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

operating code in this circular pattern, and therefore moral admonition plays an essential role in life. Furthermore, the Chinese have faith in the correspondence of a moral order with the natural order: heaven aids the good rulers and punishes the tyrants. As a result of these mores, the writing of history was long based on morality and had a strong didactic function.

However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the country was forced by foreign military power and technology, such as the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, to open up to the world, and Darwinism—together with other Western concepts—was introduced in China. As the notion of evolution by natural selection and the law of the survival of the fittest gained precedence, a linear and progressive comprehension of history gradually replaced the traditional circularity. A materialist and Darwinian manner came to prevail: history is a progression, a straightforward teleological evolution. According to this belief, history is like an album of facts that are forever true about the past; it is the record of past reality. Historical records, moreover, have an important admonishing function: the past should serve to provide present and future generations with experiences and lessons to help them avoid repeating past mistakes. A binary opposition of new and old, progressive and regressive, revolutionary and reactionary replaced the old system of circularity.

Unlike traditional historians who attempted to explain history with grand narratives, Mo Yan writes historical fiction that is consonant with “Nietzsche’s insistence in The Use and Abuse of History … that the ‘historical’ is an aesthetic creation whose truth is dramatic rather than objective.”³¹ By embracing a skeptical attitude toward the progressive conception of history and challenging it, Mo Yan’s historical fiction deviates from orthodox literary practice. Unlike the revolutionary history produced during the time of the Maoist monologue—history that submitted to the official ideology, that carried out the official narrative, and that was filled with class struggle and collectivism—history under Mo Yan’s pen is full of desire and imagination, constructed by the élan vital of individuals.