Mo Yan

Mo Yan after giving a reading in Hamburg, Germany. [[1]]

Mo Yan (1955)

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   1 Biography
   

[edit] Biography

Born in a Province, and Family of Farmers, Mo Yan, Originally named Guan Moye,Grew up to be one of the most famous Chinese authors of his (and our) time. He left school to work in an oil refinery during the cultural revolution, and eventually joined the People's Liberation Army. Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese, was a name chosen to remind the author to be careful what he said, he was known in school to be quite outspoken.

Though Mo Yan is considered throughout the world to be an exceptional writer, his choice as a Nobel Literature Prize Laureate was stirred much controversy. "Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.” (qtd. en The New Yorker)

His works are Historic Epics, in which he uses Black humor and often has female characters in nontraditional roles

He was inspired by the Works of Lu Xun.

Moyan's English translator is Howard Goldblatt�.

"Mo Yan’s powerful new novel, “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” contains many such vivid set pieces. His canvas covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience from 1950 until 2000... Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, “Life and Death” remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary."

Masterpiece of MoYan--Red Sorghum.

Red Sorghum is a large novel with Tolstoyan scope,this novel focus on the Gaomi Township “a metaphor for china’s fate.The sorghum fields as associated with the human body. Moyan shows how war in the late 1930s destroyed civil life and community in china and overpowered barriers of decency that could have have protected communities and vulnerable people from barbarism and war’s devastation. In the red sorghum, cultural and social institutions do not provide protection and nurturing, and in the aftermath of such failure the human body itself becomes the target to be burned, trampled, penetrated, flayed, and dismembered. These acts are repeated so often in the novel that we eventually come to see them as ways of searching the limits of what the body can endure in a kind of epistemological horror show. The body is probed to reveal the limits of what people can know and suffer through, suggesting that at the extremes of cultural default the human body is the only stage left for playing out conflict when the social institutions and processes information that was meant to be processed impersonally. In effect, MoYan creates a negative sublime in which the human stands in for culture and bears the burden that culture and communal conventions can no longer shoulder.

Thus, the township community and the persistent violation of bodies in it in the Red Sorghum are MoYan’s epic depiction of the cost paid when social and cultural institutions flater. When moyan says that “this novel is about my longing for the contentment of love and a life of freedom,” he is presenting the positive side of what is otherwise depicted as a negative, stark vision when atrocity in regard to the human body plays out in every conceivable way in this novel.

2 comments of MoYan:“On the surface, red sorghum seems to be about the war against japan. But in reality, it’s about the folklore and legends toid by my kin. Of course, it’s also about my longing for the contentment of love and a life of freedom.”"I can’t help but chuckle to myself. If this is innovation, then being innovation is the easiest thing in the world. "

Folklore and the chinese story-telling tradition.

MoYan concedes that his narratives are praised for “fantastic innovation” and postmodern experimentation, but he responds by saying that ...Here MoYan is acting as a culture conservationist and historian, preserving stories that are foundational to and also reflect experiences key to Chinese identity and that are, in some cases, hundreds of years old. His experimentation is transformative and challenges expectation of how a novel should work and what stories should be told, and it also creates continuity. Moyan comments that he adapted the stories he heard from his childhood in his work, which helps to explain the episodic structure of many of his narratives. He adds that “the ones that haven’t been written down are far more interesting than those that have.”

“Postmodernism” in his highly experimental narratives. In Red Sorghum, for example, there is famous creative manipulation of point of view, with the narrator supplying knowledge and responses from his grandparents that he could not possibly know, and The Republication of Wine abandons realistic narrative altogether to juxtapos” Mo Yan as a character within the novel who discusses novel writing this novel’s reputed author, LiYidou. This is experimentation with character, plot, and the fourth wall of aesthetic distance that is reminiscent of postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/books/nobel-literature-prize.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/10/mo-yan-and-chinas-nobel-complex.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-press-questions-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-mo-yan-a-860970.html

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/11/60-second-guide-to-mo-yan-2012-winner-of-nobel-prize-for-literature.html