| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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countryman’s execution in silence. Greatly shocked by the slide show, Lu Xun came to believe that it was more important to heal people spiritually than to cure their physical bodies. Consequently, he decided to quit medical school to pen works in hopes of awakening people from their spiritual numbness through his writing. Lu Xun used a metaphor—the iron house—in the preface to his short story collection Nahan (
) [Call to arms] in order to describe the suffocating Chinese society in which people were asleep, unaware of the necessity of fighting for the future of their own nation and, indeed, of fighting for themselves.23 Generally speaking, Lu Xun and other May Fourth intellectuals attributed the weakness of their country vis-à-vis foreign powers (as well as all other societal flaws) to the Confucian tradition that had dominated China for thousands of years. This resulted in the May Fourth intellectuals’ adoption of what Lin Yü-sheng (
) calls “totalistic iconoclasm”—a rejection of the heritage of the past as a cultural, social, and political totality.24 With the explosion of human adversities as a major motif of May Fourth literature, the elite May Fourth writers, from their positions in the upper social strata, showed their humanistic concerns toward people who were suffering from all kinds of hardships, especially toward those living in more backward rural areas; the writers used their literary works for cultural and social criticism.
Heavily influenced by the May Fourth spirit, Mao Zedong and his party continued to radically reject the old culture; the notorious Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966, was the peak of this rejection.25 Interestingly, Mo Yan carries on the iconoclasm of his May Fourth predecessors, but in his case the target of criticism is Maoist discourse itself. Showing deep sympathy for his peasant counterparts. Mo Yan places himself among ordinary Chinese people and examines the sources of the calamities they suffer from a nonelite point of view: this is one of the most important differences between Mo Yan and Lu Xun. Although they held deep sympathy for the Chinese people, especially for those in rural areas, Lu Xun and his May Fourth comrades, as intellectuals and elites, nevertheless exhibited a somewhat self-righteous attitude, whether consciously or not. Mo Yan, however, is totally devoid of this self-pride and