Mo Yan is a poet who tears down stereotypical propaganda posters, elevating the individual from an anonymoushuman mass. Using ridicule and sarcasm Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications as well as deprivation andpolitical hypocrisy. Playfully and with ill-disguised delight,he reveals the murkiest aspects of human existence,almost inadvertently finding images of strong symbolic weight.
North-eastern Gaomi county embodies China’s folk tales and history. Few realjoumeys can surpass these to arealm where the clamour of donkeys and pigs drowns out the voices ofthe people’s commissars and where bothlove and evil assume supematrual proportions.
Mo Yan’s imagination soars across the entire human existence. He is a wonderful portrayer of nature; he knowsvirtually all there is to know about hunger, and the brutality of China’s 20th century has probably never beendescribed so nakedly, with heroes,lovers, torturers, bandits - and especially, strong,indomitable mothers. He showsus a world without truth, common sense or compassion,a world where people are reckless, helpless and absurd.Proof of tlus misery is the caruubalism that recurs in China’s history. In Mo Yan, it stands for unrestrainedconsumption, excess, rubbish, camal pleasures and the indescribable desires that only he can attempt t.elucidatebeyond all tabooed limitations.
In his novel Republic of Wine,me most exquisite of delicacies is a roasted three-year-old. Boys have becomeexclusive foodstuff. The girls, neglected, survive. The irony is directed at China’s family policy, because of whichfemale foetuses are aborted on an astronomic scale, girls aren’t even good enough to eat Mo Yan has written anentire novel, Frog, about this.
Mo Yan’s stories have mythical and allegorical pretensions and turn all values on their heads. We never meet thatideal citizen who was a standard feature in Mao’s Ctuna. Mo Yan’s characters bubble with vitality and take eventhe most amoral steps and measures to fulfil their lives and burst the cages they have been confined in by fate andpoMcs.
Instead of communism’s poster-happy history, Mo Yan describes a past that, with his exaggerations, parodies andderivations from myths and folk tales[来自www.lW5u.Com],is a convincing and scatlung revision offifty years ofpropaganda.
In his most remarkable novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, where a female perspective dominates, Mo Yandescribes the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine of 1960 in stinging detail. He mocks the revolutionarypseudo-science that tried to inseminate sheep with rabbit sperm, all the while dismissing doubters as right-wingelements. The novel ends with the new capitalism ofthe ’90s with fraudsters becoming rich on beauty products andtrying to producea Phoenix through cross-fertilisation.
In Mo Yan,a forgotten peasant world arises, alive and well, before our eyes, sensually scented even ins mostpungent vapours, startlingly merciless but tinged by joyful selflessness. Never a dlmmoment The author knowseverything and can describe everything - all kinds of handicrafi, smithery, construction, ditch-digging, animalhusbandry, the tricks ofguerrilla bands. He seemst.cany all human lif[来自wwW.lw5u.cOM]e on the tip ofhis pen.
He is more hilarious and more appalling than most in thewake of Rabelais and Swift - in our time, in the wakeof Garcia Marquez. His spice blend is a peppery one. On his broad tapestry of China’s last hundred years, there areneither dancing unicoms nor skipping maidens. But he paints life in a pigsty in such a way that we feel we havebeen there far too long. Ideologies and reform movements may come and go but human egoism and greed remain.So Mo Yan defends smallindividuals against all injustices - from Japanese occupation to Maoist terror and today’sproduction frenzy.
For those who venture to Mo Yan’s home district,where bountiful virtue battles the vilest cruelty,a staggeringliterary adventure awaits. Has ever such an epic spring flood engulfed China and the rest ofthe world In Mo Yan’swork, worldliterature speaks with a voice that drowns out most contemporaries.