The Narrative Strategy of Chinese Avant-Garde Novels:The Case of Mo Yan
作者：乔国强 来源：本站原创 浏览量：6525 2009-08-27 13:32:46
The Narrative Strategy of Chinese Avant-Garde Novels:The Case of Mo Yan
Abstract: Initiated mainly by Ma Yuan, Ge Fei, Su Tong and Mo Yan, the literary Avant-Garde has played a prominent role in contemporary Chinese literature since the mid-1980s. It advances some revolutionary concepts of narrative, language and human existence, directing its poignant query into the very truth of life and attempting to exhaust the possible forms of literary expressions. As a kind of cultural force, the flowering of Chinese Avant-Garde writings help perceptually and conceptually to transcend over the age-old cultural tradition. As one of the representatives of this literary school, Mo Yan has a great cultural and literary repercussion. Most of his writings are credited with a sense of history, which is sensitive to the links between man and society but unsympathetic to the tradition of theoretical elaboration or political ideology. This essay will mainly discuss some of Mo Yan’s most featured narrative strategies, such as his conscious choice of cultural position as a writer—to write as one of the ordinary people, rather than to write for the ordinary people. The author believes that Mo Yan’s cultural position in his writings is so important that it governs the dynamics of his plots, characters and themes.
Key words: Chinese avant-garde novels/narrative strategy/Mo Yan; cultural position/Jiu Guo/ Sheng Si Pi Lao
1. Avant-garde: innovation and revolution
The literary avant-garde continuously operating in China has been much discussed and debated since the latter part of the 1980s. However, so far no concerted understanding has been achieved with the exception of identifying a few avant-garde writers, such as Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Can Xue and Mo Yan. This status has much to do with the fact that scholars of Chinese literature have recognized more innovation of literary forms than revolution of subject matters and the cultural positions those avant-garde writers take. 1
Generally speaking, Chinese literary avant-garde by definition refers to those vanguard writings since the mid-1980s that break through the age-old literary traditions in forms, subject matters and cultural positions. However, it varies with the passage of time. That is to say, at the initial stage of the 1980s, the avant-garde writers launched a formalistic innovation, yet to a great degree, kept their subject matters politically and ideologically intact, such as Ma Yuan’s Gangdisi de youhuo (Temptation of Gangdisi, 1985), one of the representative writings of avant-garde during that period. Ma Yuan juxtaposes some fragmented stories that are quite unrelated to each other, trying out various narrative strategies, such as blurring the boundary of fiction and reality by the author’s intrusion and thus, arousing the enthusiasm of narrative innovation in China. Nevertheless, the novel itself reveals nothing but the temptation of primitiveness in Tibet to the modern civilization embodied by some urban youth who made exploration of Tibetan lives and the mysterious legends there. Even if some other early avant-garde writers did direct their thematic concerns against the enduring social norms and cultural habits, such as Su Tong’s Qi Qie Cheng Qun (Wives and Concubines in Groups, 1989), they merely tried to reveal and evaluate their gnarled protagonists’ desires—again they blinded their protagonists to political and ideological challenge. At best, they offered an unwanted past and developed a complex sensibility of suffering in their novels, such as Yu Hua’s Huozhe (Being Alive, 1992).
However, since the 1990s, the avant-garde writers have fought on the two fronts, that is, while continuing their experimentation with varieties of narrative forms, which causes a great outcry for a rethinking of the established literary and aesthetic principles and orders, they maintain their self-imposed and outward-imposed isolation from the mainstream by offering plausible defiance to the authorized version of Chinese history and the actualities of modern experience, aiming to offend the social norms and sensibilities, which the mainstream writers have never ventured to do. Indeed, the avant-garde writers in this period tend to deconstruct what Chinese readers have been taught about the history and, to some degree, undermine what the authoritative media has propagandized since the establishment of new China. Furthermore, those avant-garde writers represented by Mo Yan clearly state their anti-traditional cultural position. For example, Mo Yan once said that he wrote as one of the ordinary people rather than for the ordinary people (Mo Yan 2003: 4-8), challenging what the authority has ever called for. He further clarified that
The slogan that ‘to write for the ordinary people’ sounds very modest and as humble as something like working as a horse or a cow for the ordinary people, but it is rather commanding, … [it is] something like officials’ saying that they are servants but in fact, they are not….
The one who assumes a stance that ‘to write as one of the ordinary people’ believes that no matter who he is, a novelist, a poet or a playwright, he is the same as any other craftsmen, such as a sophisticated basket weaver, bricklayer or carpenter—they are as noble as the writers…. He will never separate himself from the ordinary people (Mo Yan 2003: 4-5; translation mine).
