Douban only has 7.5 points, and Mo Yan's new book is underestimated
In 2019, writer Mo Yan, Yu Hua and Su Tong visited Shakespeare's former house together. In front of the statue of Shakespeare, Mo Yan vowed to spend the rest of his life "completing a transition from novelist to playwright." He hopes that in the future people will call him a "playwright" so that he can be distinguished from the two novelists Yu Hua and Su Tong.
In fact, Mo Yan has always had the idea of becoming a dramatist. "The first thing I became a lead character was a novel, but the real debut was a drama called "Divorce"." Divorce was created in 1978 and has not been published. Mo Yan felt that he had written badly and burned it.
Even after becoming famous as a novel, Mo Yan is still interested in writing screenplays: "In my past novels, too dazzling language overshadowed my ability to write dialogue, and writing dramas can stimulate my talent in dialogue." He successively created drama plays "Farewell My Concubine" and "Our Jing Ke", opera literary dramas "Jinyi" and "Sorghum Wine", and the novel "Sandalwood Punishment" that incorporates opera elements such as Mao cavity has been adapted into opera.
The drama "Crocodile" published in June is Mo Yan's latest work. He said that he realized his "ambition" to become a playwright.
In a discussion at Fudan University, Mo Yan explained why "crocodile" has become a symbolic plot in the play. He learned by chance that crocodiles have a special habit and will not grow if they are kept in a small space; But if the tank in which it is placed changes from one meter to two or three meters, it will grow rapidly as the tank increases. In his view, this is full of symbolism: human desire is sometimes like a crocodile, which expands rapidly if left unchecked, and without limits.
In the end, the crocodile becomes in the script as a "character who is not a character who is not a character who is not on the stage all the time", and climbs out of the huge fish tank to talk to the protagonist - human desires are imaged.
✎ Author | Cao Jili
✎ Edit | Tan Shan Mountain
"Crocodile"
Mo Yan
KEY·Can Culture | Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 2023-6
Mo Yan has published a new book.
Three years after the publication of his last book "Late Mature People", Mo Yan came up with a new work "Crocodile". In particular, this is a play, one of the four major genres in the definition of literary textbooks, and drama purely as a text has long been out of the field of view of most readers.
The content of the four-act play is not long, but in form it seems to place Mo Yan's desire for some kind of "transformation". Perhaps Mo Yan was successful enough as a novelist that his vow to "become a playwright" was repeatedly mentioned. In fact, Mo Yan, who has become a literary symbol, his transformation and thinking cannot but attract widespread attention.
If only from the Douban score, "Crocodile" is currently fixed at 7.6 points, which is decent; the number of ratings is nearly 1,000, no more, no less. But Mo Yan and his works obviously cannot be considered by ratings alone.
For example, in the speech around the new book at Peking University, Mo Yan raised a fan in the hot classroom, smiled at the audience, his eyes narrowed cutely, and every move was taken by the college students on the scene, made into an emoji, and widely circulated.
Mo Yan meme.
On June 19, Mo Yan published "Emoji made by netizens, unified thanks!" on his personal public account! "I received a lot of emojis made for me by enthusiastic netizens, thank you for your enthusiasm, I will use it in the future", and put a series of his own emojis in the text.
Unsurprisingly, the number of views of this push soon reached "100,000+", and netizens in the comment area lamented Mo Yan's "groundedness" and discussed the humor of this set of memes, but few people talked about literature.
It is not difficult to imagine that the users of memes are likely to be far more likely than the readers of new books. For Mo Yan, who is nearly seventy years old and brings his own traffic, this can certainly be an interesting thing; But for relatively declining literature, this is perhaps the most insoluble dilemma of the current era, like the fish tank that traps the crocodile in the story.
This story is very indescribable
The story of "Crocodile" is not complicated: the corrupt official fled to a foreign country with his subordinates and his family and mistress, and after seeing all kinds of people, his desire gradually expanded, his faith gradually collapsed, and his life finally fell apart.
Whether from the point of view of word choice or character setting and dramatic structure, it can be said to be a very "Mo Yan" script, and it is not difficult for readers familiar with Mo Yan's past works to find some familiar feelings from it.
Such as unbridled language and overflowing imagination. At the end, the corrupt official faces his son and the crocodile's large monologue, which spreads like flowing water, seemingly endless, but faintly grasps the theme of the story. The scene of the corrupt mistress jumping off the stage with a ribbon in the author's imagination over and over again also has a sense of strangeness common in past novels - although this may cause some difficulties for the actors after the story is brought to the stage.
For example, local elements that pop up from time to time. Although the background of the story is set on the other side of the ocean, it is obvious that Mo Yan is more comfortable as soon as the brushstrokes arrive in the countryside.
The characters in the play have a discussion about sweet potatoes: "Sweet potatoes are the best food in the world, and they are the food that Chinese should be thankful for." Although it rourned our appetite for a while, after eating white-faced steamed buns for a few years, we began to miss the taste of sweet potatoes again. "It seems to convey something, but the meaning is open, always implicating Chinese common memory of the local land."
On August 4, 2022, Mo Yan came to the Jiangsu Grand Theatre to watch the premiere of the drama "Red Sorghum Family". / Jiangsu Grand Theatre
Such as interspersed with dark humor and surreal plots. The protagonist's name is "Wuxi" (無惮) (無惮), and his mistress is called "Skinny Horse" (Yangzhou Skinny Horse, a synonym for a prostitute).
