easy to find that the main characters active in it are all driven by a life desire trapped in perdition. Still, they are crazed with the lust for adventure and are conscious of no restraints: Sun Bing, the Maoqiang arias mummer, has a strong compulsion to fulfil a piece of ‘grand life opera’ and indulges in the dramatic fantasy of ‘whether the butterfly is me, or I am the butterfly’, taking the cruel punishment and torturing on himself as the magnificent ending of his dramatic life. Sun Meiniang, another character in the novel, holds on to her true love without success. Her beauty is beyond comparison, her big feet extremely dreadful, and her dazzling beauty and charm overwhelm her lover Qian Ding’s heart and soul like a flood. Zhao Jia, the 5 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher and founder of panentheism.

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executioner, exhibits one aspect of human life to pursue the ultimate beauty of cruelty. In his heart, slaughtering is the most beautiful, tragic, and almost overpowering performance of the human world. His Satanic pursuit results in his demonic personality, with which his greatest desire is to complete an execution of supreme and perfect punishment to feel fully satisfied in life. Zhao Xiaojia does not belong to the world; he is an insane person living in a world of himself, who looks at the external world as nothing more than a world of creatures, in which for him only pursuit and escape are left. Qian Ding, the county magistrate, is trapped in the desires of his heart, and yet he is willing to shake them off. He is of the kind who is caught in a dilemma between the irrational display of desire and the sound suppression of appetite, and his aspiration, aptitude, achievement, and even life all fall into the abyss between the folk and the royal court. In the novel, different characters and all kinds of intricate life tragedies, in the light of humanity resulting from their passion for life, run together like a mighty river towards the Gate of Death. There are youth, love and art, but misfortune, agony, and predestination as well. Chinese intellectuals have always lived and protected themselves using traditional values, having flexible means to choose whether to manage the country’s affairs, help the people and the society, or pursue their own solitary personal edification. However, when the storm of advance in its death throes torments the old order of values, and the new value system is yet to be established, the royal road of self-prevention seems blocked, bringing about unparalleled panic and vulnerability. Thus, some of them flee into the folk society, seeking refuge for spiritual consolation. In their eyes, the folk society is, for one thing, a den of iniquity, and ultimate vulgarity, and the wasteland that needs their work for enlightenment and salvation; for another, it is an alternative fictitious land of peace, pure, plain, and full of vigour. For example, Qian Ding in the novel, on the one hand, accepts joyfully all the benefits brought by the folk and expresses his inborn original desire for love and sex that have long been suppressed; on the other hand, the long-standing cultural accumulation and moral order have determined that he cannot give up the traditional concepts of ‘cultivating the moral self, managing the family, governing the state and safeguarding peace under Heaven’. Moreover, he cannot abandon the feudal ideal of being a person filled with compassion and filial piety, loyalty and honesty, benevolence and kind-heartedness. Hence, he must reject and suppress the outlet for his original desire but suffers an awkward situation in his struggle over whether to cater to it or resist it. However,

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the charm from folklife (Meiniang’s love) becomes the source to activate his vitality. Meiniang’s natural beauty, courage, and strength displayed in her pursuit of identity, freedom, and joyful love are Qian Ding’s dream harbour, which can comfort his weary soul. In the process of identifying himself with the folklife, he feels that his life bustles, cries, and roarings in such an unprecedented free form as a thirsty fish jumping into the sea. To throw himself into the folk society is Qian Ding’s salvation for his own heart and soul which have been insensitive, but the process of redemption and reaching the free world afterlife is one of self-destruction. In the novel, Qian Ding always hovers between his lawful wife and Meiniang, and everything makes it hard for him to choose between the two. His wife symbolises the rational choice of reservedness, self-esteem, golden mean, moderation, and the influential feudal ethical code and culture that help to manage state affairs. At the same time, Meiniang stands for the original life force and lure that is unrestrained, passionate, expressive of individuality, and uninhibited in proprieties. He describes his wife and Meiniang like this, ‘One is ice, and the other is fire’. Such a two-tiered choice puts him in such a quandary that he is at a loss as to whom he should choose. Finally, after a long time of thinking, he throws himself into the burning flame without hesitation. Then, just as a stray lamb returning to the grassland, he is filled with freedom and comfort: I turn and go to the Tongde drill ground without looking back anymore. When the moonlight is shining in my eyes, I feel numerous flowers in bud clustered in my heart. Among them, one that blossoms is a tune of Maoqiang arias which can have a significant effect on one’s heart. The long but clear-rhythmic melody of Maoqiang arias echoes in my mind, keeping my every movement on the beat of Maoqiang arias.6

We may as well regard the process of Qian Ding, the intellectual, embracing the folklife and accepting the folk culture as the process of returning to hometown life, of opposing the feudal ethical code and culture and experiencing rejuvenation through enlightenment. In the Chinese traditional Confucian ethic and poetic education characterised by gentle and mild persuasion rather than direct and violent criticism, Maoqiang arias and Meiniang reignite the fire of his perceptual life hidden deep in his heart and show his innate character. Meiniang symbolises 6 Mo Yan. Sandalwood Death. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House, 2001.

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the luxuriant and inspiring vitality of folklife. Her engagement with Qian Ding undoubtedly transcends the Confucian ethical life and reaches the paradise of original divinity. ‘He and she both give birth to beauty with the cocoon shell sloughed, and just on the ground paved with square stone, they ascend to heaven and become immortals’. The main characters in Sandalwood Death are all desperately fleeing from the circle of fate, with all moving paths pointing towards the same centre—death. People are sure that death would be the final destination for life, though they cannot foresee the pathways on which life would proceed. Death is not only the cruel slaughter of life but also the last moment when the flame of life bursts forth. For slow slicing or the sandalwood death, both of them show the actual existence of life by extending the death process and aggravating the pain of death. At the same time, the power of punishment also highlights such reality, including the sin of desire, the frailty of life, lifelong misery, and the torment of death. Life itself is but a process of heading for death painfully. In northeast Gaomi, where life and death are performed on the stage, people spontaneously play the farewell song to life—the sandalwood death. The writer develops the novel Sandalwood Death around this horrifying and miserable punishment. The novel is filled with Zhao Jia’s sweet memory of his career as an executioner, and the bloody and violent execution scene is now and then thrust into readers’ minds. The fascinating parts of the novel are the description of the punishment and Maoqiang arias. The punishment and the splendid title related to it can be called the main selling point of the novel. What the savage torture displays are a kind of complicated external form of carving flesh, but what it brings about is a kind of inexplicable and profound perceptual experience. Pain itself is impossible to describe, and there is a great distance between the form of savage torture and our understanding of it, which enables a weightless drop from its formation to our suffering of it. The form of punishment and the stretching force created in experiencing the sentence is the root of our trembling curiosity and horrific fascination when confronted with the depiction of the sentence. In the novel, punishment symbolises the deformed development of the Chinese traditional official culture and the feudal autocracy. As a violent means of political life, punishment has long occupied an important position in the court politics of successive dynasties of China and is full of variations. Especially in the last days of the dynasty, when the feudal ethical rites collapsed, and those without virtues or talents usurped

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high positions and lorded it over others, a punishment often culminated in the extreme, so inhuman that it would make people’s blood boil. Just as explicitly mentioned in the novel, its variety includes beheading, cutting a person in half at the waist, slow slicing, Yama cramp, and sandalwood death. Claude, a German colonist, offers a wonderful comment on the status of punishment in the Chinese feudal political ruling, saying that China is lagging in everything but the penalty, which is the most advanced in the world, for there are unique talents in this aspect in China. The Chinese art and the quintessential Chinese politics will not die until he has suffered the most incredible agony. The brutal corporal punishment significantly impacts people’s visual and auditory senses and castrates the spirit of onlookers and gossips. Thus, every concept or behaviour is nipped in the bud that goes beyond the existing regulations and norms. The rulers’ aim is not to punish, but to create a horrifying atmosphere in which everyone would feel imperilled. That is the result to which they aspire. Nonetheless, to adopt violence in the name of legitimacy exhibits the absurdity of punishment. What penalty manifests more behind the cruelty is a kind of dramatic effect on sight. It is an absurdity that has distorted human nature. Furthermore, the impact of psychological castration on peoples’ spirits occurs in onlookers and spreads to the executioner. As a talented executioner, Zhao Jia’s shrinking emotion, loss of libido, and death of conscience seem to result from his clinging to his profession without any distraction. Still, virtually it is because his personality and nature have gradually become alienated and deteriorated in the process of the violent execution. He has become a killing machine just of a human shape, ‘We are entirely not human, but deity, and the country law’. ‘I am not myself, but representative of the Emperor and Empress Dowager, the law executor of Qing Dynasty’. When he retires and intends to return to his native town, Empress Dowager Cixi shows him a string of sandalwood Buddha beads and an emperor’s chair, a kind of praise and affirmation that symbolises the immersion of folk society in political violence. Having confused his identity as an executioner with the law and the country’s power, Zhao Jia endows it with a sacred meaning. He pursues the perfect execution like a zealot. He is so deeply involved in the bloody killing that he cannot extricate himself, ultimately becoming a freak bred by the deformed development of the Chinese political culture. He even views the sandalwood death of Sun Bing, the father of his daughter-in-law, as the final glory of his executioner’s career. As for me, Zhao Jia’s persistent

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pursuit of punishment can match Sun Bing’s craziness about Maoqiang arias, but the two go in opposite directions, as one is a healthy pursuit of identity. At the same time, the other is the deformed development of human nature. Sandalwood death is the swan song of Zhao Jia’s career as an executioner, but it is more like a sad lament for the fading dynasty and its feudal political culture that is going to end. Sandalwood death is also the swan song of Sun Bing’s life performing Maoqiang arias. Still, it is passionate praise of the folk’s free lifestyle and the initially simple life essence of sacrificing one’s own life for a just cause.