That is to say, for Mo Yan, the major difference between the one who writes ‘for the ordinary’ and the one who writes ‘as one of the ordinary people’ is that the former will think of how to influence readers in a positive attitude toward social reality no matter what it is, or, how to expose and condemn something bad and how to advocate something good through his writings; while the latter does not think of those and therefore, he can equate himself with his characters and readers (Mo Yan 2003: 4). In effect, the stance Mo Yan assumes is an impassioned criticism of the bias inherent in Chinese literary mainstream—to write something politically correct. Thus, to some degree, it seems incumbent upon him and those avant-garde writers to reconstruct the system of narratological concepts in their deconstruction of Chinese literary tradition and therefore, contextualize that system and those concepts in the non-institutionalized history and social reality.
2. Mo Yan: a case study
The Mo Yan case serves here as a kind of parade of avant-garde writings, precisely, a parade of the tension between experiments of narrative strategy and the thematic concerns of the non-authoritative version of Chinese history and reality. Most of Mo Yan’s themes are concerned with the interplays among politics and culture and the value of perpetuating life. His narrative strategies are about the feelings of fragmentation, inconsistency, and playfulness, raising the specter of forms to great effect. Thus in combination, his novels arouse his readers to thought, perplexity, the possibility of faith and finally the perception of art and therefore, make each of us, the author and his readers, have a stake in the consequence of the reading.
2.1.1 Narrative forms versus reality
Generally, narrative forms employed in Mo Yan’s novels jointly generate the stories and help to shape readers’ interpretations of meanings and significances of subject matters. Take Mo Yan’s Jiu Guo (Republic of Wine, 1993) for example. Jiu Guo is actually a kind of revelry of various narrative forms, which encompasses styles of epistolary, fictional, meta-fictional, realistic, etc. The interplay of those styles registers a bitter satire of the police, a poignant condemn of the social reality embodied in the murder of babies, the Chinese craziness for wine and the absurdity of a dwarf’s devilishly remarkable prowess. However, I will narrow down to analyzing some of his narrative strategies, such as sequence, embedding and the mixture of fictional and realistic narrative and therefore, to display Mo Yan’s commitment to narrative innovation.
First, the narrative sequence has a fructifying effect. Jiu Guo consists of ten chapters. Basically, each of the first seven chapters is geometrically and episodically structured, which contains four sections:
lSection 1 is the main story, which narrates Ding Gouer’s (a detective from the provincial police bureau) investigation of murdering infant babies;
lSection 2 is letters from Li Yidou (a doctor of wine), who asks Mo Yan, the author of this novel, to read and make commentary on the stories he writes;
lSection 3 is the author Mo Yan’s replies to Li Yidou’s letters, in which he makes commentaries on the stories written by Li Yidou and occasionally mentions his own writings;
lSection 4 is embedded stories written by Li Yidou, which mixes up sometimes with the main story.
The sequence here offers different perspectives from which information is presented. Specifically, in Section 1, the main story is focused on the murder of babies, the corrupted detective and his relations with a woman truck driver; in Sections 2 and 3, the embedded letters going between the two authors reveal their moral and cultural positions on the current issues; and in Section 4, the embedded stories mainly expose the murder of babies as well as the evil aspect of Chinese culture of wine. It seems that what the detective in the main story investigates actually can find a source in the embedded stories and therefore, to make the issue overlapped in the main story and embedded stories, which indicates that the stories told respectively by the author of the novel and author of the embedded stories are indeed one story.
But in Chapters 8 and 9, the narrative sequence, though still structured in four sections, is changed: the main story comes to the last, indicating the fictional narrative is replaced by the realistic one. Generally, the sequence in which information is provided to readers affects the form of attention readers accord to it. These sequence-changed chapters generate a mixed feeling of interruption and tantalization. Previously, our attention is focused primarily on the major characters’ action and situation told by the author of the novel. We read each chapter with the expectation that we are going to know what will come out in the detective’s investigation of the murdering, yet we are now interrupted by the author of the novel and author of the embedded stories and feel tantalized by the awareness that both the main story of detective’s investigation and the embedded stories that correspond to the main story to reveal the evil aspects of Chinese culture of wine will end up with nothing definite.
