Text/Po Mu laughs
In 2006, the lunar year of the dog, leap July. It was a period of great harvest in Chinese literature, and the Chinese literary scene was very lively that year. At the beginning of the year, the president of the Chinese Contemporary Literature Research Association, the deputy editor of the "Chinese Literature Yearbook", and the professor of the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Bai Ye and Han Han, triggered one of the biggest literary melee wars in the early Internet era, and then Yu Hua launched the lower part of "Brothers", Su Tong made a high-profile comeback with "Bi Nu", Tie Ning, the new chairman of the Writers Association, took out "Stupid Flower", as well as Wang Meng's autobiography, Haiyan's romance, and Liang Xiaosheng's continued anger... In such a noisy noise, Mo Yan, who is already 51 years old, published "Life and Death Fatigue".
Mo Yan's year of "knowing the Mandate of Heaven" was not easy, and the 2005 Mao Dun Literature Award swept him into the whirlpool of public opinion. That year, Mo Yan's "Sandalwood Punishment" was extremely popular in the reading circles and the critics, and even created a rare result of unanimous approval in the review process. However, the final result is Xiong Zhaozheng's "Zhang Juzheng", Zhang Jie's "No Words", Xu Guixiang's "The Sky of History", Liu Jianwei's "The Age of Heroes" and Zong Pu's "Records of Dongzang" won awards. Public opinion suddenly exploded, and the "Hero Age", which was previously reluctantly shortlisted as an add-on work, won the award, why was the "Sandalwood Punishment" that passed unanimously brushed off? Strong doubts and controversies have been overwhelming, and Nandu Review and other important Chinese literary critics of that year have published "Where is the cursive head of the Mao Dun Literature Award?" Articles with stern wording such as "How the Mao Dun Literature Prize Became a Contradictory Literature Award" became the center of public opinion for a while.
However, in the face of the good opportunity of hype, Mo Yan continued to be silent. He had always referred to himself as a farmer, equally resistant to his status as a writer and a celebrity, and had always carried with him a certain natural discomfort in the face of the hustle and bustle along the way. Including the fierce debate surrounding him after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, he is still as good as ever, as the name suggests, making people look "very anxious", and there is an impulse to shout at him: "You are talking". Perhaps, this is Mo Yan's simplicity, or even Mo Yan's cowardice, but people who have read "Life and Death Fatigue" will understand that it is actually Mo Yan's Zen.
"Life and Death Fatigue" is Mo Yan's penultimate novel so far, although three years later, the novel "Frog" finally won the Mao Dun Literature Award, but "Life and Death Fatigue" seems to have made people perceive Mo Yan's "knowing the destiny of heaven" like transparency and epiphany. There is some truth in the literary critics' liking to regard "Fatigue of Life and Death" as the most important masterpiece of Mo Yan's art. Starting from "Red Sorghum Family" and passing through "Wine Country", "Fat Buttocks", "Sandalwood Punishment", and "Forty-One Cannons", Mo Yan's novels have always maintained a very high standard, but "Fatigue of Life and Death" is more like a statement summary of his artistic exploration and long-term thinking.
"Life and Death Fatigue" tells the vicissitudes of Ximentun in Gaomi Northeast Township from 1950 to 2000 for a full half century in time span. The story of the novel is always placed in the grand historical set, the landlord Ximen Hao, who has worked hard all his life and accumulated virtue and good deeds, was shot in the land reform, and Ximen Hao suffered unimaginable torture in the Yin Cao Mansion, but still insisted on shouting injustice to the King of Yan - in the two years of the Prefecture, no matter how painful the torture was, he was disobedient. The king of Yan could not, so he played tricks, saying that he wanted Ximen to make a "return to the yang", but in fact, he was reincarnated as a donkey, a cow, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and a large baby, Lan Chitose, reincarnated among his relatives in the northeast township. Because of the strong obsession, Meng Po Tang is ineffective against Ximen Hao, so Ximen Hao is equivalent to carrying the memory of several generations and becoming a historical witness to the 50 years of vicissitudes in Northeast Township and the fact that things are not human.