‘Biopolitics’ and Historical Writing: A Discussion of Mo Yan’s Frog Songrui Li

1

The Literary Form as a Key Element of Mo Yan’s Frog

On the occasion that the whole nation was celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mo Yan had his new novel Frog published. Mo Yan claims that for this novel, he ‘has made preparation for over ten years, written for four years, and revised for several times’.1 Whether from the time of publication or from his creative intentions for ‘the sixty-year history of local-colour China’,2 the writer has attempted to review and reflect the history of the People’s Republic of China through his writing. In this sense, Mo

1 Cited from the words printed on the cover flap of Mo Yan’s Frog published by

Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2009. 2 Ibid.

Source: Soochow Academic, 2011(1): pp. 85–90. S. Li (B) Chinese National Academy of Arts, Beijing, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_13

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Yan has been consistently emphasising ‘the dignity of novels’,3 so one cannot ignore his strong ambition to write. As written on the flap of the covering: ‘The novel is dedicated to thousands of readers living through or born in the era of family planning’. It looks at the so-called ‘undulating child-bearing history’,4 depicting different formations of child-bearing in various historical periods of the People’s Republic of China. However, rather than adopting the realistic style of the narrative convention as the usual writing style about history in contemporary literature, this novel embodies distinctive features of postmodern writing. Therefore, when one interprets the meaning of Frog , he should not confine himself to the theme but should base his analysis on the form. As for Frog and other works of its kind, how to tell the story is more important than what the story is about. Frog is a collage of three different literary forms—the literature material, the drama script, and the epistle. The body is composed of four sections that Kedou, a lover of literature, wrote to the Japanese writer Sugiya Yoshihito, the content of which was his preparation for the play he would write, taking his aunt as the protagonist. So, the fifth section of the novel is the final drama script he finished. What’s more, at the beginning of each section goes forward a brief epistle Kedou sent to Sugiya Yoshihito. Based on such a structure of the novel, it is evident that the story in Frog is arranged from two aspects. One is about Kedou’s recounting of his aunt’s experiences as a gynaecologist and family planning cadre, and about what he had gone through since the new century came. The other is about Kedou’s attempts as a lover of literature to write the story above into a drama script as excellent as ‘The Flies’ or ‘Dirty Hands’.5 As Kedou, the narrator, said to Sugiya Yoshihito at the beginning of the novel, the latter’s address entitled ‘Literature and Life’ had enlightened him about his starting literary creation. To some extent, what Frog deals with is exactly ‘literature and life’. It is not only a story about various oppressions that ‘life’ has suffered when confronted with ‘politics’ of different forms, but also a story of how to express people’s experiences in history and life through literature. From this perspective, the significance of Frog 3 Mo Yan. ‘In Defense of the Dignity of Novels’. Contemporary Writers Review, 2006(1). 4 Cited from the words printed on the cover flap of Mo Yan’s Frog published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2009. 5 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 4.

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lies not just in its evaluation and reflection of the gains and losses of the family planning policy, but in its meditation on how Kedou and his aunt’s historical experiences acquired in the sixty years of life have been transformed into a literary form. The discussion of Frog in this article would thus concern the two aspects mentioned above. At first, starting from Foucault’s theory of ‘biopolitics’, it analyses how the protagonist had a hand in slaying and tormenting ‘life’ in two different ‘political’ forms from the first to the fourth section of the novel. Secondly, the article aims to reveal the ‘confessional’ theme by focusing on the five letters Kedou wrote to Sugiya Yoshihito. Thirdly, based on the analysis of Kedou’s final drama script in the fifth section, the article discusses why the protagonist could not write out his own historical experiences in a literary form, whereby exploring how literature should reflect the topics on the complicated and diversified life and emotional experiences of the contemporary Chinese people.

2

Michel Foucault’s ‘Biopolitics’: ‘Life’ and ‘Politics’ in Frog

Taking family planning as the theme in Frog , Mo Yan obviously attempts to discuss a topic concerning ‘biopolitics’. Just as what was said via the characters’ words in the novel, the family planning policy was ‘the instruction issued by Chairman Mao and a national policy. Chairman Mao once said that we human beings should control ourselves on the growth of population in a planned way’.6 Here ‘to control’ and ‘in a planned way’ implicate that the modern nation as a current form of organisation starts to bring ‘life’ into the control of ‘politics’, making ‘life’ serve its ‘political’ purposes. The French scholar Michel Foucault initially put ‘life’ and ‘politics’ together and made a theoretical exposition. In the lecture series that he gave at L’Institut de France in 1976, Foucault made a distinction between the ruler’s power on death and that on life. He argued that ‘the key difference between the ruler of a modern country and the king of a monarchy is that the latter only has the power of death or the power to execute a person, but no power to control ‘life’ while the former wields not only the power on death but also the power on ‘life’. That is to

6 Ibid., p. 56.

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say, the former controls life by regulating the process of birth and death rates, reproduction rate and the population reproduction’.7 Therefore, modern rulers finally achieved the occupation of all ‘from organism to biology, from flesh to human population’ through the dual management of ‘penalty techniques’ (the power on death) and ‘adjusting techniques’ (the power on life). Thus, such a power imposed on life by the ruler was called ‘biopolitics’ by Foucault. It is essential to make a rather detailed introduction to Foucault’s theory of ‘biopolitics’ for our discussion of Frog . Though Foucault’s discussion of ‘biopolitics’ eventually pointed to the examination of the origin of racism, it leads to a reflection on Nazism (a variant of capitalism). Although the reflection of the variant forms of capitalist society is irrelevant to the discussion today, the concept of ‘biopolitics’ put forward by Foucault undoubtedly calls on our attention that ‘life’ seems to be the most natural and authentic, but it can hardly keep itself unattached in the modern society, for it has long been woven into the logic of modernity, thus deeply connecting with ‘politics’. As a result, when it comes to the family planning concerned in the novel, we should not interpret it as persecution subjected to ‘human nature’ or ‘human rights’ by a totalitarian state, just as what some Western critics with concealed intentions have done. On the contrary, such control and inhibition that ‘politics’ imposes on ‘life’ should only be regarded as an inevitable outcome in China’s developmental process of modernistic logic. In my opinion, it is in this sense that the main body of Frog , or Mo Yan’s arrangement of the material for Kedou’s creation of play from Section One to Section Four, has touched upon the project under the discussion of ‘biopolitics’. As analysed above, the first four sections of Frog are the four pieces of material Kedou, a lover of literature, wrote to Japanese writer Sugiya Yoshihito, which were his ‘preparation to create a play about his aunt’.8 However, since Kedou often added his own emotional outpouring to Sugiya in the material, we can also understand it as a long letter he wrote to Sugiya in a sense. The arrangement of these four parts seemed to contain Mo Yan’s interpretation of the sixty-year history of the People’s Republic of China. In the first section, the novel reminded readers of

7 Foucault, M. The Society Must Be Defended. Shanghai: Shanghai Peoples Press, 1999: p. 229. 8 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 78.

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China before the Anti-rightist Movement (between 1955 and 1956), which was at its golden age, so was his aunt. In his memory, his aunt had recalled numerous times with eyes gleaming and with her heart filled with longing: ‘In those days, I was taken on as a living god or goddess, and I was Avalokitesvara (delivering children to those who are in great desire of one). With the fragrance of flowers of all sorts emanating from me, I have attracted bees and butterflies to cluster around me dancing’.9 Such a description full of pleasant emotions is, in a manner of speaking, the only light and bright paragraph in the whole novel. After that, the story gradually opens up a world of deep and heavy sorrow before readers’ eyes. The first section goes to an end at the point that the aunt was being criticised and denounced publicly for her errors when the ice of the meeting place broke, causing ‘many people to fall into the icy water’.10 However, the second section ends with the death of Kedou’s first wife, Wang Renmei, whose baby was to be born soon, finally died in the forced abortion procedure by her aunt. What’s more, the third section comes to a close when Wang Dan, who tried to give unplanned births, died of a premature delivery due to the aunt’s endless chases. Judging from the arrangement of ‘death’ as the ending in the first three sections, what the novel tells us seems to be a process in which ‘life’ has been gradually controlled by ‘politics’ since China started to implement the family planning policy in 1960s, and women’s requirements for reproduction have been constantly suppressed by the family planning policy represented by the aunt. In this way, ‘politics’ begins to control the birth rate of the whole country based on its own needs, thereby bringing about death as a result of constant suppression of ‘life’. Nevertheless, when the story goes on to the fourth section, the ending does not highlight death but turns to the birth of ‘life’. This section comes to an end with the birth of Kedou’s son and the announcement that this baby ‘would surely become a legal resident, enjoying all the welfare and rights bestowed to all children of the country’.11 Simply judging from such an arrangement of structure in the novel, we may see that the writer seems to indicate that ‘life’ has been gradually controlled by ‘politics’ in many ways since 1957 by writing about death

9 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 22. 10 Ibid., p. 73. 11 Ibid., p. 277.

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in the first three sections. However, in the fourth section, the birth of an unplanned baby implies that ‘life’ began to cast off the repression of ‘politics’ in the new century and ‘revived’ in some sense. But what is connoted in the novel Frog is not easy as such. In fact, the fourth section mainly reflects the complex connotations of the novel. In the section, the aunt is no longer the protagonist, and it is mainly about the story of Little Lion, Kedou’s wife, who managed to bear a child via in-vitro fertilisation through a surrogacy agency while keeping her husband in the dark. Although Kedou initially thought it immoral to have Chen Mei, the daughter of his primary-school classmate, give birth to his son, thus trying every means to have the unborn baby aborted, the plot takes a sudden change at this point. Kedou came to realise that many years ago, just because of his weakness, he played a supporting role. At the same time, his aunt carried out the family planning policy to force Wang Renmei to take an induced abortion, in which Wang trying every means to bear a child died a tragic death. Therefore, he could only atone for his sin with the birth of a son. He thought, ‘My full awareness of my past sin will eventually get a chance for salvation. No matter what causes or what results may be brought about, I will certainly open my arms and hug this newborn baby bestowed by God’.12 As a result, he became quite at ease with Chen Mei’s surrogacy. He declared that ‘there is nothing wrong with the society but myself to have doubted the legibility of surrogacy before’.13 From this perspective, the aunt followed the same logic as Kedou. A genuinely faithful Communist as she was, she showed no mercy when carrying out the family planning policy, claiming, ‘I would rush toward whichever place the Party pointed to…, and now I have a nickname to be called “Devil Incarnated”, which brings me much glory’.14 However, what makes this novel interesting may not rest on the description of how the aunt was determined to carry out the Party’s policy, but with insertion of the aunt’s remarks on herself in the past days into a narrative of her experiences in early years through continuous quotations of the narrator Kedou. In other words, though the novel deliberately portrays the aunt

12 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 265. 13 Ibid., p. 252. 14 Ibid., p. 87.

