| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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these three historical novels: the author’s notion shifts from a nostalgic, masculinized ancestor worship in The Red Sorghum Family to a problematization of history per se represented by a philogynous writing style in Big Breasts and Wide Hips and later shifts to a parody of Buddhism’s six realms of reincarnation loaded with comic vision in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.
Chapter 2 explores Mo Yan’s paradoxical nostalgia toward his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township. A comparison of Mo Yan’s “White Dog and the Swings” with Lu Xun’s two stories “Guxiang” (
) [My old home] and “Zhufu” (
) [The new-year sacrifice] delineates the similarities and differences between Mo Yan and Lu Xun in terms of their criticism of intellectuals, especially those who return to their hometown after a relatively long sojourn elsewhere. The chapter also examines other stories set in Mo Yan’s hometown in order to investigate, on the one hand, how the depiction of rural life is condensed and concretized in Northeast Gaomi Township, and on the other hand, how this township has transcended its status as an ordinary homeland for the author, who has turned it into a conceptual plane of existence, a timeless and boundless stage on which he is free to perform.
Chapter 3 studies the extensive descriptions of violence in Mo Yan’s works. The graphic scene of flaying a human still alive in The Red Sorghum Family marks the beginning of his use of violent narrative; ever since then, violence has been a major recurring theme in his stories and novels—domestic violence is represented by “Dry River” and The Garlic Ballads, and extreme cruelty related to the fate of the nation is represented in The Red Sorghum Family and Sandalwood Punishment. In addition, Mo Yan questions the legitimacy of violence committed in the name of revolution by depicting such violence in disturbingly graphic detail; Big Breasts and Wide Hips is a good example of this.Violence between human beings and animals is also featured, and typical cases can be found in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Forty-One Bombs, among others. Like some other major post-Mao writers, such as Yu Hua (
), who is known for his explicit and vivid depictions of violence, Mo Yan reveals his absorption of and deep disappointment