The recently deceased sinologist Shi Jingqian has always had a high opinion of Mo Yan and "Fatigue of Life and Death", once saying: "'Fatigue of Life and Death' covers almost the entire revolutionary period of this country, and can be called the documentary novels of that era... A sense of absurdity, paradox, and absurdity haunts this work. "If "Fatigue of Life and Death" is only from the perspective of art form and story content, it has indeed achieved a certain almost perfect blend of water and milk, and we say that this long piece is the "master" of Mo Yan's literary exploration and transcendence, which is based on this reason. Mo Yan once said very plainly and sincerely that his creations were "ideologically and artistically... Deeply influenced by Kafka, García Márquez and Faulkner". The sense of absurdity and absurd consciousness that Mr. Shi Jingqian talked about is also the elucidation of Mo Yan's artistic characteristics. Kafka and Márquez did deeply influence an entire generation of Chinese writers, including Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Ma Yuan, and Remnant Xue, who laid the basic map of contemporary Chinese literary history.
From "Life and Death Fatigue", we can see the deep traces of absurdism and magic realism in the writers of that generation. Absurdity is Kafka's most important trait, and his works such as Judgment, Metamorphosis, and Castle are actually about the loneliness and alienation of the individual, the emptiness and lack of the spirit, and these powerless, morbid dilemmas constitute the absurd consciousness of Kafka's novels. In "Fatigue of Life and Death", our most prominent feeling about Ximen Is "the powerlessness of fate". He fought in the mansion for two full years, but it was impossible to fantasize about resurrection in itself. He was reincarnated six times, each time by his relatives, but he could only watch his wife being humiliated, his son betrayed, the world cold, all beings upside down, what he wanted to protect was doomed to be broken, and what he wanted to vent was bound to be fruitless. Even the people around him, very politically ambitious and politically minded Ximen Jinlong has always longed for power, has been calculating for this desire organ, but in the end he still ended up dead, Pang Chunmiao longed for love, worked hard for love, but in the end it was still a corpse on the street...
Pale powerlessness and futile light flicker in the terrifying waves of the grand narrative, and the surrounding environment seems to be infinitely increasing and enlarged, and the individual appears even smaller. It's like Gregor in Metamorphosis suddenly feeling that everything has become huge, and no matter how careful he is, he is rejected by his family. It's also like K in "The Castle" who can't get into the castle with all his might, or Joseph in "The Trial" who racks his brains and can't get rid of the false accusations. And Mo Yan continues to run away in Kafka's absurdity, and continues to seek his dreams in the name of Márquez: Kafka's absurd consciousness is hidden in pathological alienation, and Mo Yan's absurd consciousness blooms in the blossoming of magic realism.
In 1985, Mo Yan came to the Literature Department of the People's Liberation Army Academy of Arts to study after many hardships, and by chance he heard an editor say that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was a particularly great work, and Mo Yan, who was in the initial stage of literary creation, went to Wangfujing to buy a copy. Many years later, Mo Yan can still recall the feeling of reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" at that time: "After reading it, I was fascinated by the momentum of that language - it was really painful to write a novel like this... It has an astonishing artistic power and intellectual power. He later told Ye Kai, the author of "Mo Yan's Commentary", that he "only read one page of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", and he was so excited that he went around the room, and then he put the book down and began to write his own novel..."
Because of this, Mo Yan's novels have maintained strong Traces of Márquez from the beginning. The beginning of "The Red Sorghum Family" was once imitated by many Chinese writers: "In the ninth day of the first month of August in the ancient calendar of 1939, my father, a bandit, was a little more than fourteen years old. He followed the team of the legendary hero Yu Zhan'ao, who later became famous all over the world, to ambush the Japanese car team on the Jiaoping Highway. This kind of writing that mixes the present, past and future is obviously derived from "One Hundred Years of Solitude". "Red Sorghum Family" is also like "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which completely breaks the linearity of time in the entire narrative that follows, and moves to a new dimension of free processing and arbitrary shaping of time and space.