Second, the narrative gap between the main story and the embedded stories is bypassed by the embedded letters. Since the embedded stories are functioned in fact as a kind of complimentary parts of the main story, the real embeddings in the novel are the letters going between the two authors. When we pick up and read all of these letters alone, we will realize that the letters not only demonstrate the relationship between the two authors, but also reveal the interrelationship among the stories told respectively by the two authors. The letters written by Li Yidou, the author of the embedded stories, actually function as prefaces and backdrops of the stories, while the letters by Mo Yan, the author of the novel, as epilogues and commentaries, jointly creating dynamic tensions and therefore, contextualizing themselves into the whole novel. For example, Li Yidou wrote a preceding letter to introduce one of his stories:
Tutor, last night, I wrote another story entitled ‘Fleshy Baby’. In this story, I believe I adeptly employed Lu Xun’s technique of writing, changing my pen into a sharp ox-ear-shaped knife. I peeled the gallantly-skinned civilization, and exposed its brutal core of morality. This story of mine belongs to ‘severe realism’. It challenges the ‘Ruffian Movement’, the currently epidemic styles, such as ‘playing with literature’. It is a kind of practice that attempts to awaken the mass through literature (Mo Yan, 2004: 44; translation mine).
The first impression of this letter gives us is quite ludicrous: Li Yidou, an anonymous writer who has never had anything published, dares to liken himself to Lu Xun. Nevertheless, when we read through the succeeding story, we come to realize that Li Yidou is really a Lu Xun—both of them cry for saving children. We would feel surprised to read Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’, in which he condemned the Chinese feudal society that made the children mad. But we would feel even stunned by the succeeding story Li Yidou told, in which he related that many poor families sell their babies to a Cuisine College, where the babies are braised in brown sauce to make a course of dish! The ultimate effect is no matter that we are previously provided with some information that implies the story is fictional, we still feel irritated and agonized. This effect is achieved not only by what we have already been informed about the investigation of murdered babies in the main story, but also by the hints we find in the quoted letter, such as ‘gallantly-skinned civilization, and brutal core of morality.’
The third, the fictional narratives (stories told by Mo Yan and Li Yidou) and realistic narratives (letters between Mo Yan and Li Yidou) are highly hybridized. That is, the stories told respectively by Mo Yan and Li Yidou, who are both fictional characters and realistic persons, and the letters going to and fro between them combines to create a strong effect of shuttling between the two coexisting worlds—fictional and realistic and thus, to form a conceptual frame of actuality, which guides the readers’ interpretations of the situation. But Mo Yan plays a trick here—using the fictional narrative to condemn the murder of babies and satire the corrupted and fatuous detective; while using the realistic narrative to abate the tension created by the condemnation and satire, compromising between the two narratives.
In Chapter 10, though it still maintains 4 sections, the embedded story written by Li Yidou disappears. Instead, Mo Yan, the author of the novel, comes to the front, shedding light on all the events and situations and thus eventually merging both the fictional and the realistic narratives into a single whole. This merging of the two narratives helps reinforce primarily our general understanding that the government officials embodied by the woman vice mayor and head of the city propaganda bureau, are basically corrupted, though they do not seem as evil as what previous chapters have exposed. In this chapter, Mo Yan ends up with a meeting with the woman vice mayor at a banquet, who has great capacity for wine. Mo Yan wrote,
Mo Yan saw the square-faced woman vice mayor coming to him, white and delicate, with eyes rippling like autumn waters. She was elegantly dressed as if a figure from the Tang Dynasty.
Mo Yan intended to stand up to show his courtesy, but unexpectedly slipped under the table. Under the table he heard the vice mayor shouted loudly:
‘Why, great writer? Hide out? It won’t do though you hide. Drag him out. Drink. If he refuses to drink, squeeze his nose and pour the wine down!’
Two strong arms dragged him out. He saw the vice mayor raised a big bowl of wine with her lotus hand and push it to his face, shouting valiantly:
Wine in China is in reality a code of culture as well as a code of politics. The rule for the game is that bottom-up of a glass of or, a bowl of wine has to do with power, prestige and loyalty, namely, the government officials can demonstrate their powers/rulership and prestige through their orders of bottom-up, while their subordinates may express their loyalty by obeying the officials’ orders of bottom-up. Thus, this conclusive scene as above-quoted evidences the thematic depth and furthermore, reveals the temper of the times and culture.