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in her early years as a firm Communist cadre who implemented the family planning policy at any costs, it also emphasises that ‘in her later years, the aunt consistently felt guilty of her sins that were beyond redemption’.15 She even held that ‘at that time [from the 1950s to 1970s], all people were insane. What a nightmare!’16 From such a metaphor as a ‘nightmare’, we can see that the aunt in her old age repented for what she had done when she was young. It was because of such ‘repentance’ that the aunt, once extremely upright who would endure herself when her hair was pulled off rather than telling a lie in the period of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, now, out of everyone’s expectation, felt no sense of shame to prove Little Lion to be the natural mother of Kedou’s son. But here, neither Kedou nor the aunt was aware of what they did. At the same time, they made an atonement for the family planning policy before. They once again became the accomplice for current ‘biopolitics’, practising the control and slaying of ‘life’ differently. Yet, the slaying was mainly embodied in the deprivation of Chen Mei’s unborn baby. From what was depicted in the novel, Chen Mei was deprived of everything by capital to be a proletariat. Once the most beautiful girl in Gaomi, she was then disfeatured by the fire while working in Guangzhou and had to wrap her body with a black veil. However, the logic of capital always has the insatiable appetite for depriving her of her beautiful appearance and materialising her into a means of production. As Li Shou described to Kedou, ‘She is nothing but a tool that you just rent for use, and that’s it’.17 With such a light statement, the capitalist just stole Chen Mei’s baby as his own. There was thus no surprise when Chen Mei made such an indictment: ‘I felt myself an ugly cocoon with a beautiful life bred inside. However, the moment he breaks out from the cocoon, I am just an empty shell’.18 As I see it, it is here that Mo Yan’s writing touches on a profound topic. When Kedou was repenting of the ‘life’ suppressed by a form of ‘biopolitics’, he became an accomplice for another form of ‘biopolitics’, and tormented ‘life’ again. In that case, although the first three sections have a different attitude towards

15 Ibid., p. 71. 16 Ibid., p. 51. 17 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009:

p. 250. 18 Ibid., p. 313.

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‘life’ from the fourth superficially, they all follow the common logic. That is to say, they try to achieve ‘political purpose’ of some kind by controlling ‘life’. In essence, ‘life’ simply serves for ‘the future of the nation and its peoples’, while ‘politics’ just serves for capital appreciation.

3

The ‘Confessional’ Theme in Kedou’s Five Letters

If the body of the novel mainly explores the subject of ‘biopolitics’, the written message at the beginning of each section and the fifth section then deals with how to put the aunt’s and Kedou’s historical and life experiences into the literary form. Some critics view the five letters Kedou wrote to Sugiya Yoshihito as ‘the redundancy in narration’,19 and Sugiya Yoshihito, the receiver of the letters, is also of no value for his existence. It seems that ‘as for this mystical Japanese writer, except for a possible involvement of Mo Yan’s personal life experience that is hard to understand by an outsider, he has no more special function in the novel than an ordinary reader’.20 However, I hold that these seemingly insignificant letters have played multiple roles: In addition to restricting Kedou’s identity and echoing the novel central part, they also position Kedou’s writing as an ‘atonement’. In his first letter, Kedou seemed humble, with a low profile, more or less worming himself into Sugiya Yoshihito’s favour. He claimed that the latter’s lecture titled ‘Literature and Life’ had evoked his desire to write, so he attempted to create a play about his aunt. However, in the second letter, when informed that Sugiya Yoshihito was the son of a Japanese general who had invaded Gaomi, Kedou at once showed his moral superiority to the latter and even comforted him, saying, ‘Nowadays, what the world lacks most is just this spirit— referring to Sugiya Yoshihito’s spirit of reflection on history. If everyone would make a clear reflection on history and himself, humankind should have avoided numerous foolish behaviours and actions’.21 It would be of significance to compare the second letter with the third letter. In the third letter, Kedou defended the family planning policy, claiming that

19 Ibid., p. 126. 20 Liang Zhenhua. ‘Illusory Truth and True Illusion: On Mo Yan’s Frog ’. China Book

Review, 2010(4). 21 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 78.

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‘History just sees the outcome, but ignores the process towards it. Similarly, people only see all kinds of grand architectures like the Great Wall of China and Pyramids in Egypt, but not the millions of human skeletons under them’.22 Therefore, although the family planning policy may be extremely cruel, it has contributed a lot to ‘not only the development of China itself but all the humanity’.23 Thus, we can see that though Kedou expressed great admiration for Sugiya Yoshihito’s reflection on history in the second letter, his own attitude towards history was that he defended history and refused to reflect on it. In fact, what he could see was just the positive outcome brought about by the control of ‘politics’ over ‘life’, and he was unwilling to face squarely ‘millions of human skeletons’ resulted from the process. Yet the fourth letter took a comical turn. No longer showing his confidence in defending history, he began to take writing as a way of atonement, believing that ‘since writing could make an atonement, I would keep on writing’.24 In the fifth letter, however, he did not assuage his sense of guilt after the completion of his writing. Instead, he felt that his ‘guilt was not alleviated, but turned to be much heavier’.25 Therefore, he inquired Sugiya Yoshihito, ‘Is it true that a soul entangled with guilty feeling may never expect deliverance?’.26 The analysis above makes it clear that Sugiya Yoshihito is not a meaningless character in the novel. Instead, he has a structural correspondence with the protagonist, Kedou of structure. To some extent, they are of a mirror-image relationship. The process of Kedou’s writing was that of his constant approaching Sugiya Yoshihito. Though they were worlds apart in status initially, they occupied the exact position of ‘atonement’ at the end of the novel, which might explain why Mo Yan arranged Kedou to send five letters to a Japanese writer. Furthermore, what makes the novel interesting is that in the first section where ‘life’ was suppressed and inhibited by ‘politics’, Kedou showed great confidence in his correspondence with Sugiya Yoshihito, speaking up for the family planning policy. However, as the story went on into the fourth section about Kedou’s realisation of his ‘atonement’ 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 179. 25 Ibid., p. 281. 26 Ibid., p. 282.

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by the birth of a newborn baby, Kedou began to reflect on history and express his ‘penitence’ in his letter to Sugiya Yoshihito. Consequently, the five letters presented an obvious misplacement and contradiction to the central part of the novel. In my view, such a displacement and a contradiction between the story and the storyteller imply that Kedou found his writing in a tight corner. As a result, he would be unable to tell the story as he had expected, which can be testified in the analysis of the fifth section. After reading Section Five, we may feel stunned, first by the sudden change of writing style—a sudden insertion of play into the text itself is a shock and a block to readers’ reading experiences. Secondly, the drama script does not unfold according to the time order as the story goes on in the first four sections. Still, it only frames a dramatic story that happens simultaneously in the fourth section, which is another departure from the time clue. Finally, we are informed from the letters written by Kedou that the first four sections are his ‘preparation for writing the play that takes his aunt as the subject’.27 Hence, what startles readers most might be that Kedou’s final work was completed in such an unexpected manner. With so many years of brewing, this nine-act play has not been based on ‘the aunt’s life’28 at all, nor has it taken the aunt as a protagonist. Instead, it is only an extension of Section Four, describing how Kedou and his friends took forcible possession of Chen Mei’s baby. From this perspective, the ending of Frog seems quite inconsistent with the whole novel, since according to Kedou’s letters, the original intention of devoting a full-length novel to his writing material is to create a drama script about the aunt’s life story. What’s more, Kedou was quite optimistic about the play he was to finish at the beginning of the novel, believing that it would be ‘as excellent as Flies and Dirty Hands’.29 Nevertheless, while the novel was ending with the script genuinely coming out in front of readers, what happened in the first three sections disappeared totally in the script, which would only be regarded as somewhat of a repetition of the fourth section. Furthermore, most interestingly, time itself also fainted away in the script. In the scenario instructions at the beginning of each stage, there were no

27 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 78. 28 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 4. 29 Ibid.

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signs referring to time to be found except for the moon as a symbol of late night. As a result, it made Kedou’s script a failure in writing about history and made it a sheer utopia beyond the course of time. And it stood in sharp contrast to the historical narration consciously adopted by Kedou in the previous four sections. The questions induced were as follows: Why could Kedou not honestly tell about ‘the aunt’s whole life’ in the novel? Why was he unable to endow his history and life experiences with a literary form? Why did his original consciousness of history, after such a long period of preparation,30 disappear suddenly when he finally began his writing? Why did he eventually just unfold the readers with a fragmental piece beyond time? From my viewpoint, to answer all the questions above, it is evident that we should only resort to Kedou’s final completed work. In the nineact play Frog (the same name as the novel) written by Kedou, the plot is unfolded basically around two clues: one is Chen Mei’s cry and shouts for her grievances here and there, looking for her baby, and the other is the celebration by Kedou, his family and friends on the birth of a son at old age. Both clues develop alternatively with the story until the eighth act when Gao Mengjiu decides that the two clues converge together at last. Having been bribed, the parodied judge Gao, thus showing partiality to Kedou with his family and friends, grants using sophistry Chen Mei’s baby to Little Lion, Kedou’s wife. It is just in this scene that all characters gather, among whom all else are standing straight opposite to Chen Mei, blaming her as a saboteur of the usual social order; on the other hand, Chen Mei’s appearance itself has also confirmed this point. As this severely burned woman always wraps herself head-to-ankle with a black veil, in case an exposure should scare away those encountering her, she brings others a spooky feeling on her. In that case, such a ‘ghost’31 who has been oppressed and exploited to an empty shell by capital is bound to be condemned by the public and have no place to stay in a society where money goes beyond everything else. Therefore, whether considered from the structure of the play or the character’s image, Chen Mei is just interpreted as a ‘ghost’ in the play Frog and is exiled from the ‘normal’ society. 30 According to the time signed on the five letters respectively ‘March 21st, 2002’, ‘July, 2003’, ‘New Year’s Day, 2004’, ‘October, 2008’, and ‘June 3rd, 2009’, Kedou’s writing has lasted for seven years. 31 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009: p. 315.

