| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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Moreover, it is also worth mentioning that Mo Yan carries on Lu Xun’s tradition of fighting against cultural maladies, social injustice, and political failure in both Maoist and post-Mao China, where the political party established by Mao is still in power. Although Lu Xun’s fictional works are largely characterized by cultural and social criticism, Mo Yan’s novels, novellas, and short stories exhibit a much more obvious disapproval with respect to recent and current political circumstances in China. This is certainly not a light undertaking for a long-term army writer who has been part of the state apparatus. This book will examine Mo Yan’s inheritance and development of Lu Xun’s literary spirit as well as how he challenges the official ideology as reflected in revolutionary literature. Given the latter examination, discussions of his subversiveness and dissension in a broad sense are only natural for this study.
This book is thus a thematic study of Mo Yan’s fictional creations within the framework of his continuity with and innovations on Lu Xun’s work against the background of post-Mao China. Because Mo Yan has already been studied broadly under the rubrics of various theories, a close examination of the texts may be of benefit to readers. Rather than attempt an exhaustive analysis of Mo Yan’s fiction, this volume conducts a focused textual study of some representative works in support of the analysis and presents a discussion of several important themes in his books. Mo Yan’s oeuvre is so complex and rich, however, that no single study could possibly cover every work; one can only make selections. Four themes, therefore, serve as focal points for the chapters of this work: (1) Mo Yan’s representation of history, (2) his paradoxical nostalgia, (3) his fancy for writing about violence, (4) and his employment of satire. Through an examination of these themes, this study serves to uncover the energy, imagination, innovation, mission, and passion of this important post-Mao writer through a close reading of his novels and stories. I hope to contribute to the field of Chinese literary criticism by illuminating an image of Mo Yan as at once a successor and a developer of Lu Xun’s legacy and by demonstrating that Mo Yan’s accomplishment is a combination of the May Fourth literary spirit and his own brilliance. Even though Lu Xun is known for both his essays and works of fiction, only