2.1.2 Narrative forms versushistory
In terms of cultural position, Mo Yan’s avant-gardeness finds expression primarily in his analytic sense of the dynamics of history. Although he is actually a writer with rich indigenous cultural tradition, Mo Yan is daringly suspicious of what the official have said about history. His attempt of deconstructing the egregious past to uncover a new dimension of history—the negative sides, or rather, the inhuman side of the so-called class struggle and the like—runs counter against the established cultural and political values and therefore, thus forming the intellectual tension and major brand-new spectrum of interests and subjects. In brief, the real value that glorifies Mo Yan as an avant-garde writer is not only that he offers readers with tactile information and critical perspective to look back at the Chinese history, but also that he takes the lead in refusing to negotiate with the authoritative version of history that has never been and could never have been challenged before.
To a great degree, a choice of a segment of the historical record to narrate influences interpretations of the events that the historian reports. (Cf. White, 1973: 6-7) Accordingly, a writer’s choice of this segment of the historical record rather than that one plus his particular ways of interpreting the segment of history he chooses indicates the writer’s cultural, political and moral orientation. As far as Mo Yan is concerned, the richly textured historical world he chooses to write is sick, phobic and chaotic, lending the story a decidedly anti-traditional flavor. Take Mo Yan’s recent novel Sheng Si Pi Lao (Exhaustion of Life and Death, 2006) for example. The history on view is circumscribed to an uncaring and sometimes, even inhuman society in the past, especially during the barren years of Land Reform movement after the liberation and the Great Culture Revolution, exposing with a noted heightening of emotional velocity the political exclusion and decimation. The strength of his choice of history in this novel is that he develops a conception of victim in his narrative, who either passively suffers from history (Ximan Nao), or becomes survivor evading history (Lan Jiefang), or is reshaped by the history (Ximen Jin Long); while the weakness is that in his feverish conceptual debate over what that sustains Chinese institution or cultural cohesion, he mythicizes and canonizes his victimized protagonists, such as Ximen Nao, one of the protagonists in the novel, and therefore, conversely undermines what he has labored to establish.
The novel Sheng Si Pi Lao is reminiscent of the social tracts of the recent fifty years, i.e. from 1950 to 2000. Mo Yan gives a vibrant account of his characters that were adrift in political and economic complexities during this period of time, registering a clash between a dense and exciting new reality and the pull of a nightmare past. The inescapable rhythms of lives here are presented through a kind of multi-layered narrative, or rather, shifts of point of view, which are based on the six courses of Buddhistical samsara. Specifically, the narratives are made from the perspectives of a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey and a man in turn, who are the reincarnations of Ximen Nao, an innocent landlord who was executed to death by a captain of civic militia during the Land Reform after the establishment of new China. The paramount important choice of dubious Ximen Nao as one of the major narrators, who, in the traditionalist’s eyes, is an evil landlord executed by the revolutionaries and therefore he has got no right to speak for himself, together with the overarching subject matter that Ximen Nao’s property are confiscated and his two concubines are shared respectively by the captain of civic militia and one of his long-term hired hand after his death, illuminates the intricacy of Mo Yan’s avant-garde position. In other words, allowing such a person to speak for himself and such subject matters presented in the novel is in fact to reverse the verdict of history and lampoon the cruelty and absurdity of the revolutionary dictatorship.
However, Mo Yan weakens the force of his choice by overplaying with some of his narrative strategies, for example, the functional important shifts of point of view in the narration. Indeed, frequent shifts of point of view can help provide multiple perspectives; but the problem is that Mo Yan does not go so far as to invent new carriers of narrative form but resorts to Buddhistical samsara, which is actually not of vanguard but of convention in Chinese culture. Therefore, in reference to the plane of narrative strategy, Mo Yan’s shifts of point of view are at best an experimentation of how to maintaining fictional interest; while at worst, they boil down to an outlet of his submerged dissent against the established literary and aesthetic principles and orders.
Another weakness of the narration is the employment of Mo Yan as one of the three major narrators, who is in the same name of the author Mo Yan. The narrator Mo Yan is rather ambiguous in the novel, as the author Mo Yan confirms that the narrator Mo Yan is neither himself, nor a writer in a real sense. The reason for his existence in the novel is for the sake of narration only. 2 The author Mo Yan also adds, ‘the appearance of Mo Yan, a narrator in the novel, offers an ambivalent interpretation and therefore, to enhance the ambiguity of the novel. These three narrators jointly form a complex relation of tension’ 3 In effect, Mo Yan’s confirmation itself is quite ambiguous and ambivalent, not to mention the effect of tension he intended to create through these three narrators only resulting in bafflement. For one thing, the narrator Mo Yan’s existence in the novel seems quite unaccountable: he has nothing to do with most of the events and little to do with the development of the plots; for another, the author Mo Yan attempts an intertextuality by constantly but rather irrelevantly mentioning the narrator Mo Yan’s literary works, yet the author Mo Yan later states that he has never written them.4 There raises the questions that why the author Mo Yan makes such attempt as to confuse himself with the narrator Mo Yan and, whenever the author Mo Yan mentions the narrator Mo Yan’s works, he mentions them disdainfully and announces in the meanwhile that they are fictional and untrustworthy.