The straightforward and contrasting naming method is everywhere in Mo Yan's past works. And in "Crocodile", even the writer Mo Yan and his work "Frog" often appear in the dialogue of the people in the play, and these "Easter eggs" are enough to make readers smile.
As for the surreal plots such as the growing crocodile becoming able to speak human words, and the bridge that capsized in the dream really collapsed the next day, compared with the animals in "Life and Death Fatigue" who are repeatedly reincarnated and retain the memories of their past lives, it seems to be a small witch.
For Mo Yan, moving from fiction to script, the stage scene is more like a restriction than an amplification of its expressiveness. For example, the famous description of the Ling Chi scene in "Sandalwood Punishment", the cross-era rural chronicle in "Fat Milk and Fat Buttocks", and the discussion of reproductive desires and policy changes in "Frog" are not easy to bring to the stage in an authentic way.
Instead, this "Crocodile" in front of me continues the stylized language, plot, and imagination to the greatest extent within the framework of the drama. From this point of view, "Crocodile" is a mature enough work.
Cover of Sandalwood Punishment (January 2017 edition of Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House).
Can you wait for another Mo Yan?
"Of course, I always keep in mind that I don't want to write an anti-corruption story on stage, I think it is still necessary to create a character with personality on the drama stage through such an angle and material." This is Mo Yan's expression of creative mood in the discussion at Fudan University.
It can be imagined that the author's original intention must not be simply to write a realistic story of punishing evil and promoting good, anti-corruption and anti-corruption. Then, this "Crocodile", especially in combination with the afterword after the book, seems too realistic and too one-size-fits--
The depiction of the life of corrupt officials in the story, whether it is a mistress who wants a name, or a secretary who secretly communicates with his mistress, and the son of a corrupt official who has fallen into a foreign society, there are too many similar shadows in popular film and television works, and there is suspicion of "TV dramatization" simple treatment.
Take a dialogue between the original wife and mistress in the play as an example: "The old lady is out, let's ride a donkey to read the account book - let's walk and see!" "What if, women are all this set, crying, making trouble and hanging themselves three times, in fact, they are all acting." Compared with Mo Yan's novel, similar parts make people feel a lack of imagination.
Inside "Crocodile".
What is the most attractive quality of Mo Yan's work?
Or "magical reality", although this is already an abused literary concept, it must be said that Mo Yan has always been the best practitioner of magical reality in the Chinese world.
Faced with the diverse landscapes, complex realities, and long history of China's countryside and society, he is able to use jumping plots and dialogues, imaginative language, and surreal structures to reveal the texture behind them more profoundly. Many of his previous writings have repeatedly demonstrated this outstanding ability.
In fact, Mo Yan's pen rarely sees pure realist expressions, and restoring a real character and story as much as possible has never been his pursuit. Then, looking at "Crocodile" from this dimension, it is really a little bland, at least it is difficult to bring readers unexpected reading surprises like "Life and Death Fatigue" and "Red Sorghum Family".
The most important image in "Crocodile" is, of course, the crocodile swimming in the center of the stage. It is the embodiment of the desires in the hearts of the characters in the play, and as the fish tank is changed again and again, it grows with these desires, and finally devours the discredited protagonist at the end. But such references and symbols are too straightforward, and even the concept of "desire" as the core proposition of the whole story seems to lack novelty.
Compared with "Frog", which uses frogs to write about reproduction and countryside, and "Life and Death Fatigue" uses animal reincarnation to connect history, "Crocodile" lacks a surreal sense of reality, but has more overly realistic triviality and vanity. In this way, "Crocodile" does not have too many transcendent expectations.
The cover of "Frog" (Commemorative Collector's Edition) (August 2020 edition of Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House).
The huge and complex reality of Chinese society can neither be too immersed in realistic depiction, nor allow observation perspective and imagination to float in the sky, which tests the patience and conscience, pen power and determination of writers. Mo Yan has already contributed the best works and the highest honor to date to Chinese literature, and he should certainly be more tolerant of his transition to drama in his later years.
We can expect Mo Yan to continue his deep insight and precise deconstruction of the world we face today, and to transplant his magical reality tradition more skillfully on stage.
But what is more worth looking forward to is: is it possible that this tradition will be widely inherited and carried forward? When Chinese scenes of life generally shift from the countryside to the city, and the state of life rushes from the pre-modern to the post-modern, the magical reality has an increasingly broad narrative space.
To some extent, this may be the salvation of literature for both authors and readers, and it is also a salvation of literature for itself.
In 2019, the opening ceremony of Mo Yan's International Writing Center was held at the University of Oxford, UK, with Mo Yan as the director of the center, and Yu Hua and Su Tong as writers in residence. /Beijing Normal University official website
As for the writer group itself, the group of well-known writers represented by Mo Yan are accustomed to stepping off the podium and walking onto the variety show stage, accustomed to being surrounded by applause. How does the crocodile, which symbolizes fame and fortune, crawl under the writer's pen? Will the glass fish tank in the writer's heart gradually expand with desire as in the story until it bursts?
These may be the propositions that more pan-literary readers are more concerned about - after all, the most important identity in the minds of the public is still the Nobel Prize winner in literature.
In the current era, there are more readers who care about literary scholars than readers, and whether or not to write and how to write their own desires may show sincerity more than writing broader and general desires.
· END ·
Author丨Cao Jili
Editor丨Tan Shan Shan
Proofreader丨Huang Siyun