A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan By She ...

history from 1950 to 2000. The discussion in this chapteraddresses not only the ways in which Mo Yan inherits and develops Lu Xun’s critical attitude toward history but also how Mo Yan’s conception of history changes during the decade between The Red Sorghum Family and Big Breasts and Wide Hips and between that work and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. On the one hand, Mo Yan attempts to demoralize, so to speak, the moralized history and to go against the official ideology. On the other hand, he tries to problematize history itself by subverting the binary opposition between good and evil, an opposition that had been set up in the old model of historical fiction. Characters are no longer treated as mere embodiments of such positive values as filial piety, faithfulness, and righteousness, or of such negative values as betrayal, disloyalty, and dishonesty. Instead, the characterization of the individuals in Mo Yan’s novels is true to life, full of mixed qualities and human complexities.

In addition, Mo Yan blurs the boundary between history and fiction, confirming Hayden White’s observation that “history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation.”²⁸ For Mo Yan, history is not necessarily progressing. By the same token, the writer denounces the degeneration of the human race. Interestingly, women, romantic attachments, and human sexuality play positive roles in his historiography. In Big Breasts and Wide Hips, he even adopts a philogynous way of writing: he writes adoringly about the female body throughout the book. Put otherwise, Mo Yan vulgarizes the grand narrative of history, making characters from “below” the central figures of his stories and presenting them as larger than life. Georg Lukács’ remark about Walter Scott could easily have been made about Mo Yan: “He writes from the people, not for the people; he writes from their experiences, from their soul.”²⁹

The opening sentences of Sanguo yanyi () [Romance of the three kingdoms] read, “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been” ().³⁰ This neatly summarizes the traditional Chinese belief that history is circular, repetitive. The Chinese also believe that retribution for sin—or more precisely, causality in its karmic sense—is the basic