Some time ago, the death of a famous writer caused a lot of harsh criticism and "bottoming out", and some people said that this was a "whip corpse". In fact, there is another literary scholar who is far more famous than him, and although he is there, there are already countless people who are impatiently intent on striking him with the fist of words. This "poor man" is Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Theatrical talents, even if they are resolute opponents, probably do not dare to deny it lightly, Mo Yan is one of the most attractive storytellers in contemporary novelists, the grand narrative ability of the epic class is rarely reached, and the imagination of thesis science is far beyond Jia Pingwa, Yan Lianke, and Chen Zhongzhong. His more than 30 years of cooking, a collection of nearly 40 works, almost independently constructed a class of ethnography related to rural China. His colleague Yu Hua once publicly declared: "I am not afraid of offending people, from the perspective of literary standards, Mo Yan is at least enough to win the Mao Dun Literature Award 10 times." Because 90% of the works of the Mao Award are not as good as the worst one of Mo Yan's", it can be said that it is highly respected. Yu Hua was so arrogant, he had just praised Lu Xun.
But at the same time, for Mo Yan, the Nobel Prize winner, there has always been "public anger" in society. There is an equally loud voice that believes that Mo Yan is a "traitor" among the Chinese people, and the voice of "crusade" has been heard for 8 years and has constantly triggered a major split in public opinion. These friends believe that Mo Yan is not only not good enough to make a name for himself, but more importantly, his Chinese world has seriously distorted and defaced the image of the Chinese people, and the picture of Chinese life he shows is full of ignorance, barbarism, darkness, filth, corruption, degeneration and other negatives. They asserted: Why did Mo Yan do this? Because it is to please the West!
To be fair, this question is certainly not on the line, but that kind of resentment is really not empty. Reading Mo Yan's works, even the most calm readers will probably wonder: Chinese thousands of things, why does Mo Yan prefer to indulge in those creepy national negativities? Is the intention in this out of the need for literary and artistic expression, or is it just a strategy adopted to cater to the attention of Westerners?
Although, in the face of these right and wrong and even insults, Mo Yan has been very silent in the past 8 years, he has grievances in his heart. His new book, "Late Ripening People", not only records the human situation before and after winning the Nobel Prize, but also deliberately borrows the characters in the book to explain, "Your novel has no good person except you, I will sue you for slander", the mood should be both distressed and sad.
Although I am full of sympathy for Mo Yan, I cannot deny that Mo Yan's things, from the early "Wine Country" and "Red Sorghum Family" to the later masterpieces such as "Sandalwood Punishment" and "Life and Death Fatigue", do have a strong "national self-palace complex" that cannot be dissolved, which makes people feel unbearable!
It is common to see that when Mo Yan first started the Chinese literary scene, some of his works, such as "Transparent Carrots", focused on the national nature of Chinese, even if his original intention was only to "eat delicious dumplings three times a day". In the early 1980s, when he first debuted, when his peers were still toddlers on the road of literature, only knowing the low-end operations of "scar literature" and "right-wing literature", he quickly reached the top as soon as he appeared, directly touching the "ceiling" of literature and even Chinese writing.
Mo Yan's youthful military uniform photo
Moreover, since then, he has never left this line of thinking: examining, criticizing, and torturing the physical ethics and spiritual inferiority of the Chinese people, "writing about himself and the nation as sinners." I still remember very clearly, a certain famous professor I respect, every time Mo Yan is mentioned in class, I can't help but shake my head and sigh, "You see Mo Yan's "Wine Country", that is really a genius"! He is Mo Yan's peer, and for more than 30 years he has been unable to figure out how Mo Yan, a young man of less than 30 years old and a low-educated person who has not graduated from primary school, wrote such excellent and profound works in the first place.
Indeed, these works are still extremely impactful when they are looked at now, whether it is a different kind of text expression or a stimulus from the spiritual level. But at the same time, the "Mo Yan Paradox" is already so obvious from the beginning: in terms of craftsmanship, these works are so neat and exquisite, and they are full of style; but from the perspective of national emotional cognition, the Chinese group portraits inside seem to have been hollowed out from the bones, and they are all ugly displays of Chinese-style local farming culture, which is unbearable to face.