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Yet, in contrast to this scene, there is the last act. Unlike the previous eight shows filled with tension and anxiety, in this act, after Kedou and his company eventually send Chen Mei into exile, there emerges a scarce feeling of tranquility and serenity. Though Kedou and the others feel much guilty about Chen Mei, the aunt sighs, ‘I always have a feeling that you—including me surely—have done wrong for Chen Mei’.32 But they all hold that with the successful birth of Chen Mei’s baby, they will finally make a redemption, and clear all the crimes they have committed in carrying out the family planning policy. Accordingly, the play ends at a breath-taking moment: The aunt, after delivering Chen Mei’s baby and knowing perfectly well Little Lion is not his natural mother, inquires Kedou about whether Little Lion has enough breast milk to nurse the baby, while Kedou also tacitly claims that his wife has an abundance of milk ‘like an eruptive fountain’.33 In such a manner of deceiving oneself and the other, the two have completed the so-called ‘penitence’ and ‘expiation’. From this perspective, Kedou’s final completed play is the same as his fourth piece of source material, both writing about ‘repenting’ of guilt ‘in the past’ by recommitting crimes ‘at present’. The aunt finds herself too strict with implementing the family planning policy, having ‘killed’ over two thousand babies through abortion ‘in the past’, and her two hands reeked with a ‘stench’ of blood.34 As for Kedou, he feels it is because of his weakness that he has compelled his ex-wife Wang Renmei to get an abortion, which ultimately resulted in her miserable death. Just for their deep obsession with their ‘mistakes’ ‘in the past’, feeling themselves ‘accomplices’ in the suppression of ‘politics’ over ‘life’ in those days, they traded Chen Mei’s benefits for the birth of a new life, turning her life into a ‘tool’. Given this, we seem to have figured out why Kedou could not put his history and life experiences into a literary form. In his long writing process, Kedou has transformed his writing on account into ‘repenting crimes he committed, hoping to find a way to mitigate them’. There is nothing to be said against this transformation itself, but the question is that Kedou’s reflection and redemption are based on his

32 Ibid., p. 336. 33 Mo Yan. Frog. Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009:

p. 323. 34 Ibid., p. 179.

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failure to understand reality. He always never realised that the harm he did to Chen Mei could never be compensated with money, which was also a torment upon ‘life’, just as he had done to Wan Renmei. It was just because of his inability to make out the reality that Kedou could only make a reflection on history and make atonement by way of committing crimes. What’s more, the historical writing he had been trying hard to create finally became fragments floating outside the course of time for the loss of reality as its direction.

4 Historical Experiences Expressed in Literary Form From the analysis above, it can be concluded as follows. On the one hand, Mo Yan’s Frog coincides with the topic of ‘biopolitics’, that is, the issue of oppression of ‘life’ in two different ‘political’ systems. On the other hand, it also raises the question of how a writer presents this topic in a literary way. As for Kedou, a lover of literature, he obviously could neither learn the issue of ‘biopolitics’ in contemporary society nor complete his writing about history. Although he spoke highly of the spirit of reflecting on record in his letters to Sugiya Yoshihito, ironically, he did not qualify for it. In my view, deficiency in the ability to make a historical reflection resulted in the malposition between Kedou’s five letters and the body of the novel. Moreover, from Kedou’s final piece of playwriting, it was evident that though he had intended to write about his aunt’s whole life, clearing up the sixty-year history, what he finally finished was nothing but a piece of writing without involving time and history. As Croce said, all history is that of the present. Therefore, any reflection on history should be based on the correct understanding of the present. When Kedou was repenting of all he had done as an ‘accomplice’ in implementing the family planning policy, he neglected the fact that a new ‘biopolitics’ by his side was tormenting and killing ‘life’ again. Thus, he could not complete his writing about history in the real sense. As he said in his fourth letter, ‘since writing could make an atonement, I would keep on writing’, his writing became nothing but a tool for his ‘redemption’. However, like Kedou and the aunt who killed ‘life’ again to ‘atone for their crimes’, Kedou’s writing could not virtually help him to attain redemption. After completing the play, he could do just to prompt Sugiya Yoshihito this

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question, ‘Is it true that a soul entangled with a guilty feeling may never expect deliverance?’. From this perspective, there is no doubt that Mo Yan’s Frog , published on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, is of great practical significance. It addresses inquiries into the oppression of ‘life’ in contemporary society and reflects on how we will convey our historical experiences and turn them into literature. When it comes to this question, indeed, we cannot commit a crime again ‘at present’ just for the atonement of ‘past’ crimes or refuse to reflect in the name of reviewing history that Kedou did in the novel. Yet a serious problem in the current Chinese society is that people, like Kedou, are prone to be immersed in rejecting and repenting of the two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s, unable to respond to what is changing today’s society appropriately. Just so indulged in such an atmosphere, the literature of our age can neither express the era of us nor write about history. In the end, it goes the same way out of account as in Kedou’s nineact play Frog . Incompetence at this level likely shows what is critical and significant in Mo Yan’s writing, while the value of literature emerges from writings of this type.

Mo Yan and William Faulkner: Construction and Interpretation of Folk Mythology Yingfeng Li

In October 1984, the Chinese translation of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by Mr. Li Wenjun was published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. In December of the same year, Mo Yan, a student in the Literature Department of PLA Academy of Art, ran into it. ‘Enlightened by his Yoknapatawpha County, I got a nerve to write about my northeast Gaomi in the novels’.1 Then, he started a ‘Mo Yan whirlwind’ throughout China. Together with Garcia Marquez, the writer of One Hundred Years of Solitude, William Faulkner once greatly influenced the generation of Chinese ‘root-seeking’ writers in the mid-1980s. However, in the following decade, if the creations of these writers are taken into consideration, it is only Mo Yan who resembles Faulkner in choosing a consistent theme for his writing, adopting a style of writing of his will and expressing the pathos of spiritual kind. Like Faulkner, Mo 1 Mo Yan. ‘The Robber Is Always Bolder Than the Predecessor’. [EB/OL]. http:// www.jcrb.com. 2001–2003.

Source: Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages, 2002(1): pp. 90–94. Y. Li (B) PLA University of Foreign Languages, Luoyang, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6_14

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Yan has constructed his own folk mythology. But the two writers have interpreted ‘mythology’ differently, displaying different cultural connotations and personalities. This article focuses on exploring the influence of Faulkner on Mo Yan, on how much Mo Yan has accepted Faulkner’s ideas, and what he has violated in the course of acceptance. As for Mo Yan, the most significant enlightenment Faulkner has brought to him should be the topic related to ‘history’. History is the core subject of ‘folk mythology’. Whether Ybknapatawpha County or northeast Gaomi, both of them return to history using storytelling, memorising, and even conceiving, constructing an unlimited domain of time and a symbolic spiritual homeland within limited space. Yet as two different homelands, they are provided with other times and history, with a profound discrepancy in cultures embodied in different areas. The South of the United States, though once advancing politically and culturally, had been declining before the Civil War, and everything after that was a nightmare. We should keep in mind that the rise of ‘Southern literature’ does not stand for the recovery of the South. On the contrary, it is a sentimental attachment to the homeland rooted in blood, and a dual reflection on tradition and modernity after the Southern practice irrevocably became irretrievably corrupt. As a representative of American ‘Southern literature’ and the hardcore in American literature’s ‘modernisation’ process, Faulkner has in his novels involved acute contradictions between tradition and modernity and complicates spiritual orientations. He criticises the seclusion and the ossification of the South and ridicules the cruelty of modern civilisation. While he is rethinking the alienation of capitalist society profoundly, he also reflects on the sinking of ‘tender affection’ into oblivion in the hierarchical system. Thus, he is named ‘the simplest of countrymen, the most painful of modern intellectuals, the most audacious of literature writers, and the most conventional of ethicists’.2 He portrays the decadence of the whole Southern society, which becomes a wilderness of bloodiness in his writing. Yet, he poses himself as a countryman who nourishes his flesh and soul with nature. Taking everything into consideration, Faulkner denies the tradition. He conveys ‘hatred’ with the passion of ‘love’. Quentin, the most crucial figure in Faulkner’s works, once at the end of a novel, announces ‘in the

2 Ousby, I. An Introduction to 50 American Novels. Trans. Wang Wensheng & Shen Lei. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1991.

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chilly air’ loudly: ‘I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!’3 He is acting farewells to his past. Shortly afterwards, the Southerner who ‘does not hate’ ends his life on his own accord. Into his historical theme of ‘folk mythology’, Faulkner pours a type of time-consciousness that is entirely modern, even excessively advanced those days. The present is existing in history. The relationship between the past and the present is that the former is continuously interpreted by the latter. The reason why the homeland becomes a myth is that the historical time embodied in it is a structure that is beckoning and waiting to be developed and recast. In other words, ‘tradition’ does not exist at all, for all traditions point to the future. The significance of tradition in different guises will be explored by ‘the present’ time and again, while ‘the present’ confirms itself through explorations of tradition once after another. Faulkner’s nostalgic style of ‘Southern complex’ is in nature a farewell ceremony, bidding farewell to the Southern tradition using complicated spiritual thinking and type of writing. How Faulkner handles the historical theme as a whole has dramatically influenced Mo Yan, including positioning himself as a ‘countryman’, his recollection and metaphor of the hometown, the conflicts between tradition and modernity, and the numerous sentence patterns as complicated and fanciful as nightmares. Mo Yan said: ‘After reading works of Faulkner, I felt as if awakened from a dream; some novels would talk sheer nonsense like that… As a result, I threw his books aside and began writing my own’.4 It is worth noting that Mo Yan puts great emphasis on writing of his own, claiming that he has not finished reading The Sound and the Fury up until now. Inspired by Faulkner, Mo Yan wrote about his hometown and its history. His interpretation of the relationship between tradition and modernity, and even the writing style and sentence structure, are in similar forms but with different connotations of his creation. Compared with the concrete history of the South of America like that of Yoknapatawha County, northeast Gaomi is more like a symbol or an account in imagination. So faint is the regional characteristics in Mo Yan’s novels. He has poured some myth throughout ancient China with its courage and passion into that boundless sorghum land. On the head page 3 Faulkner, W. Absalom, Absalom!. Trans. Li Wenjun. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2000. 4 Mo Yan. ‘The Robber Is Always Bolder Than the Predecessor’. [EB/OL]. http:// www.jcrb.com. 2001–03.

