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Mo Yan

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As Chinese names, Guan Moye's family name is Guan, Mo Yan's family name is Mo.
莫言
Mo Yan
Mo Yan in 2008
Mo Yan in 2008
BornGuǎn Móyè (管谟业)
(1955-02-17) 17 February 1955 (age 69)
Gaomi, Shandong, China
Pen nameMo Yan
OccupationWriter, teacher
LanguageChinese
NationalityChinese
Period1981 – present
Notable worksRed Sorghum,
The Republic of Wine,
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature
2012
Mo Yan
Traditional Chinese管謨業
Simplified Chinese管谟业

Guan Moye (born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer, described by Donald Morrison in U.S. news magazine TIME as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers".[2] He has been referred to as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.[3]

Before 2012, he was known to Western readers primarily for two novels which formed the basis of the film Red Sorghum. That year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".[4][5]

Biography

Mo Yan was born in 1955, in the northeast Gaomi County in Shandong province to a family of farmers. He left school during the Cultural Revolution to work in a factory that produced petroleum. After the Cultural Revolution he joined the People's Liberation Army,[6] and began writing while he was still a soldier, in 1981. Three years later, he was given a teaching position at the Department of Literature in the Army's Cultural Academy. In 1991, he obtained a master's degree in Literature from Beijing Normal University.[6]

Work

"Mo Yan" (Chinese: 莫言) — meaning "don't speak" in Chinese — is his nom de plume.[7] In an interview with Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he explains that name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside, because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up.[3]

Mo Yan began his career as a writer in the reform and opening up period, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981. Several of his novels were translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame.[8]

Mo Yan's Red Sorghum is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The author deals with upheavals in Chinese history such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; for example by portraying the suffering of the invading Japanese soldiers.[1] His second novel, The Garlic Ballads, is based on a true story of when the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that would not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine is a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun.[1] Big Breasts & Wide Hips deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts.[9] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics regarded Big Breasts's portrayal of Communist soldiers as lazy, indiscriminate slaughterers, as an endorsement of the Kuomintang's role in fighting the Anti-Japanese War.[9]

Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote his latest novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out in only 42 days.[3] He composed the more than 500,000 characters contained in the original manuscript on traditional Chinese paper using only ink and a writing brush. He prefers writing his novels by hand rather than by using a pinyin input method, because the latter method "limits your vocabulary".[3]

Style

Mo Yan's works are characterised by hallucinatory realism. They are predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the social realism of Lu Xun and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. In terms of traditional Chinese literature, he is deeply inspired by the folklore-based classical epic novel Water Margin.[10] He also cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.[3] A major theme in Mo Yan's works is the constancy of human greed and corruption, despite the influence of ideology.[1] Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. Mo Yan says he realised that he could make "his family, people I'm familiar with, the villagers..." his characters after reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.[3]

Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring of distinction between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad". His female characters often fail to observe traditional Chinese gender roles, as the mother in the Shangguan family in Red Sorghum fails to bear her husband sons, and is instead an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others. Male power is portrayed cynically in Big Breasts & Full Hips, and there is only one male hero in the novel.[9]

Relationship with other writers

Mo Yan strongly advocates that Chinese authors read foreign authors and world literature.[11] At a speech to open the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, he discussed Goethe's idea of "world literature", stating that "literature can overcome the barriers that separate countries and nations".[12]

The Chinese writer Ma Jian has deplored the lack of solidarity and commitment of Mo Yan vis-a-vis other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished and/or detained despite the freedom of expression recognised by the Constitution.[13]

Mo Yan has been criticised for hand-copying Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech.[14]

List of works

Novels

Short story collections

  • Explosions and Other Stories
  • Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh[15] (1999; English: 2002)

Other published works include White Dog Swing, Man and Beast, Soaring, Iron Child, The Cure, Love Story, Shen Garden and Abandoned Child.

Awards and honours

Nobel Prize in Literature, 2012

On 11 October 2012, the Swedish Academy announced that Mo Yan had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".[5] Aged 57 at the time of the announcement, he was the 109th recipient of the award and the first ever resident of mainland China to receive it—Chinese-born Gao Xingjian, a citizen of France, having been named the 2000 laureate. According to Swedish Academy head Peter Englund, Mo Yan was "overjoyed and terrified" to hear the news and had been at home with his father when he heard the news.[16][17] Englund also said, "He has such a damn unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him".[18]

Adaptations

Several of Mo Yan's works have been adapted for film:

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Inge, M. Thomas (2000). "Mo Yan Through Western Eyes". World Literature Today: 501–507. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Morrison, Donald (14 February 2005). "Holding Up Half The Sky". TIME. Retrieved 14 February 2005.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Leach, Jim (2011). "The Real Mo Yan". Humanities. 32 (1): 11–13. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  4. ^ "Mo Yan får Nobelpriset i litteratur 2012". DN. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  5. ^ a b "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 Mo Yan". Nobelprize.org. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  6. ^ a b Wee, Sui-Lee (11 October 2012). "China's Mo Yan feeds off suffering to win Nobel literature prize". Reuters. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  7. ^ Ahlander, Johan (11 October 2012). "China's Mo Yan wins Nobel for "hallucinatory realism"". Reuters. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  8. ^ Cohorst, Kate (11 October 2012). "Professor From Notre Dame Translates Nobel Winner's Novels". University of Notre Dame. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  9. ^ a b c "From Fatherland to Motherland: On Mo Yan's 'Red Sorghum' and 'Big Breasts and Full Hips'". World Literature Today. 74 (3): 495–501. Summer 2000.
  10. ^ Howard Yuen Fung Choy, Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979 -1997. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. pp. 51–53. ISBN 9004167048.
  11. ^ "World Literature and China in a Global Age". Chinese Literature Today. 1 (1): 101–103. July. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
  12. ^ Yan, Mo; Yao, Benbiao (2010). "A Writer Has a Nationality, but Literature Has No Boundary". Chinese Literature Today. 1 (1): 22–24. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  13. ^ "From cowherd to Nobel, it was a long lonely journey: Mo Yan". Business Standard. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  14. ^ Zhou, Raymond (9 October 2012). "Is Mo Yan man enough for the Nobel?". China Daily. Retrieved 9 October 2012.
  15. ^ a b c d e "About the Author: Mo Yan". University of Chicago Press Books. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  16. ^ "Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature". BBC News. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  17. ^ "Chinese writer Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature". Xinhua. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  18. ^ "Chinese writer Mo Yan wins Nobel prize". The Irish Times. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mo Yan.

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