The Blueprint of Mo Yan's Literary Kingdom - Gaomi "Northeast Township" in Shandong
Moreover, the more important drawback is that Mo Yan's novels are always tirelessly telling almost identical stories, and the "sense of reproduction" is particularly strong: the rendering of eating "babies" in "Wine Country", the elaboration of "fetishism" in "Fat Buttocks", the relish in "Red Sorghum" and "Sandalwood Punishment", the heavy ink on "persecution mania" in "Frog", and the deep excavation of "perverted psychology" in "Life and Death Fatigue", almost all of them are "ugly Chinese" big writings. In his works, men always seem to be obscene, women seem to be forever eager to be dissatisfied, what voyeurism, stealing, collusion, abuse, killing, as a symptom of Chinese national nature, all the time as a metaphor flashed.
Reading his books, whether as a Chinese or simply as a human being, may find it difficult to appreciate the sense of literary proportion and the aesthetic effect of art. Mo Yan, who looks good, is there only the "Flower of Evil" in his literary world?
When the award was first awarded, it was popular in the community
Probably therefore, there are huge voices of "conquest" that believe that Mo Yan, as a Chinese writer, will only exhibit the violence, filth, ugliness and pathology of the Chinese people, and is completely self-stigmatizing, self-smearing, and wagging his tail to beg for mercy on foreign races. They further deduced that Mo Yan's "eating inside and outside, with ulterior motives", whether it is a work or a person, is unbearable.
As far as my personal feelings are concerned, it is obviously unfair, even ignorant, to understand Mo Yan so simply and crudely. To put it bluntly, such a good practice of the "Great Law of the Heart" is actually more one-sided in the criticism of the critic's thinking and IQ than the "extremism" of Mo Yan's works, and it also reflects how farther these friends who are superficially righteous and awe-inspiring have a gap in their understanding of literature! At the beginning, the then chairman of the Nobel Prize for Literature Jury, the 79-year-old Westberg, spoke highly of Mo Yan, "I want to say to Chinese, and others, that Mo Yan is not only a great writer in China, but also a great writer in the world. East Sea and West Sea, is the psychology so different?
Westberg
Whether Mo Yan can be regarded as a "great writer in the world" is not discussed for the time being, but in contemporary China, his position in the top two is unquestionable (although I personally value Jia Pingwa more), and his half-life efforts should not be slandered by all kinds. Because the reason is very simple, whether it is "criticizing reality" or "reflecting on national nature", it is not the same as "unpatriotic". Mo Yan's "ugly Chinese" treatment, such as accusations, exposés, and even criticisms, is just a consideration for the selection of materials as a writer. More importantly, the so-called love is deeply responsible, and criticism is also a kind of introspection and repentance. The purpose of any ambitious writer should be to stand at the highest level, to reflect the joys and sorrows of human beings, as well as the difficulties of human nature and the world, rather than blindly praising, deliberately embellishing wrongs, and covering up historical memory. Criticism, denunciation, exposure, reflection, is also a deeper kind of love.
Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe, the most admired Chinese writers are two: Lu Xun and Mo Yan
Literature's depiction of the Chinese people, whether it is praise or disparagement, can actually mirror each other, so as to illuminate different aspects of the human spirit. Moreover, if you have really read one or two Mo Yan, it is not difficult to feel his "intentions": he wrote some of the Chinese, which is so ugly and unbearable, and it is the heaviest pain, but it is by no means and has never been able to degrade the personality of "Chinese", and it has nothing to do with the accusations of "unpatrioticism" or "hate this nation". His thoughts have been defended more than 20 years ago: he wrote down all kinds of dark aspects, not to the wall, but also to hope that the people of the country will remember the past and correct the existing ugliness, which is a moral responsibility and a deeper way of love.
Stills of "Red Sorghum" adapted from Mo Yan's work
This mood, his essay entitled "Others Are Guilty, I Am Guilty" when he was young, has long been very clear: "As a person who writes novels, you should be good at thinking about problems from the opposite side", and you should "have a sense of self-repentance and self-reflection, and torture the sins hidden behind goodness".
It can be said that if just because of the scars of the nation and the people, it is considered to be deprecated, then the understanding is even uglier, more of a world where the people's wisdom is suspended!
