| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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literature, society, history, politics, and language. Indeed, Mo Yan’s complexity is comparable to that of Lu Xun, the most important exponent of May Fourth literature and China’s most-discussed twentieth-century writer, whose works—especially his fictional writings—have become classics of modern Chinese literature. Mo Yan himself has said that Lu Xun is one of the writers from whom he has gained great inspiration. In a book Mo Yan edited in 1999, Suokongli de fangjian: yingxiang wo de shibu duanpian xiaoshuo (
) [A room seen through the keyhole: Ten short stories that have influenced me], he collected ten stories, each by a celebrated writer: Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), Argentinean author Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), James Joyce (1882–1941), D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), Gabriel García Márquez (1927–), William Faulkner (1897–1962), Ivan Sergievich Turgenev (1818–1883), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Japanese writer Tsutomu Minakami (1919–2004), and Lu Xun (1881–1936).5 As this list demonstrates, Lu Xun is the only Chinese writer Mo Yan feels has significantly influenced his own writings.
An examination of Mo Yan’s fiction reveals that he has inherited the literary characteristics of Lu Xun’s work (either consciously or unconsciously) that by and large represent mainstream May Fourth literature; in this way, Mo Yan bridges the rupture between the May Fourth period and the new literature of the postrevolutionary era. At the same time, however, Mo Yan does not live in the shadow of Lu Xun: he has certainly developed his own singular writing style, one that makes him unique and makes him stand out from his contemporaries. In other words, although Lu Xun’s influence is evident in Mo Yan’s work, Mo Yan’s work has such a strong style of its own that he would never be thought of as a modern-day Lu Xun. Keeping in mind that the personal experiences and social circumstances of Mo Yan as a writer are very different from those of Lu Xun, it is of little significance to make a comparison in terms of the quality of their oeuvres, as has been done with Mo Yan and William Faulkner.6 It is valuable, however, to note how Mo Yan—who among his peers is the writer most influenced by Lu Xun—adopts Lu Xun as his model and yet simultaneously maintains his own identity.