Chapter 74 Section 4: Folk Examination of War History: "Red Sorghum"

Mo Yan's novella "Red Sorghum"[9] is an anti-Japanese story told from a folk standpoint.This kind of folk standpoint is firstly reflected in the two aspects of the plot frame and the characters of the work.The description of the story of the War of Resistance is not uncommon in contemporary Chinese literature, but "Red Sorghum" is different from previous revolutionary historical war novels in that it uses all pen and ink to describe the war organized by the bandit commander Yu Zhanao in the form of virtual family memories. Civilian armed forces, and all kinds of wild stories that happened in the rural world of Northeast Gaomi Township.The plot of this novel is intertwined with two story lines: the main one is about the cause and process of the ambush of the Japanese motorcade by civilian armed forces;Yu Zhanao was a bearer when Dai Fenglian was married. He tried to flirt with her along the way, and led the crowd to kill a bandit who wanted to rob the sedan chair. Then he ambush Dai Fenglian by the roadside when she returned home, and took her into a sorghum field. This is how I started a passionate love affair, and then Yu Zhanao killed Dai Fenglian's leper husband, officially became a bandit, and officially became her lover.It is not difficult to see that in this story line, what is always highlighted is a kind of vigorous folk passion, which contains the fascination with sex and violence, and is based on wild and unruly wild vitality.This obviously goes beyond the limitation of political ideology, giving a direct observation and free expression to the folk world.The previous thread of the anti-Japanese story begins with the long-term worker of Dai Fenglian’s family, Uncle Luo Han, who was ordered to be brutally skinned to death by the Japanese, to Yu Zhan’ao’s indignant mobilization of bandits to ambush the Japanese car convoy on the side of the Jiaoping Highway. A civil war fought by bandits and villagers.The whole battle process reflected a spontaneous violent desire of the people to rise up and resist for survival, which to a large extent weakened the political color of historical wars and reduced them to a naturalistic struggle for survival.In a nutshell, the plot of "Red Sorghum" is based on folk themes. Although it tells the story of the War of Resistance Against Japan, what stands out in it is mainly the vivid violence and sex in the folk world. content.What is related to this is that this novel also removes the concept of positive and negative characters based on the traditional ideological binary opposition in the creation of characters. He has dual identities, and in his character, he tried his best to exaggerate a kind of folk color that is rough, violent and full of primitive sense of justice and passion for life. Similar reckless characters also appeared in modern historical novels in the 1950s and 1970s, but it was necessary to establish an orthodox hero with political and moral standards beside him, so as to convey the ideological content stipulated by ideology, but in "Red Sorghum In ", Yu Zhanao is the only main hero who is highlighted. His reckless shortcomings and heroism have not been judged or corrected by any political standards, but he has restored the true nature of the people with his true character.These characteristics are also reflected in the portrayal of characters such as "my grandma" Dai Fenglian and Uncle Luohan.For example, the warm, plump, pungent, and decisive feminine beauty of "my grandma", the loyal, persevering, and indomitable peasant nature of Uncle Luohan, and the reckless and impulsive temper of "my father" Xiaodouguan. The indulgence and vitality of the people are full of them.Since the narrator writes these characters as the elders of his own family, he reflects in them the willful and easy-going feeling rarely seen in previous revolutionary historical stories.This makes this novel very clearly express a tendency to truly identify with the folk value scale in terms of character image creation and emotional affinity.It is based on the value orientation of folks advocating vitality and freedom. The author describes the murder of "my grandpa" and the wild love of "my grandpa" and "my grandma", as well as various rough and unruly personalities and behaviors of other characters. , to create a strong and simple beauty so naturally.

"Red Sorghum" has opened up a vivid folk world in the creation of modern historical war themes. In this sense, it can also be said that what this novel tells is not about historical wars, but the writer's meaningful experience in the space of folk discourse. Entrusted.The narrator has a passionate exclamation at the beginning of the novel, strongly praising his hometown, praising his heroic ancestors, and saying that the deeds of the ancestors and their heroic tragedy "dwarf us living unworthy descendants, While progressing, I really feel the degradation of species.” This kind of sigh runs through the whole novel, and it becomes more intense and touching, which undoubtedly reflects a kind of living state that the writer regards the folk as his ideal.Folks are a place of freedom and lawlessness, folks are in a state of vitality and enthusiasm, and folks are a splendid, magnificent, gentle and honest spirit. These are the sources of the charm of freedom that people yearn for.The narrator compares the real life with such a folk ideal state, but finds that this state is only the existence of the past tense. The heroic dramas in Northeast Gaomi Township are all staged in the past time, which makes him feel regretful. He couldn't help expressing the emotion that the progress of civilization implies the degradation of caste.This obviously introduces a historical judgment scale that has nothing to do with political ideology and intellectual tradition: looking at historical development and social reality from the standpoint of the people, it reveals a tendency to disperse vitality and limit freedom .In "Red Sorghum", this kind of regret and emotion in turn strengthens the idealization and praise of the once existing state of folk freedom, so that it presents a more brilliant and charming color.