If the standard is so absurd, then how should Lu Xun, the "soul of the nation," live by himself? Chen Zhongzhong, the author of "White Deer Plain", also solemnly "countered" the doubters, saying, "Chinese writers have finally entered the ranks of the Nobel Prize, and I think this is not only the glory of Mo Yan, but also the glory of the entire Chinese literature, which will surely have a lasting and extensive impact on the Chinese literary circle.", which is a very fair word. Mo Yan, a man who calls himself "the son of a peasant from Gaomi Northeast Township in Shandong Province, China," is a literary master who has truly cultivated himself, and who has been recognized by the world for his extraordinary literary talent, but has been attacked and slandered by all kinds of attacks and slanders by domestic people. Rufuzi's words are still in the ears: disunity, infighting expertise, jealousy of the virtuous ability, are the greatest inferiority!
Moreover, a very important but increasingly forgotten common sense is that the writing and understanding of literature should be diverse, and a hundred flowers blooming and a hundred schools of thought are the norm. Some paranoid friends, because of the narrowness of thinking and the lack of understanding, will only see Mo Yan write the Chinese people as emotionally rough, mentally handicapped, and naïve citizens, and write a group of people full of pathological aberrations about violence, butcher knives, filth, etc., and indignant about this. But they selectively ignored how Mo Yan sang the praises of the great low-level Chinese people:
Mo Yan's works do not always write about the dark side, and good and evil, beauty and ugliness have always coexisted. He has a lot of criticism of the Chinese people at the bottom who are "angry and indisputable", but more is actually sympathy for "mourning their misfortunes", and ultimately pins his hopes and ideals on these "sentient beings", rather than some noble doctors, talents and beauties, and emperors and generals. In his pen, Chinese noble sentiments, always showing a stronger sense of existence in times of crisis:
Mo Yan's "Chinese" of indomitable and indomitable, brave and fierce resistance to death
In "Red Sorghum", those Chinese who "sleep in the sorghum field" do not hesitate to fight for their homeland in the Moshui River Bridge and the sorghum field when the foreign insults come, and those who only see the "sick deformity" of the people in "Fat Buttocks" do not want to see the magnificent history of 20th-century China presented by Mo Yan in the book, especially the bloody struggle of the Shandong peasants to resist the colonialists to repair the Jiaoji Railway. The unbearable weight that women of the old times encountered as tools for the inheritance of the old-fashioned family! As well as the suffering of those long years of war, the blood and tears of the nation in those barbaric times, and the various life-and-death pains experienced by Chinese mothers and Chinese villagers, Mo Yan is truthfully reflected and deeply saluted!
Why can't the "trolls" see this? Can it be that because Lu Xun also focused on the negativity of "national inferiority" and Xiao Hong also focused on writing about the barbarism of the Chinese people, it can be easily determined that they are all "traitors"?
Chen Zhongzhong
That is to say, although the history of these families and the image of the people of the country displayed by Mo Yan are inevitably distorted and exaggerated due to the limitations of the "magic reality" technique, his foothold is definitely not ugliness, but reflection, examination, and torture, which is a wake-up call, and it is to seek progress through criticism.
Moreover, as readers, we have read and talked, and if our hearts are still plain, in fact, we can also see that the ugly things that Mo Yan pointed out Chinese are deep-rooted national problems, and in fact, most of them are still there today. No country, no society, no time can be perfect. Otherwise, is it necessary to vigorously promote "positive energy"?
"Homecoming"
Writers, some insist on writing beautifully, some focus on the dark side, is nothing more than a matter of taste and direction, rather than a position or even a judgment of character. It can be said that the suffering and unbearable suffering of the Central Plains people in history and reality make Mo Yan's works full of aggressive power, but from a higher level, they also shine with the fire of love that will never be extinguished. Life in shandong provides mo yan with themes, and love and hate, hope and despair are the spiritual essence of his works!
In the face of these controversies, "seeing that everyone is pointing and pointing at the evaluation", Mo Yan has generally ignored it for 8 years. The only time he responded was at the "Symposium on Mo Yan's Works" held by the China Academy of Arts. That day, in the face of the question that someone was a "traitor", he just looked dark and said, "In the face of criticism, I will benefit for life", "From learning that I won the Nobel Prize to today, I seem to have experienced a baptism, like a mirror, seeing people's hearts, seeing the world, and seeing myself", in addition, he was no longer willing to say more.
Since then, Ren'er has had a wind of east, west, south and north, and I have written a chapter with a clear conscience. The pen name "Mo Yan", as if pre-emphatic, has been really silent since then.