What is more, the first-person narratives employed in the novel are marred by frequent inconsistency, namely, they are in most cases actually the variant omnipresent and omniscient third- person narratives. For example, in a chapter the narrator Lan Jiefang told a story about an old man. The author Mo Yan wrote:
The one who said it was an old man, who once studied in an old style private school and knew numberless words. The old man often stayed in the barber’s and said conceitedly to the ones who came to have their hair cut: if you had any words that you didn’t know, just asked me, if I couldn’t tell you, I’d pay the expense for your hair-cut. Some of middle-school teachers looked up some rarely used words in the dictionary and asked him. But it was easy for him to answer them. Therefore, one of the teachers invented a word, namely, he drew a circle with a dot in it, and then asked the old man what it was. He sneered at it. Did you want to put me into a hard position? No, you couldn’t. This word was read ‘Peng’, meaning to throw a stone into a well and then we got the sound. The teacher said: no, it was a word I invented. The old man said in reply that every word was invented at the beginning. The teacher was silenced, and the old man looked triumphantly (Mo Yan, 2006: 147; translation mine).
Obviously, this is a third-person narrative. Because on the one hand, the narrator is omniscient and omnipresent: he knows where the old man frequents, every detail about how the teachers trouble the old man and, even the old man’s psychological activities; while on the other hand, the narrator Lan Jiefang is actually a fifteen years old boy then. The reality is, as an individual farmer, i.e. the one refused to join in the people’s community, he is in a vulnerable social location, or even worse, classified as one kind of evildoers during the red-scare of the Culture Revolution. That is to say since he is isolated and lives a marginal life, he can possibly neither know that the teachers look up in the dictionary to find some rarely-used words to question the old man, nor can he know the details that one of the teachers invents a word. The only way he learns these details is from somebody else. Yet the problem is that the author Mo Yan has never mentioned where Lan Jiefang learnt the story. Therefore, the inefficiency of this confused first-and-third person narration throughout the novel results in a dubious reading of this novel and furthermore, indicates an unresolved conflict between the author Mo Yan’s imagination and presentation and his as well as most of the avant-gardes’ marked tendency to break decidedly away from everything normal and formal.
Indeed, the break with everything normal and formal made by Mo Yan as well as some other Chinese avant-garde writers will entail a final departure from both the historical perception permeating the ideology of obedient Chinese and the collective nature of that ideology and acceptance of authoritarian social system essential to contemporary Chinese culture. Nevertheless, the vulnerable location of a writer, especially vanguard writers in contemporary China together with the antagonistic nature of diachronic genealogies and synchronic associations he made will eventually harbors ambiguities, though it catalyzes a historical event that has been particularized and represented as a fantasy of cultural belonging of the time.
Notes
1 Cf. Chen, Sihe. (ed.) (1999). Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng (A Course on Contemporary Chinese Literary History), Shanghai: Fudan University Press; Wang, Xiaoming. (ed.) (2003). Ershi shiji zhongguo wenxueshi (A History of 20th Century Chinese Literature), Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin; Tang, Jinhai. and Zhou, Bin. (eds.) (2003). Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue tongshi (A History of 20th Century Chinese Literature), Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin.
2 Cf. ‘Sheng Si Pi Lao Called in Question, Mo Yan Offered the Answers’(Sheng Si Pi Lao Zao Duzhe Zhiyi, Mo Yan Yiyi Zuoda), quoted from http://www.dwcm.net/2006/4-22/185349.html, also see “Not a Summery: Mo Yan’s Reply to the Questions” from http://book.qq.com/a/20060313/000005.htm
3, 4 ‘Sheng Si Pi Lao Called in Question, Mo Yan Offered the Answers’ Sheng Si Pi Lao Zao Duzhe Zhiyi, Mo Yan Yiyi Zuoda), quoted from http://www.dwcm.net/2006/4-22/185349.html also see “Not a Summery: Mo Yan’s Reply to the Questions” from http://book.qq.com/a/20060313/000005.htm
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