However, we cannot fail to see that identifying the folk world as an ideal state will actually make it natural to depict the vulgar and ugly side of it: like the portrayal of the vulgar character of the characters in "Red Sorghum", the brutal killing ( Especially the description of the naturalistic bloody scene of human skinning) all use stimulating violence to present a strange beauty that is in harmony with the work as a whole, but fundamentally, this tendency reflects the inherent nature of the folk world. Vulgar cultural forms.It's just that this tendency in "Red Sorghum" can still maintain a shocking force because of the author's full artistic ideals, and it is still conducive to reflecting the humanistic care contained in the work.However, as far as the later trend of new historical novels is concerned, the indiscriminate expression of folk vulgar forms pioneered by "Red Sorghum" has become more and more vulgar in nature. Once the support of real folk ideals is lost, this kind of The description naturally degenerates into the author's self-indulgence in sensory stimulation, and loses the humanistic meaning that should be recognized by the people.

Regarding "Red Sorghum", it is worth mentioning the novelty of this novel in writing.Mo Yan was deeply influenced by the American writer Faulkner and the Latin American writer Marquez. From them, he boldly borrowed the time and space expression techniques of stream-of-consciousness novels and the plot structure of magical realism novels. In "Red Sorghum", he It almost completely breaks the traditional time-space sequence and plot logic, and tells the whole story very freely.But this kind of seemingly arbitrary narration is governed by the writer's main emotion, which is secretly consistent with the vigorous free spirit in the work.In addition, Mo Yan also showed his excellent ability to master the Chinese language in this novel. He used a lot of rhetorical devices such as metaphor and synaesthesia, which are full of imagination and always go against the rules, forming a unique language at the language level. This kind of magnificent and magical feature creates the emotional support of the unusual folk beauty in the whole novel.

Notes: [1] The phenomenon of "new realism" was first proposed and discussed at the "Realism and Avant-garde" seminar jointly organized by "Literary Review" magazine and "Zhongshan" magazine in Wuxi in the autumn of 1988.At first, there were many references, such as "post-realism", "neo-realism" and so on. "Zhongshan" magazine opened the "New Realistic Novels Exhibition" in the third issue of 1989, and officially confirmed the term "new realism". name. [2] All of these writers almost deny or have nothing to do with this naming method, and their writing styles are also different, so it is difficult to classify them all into an absolutely unified theoretical summary These all show that the so-called new realistic novels can only be regarded as a creative tendency in a certain period of time, rather than a literary genre in the strict sense.

[3] See Zhang Yesong's "New Realism: Back to Literature itself", included in "Personal Situations", Shandong Friendship Publishing House, 1997 edition, p. 32. [4] Quoted from Chen Sihe: "About "New Historical Novels", included in "Rooster Crows Wind and Rain", Xuelin Publishing House, 1994 edition. [5] "Landscape", first published in the fifth issue of "Contemporary Writers" in 1987. [6] , first published in the first issue of "Novelist" in 1991. [7] Quoted from Liu Zhenyun's "Wear and Loss", "Mercury Novella" No. 2, 1991.

[8] Quoted from Chen Sihe et al.'s dialogue "Liu Zhenyun: How long can the satirical spirit in contemporary novels last?" ", included in "Understanding the 1990s", People's Literature Publishing House, 1996 edition, p. 90. [9] "Red Sorghum" was first published in the third issue of "People's Literature" in 1986. Mo Yan later published "Red Sorghum" and its sequels "Saoliang Wine", "Dog Road", "Saoliang Funeral", and "Dog Skin". The novellas were synthesized into a coherent novel "Red Sorghum Family", which was published by the PLA Literature and Art Publishing House in 1987.This article discusses the original novella "Red Sorghum".