Mo Yan himself never shyly expressed his mentorship to Márquez, and even took the initiative to talk to people about his "Blonde Baby" being influenced by Márquez, and the winged old man in "Ball Lightning" was inspired by Márquez's "The Old Man with the Giant Wings". Even as far as Mo Yan's last novel so far, "Frog", we can still feel this influence and tribute - the aunt in the novel finally married hao Da hand, the "master of folk arts and crafts", and pinched the clay doll every day, hoping to use this way to atone for the forced abortion of others, which reminds people of Colonel Aureliano in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" who always reinvents the little goldfish to the children.
However, if this were the case, Mo Yan would clearly not be enough to become one of the most important leading figures in contemporary Chinese literature. Looking at Mo Yan's literary world, the son of a peasant who was born in the northeast township of Gaomi, who grew up in Sisi, eventually became the cradle of literary giants. The "Gaomi Northeast Township" written in "Red Sorghum" is undoubtedly the most beautiful and ugly, the most detached and the most worldly, the holiest and dirtiest, the most heroic and good man, the most kingly and the most delicious place, the most able to drink and the most love" is where Mo Yan finally understood the "way of literature". "Fatigue of Life and Death" is not only the sum of Mo Yan's tributes to Kafka, Márquez, and Faulkner, but also his decisive creation beyond his own literary and artistic master.
"Life and Death Fatigue" is not a magic realism in the traditional sense, its chapter body design makes people feel a kind of formal rebellion, and its content preset of six reincarnations shows the literary determination of a Chinese local narrative. "Life and Death Fatigue" is written from the "Journey to the West" like Yan Luo, under the blessing of the Buddhist reincarnation meaning, using the animal perspective of the reincarnation of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" to reconstruct the human story, using the brush strokes of the "Shan Hai Jing" divine beasts and wonders to write about the broader natural world outside human society, and even using the brushwork of the "Dream of the Red Chamber" to deal with the imagination of the characters in the novel...
When Mo Yan wrote about Lan Chitose's expression in "Fatigue of Life and Death": "Look at the expressions of the many animals that loom on his face: the dashing and debauchery of the donkey, the straightness and stubbornness of the cow, the greed and violence of the pig, the loyalty and flattery of the dog, the alertness and naughtiness of the monkey - look at the vicissitudes and sad expressions of the combination of these factors, the memories of the cow are coming and going, like a wave chasing to the beach; like moths, flocks of people throwing themselves into flames; like iron filings, sticking to magnets quickly; like smells, It is like a color that is poured open on fine rice paper; just like my thoughts about the woman who has the most beautiful face in the world, it can never be broken..." We know that at that moment, Mo Yan stood on the fertile land of Northeast Township, and found the "Tao" in his own literary creation through "Life and Death Fatigue", a novel that was destined not to win the Mao Dun Literature Prize.
Mo Yan's northeast township is close to Pu Songling's hometown, and the narrative style of "Liaozhai Zhiyi" is "repeated and bizarre, and the text is longitudinal and sophistry" is finally able to be vented like a wild ocean in "Life and Death Fatigue", which is the literary nourishment that Mo Yan absorbed in his hometown, and it is also the thickness and richness unique to Chinese literature. In his 2007 speech, Mo Yan said emotionally: "After writing "Life and Death Fatigue", I can dare to say that I have written a relatively pure Chinese novel. It is for this reason that the Nobel Prize-winning lifetime judge Es Pumark wrote in his personal comments to Mo Yan: "Mo Yan is a magician of realistic depictions—he observes the tradition and modernism of chinese society as a whole, which is his characteristic and innovation." ”
It is also in this sense that we say that Mo Yan's literary core has never been negative, but on the contrary, he has finally realized the sinicization of modernist life consciousness, which is a kind of firmness and thickness with the traditional Chinese cultural heritage. In the face of years of doubts, arguments and even insults, Mo Yan is very much like the blue face in "Life and Death Fatigue" that has stubbornly insisted on going it alone since the 1950s. No matter what kind of strong winds and waves this tenacious man experienced and the group attack, even if even his wife and children no longer lived and worked with him, he still silently insisted on his one acre and six points of land, still silently and desperately worked, and eventually became a well-known "single-dry household" in the whole county and registered in the whole province.