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of Red Sorghum Clan, Mo Yan writes down his famous words: ‘This book is dedicated to calling up the spirit of the brave departed and the wrongly aggrieved wandering about in the vast expanse of bright-red sorghum fields of my hometown. As your unworthy descendant, I am ready to gauge out my heart that has been soaked black through in the marinade of soy sauce, have it minced and placed in three bowls, and then presented on the sorghum field. May you have a good taste of my offering! Have a good taste!’.5 The undisguised worship of ancestors reflected in his words is a profound identification of China’s traditional concept of ethics. As a result, here evolve the differences in cultural ideas and even the thinking modes. Both of them originate from the anxiety of modernity, handle the themes of history and time, and cherish their deep affection for the past and tradition in the same way. Still, Faulkner takes leave of the practice in the contradiction between tradition and modernity, while Mo Yan holds the past in high esteem by contrasting it with the present. With his deep love for the practice in older days so pure and true, Mo Yan leads it off in his writing with great eloquence. In Faulkner’s writing, traditional concepts and modern spirit are presented alternatively, and his value judgement is changing based on specific persons like Quentin. He simultaneously possesses the outworn ideas in ethics as well as the excellent and advanced modern consciousness. However, in Mo Yan’s works, the past and the present are of distinct opposition. Of his novels, those writing about memory and probing into history ‘recount how the ancestors lived their lives in the past years, their [‘my grandpa’’s and ‘my grandma’’s] bold and unrestrained lives, and unfettered legendary experiences, while some others depict the countryside life, the peasants’ emotions and the living conditions, as well as the pressure and the distortion that humanity has suffered in contemporary era’.6 The glory of the past and the trifling of life are sharply opposed in the two types of novels and characters. What should be made explicit is that the two pairs of concepts—‘the past and the present’ and ‘tradition and modernity’ do not entirely correspond. The former in Mo Yan’s novels, included in the thinking of modernity, is

5 Quoted from the words printed on the head page of Mo Yan’s Frog published by PLA Literature and Art Publishing House in 1997. 6 Hong Zicheng. Contemporary Chinese Literary History. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999: p. 330.

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a remarkable transformation and selection of the latter as a basic proposition. Confronted with the topic of ‘history’ introduced by Faulkner, Mo Yan has never indulged himself in the abstract thinking of ‘time’ the way Westerners have adopted. Instead, he is bound up worrying about the degradation of ‘species’, transforming the time philosophy out of deep thinking in Faulkner’s novels into a frequent justification for full-blood and cross-breed. For more than a decade, works created in the period from Red Sorghum to Big Breasts and Wide Hips have run through the wit and erudition about ‘species’ in Mo Yan’s folk mythology. It is always representative of the dignified and profound Chinese culture with dialectical spirits to esteem the past over the present and borrows ancient lessons to criticise the current practices. In other words, the admiration of ‘the past’ all along makes an implicit allusion to ‘the present’. Since the ‘May Fourth Movement’ in 1919, ‘the opposition between the past and the present’ has become an extremely complex ‘modernistic discourse’ in the process of ‘modernity’ in China. Mo Yan’s passion, anxiety, and agony gush out between his worship of ancestors and his disappointment in people today. Such a ‘shift’ in his acceptance of Faulkner’s ‘historical’ theme also shows that the specific context is different from that of the West in the process of China’s modernity. Nevertheless, it is filled with valid feelings and deep meditation on the real world. When it comes to narrating techniques of the text, Mo Yan and Faulkner share obvious similarities, but they also have distinct differences. Here just such two aspects as style and image characteristics are taken into consideration. From the perspective of stylistic structure, the narration of both writers is open-ended, and they both tend to increase the capacity of narration by overlapping and condensing the event time. Derived from a profusion of complex sentence patterns in Faulkner’s writing, the ‘unkempt’ style created by Mo Yan also arouses a wealth of association and grandeur. The difference lies in that Mo Yan adopts a large amount of parenthesis, and puts one straggly subordinate clause after another in an appositional relationship. What happens in the past, present, and future are arranged, entangled together via different tenses. At times a single sentence just brings about a complete story, thus turning it into an integrated micro-world that seems diverse but logically structured. As for the successor, it appears that Mo Yan’s novels are heavily loaded with images in respect to the sentence structure. ‘Such a writing style of strong emotional experiences is connected with ardent desire for vitality

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with primitive and wild nature’.7 What matters in Mo Yan’s sentences is not time or logic but space and sense. Such ‘embellished’ and ‘unkempt’ sentence structures, when stretched into chapters, often result in ‘afterclap’ paragraphs, which dissociate themselves from the main lines and go their way to create vibes or tastes of some kind. In his late work Big Breasts and Wide Hips , images seem refined in sentences, yet the ‘embellished’ details and paragraphs are written in a more professional and skilled way. Among them are pure descriptions of local customs and practices, mystical people, and anecdotes (like the scene in which ‘Zhang Tianci leads the corpses back home’). The linear time is often overwhelmed by details, yet no strict logical rules are required for what would go on in fact. According to Aristotle in Western poetic traditions, ‘episodic plots of this kind are the worst of all’. ‘The so-called episodic plots refer to those hung together without any causal relationship at all’. Never can such episodic plots be found in Faulkner’s novels, but they are quite accessible in Mo Yan’s works. Mr. Pu Andi once made a pertinent analysis of the differences between the Eastern and the Western narrative structures. ‘The “imitation” of human experiences in narrative art is at times conveyed by adopting a “chronological” model, but at other times by some kind of “spatial” model’.8 In contrast, Faulkner’s narrating style, whether in specific sentence patterns or structural frameworks, is a presentation of a stereoscopic time model deducted from contemporary philosophical concepts of the West. At the same time, Mo Yan’s type of writing bears more narrative traditions of China with a more prominent impression of space, which, without consideration of excessive rhetoric, can be labelled as ‘the stylish and the ethnic’.9 As such, the spurts of his imposing manners are of natural and free creation. As for the selection of images, Faulkner and Mo Yan have adopted some unique ones to interpret their topics and ‘history’ in their eyes, respectively. Interestingly, the most outstanding images are about ‘human species’ and essential human survival, which also embodies the differences in history and space. For Faulkner, it is about race, while for Mo Yan, it

7 Hong Zicheng. Contemporary Chinese Literary History. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1999: p. 330. 8 Pu Andi. Chinese Narratology. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1996: p. 57. 9 Ibid.

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is an analogy between ‘sex’ and politics. Faulkner’s minute examination of the reasons for the decline of the South touches on the crux of racial discrimination at the very beginning, which yet is presented in the process of development. In The Sound and the Fury, published in 1920, the image of the black maid Dilsey was granted by Faulkner more reason, mercy, and warmth than those of the white nobility, thus starting the image of ‘race’. In the works after that, ‘race’ gradually evolved into the key factor of dramatic conflicts, turning ‘racial conflicts into the most powerful image standing for the past, of which only the present can narrate the buried history’.10 Twelve years after the publication of The Sound and the Fury, Light in August was published, focusing on Joe Christmas, whose racial identity was unknown. His family background was a mystery, and ‘his behaviour was neither black nor white’, which made his fellow townsmen ‘go crazy’. His alienation from the black and the white groups finally resulted in his dual destructions, physically and mentally. Again in Absalom, Absalom!, the discovery of racial identity became the core and the most serious of all events suspended in the whole book, which so profoundly disclosed the root of the decline in the South. However, what is focused on under Faulkner’s discussion about the image of ‘the South’ has nothing to do with politics, but what concerns is how people can be born with the right to live freely and equally, and whether people can maintain their spirits to sympathise, commiserate, love, and sacrifice. Similarly, there is also a plot for Mo Yan’s writing about ‘sex’, which gives its first appearance in Red Sorghum. It is a kind of worship for the female or a release of personal emotions. Later on, Mo Yan shows special interest in his Joy and other works of the kind at a time when there is just ‘discourses on sex’ and ‘image of sex’ widespread in the literary circle. Till the publication of Big Breasts and Wide Hips , the issue of ‘sex’, underneath the image of ‘maternity’, rises to become a symbol and rather an abstract topic. In this book, the images get repeated everywhere, from the title to the content. Even the basic plot about characters, for example, the life experiences of the seven daughters in the Shangguan family, work to strengthen the topic of sex. A most interesting phenomenon is that the image of sex or the topic of sex is always interwoven with the image or the topic of politics, so sex becomes more often a metaphor for politics. However, the human nature 10 Elliott, E. The Columbia History of the American Novels. Trans. Zhu Tongbo, et al. Chengdu: Sichuan Lexicographical Press, 1994: p. 750.

