| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
style, but in general May Fourth literature can be divided into two major categories, one of which is decisively more influential than the other. Mainstream May Fourth literature, led and represented by Lu Xun, was an elite and mission-driven literature that attempted to address and transform multiple maladies of the nascent republic, including the negative aspects of China’s long history as well as crises the country faced from foreign forces. The complement to this kind of didactic literature was market-oriented popular literature, such as the sentimental fiction of the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly school, the apolitical nature of which led to its condemnation by the May Fourth leftists and their successors as ideologically insensitive, politically backward, and culturally decadent. As a result, popular literature and its important writers have by and large been neglected by literary critics in Mainland China. Because the present study does not attempt to carry out research on this second—but not secondary—category of the May Fourth literary phenomenon, I have treated the works of Lu Xun and his followers as the primary representatives of May Fourth literature in the discussion of Mo Yan’s continuity and discontinuity of the spirit of that particular historical period.
May Fourth literature is heavily loaded with the intellectuals’ sense of obligation to save the nation and change society, a sentiment that is best exemplified by Lu Xun’s legendary slide-show incident, a well-known episode in Lu Xun mythology. (For years, people believed that the slide-show incident had indeed taken place until recently when some scholars argued that there was no evidence to prove that it happened.) The young Lu Xun went to Sendai, Japan, to study Western medicine in 1904 because he distrusted traditional Chinese medicine because it failed to cure his father’s tuberculosis and save the old man’s life. One day, a Japanese instructor finished his lecture earlier than usual, so he showed documentary slides to his students of the execution of a Chinese spy during the Russo-Japanese war fought on Chinese soil (1904–1905). At the center of the execution scene was a Chinese man who was accused of having spied on the Japanese for the Russians and therefore faced decapitation by the Japanese. Around him stood a group of Chinese people, apparently strong and healthy, who were watching their fellow