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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.
Mo Yan
莫言
Mo Yan in 2008
Mo Yan in 2008
BornGuan Moye (管谟业)
(1955-02-17) 17 February 1955 (age 69)
Gaomi, Shandong, China
Pen nameMo Yan
OccupationWriter, teacher
LanguageChinese
NationalityChinese
EducationMaster of Literature and Art - Beijing Normal University (1991)
Graduated - People's Liberation Army Art School (1986)
Period1981 – present
Notable worksRed Sorghum Clan,
The Republic of Wine,
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature
2012
SpouseDu Qinlan (杜勤兰) (1979-present)
ChildrenGuan Xiaoxiao (管笑笑) (Born in 1981)

Guan Moye (simplified Chinese: 管谟业; traditional Chinese: 管謨業; pinyin: Guǎn Móyè; born 17 February 1955), better known by the pen name Mo Yan (/moʊ jɛn/, Chinese: 莫言; pinyin: Mò Yán), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. He has been referred by Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME as "one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers",[2] and by Jim Leach as the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.[3] He is best known to Western readers for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum Clan, of which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later adapted for the film Red Sorghum. In 2012, Mo 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]

Early life

Mo Yan was born in 1955, in Gaomi County in Shandong province to a family of farmers, in Dalan Township (which he fictionalised in his novels as "Northeast Township" of Gaomi County). Mo was 11 years old when the Cultural Revolution was launched, at which time he left school to work as a farmer. At the age of 18, he began work at a cotton factory. During this period, which coincided with a succession of political campaigns from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, his access to literature was largely limited to novels in the socialist realist style under Mao Zedong, which centered largely on the themes of class struggle and conflict.[6]

At the close of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Mo enlisted in the People's Liberation Army (PLA),[7] and began writing while he was still a soldier. During this post-Revolution era when he emerged as a writer, both the lyrical and epic works of Chinese literature, as well as translations of foreign authors such as William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, would make an impact on his works.[8] In 1984, he received a literary award from the PLA Magazine, and the same year began attending the Military Art Academy, where he first adopted the pen name of Mo Yan.[9] He published his first novella, A Transparent Radish, in 1984, and released Red Sorghum in 1986, launching his career as a nationally recognized novelist.[9] In 1991, he obtained a master's degree in Literature from Beijing Normal University.[7]

Pen name

"Mo Yan" — meaning "don't speak" in Chinese — is his pen name.[10] 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] The pen name also relates to the subject matter of Mo Yan's writings, which reinterpret Chinese political and sexual history.[11]

Works

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.[12]

Mo Yan's Red Sorghum Clan 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 from the point of view 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.[13] The book was controversial in China because some leftist critics regarded Big Breasts' perceived negative portrayal of Communist soldiers.[13]

Extremely prolific, Mo Yan wrote 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 typing using a pinyin input method, because the latter method "limits your vocabulary".[3] Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is the story of a landlord who is reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land reform movement.[9] The landlord observes and satirizes Communist society, such as when he (as a donkey) forces two mules to share food with him, because "[in] the age of communism... mine is yours and yours is mine."[11]

Influences

Mo Yan's works 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.[14] He also cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.[3]

Mo Yan, who himself reads foreign authors in translation, strongly advocates the reading of world literature.[15] 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".[16]

Style

Mo Yan's works are epic historical novels characterized by hallucinatory realism and containing elements of black humor.[11] 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 "[my] family, [the] people I'm familiar with, the villagers..." his characters after reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.[3] He satirizes the genre of socialist realism by placing workers and bureaucrats into absurd situations.[11]

Mo Yan's writing is characterised by the blurring of distinction between "past and present, dead and living, as well as good and bad".[13] Mo Yan appears in his novels as a semi-autobiographical character who retells and modifies the author's other stories.[9] His female characters often fail to observe traditional gender roles, such as the mother in the Shangguan family in Big Breasts & Wide Hips fails to bear her husband sons, and who is instead an adulterer, becoming pregnant with girls by a Swedish missionary and a Japanese soldier, among others. Male power is also portrayed cynically in Big Breasts & Wide Hips, and there is only one male hero in the novel.[13]

Nobel Prize in Literature, 2012

Mo Yan In Stockholm to receive the 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. In his Award Ceremony Speech, speech, Per Wästberg explained: "Mo Yan is a poet who tears down stereotypical propaganda posters, elevating the individual from an anonymous human mass. Using ridicule and sarcasm Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications as well as deprivation and political hypocrisy." [17]

Swedish Academy head Peter Englund said less formally, "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]

Controversies and criticism

Winning the Nobel Prize occasioned both support and criticism.

The Chinese writer Ma Jian deplored Mo Yan's lack of solidarity and commitment to other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished or detained in violation of their constitutionally protected freedom of expression.[19] Several other Chinese dissidents such as Ye Du and Ai Weiwei also criticized him,[20] as did 2009 Nobel Laureate Herta Müller who called the decision a "catastrophe".[21] A specific criticism was that Mo hand-copied Mao Zedong's influential Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech, which described the writer's responsibility to place politics before art, [22] and he has attracted criticism for his supposed good relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.[23]