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hidden in it has gradually faded after Red Sorghum. In Big Breasts and Wide Hips , too strong symbolic colours are granted to the images of sex and maternity, and their excessive repetitions make them less implicit but rather stereotyped. As far as the conception is concerned, Big Breasts and Wide Hips deals with a quite profound topic. Unfortunately, the overly heavy ‘political complex’ and the stereotyped-looking symbolic writing style efface the vital power and connotation possessed by the image of sex itself. We know that Mo Yan has revealed more political passion when writing about sex and human nature with diligent care. At the same time, Faulkner has expressed his respect and love for humanity and humankind from a more profound depth when he spares no effort to expose the evil inside racial politics. At that point, what Mo Yan has done is not worth that of Faulkner. To Faulkner, history emerges mainly as a vocative structure to be interpreted. In the course of interpretation, some elements are destroyed, abandoned, and forgotten while others are constructed and reconstructed. The Sound and the Fury, the most important of all representative works, is just a demonstration of double efforts in destruction and construction. The steps are full of hardships and grievances. In its revelation regarding the South’s decline, the works take the image of the black maid Dilsey as the embodiment of warm wishes. While breaking the traditional structure of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner tries to tell a complete story with a ‘quadruple’ para-structure. In such a structure, all suspicion and doubts in terms of interpretation eventually become a subversive force against the traditional forms and concepts and turn into the internal tension in the novel with rich implications due to diversified differences. Another critical piece of his works is Absalom, Absalom!. Elliott calls it an ‘explanatory novel’.11 Faulkner arranges it in a structure similar to that of a detective novel whose explanatory narration provides reliable power of logic and charm of thinking. The extremely stressful and oppressive pain of spirit in the novel has given readers a heart-shaking impression. The most heart-touching of all is about the two young men with ties of kinship, their mutual support, their aspiration and willpower, as well as their anxiety and destruction. By destroying themselves, they have manifested humankind’s ‘courage, glory, hope, pride, sympathy,

11 Elliott, E. The Columbia History of the American Novels. Trans. Zhu Tongbo, et al. Chengdu: Sichuan Lexicographical Press, 1994: p. 750.

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mercy and spirit of sacrifice’.12 This spiritual value, which has been rediscovered and interpreted, transcends politics and time. It will continue to build and present the future of the South of America/America/humanity. As to Mo Yan, history mainly provides him with an energy resource for subversion. What he writes about often keeps on wobbling between humanity and politics, which might result from China’s national conditions. As for Mo Yan himself, his concern of modern China seems to have been invested with much consideration in politics. In between a good many of his lines is displayed a complex of ‘rebellion’, as he writes in ‘I Hate All Spirits’, ‘Contemporary literature is nothing but a double-yolked egg, of which one yolk is the spirit of blasphemy, and the other is selfconsciousness. Both seem irrelevant, yet they are in lockstep, maintaining in the egg of literature. At present, criticism of Spirits is virtually that of bureaucracy as well as that of politics, and which acts as a fanfare of trumpets to evoke self-consciousness. Therefore, the criticism of Spirits changes into a catalyst for democratic politics’.13 Indeed, many of his works represented by the series of Red Sorghum have made profound impact on the concepts of war, history, revolution, and even literature of an era, which has brought about a kind of political subversion and carnival. When it comes to the status of Big Breasts and Wide Hips in Mo Yan’s folk mythology series, ‘it could be regarded as his elaborate summary on his novel writing for ten years’.14 It is about the great sufferings of our nation and the tenacious survival of peasants at the bottom of society. Both are still going on up till now. However, it is a puzzle that the tragic feeling is yet limited with several scenes describing death. What’s more, the sexual and political discourses in the novel are equipped with solid challenges and with willful rebelling attitudes, while a stream of smouldering resentment and vicious joy is flowing here and there in between the lines from time to time. Take the scene of all widows remarrying simultaneously, for example. Except for the farce effect of bantering, it is hard to taste human nature and beauty, to judge the narrators thinking and wisdom which should have gone beyond that of the characters. Writing like this also runs counter to the public image 12 Faulkner, W. ‘William Faulkner’s Lecture on Nobel Prize in Literature’. In Li Wenjun (Ed.). Essays on William Faulkner. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1980: p. 255. 13 Mo Yan. ‘I Hate All Spirits’. In Zhang Zhizhong (Ed.). On Mo Yan. Beijing: China Social Science Press, 1980: p. 291. 14 Huang Ziping. Edge Reading. Jilin: Liaoning Educational Press, 2001: pp. 91–192.

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of ‘maternity worship’ in the novel, which has virtually ‘brought up unnecessary ramifications’. Instead, maternity worship should be taken as the suppression of the political discourses on sexual discourse. Once the suppression of this kind works, the image of maternity or humanity would be reduced to a rigid illusion with a type of artificial polishing. Big Breasts and Wide Hips is undoubtedly a severe novel with the devotion of the most significant efforts. Also, the association of meanings between sex and politics revealed utilising symbolic writing can indeed contain the most profound connotations of human nature. The only pity is that its political discourse remains just at the level of subversion, where it cannot gather enough energy for deconstruction. At times it suppresses humanity and excludes the difference of meaning with the quite explicit binary oppositions in politics. However, it should have been holding onto the main topic of ‘sex’ to explore a much wider space for interpretation. On many occasions, Mo Yan acknowledged Faulkner’s significant influence on his literary creation but then made fun of himself, saying: ‘The robber is always bolder than the predecessor’, which once again stresses his ‘rebellious’ spirit and subversive consciousness. Mo Yan’s folk mythology stems from Faulkner, but everything has more or less made a certain ‘shift’ from that in Faulkner’s creation, whether it concerns topic, form, or inherent spirit. This shift in writing has its gains and losses, yet may, after all, be accepted as an inspiring and highly successful artistic practice. Interpretation of history demonstrates the writer’s personality and creativity and reveals cultural differences, reflecting the challenging but unique process of modernity in China.

Appendix: Partial Lists of Mo Yan’s Works in Both Chinese and English

Chinese Title

English Title

夜鱼 奇遇 怀抱鲜花的女人 白棉花 粮食 春夜雨潇潇 丑兵 雪花儿 因为孩子 放鸭 金色鲤鱼 我和羊 民间音乐 岛上的风 雨中的河 黑沙滩 透明的红萝卜 草鞋窨子 石磨 白狗秋千架 球状闪电 金发婴儿 大风 枯河

Fishing in the Night Fortuitous Encounter A Woman with a Bundle of Flowers White Cotton Food Supplies A Rainy Spring Night An Ugly Soldier Snowflakes On Account of Children Duck Herding Golden Carp Sheep and I Folk Music The Wind on the Island River in the Rain Black Beach The Transparent Carrot Cellar for Straw Sandals Millstone White Dog and the Swing Ball Lightning Baby with Blond Hair Gale Dry River (continued)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6

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222

APPENDIX: PARTIAL LISTS OF MO YAN’S WORKS IN BOTH …

(continued) Chinese Title

English Title

秋水 五个孛孛 马蹄 三匹马 爆炸 美丽的自杀 断手 红高粱 狗道 筑路 大风 苍蝇•门牙 奇死 高粱酒 高粱殡 欢乐 弃婴 红蝗 罪过 猫事荟萃 飞艇 夜渔 翱翔 屠户的女儿 麻风的儿子 姑妈的宝刀 红耳朵 梦境与杂种 战友重逢 模式与原型 灵药 铁孩 二姑随后就到 丰乳肥臀 拇指铐 蝗虫奇谈 长安大道上的骑驴美人

Autumn Flood Five Buns Horse Hoof Three Horses Explosion A Beautiful Suicide Broken Arm Red Sorghum The Way of Dog Road Construction Gale The Fly, The Incisor Strange Death Sorghum Wine Funeral in Sorghum Field Joy Abandoned Baby Red Grasshopper Sin Anecdotes of Cats Airship Fishing in the Night Soaring Away Butcher’s Daughter Leper’s Son Grandaunt’s Treasured Knife Red Ear Dream and Bastard A Veteran Reunion Pattern and Prototype A Miraculous Cure Iron Boy Aunt’ll Come Soon Big Breasts and Wide Hips Thumb Cuff Strange Stories about Grasshopper A Beauty on a Donkey in Chang’an Avenue A Long Race Thirty Years Ago Bull Battle in the Alamo Woods A Wolf Hung on a Apricot Tree

三十年前一次长跑比赛 牛 白杨林里的战斗 一匹倒挂在杏树上的狼

(continued)

APPENDIX: PARTIAL LISTS OF MO YAN’S WORKS IN BOTH …

(continued) Chinese Title

English Title

我们的七叔 祖母的门牙 师傅越来越幽默

Our Uncle the Seventh Grandma’s Incisor Shifu: You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh Treasure Map Shenyuan Garden Wild Mule Son’s Foe Commander’s Woman Clan of Scent A Beauty of Snow and Ice Headstand Red Sorghum Clan The Garlic Ballads Thirteen Steps The Republic of Wine The Herbivorous Family Red Forest Sandalwood Death Pow! Red Forest Cotton-selling Road Old Gun Casting Sword

藏宝图 沈园 野骡子 儿子的敌人 司令的女人 嗅味族 冰雪美人 倒立 红高粱家族 天堂蒜薹之歌 十三步 酒国 食草家族 红树林 檀香刑 四十一炮 红树林 售棉大路 老枪 铸剑

223

Index

A absurdity, 66, 67, 71, 116, 119, 122, 123, 147, 156, 160, 162, 177, 194 accelerating zone, 86, 87 addiction, 91 aesthetic appreciation, 153 aesthetic fantasies, 49 aesthetic judgement, 3, 165 Ah, Cheng, 26 Airship, 49, 55 alienation, 18, 62, 212, 217 A Long Race Thirty Years Ago, 3, 4, 64, 65 ambiguity, 5, 37 Anti-rightist Movement, 201 artistic language, 20, 185 Assmann, Jan, 84 atonement, 203–205, 209, 210 authority, 50, 62, 63, 86, 121, 159, 187 avant-garde school, 31 avant-garde writers, 32

