| 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.
of any sense of being a superior spokesman because he sees himself as one of the people whom he is both speaking for and criticizing. Although he does not necessarily attempt to turn his work into a weapon as Lu Xun did, Mo Yan nevertheless speaks for his fellow citizens and thus transforms his fiction into social criticism. Moreover, his writings move in the direction of political or national allegory; this is especially true of the fiction he has produced in later stages of his career. At the same time, however, Mo Yan distinguishes himself from the May Fourth intellectuals as well as from his own contemporaries by his wild imagination, unique employment of language, and an increasingly noticeable playfulness in his later works. These qualities prevent his works from becoming mere exposé; they display the pure pleasure of writing. In other words, for Mo Yan, sometimes writing is just for the sake of writing.
As a thematic study of Mo Yan, this book concentrates on four important foci in Mo Yan’s fiction. The current section has set the stage by presenting a general picture of the literary situation in China and a brief biographical introduction, which serve as context for Mo Yan’s emergence as a fiction writer who both inherited and advanced the legacy of Lu Xun, the precursor and leader of the May Fourth literary movement.
The first chapter discusses Mo Yan’s representation of history, focusing on three of his novels: The Red Sorghum Family, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The first two works are family histories placed in the context of modern Chinese history, and the third is a story about a landlord who was executed and reincarnated during the reign of the ruling party. This chapter examines the ways in which Mo Yan challenges the political orthodoxy by depicting the life of “minor figures” from “below” in a milieu where historical narrative is dominated by the world from “above,” to borrow Georg Lukács’ terms.26 In other words, chapter 1 reveals how Mo Yan’s historical figures are free from ideological dogma within a highly politicized grand narrative. It also analyzes the author’s skeptical attitude, which defies a materialistic conception of progressing history; Mo Yan holds the view that history is regressive and degenerative. In addition, the chapter addresses the changes in Mo Yan’s conception of history during the decades between