"Red Sorghum" played an important role in Mo Yan's Nobel Prize in Literature, but it is not Mo Yan's famous work. Mo Yan's novella "Transparent Carrot" published in China Writer Magazine became famous in one fell swoop, and that was Mo Yan's debut work. What really made Mo Yan famous was this "Red Sorghum".
"Red Sorghum" tells the story of a bandit leading his men to participate in the anti-Japanese resistance in a small place in Gaomi, Shandong Province, during the War of Resistance Against Japan, and it is interspersed with the love story between this bandit and the beautiful wife of a leprosy man. Of course, this story is also good, and Mo Yan's choice of theme has always been eye-catching.
This bandit Yu Zhan'ao is a tough tough guy raised by the tall and tall red sorghum in the north, he is not a hero in our traditional sense, he is cold-blooded, he kills people like hemp. In his early years, when he was not yet a bandit, he was not accustomed to the monk who had committed adultery with his mother, and in a fit of rage, he killed the monk and ran away from home. In order to survive, he made a lowly caravan. Later I became a bandit. He can be a bandit leader, of course, he has the ability. He first joined the team of bandits with flower necks, and in the bandits' nests of flower necks, he was very popular, and he was born a bandit leader, which caused the jealousy of flower necks. Later he killed the flower neck.
He was a loyal anti-Japanese hero who served the country, and he was also a murderous and cruel bandit. He was bred from the black land of the north, his black is worthy of the name, he killed people but he was not soft. Of course, he kills people is not absolutely indiscriminate killing of innocents, he kills people for a reason.
In order to deal with the love enemy, Yu Zhan'ao killed the father and son of the single family who were bullying people in order to save his lover who was trapped in a sea of suffering; he killed his uncle Yu Daya because his uncle drunkenly and sexually abused a young girl Cao Lingzi; he killed the rogue leader "Flower Neck" to save the local people from the pain of exploitation...
He fell in love with a beautiful married woman, and he disregarded any ethical customs and directly staged a live spring palace under the red sorghum and on the black soil.
Of course, with the above alone, the novel "Red Sorghum" is likely to be ignored by everyone, and it is impossible to make Mo Yan a hit, or even win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Red Sorghum is titled after red sorghum and places characters and stories in a vast red sorghum backdrop. This gives the novel a deep humanistic connotation. Sorghum has an important humanistic status in China Sorghum rice was once a life-saving food for people in the era of material scarcity, and in today's economically developed, sorghum rice has never been absent from an important position. China's famous wines such as Maotai, Wuliangye, Luzhou Laojiao, Fenjiu and other red sorghum are the main raw materials. In Hubei, there are still legends of Guan Gong and sorghum rice.
At the same time, Mo Yan also has special skills, he is different from ordinary writers, ordinary writers write aesthetic things is to let you see beauty, you can't see other things, that is, aesthetic beauty. Mo Yan writes beautiful things, he will not be obscure, will not shy away, he will let you see the whole. Mo Yan is a master of realism, if you use a painter to compare, it is like this: if a painter paints the nude of a beautiful woman, he may draw breasts, paint buttocks, let you feel the beauty of the female body, if You let Mo Yan paint, he will clearly let you see the beauty of the ass.
Mo Yan also expressed this in the original text of the novel: "The most beautiful and ugly, the most detached and the most worldly, the most holy and filthy, but also the most heroic and good man, the most kingly and the most powerful place, and the place where he can drink and love the most, this is the high-density northeast township."
This is the biggest feature of Mo Yan, the coexistence of aesthetics and ugliness, and even anti-customer-oriented, so that a large number of ugly things, human nature, society, human physiology, livestock, nature, all kinds of dirty things constantly stimulate the reader's senses, let you die to remember what he wrote, do not remember it.
It's like eating at a very luxurious five-star restaurant. Although the ingredients in the restaurant are of very high quality, the chefs are very skilled, the environment is very elegant, and the meals are very suitable for your appetite, the number of times you go, it feels like that. But if one day you eat a cockroach in your meal, you may never forget it.
Another feature of this novel is that the bandit's anti-Japanese and love story is not narrated by the author in the third person from a restricted perspective, nor is it narrated from the author's full perspective, but narrated by a hypothetical bandit's grandson "I". The bandit's many secret past events are impossible to tell to his grandson, and his very subtle physiological feelings, his grandson can not know, but it is so magically displayed in front of the reader.
This is magic realism. The subject matter is realistic and the means of expression are magical.
Look at the following passage: the grass on his grave was already dry, and there was once a bare-ass boy who came here with a snow-white goat, and the goat was unhurriedly nibbling on the grass on the grave head, and the boy stood on the tombstone, angrily sprinkled a soak of urine, and then sang loudly: Sorghum is red - Japan is coming - the compatriots are ready - start firing -
Some people say that this shepherd boy is me, I don't know if it's me.
Originally, it was bizarre enough to narrate Grandpa's secret past in the tone of "I", but what was even more outrageous was, "I don't know if it was me"!
A master is a master, and magic realism plays a thief.