B Baby with Blond Hair, 94, 97, 140, 151 Bakhtin, M.M., 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 71–73, 129 Ball Lightning , 30, 94, 97, 148, 151 Berlin International Film Festival, 16 Big Breasts and Wide Hips , 13, 17, 18, 30–33, 35, 46, 69, 70, 91, 111, 155, 156, 163, 165, 166, 180, 181, 186, 215–220 biopolitics, 199, 200, 203, 204, 209 bizarre style, 139 blended techniques, 148 Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 20 Boxer Movement, 6–8, 183, 189, 190 Butcher’s Daughter, 63 C carnivalesque, 59, 60, 71–73, 126–137 character, 3, 4, 7, 14, 17, 18, 28, 32, 33, 53, 60, 61, 63–65, 69, 73, 75, 93, 95, 102, 105, 118,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. Jiang (ed.), Hallucinatory Realism in Chinese Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0666-6

225

226

INDEX

127–129, 131–133, 135, 137, 141, 142, 144–146, 149, 151, 153, 157, 158, 161, 164, 165, 171, 173–175, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191, 193, 199, 207, 214, 217, 219 Chen, Sihe, 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 43, 46, 58, 115 childhood narrative, 90, 91, 97, 101, 102, 132 Chinese bearing, 41, 42 Chinese civilisation, 6 Chinese experience, 4, 5, 49–73 Chinese soul, 9 Chinese spirit, 4, 8 Chinese style, 33, 34, 41, 188 Chronicle of a Blood Merchant , 181, 182 chronological order, 148 circularity, 8 civilisation, 7, 21, 54, 96, 101, 133, 170, 182, 183, 188–190, 212 classical narrative, 30 collective image, 79 collective memory, 76, 77, 80, 82, 84, 87, 88 comedy, 2, 71, 183 comic effect, 61 commune economy, 84–86 complex, 50, 78, 88, 91, 93, 97, 99, 100, 144, 153, 164, 171, 202, 215, 218, 219 complexity, 5, 12, 17, 21, 43, 86, 87, 156, 159, 165, 186 condemnation, 52, 55, 60, 69, 148 conflict, 2, 24, 26, 27, 31, 35, 92, 105, 142, 213, 217 congregation, 55–57 conjecture, 93 consciousness, 2, 16, 32, 40, 55, 57, 67, 80–84, 87, 126, 128, 129,

133, 147, 148, 150, 153, 158, 159, 171, 186, 207, 214, 219 contemporary realism, 176 corporal realism, 61 countryside, 35, 41, 43, 93, 101, 104, 114, 121, 123, 156, 186, 214 couplet form, 41, 104 creative writing, 27, 29 creativity, 12, 99, 220 critic, 15, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 34, 40, 58, 89, 90, 165 Cultural Revolution, 4, 104, 112, 114, 121, 158, 159, 203 D deconstruction, 60, 69, 87, 137, 220 defamiliarisation, 25 degradation, 53, 73, 215 depiction, 16, 97, 141, 151, 161, 193 despotism, 62 determinism, 51 dignity, 14, 63, 70, 180 Ding, Ling, 114 discourse, 7, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 34, 42–47, 59, 61, 80, 96, 127, 128, 135, 219, 220 discrimination, 91, 217 disequilibria, 86 displacement, 26, 206 diversity, 34, 46 dreamland, 86 Dry River, 30, 91, 94–97, 125, 151 duality, 79, 84, 88 E Eagleton, Terry, 92 Earthbound China, 54 Eastern aesthetics, 26, 27 Eastern wisdom, 28 eccentricity, 1 Eight-Power Allied Forces, 6, 189

INDEX

elegance, 20 elite culture, 39 elite literature, 36, 137 Englund, Peter, 12 enlightenment, 87, 182, 191, 192, 212 ethical order, 85, 132 ethics, 7, 17, 26, 127–129, 136, 137, 187, 214 evolutionism, 51 exaggeration, 4, 6, 66, 148 execution, 6, 108, 113, 157, 189, 191, 193, 194 experientialism, 62 exploitation, 33 exploration, 17, 21, 26, 33, 38, 41, 80, 97, 141, 213 Explosion, 94, 97, 125 F familiarisation, 62 familiarity, 33 family planning policy, 199, 201–205, 208, 209 farce, 56–58, 62, 171, 219 Faulkner, William, 33, 211–218, 220 feces, 52, 59, 153 Fei, Xiaotong, 54 Feng, Deying, 25 festival, 57, 58, 60, 71–73 fiction, 7, 15, 16, 19, 25, 28, 30–33, 36–39, 43, 59, 61, 126 First Love, 49, 64 fixed discourse, 34 folk art, 180, 186, 187 folk culture, 39, 71, 73, 181, 183, 186, 187, 190, 192 folk history, 182, 183, 185 folklife, 180, 183–187, 189, 192, 193 folk literature, 32, 125, 180 folk mythology, 212, 213, 215, 219, 220

227

folk narrative, 32, 37–42, 44, 46, 69, 183 folkness, 50–55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 70–73, 180, 183 folk tales, 12 folk voice, 132, 182, 183 folk world, 39, 51, 52, 65–70 folk writing, 36, 37, 42 Food Supplies , 49, 69 forgetfulness, 54, 55, 57, 60, 69 formal aesthetics, 25 framework, 15, 35, 57, 75, 87, 149, 216 free speech, 183 Frog , 13, 16, 197–200, 202, 206, 207, 209, 210 G Gale, 40, 93, 144 Gao, Yuanbao, 40–42 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 5, 32, 147, 150, 211 Ge, Hongbing, 40 genre, 14, 16, 32, 132–135, 186 genuineness, 34 globalisation, 14, 30, 35, 41 Goldblatt, Howard, 103 Golden Bear Award, 16 Grandma’s Incisor, 8 grass-roots literature, 36 H Halbwachs, Maurice, 77, 78 hallucination, 24, 27 hallucinatory literature, 28 hallucinatory realism, 5, 12, 15, 25, 26, 28–31, 33, 38, 46, 125, 148, 188 historical fable, 182 historical theme, 36, 213 historicism, 60

228

INDEX

history, 4–9, 12, 16, 18, 20, 23–27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 38–41, 43–47, 54, 60, 70, 72, 73, 75, 84–88, 94, 103, 112, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 131, 135–137, 141–143, 148, 159–161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 175, 176, 179–183, 187, 188, 198, 204, 207–209, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 220 homeland, 32, 33, 36, 37, 69, 73, 212, 213 hometown, 5, 43, 60, 66, 70, 73, 85–87, 93, 128, 136, 140, 157, 179, 192, 213, 214 Hometown Series , 181 Hu, Heqing, 26, 28 humanism, 60 humanity, 3, 26, 27, 52, 101, 142, 160, 164, 191, 205, 214, 218–220 humour, 18, 61, 62, 66, 71 hunger, 33, 50, 56, 58, 70, 83, 95, 98, 111 I idealism, 60 ideology, 3, 25–27, 60–62, 88, 118, 123, 132, 165 illusion, 50, 80–83, 87, 99, 100, 129, 220 image, 18, 19, 24–26, 31, 41, 69, 70, 73, 80–83, 90, 94, 99, 103, 104, 143–147, 149, 151, 163, 186, 187, 207, 215–220 imagination, 12, 13, 15–17, 19, 29, 32, 37, 40, 42, 43, 46, 57, 60, 72, 87, 98, 101, 120, 123, 126, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 152, 168, 174, 213 imaginative narration, 103 imitation, 26, 80, 88, 148, 216

implicit structure, 58 impressionistic realism, 26 incarnation, 79, 104, 110, 120, 186 individualised style, 49 individualised writing, 38 individuality, 13, 27, 37, 39, 125, 185, 187, 192 inhibition, 96, 190, 200 injustice, 90, 91, 101, 115 intergenerational metaphor, 80 interpretation, 1, 4, 27, 35, 41, 45, 47, 49, 76, 83, 99, 104, 127, 167, 181, 200, 213, 218, 220 introspective literature, 94, 125 irony, 33, 36, 60–62

J Jia, Pingwa, 35, 43 jocosity, 61 Joy, 4, 40, 49, 51, 53, 64, 70, 71, 97, 217

K Kinkley, Jeffrey C., 24

L Lacan, 101 language, 1, 13, 14, 21, 32, 36, 58, 61–63, 72, 73, 75, 96, 102, 112, 125, 126, 132–134, 136, 137, 140, 144, 151, 168, 176, 177, 181, 186 laureate, 12, 20, 21 legends, 3, 27, 141, 146–148, 176, 182 Lei, Da, 26, 28, 89, 139, 142 leopard tail, 6, 180, 182 Leper’s Son, 64, 65 Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out , 13, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 103, 104,

INDEX

110, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123 life experience, 18, 40, 42, 97, 98, 112, 135, 159, 204, 207, 208, 217 Li, Jianjun, 33, 44 likeness, 144 literary analysis, 28 literary arena, 23, 24, 31, 45 literary context, 39, 45 literary creation, 13, 14, 17, 30, 41, 155, 166, 198, 220 literary critic, 42, 45, 47 literary criticism, 23, 27, 29, 34, 41, 42, 45–47, 92, 166 literary genre, 32 literary history, 7, 16, 20, 23, 27–29, 34, 39–41, 45–47, 75, 94, 161 literary inspiration, 31 literary paradigm, 27 literary trends, 28 literary values, 24 literature, 1, 2, 9, 11–14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 27, 29–33, 35, 36, 38–42, 45, 47, 49, 87, 88, 90, 94, 101, 112, 125, 135–137, 139, 141, 153, 163–166, 169, 172–174, 186, 198, 199, 209, 210, 212, 219 Li, Tuo, 29–31 Liu, Zhenyun, 181 localisation, 30, 33–36 localised writing, 31–33, 37 locality, 180 local opera, 37, 40, 44, 184, 185 local soil, 31, 32, 34–36 logos, 51 loneliness, 90, 91, 94, 121, 175 M magical realism, 24–27, 115 Mainland China, 32, 173