Anna Sun, an assistant professor of Sociology and Asian studies at Kenyon College, criticized Mo's writing as coarse, predictable, and lacking in aesthetic conviction. "Mo Yan’s language is striking indeed," she writes, but it is striking because "it is diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious renunciation of China’s cultural past at the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949." [6] Charles Laughlin of the University of Virginia, writing in The New York Times, however, accuses Sun of "piling up aesthetic objections to conceal ideological conflict," comparing her characterization of Mo to the official Chinese Writer's Association's characterization of Gao Xingjian as a mediocre writer when Gao won the Nobel Prize in 2000.[8] Perry Link, describing Mo Yan's fiction and politics in the New York Review of Books, asked "Does this writer deserve the prize?" Link commented that Nobel Chinese writers, whether “inside the system” or not, "all must choose how they will relate to their country’s authoritarian government." This "inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in various ways." Link compared Mo to Liu Xiaobo, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, who was jailed for dissidence, whose moral choices were "highly unusual." It would be wrong, Link concludes, "for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two."[24]

Salman Rushdie called Mo Yan a "patsy" for refusing to sign a petition asking for Liu Xiaobo's freedom.[25] Pankaj Mishra saw an "unexamined assumption" lurking in the "western scorn" for these choices, namely that "Anglo-American writers" were not critized for similarly apolitical attitudes.[26]

In his Nobel Lecture, Mo Yan himself commented "At first I thought I was the target of the disputes, but over time I’ve come to realize that the real target was a person who had nothing to do with me. Like someone watching a play in a theater, I observed the performances around me. I saw the winner of the prize both garlanded with flowers and besieged by stone-throwers and mudslingers." He concluded that "For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated." [27]

Another source of criticism was the a perceived conflict of interest on the part of Göran Malmqvist, who is one of the members of the Swedish Academy. Malmqvist had translated Mo Yan's several works to Swedish and published some on his own publishing house. Yan had also written a laudatory preface to one of Malmqvist's own books, and been a close friend of Malmqvist's wife for 15 years. The Nobel committee denied that this constituted a conflict of interest, and said that it would have been absurd for Malmqvist to recuse.[28][29][30]

List of works

Novels

  • Falling Rain on a Spring Night (1981)
  • Red Sorghum Clan, including five volumes: "Sorghum Wine", "Sorghum Funeral", "Dog Road", "The Odd Dead", "Red Sorghum" (1987; English: 1993)
  • The Garlic Ballads[31] (1988; English: 1995)
  • The Republic of Wine: A Novel[31] (1992; English: 2000)
  • Big Breasts & Wide Hips[31] (1996; English: 2005)
  • Sandalwood Death (檀香刑 Tanxiang Xing). Translated by Howard Goldblatt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. ISBN 9780806143392.
  • Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out[31] (2006; English: 2008)
  • Change (2010) ISBN 9781906497484
  • Frog (2011) ISBN 7532136760
  • Pow![32] (2013) ISBN 9780857420763

Short story collections

  • Explosions and Other Stories
  • Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh[31] (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

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 Anna Sun. "The Diseased Language of Mo Yan", The Kenyon Review, Fall 2012.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ a b Laughlin, Charles (17 December 2012). "What Mo Yan's Detractors Get Wrong". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 December 2012.
  9. ^ a b c d Williford, James (2011). "Mo Yan 101". Humanities. 32 (1): 10. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  10. ^ Ahlander, Johan (11 October 2012). "China's Mo Yan wins Nobel for "hallucinatory realism"". Reuters. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  11. ^ a b c d Huang, Alexander (Jul/Aug 2009). "Mo Yan as Humorist". World Literature Today. 83 (4): 32–35. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  12. ^ Cohorst, Kate (11 October 2012). "Professor From Notre Dame Translates Nobel Winner's Novels". University of Notre Dame. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  13. ^ a b c d Chan, Shelley W. (Summer 2000). "From Fatherland to Motherland: On Mo Yan's 'Red Sorghum' and 'Big Breasts and Full Hips'". World Literature Today. 74 (3): 495–501.
  14. ^ Howard Yuen Fung Choy, Remapping the Past: Fictions of History in Deng's China, 1979 -1997. Leiden: BRILL, 2008. pp. 51–53. ISBN 9004167048.
  15. ^ "World Literature and China in a Global Age". Chinese Literature Today. 1 (1): 101–103. July. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)
  16. ^ 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)
  17. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 - Presentation Speech". 26 Feb 2013 [1]
  18. ^ "Chinese writer Mo Yan wins Nobel prize". The Irish Times. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  19. ^ "From cowherd to Nobel, it was a long lonely journey: Mo Yan". Business Standard. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2012.
  20. ^ "Mo Yan Nobel lecture derided by China dissidents". AFP. 8 December 2012. Retrieved 8 December 2012.
  21. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/26/mo-yan-nobel-herta-muller Salon December 6, 2012.
  22. ^ Zhou, Raymond (9 October 2012). "Is Mo Yan man enough for the Nobel?". China Daily. Retrieved 9 October 2012.
  23. ^ "The Nobel prize in literature: A Chinese Dickens?". The Economist. 20 October 2012. Retrieved 14 November 2012.
  24. ^ Perry Link,"Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?" New York Review of Books, (December 6, 2012).
  25. ^ "Rushdie: Mo Yan is a "patsy of the regime". Salon December 6, 2012.
  26. ^ Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorshipThe Guardian December 13, 2012.
  27. ^ "Mo Yan - Nobel Lecture: Storytellers". (translated by Howard Goldblatt) 26 Feb 2013 [2]
  28. ^ http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201211080116
  29. ^ http://www.thelocal.se/44274/20121106/#.UTNP8jC91iY
  30. ^ http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/18/was_there_a_conflict_of_interest_in_the_nobel_literature_prize
  31. ^ a b c d e "About the Author: Mo Yan". University of Chicago Press Books. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  32. ^ "The brutal genius of Mo Yan: A sneak peek into his upcoming novel POW!". FirstPost. Retrieved 12 October 2012.

Further reading

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