Mo Yan and Hallucinatory Realism

Mo Yan, a native of Gaomi, Shandong, was born in a peasant family. In his childhood, economic poverty and political oppressionleft painful memories to him, and these psychological traits directly influenced his later novel creation. In the early 1980s, Mo Yan's novels such as The Transparent Carrot aroused attention from the literary circles, and later he created many medium-length novels such as Red Sorghum, Garden, Big Breasts & Wide Hips, The Garlic Ballads, Red Forest, Sandalwood Death and Frog, manifesting intensive cultural reflection and magical artistic feelings. Mo Yan's novel creation is influenced by American writer William Faulkner and Columbian writer Garcia Marquez. He tries to gain a new understanding of the Chinese nation's life consciousness and cultural psychology with a novel and fresh artistic feeling, and meanwhile he is rooted in the Chinese nation's soil, inheriting many expression methods of Chinese traditional literature in depth and revealing a unique mysterious sense in the course of exploring reality.

The Transparent Carrot is a representative of Mo Yan's early works. The novel depicts the Black Child, an image suffering great mental repression in hard times. The Black Child loses the warmth of his family in his childhood, hard life and inhuman labor cause him to lose normal intelligence and feelings, and he forms the habit of silent endurance in long suffering. He never speaks to others and seems to feel no pain even his hand is mutilated by a hot anvil. The girl Juzi is a symbol of good wishes and holiness in his eyes, but he only wants to enjoy such pleasure in the depths of his heart himself. When Juzi publicly expresses compassion for and sympathy with him, he bites Juzi's wrist surprisingly. His love and hate are both extremist and normal, which is the result of cruel distortion by life. However, at the same time, the Black Child also has an extraordinary perceptive ability. He can hear the sound of carrot leaves' growth. In his eyes, red carrots are crystal clear, emitting an exotic and beautiful light. The image of the Black Child not only is a true picture of misery in reality, but also has surreal symbolic color like a fairy tale. In the novel, almost all visual, auditory and sensory forms are mobilized, and abundant contents of subjective psychological experience bring about the multilayered effect of metaphoric symbolism and realize great artistic tension of the objects of expression. The work negates and criticizes not only that period, but also the terrible alienation of human nature.

Red Sorghum prominently represents the transition of Mo Yan's novels from rational meditation to perceptual infatuation. The novel symbolizes the nation's courage, valor and strong vitality aroused in a special environment under heavy pressure from the wars, hardships and shackles of feudal ethical codes rather than depicting stories of resistance against Japan. The novel shows the nation's strong and invincible will to live with the life scene of bold and uninhibited people in Northeast Township of Gaomi, and typically represents the basic style of Mo Yan's novels. The novel with the nation's strong courage and will to live, die, love and hate like red sorghum as the keynote describes all Chinese peasants' real primitive cultural psychology through the special environment of war. The work focuses on revealing and proving certain organic spiritual association among a nation's past, present and future. No previous novel on the theme of resistance against Japan is as deep-going, peculiar and soul-stirring as Red Sorghum. Mo Yan's novels created in the new period represented by Red Sorghum have changed the path of Chinese traditional novels with their unique style and become milestones of novel creation in the new period.

Hallucinatory realism literature emerged and developed in Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s as a product of combination of Latin American realistic novels' traditions and national consciousness. The most representative work is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Columbian writer Garcia Marquez, which tries to reflect the spirit of the times in a hallucinatory atmosphere, enhance national features, opposes blindly imitating Western modern literature, and advocate going deep into nature, history and tradition to discover the essence of life. Latin American hallucinatory realism also deeply influenced Chinese modern writers including Mo Yan. Inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mo Yan based himself on the daily life of his hometown's ordinary farmers, explored the roots of traditional culture in it, gained a new understanding of national culture and national life, integrated hallucinatory realism with folk stories, history and modern life, and created a magical world. The medium-length novel The Transparent Carrot mentioned above shows the salient characteristic of transition between unreal images and reality. The protagonist Black Child's behavioral mode is divorced from realistic possibility and has hallucinatory color. He can hear the sound of hairs falling to the ground and the vibration in the air caused by falling leaves; he grasps a red-hot anvil and does not drop it though yellow smoke rises from his burned hand. However, he is also an ordinary person in real life. After leaving that bridge opening, he feels cold and can no longer see that "transparent red carrot." The author wanted to demonstrate the mental distortion caused by the turbulent times to the child. The broken family and childhood without maternal love cause the Black Child's tenacity and stubbornness against pain in reality. The Black Child's world is very hallucinatory and mysterious but is not divorced from reality. This is just the unique artistic effect realized by Mo Yan relying on methods of hallucinatory realism. Red Sorghum draws on the hallucinatory techniques of Marquez and the stream of consciousness method of Falkner and adopts the structural model of fairy tales and fables, so it is full of symbols, metaphors, unreal images, etc. Forest-like red sorghum is itself a symbol of the Chinese nation's spiritual core, and the numerous characters and pictures are all full of profound implications. These enhance the profoundness of the whole work's connotations as well as its poetic appeal.

Mo Yan's novels are deeply loved by Chinese and foreign readers. His Big Breasts & Wide Hips won the first "Dajia Honghe Literature Prize" of China; White Dog and the Swing won the United Literature Prize of Taiwan; the film Nuan adapted from it won the Gold Kylin Prize at the 16th Tokyo International Film Festival. Besides, Mo Yan also won many honors such asthe French Order of Arts and Letters and the 13th Italian NONINO International Prize for Literature. Red Sorghum Clan, Big Breasts & Wide Hips, etc. have been translated into more than ten languages including English, French, German and Japanese and widely spread in the world. The publication of long novel Frog in 2009 represented another peak of Mo Yan's creation career, and it won the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011. On October 11, 2012, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to the Swedish Nobel Prize in Literature Awarding Committee's evaluation, "with hallucinatory realism," Mo Yan "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."