229

mainstream culture, 187 mainstream memory, 84 Malmqvists, Göran, 12 Mao Dun Literature Prize, 13, 16 Maoqiang arias, 6, 37, 44, 46, 179, 180, 182, 184–190, 192, 193, 195 materialisation, 53 May Fourth Movement, 13, 29, 40, 180, 215 melancholy, 14, 26 memory, 8, 28, 53–58, 60, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83–87, 93, 108, 118, 121, 123, 161, 185, 193, 201, 214 memory field, 83, 84, 86–88 metempsychoses, 103, 110 military literature, 139 mnemonics, 76, 87 mode, 73, 135, 137, 155, 156, 163, 164, 182, 183 modernisation, 5–7, 159, 212 modernistic literature, 33 modernity, 5, 32, 200, 212–215, 220 modern realism, 29 motivation, 90, 120, 168, 180, 185 Mo Yan, 1–9, 11–21, 23–46, 49–53, 55, 56, 58–67, 69–71, 73, 75–77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85–97, 101–107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 117, 119–121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 132–137, 139–142, 144–146, 148, 150–153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 163, 164, 167–177, 179–186, 188, 197, 199, 200, 203–205, 209–220 N narration, 5, 7, 8, 16, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 50, 58, 60, 62, 68, 70, 71, 73, 94, 101, 102, 104, 110, 112–116, 119, 121, 123, 126,

230

INDEX

129–132, 134, 136, 137, 164, 181–183, 188, 204, 207, 215, 218 narrative, 3, 4, 6–8, 16, 18, 26, 28, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40–43, 46, 51, 58–61, 65, 66, 68–71, 73, 90, 93, 97, 102, 108, 125, 126, 128–133, 135–137, 148, 150, 173, 180, 182, 183, 198, 202, 216 narrative language, 32, 102, 132, 133, 137 narrative style, 26, 40, 42, 44, 46, 90, 97, 102, 126, 131, 137, 183 narrator, 16, 41, 104, 105, 119, 120, 126–128, 130–133, 135, 137, 146, 198, 202 nationalisation, 36 national literature, 34, 35, 174 new-history novels, 181, 182 Nietzsche, F., 54, 55, 79 Night Mooring , 181 Nobel Prize in Literature, 11–14, 20, 21, 150 non-folkness, 51 northeast Gaomi, 32, 38, 51, 55, 57–60, 64, 82, 103, 104, 118, 123, 128, 134, 147, 148, 172, 180, 182, 184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 211–213 novel, 3, 5, 6, 14, 16, 17, 25, 31, 32, 35, 38, 41, 44, 72, 75–78, 82–87, 89, 90, 93, 95–98, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 115–117, 119, 121, 125–131, 134, 136, 137, 140–144, 146, 147, 149–152, 155, 157, 159–161, 163–165, 167–169, 174–177, 179–194, 197–202, 204–207, 210, 212, 218–220 novelette, 96, 100 novelist, 6, 7, 43, 103

O offensiveness, 1 official history, 103, 181 Old Gun, 93, 97, 140, 144, 151 omnipotent perspective, 152, 182 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 5, 147, 211 onlooker culture, 112 onlooker tradition, 112 On the Genealogy of Morals , 54 oppression, 39, 68, 78, 147, 188, 198, 209, 210 optimism, 73, 101 oral narration, 182 originality, 13–16, 21, 28, 73 outlook, 2, 17, 18, 44, 135 overstatement, 113

P parody, 58, 180 peasant economy, 84 People’s Commune, 105, 107–109, 116, 118, 121, 122, 150 perplexity, 101 personality, 4, 17, 38, 39, 63, 137, 141, 151, 159, 183, 184, 191, 194, 220 perspective, 3, 12, 13, 26, 34, 45, 73, 79, 80, 90, 92, 94–97, 102, 108, 131, 132, 136, 137, 148, 152, 153, 162, 163, 181, 198, 202, 206, 208, 210, 215 phoenix head, 6, 180, 182 physiology, 11, 27, 95 play, 15, 21, 47, 112–114, 117, 118, 127, 136, 143, 186, 189, 193, 198, 200, 204, 206–210 plexus, 91 plot, 2, 6, 15, 16, 28, 51, 72, 76, 83, 88, 104, 105, 116, 120, 122, 140, 146–150, 156, 167, 172,

INDEX

175, 176, 186, 202, 207, 216, 217 poetic metaphor, 4 political power, 85 politics, 45, 50, 95, 96, 118, 119, 122, 136, 145, 193, 194, 198–202, 204, 205, 208, 217–220 pop culture, 34, 45 popularisation, 36 pork belly, 6, 180, 182, 188 Pound, Ezra, 100 Pow!, 13, 102 power, 3, 28, 29, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 61, 63, 70, 95, 99, 105, 110, 149, 151, 158, 188–190, 193, 194, 199, 200, 218 presentation, 13, 34, 62, 70, 97, 100, 142, 216 propensity, 94, 174 protagonist, 16, 17, 28, 33, 98, 102, 106, 107, 183, 198, 199, 202, 206 pseudo-folkness, 53 psychoanalytic criticism, 99 psychology, 27, 28, 95, 149 pure literature, 25 Pu, Songling, 32, 42 Q Qian, Zhongshu, 20 Qinhuai River Series , 181 Qinqiang Opera, 35 R Rabelais, Francois, 59, 60, 72, 73 racial degeneration, 27 reactionary work, 155, 156, 162 reading experience, 25, 28, 179, 206 realistic description, 147 realistic spirit, 28

231

recollection, 54, 56, 57, 59, 79, 85, 88, 89, 91, 145, 213 redefinition, 27, 29, 46 Red Forest , 13 Red Grasshopper, 49, 58, 64, 69, 97, 153 Red Sorghum, 3, 16, 63, 64, 69, 90, 97, 130, 139, 140, 143, 145, 149, 151, 215, 217–219 Red Sorghum Clan, 12, 24, 26–28, 110, 125–129, 131–137, 140–143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 163, 176, 181, 186, 214 regionalism, 32 Renaissance, 60 resistance, 33, 36, 76, 127, 139, 141–143, 145, 157, 162, 182, 189, 190 revel, 6, 57, 58, 60, 62 revolution, 16, 33, 53, 63, 156–161, 219 revolutionary discourse, 34 Rice, 181 ritualisation, 34 Road Construction, 49 romanticism, 29, 66 root seeking literature, 27 rural society, 85, 180

S samsara, 120 Sandalwood Death, 5–8, 13, 18, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 111, 113, 179–188, 190, 193 satire, 18, 60, 104, 120–123 self-image, 4, 8, 44, 87 sensibility, 97, 144, 151 sensory images, 97 sentiment, 8, 35, 44, 45, 58, 62, 67–71, 86, 87, 92 sentimentality, 4, 68

232

INDEX

Series of the Hometown of Pterocarya Tree, 181 Shaw, Bernard, 20 Shen, Congwen, 32 shift, 8, 18, 27, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 40, 45, 62, 87, 130, 149, 186, 215, 220 Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, 2, 5 simplification, 4 Sin, 49 sinologist, 12, 23 Slavoj, Žižek, 82 Sochus Oleraceus , 25 social critique, 24, 25 social organisation, 58 sociology, 96 Son’s Foe, 63 species, 18, 96, 176, 215, 216 starvation, 50, 90, 91, 94, 98, 150 state-owned economy, 85 storyteller, 6, 7, 43, 63, 206 storytelling, 6, 12, 15, 16, 32, 37, 40, 42–44, 180, 212 structural experiment, 32 structure, 6, 14, 37, 59, 61, 95, 102, 105, 115, 123, 126, 129, 130, 135, 137, 141, 146, 149, 168, 180, 181, 183, 198, 201, 205, 207, 213, 215, 218 subjectivity, 28, 144, 164, 165 subject matter, 3, 32, 35, 42, 181 Sun, Ge, 34 superficiality, 34 suppression, 91, 96, 104, 191, 201, 208, 220 Su, Tong, 181 swan song, 190, 195 symbolism, 18, 94 T Tao, Yuanming, 32

teleology, 51 The Garlic Ballads , 12, 65, 68, 153, 176 The Herbivorous Family, 12, 111 The Republic of Wine, 12, 64, 91, 167–171, 174–177, 186 The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, 114 The Sound and the Fury, 211, 213, 217, 218 The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, 114 The Sutra of Eightfold Enlightenment , 115 The Swing , 30 The Transparent Carrot , 3, 12, 25, 28, 40, 46, 49, 63, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87–97, 100–102, 125, 140, 144, 145, 148 The True Story of Ah Q , 112 The Way of Dog , 3, 130, 143, 146 Thirteen Steps , 12, 171, 176, 186 Thumb Cuff , 8, 91, 97, 136 Thunderstorm, 97 To Live, 181–183 tradition, 5, 6, 8, 12–14, 17, 19, 27, 29, 30, 32–34, 37–42, 44, 46, 132, 142, 145, 181, 186, 187, 212–214 traditional culture, 85, 187 traditional realism, 27 transcendence, 4, 13, 17–19, 21 transformation, 70, 73, 87, 99, 148, 208, 215 trauma, 94, 96 trauma literature, 94, 114, 125 trivialisation, 5 U ugliness, 126, 133, 135, 136, 151, 153 unconsciousness, 91, 97, 180

INDEX

unlikeness, 144 utopia, 32, 71–73, 176, 207 V vanguard literature, 30, 125, 186 variation, 18, 184, 193 verbal abuse, 51–53 versatility, 26 violence, 46, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 63, 68, 90, 91, 96, 97, 104, 107, 108, 110, 112–114, 155, 180, 194 violent narration, 110, 112, 113, 116, 123 W Wang, Shuo, 1, 176 war, 33, 63, 69, 130, 141–143, 145, 146, 148, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 219 war literature, 139, 141

233

Warren, A., 24 Welleck, R., 24 White Dog , 30, 82, 93, 140 Whitman, 4, 32 Wild Mule, 52, 53, 63, 64, 69, 71 world literature, 12 writing style, 13, 33, 38, 164, 169, 173, 176, 177, 180, 186, 198, 206, 213, 215, 218

Y Ye, Zhaoyan, 181 Yu, Hua, 176, 181, 182

Z Zhang Ailing, 114 Zhang, Dali, 64, 65 Zhang, Jun, 33 Zhang, Qinghua, 31 Zhao, Shuli, 36, 43