The setting of this character is more like a totem full of symbolic significance, becoming a needle of the sea god in parallel with the six reincarnations of Ximen. The story in the reincarnation shows the vicissitudes of the northeast countryside and even the entire Chinese countryside in the past half century, and this character constantly reminds the reader at the level of textual meaning: some things will inevitably pass through the sorrows and joys of the world and finally defeat time. Perhaps, "Life and Death Fatigue" is more accurate to say that Mo Yan completed the final transcendence of Kafka-style absurd consciousness, just as he completed the final liberation from the magical reality of Marquez.
Kafka's world is strange and indifferent, and he runs through the powerlessness of the absurd consciousness to the end, although equally respectable, but less powerful. This is also the fundamental reason why we still need Mr. Lu Xun today, we need objectivity, we need to be sober, but we need strength even more. And Mo Yan is more like this hardness of Mr. Lu Xun, and has been further inherited and transformed. Of course, all of this carries Mo Yan's own distinct personality, after all, he is still such a gentle and simple person. This manifests itself in "Fatigue of Life and Death", which is the word "compassion" that Mo Yan emphasizes in the preface of the novel- "compassion based on Chinese philosophy and religion, not an imitation based on Western thought." ”
Mo Yan wrote a reincarnation story with distinct Chinese Buddhist overtones, and at the same time it seemed as if he had embarked on a journey of enlightenment that we are not very unfamiliar with. The death of Ximen in the novel can be described as "ghostly", and there is a taste of "resentment", the core element of Japanese horror films. But in the end, Ximen Hao reincarnated again and again, watching people's sorrows and joys, whether they were relatives or enemies, like long paintings flowing rapidly around him. Time flies, life is too fast, Ximen is like the epiphany of life in "Chatting with Zai Zhiyi" - those hatreds that they felt could not be resolved at that time, slowly dissipated in the experience of life and the passage of time.
The Great Wisdom Treatise says, "Great compassion is pleasing to all sentient beings, and great compassion is to remove the suffering of all sentient beings." The "compassion" that Mo Yan emphasizes in "Life and Death Fatigue" is actually the general use of "compassion" in Buddhism. Like all of Mo Yan's works, "Fatigue of Life and Death" never deliberately avoids sin and dirtiness, nor does it deliberately avoid sensitive issues, perhaps because he carries this logical preposition of Buddha-nature, which has some of the taste of the Heart Sutra: "The Relic is the emptiness of the laws, not born and not destroyed, not dirty and impure, not increasing or decreasing".
However, this is not vulgar cynicism. At the same time that Simon is relieved, "Life and Death Fatigue" also has the persistence of blue face throughout the book. This is just as Mr. Lu Xun added a footnote to the Chinese nation, which has always been gentle and generous in the last two years of his life: "Since ancient times, we have had people who have buried their heads in hard work, people who have worked hard, people who have asked for the people's lives, and people who have sacrificed their lives to seek the law,...... Although it is equivalent to the so-called 'correct history' of the emperors and generals, they often cannot hide their glory, which is the backbone of China. "With the wisdom of our nation, it is enough to understand the fatigue of life and death, and the resilience of our nation is enough to enable us to always defend the dignity and meaning of life under this fatigue and pain--this is the Tao of Northeast Township and the Zen of Mo Yan."
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