Mo Yan has written a short story A Date with the Master (与大师约会), which has a strong flavor of irony and deconstruction. A group of young amateur artists were waiting for “master” Jin Shiliang in the bar when a long-haired man appeared and deconstructed the master Jin image in their minds. The long-haired man, meanwhile, described himself as a frustrated master like Pushkin. “Master” Jin Shiliang appeared in the end of the novel and again deconstructed the image of the long-haired man. Thus, the images of the two “masters” were both deconstructed through their attacks on each other. Mo Yan’s label of “Nobel Laureate” is more eye-catching than “master”, therefore this series of new works that appeared since 2017 has attracted much attention.

These new works include drama script Brocade Clothing (锦衣), the poetry collection Seven Stars Shine on Me (七星曜我) (the ninth issue of 2017, People’s Literature magazine), the novel A Peaceful World (天下太平) (the eleventh issue of 2017, People’s Literature magazine), The People and Their Stories in My Hometown (故乡人事) (which includes three short stories: Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神), The Warrior (斗士) and The Left-hand Sickle (左镰), the fifth issue of 2017, Harvest magazine), My Cousin Ning Saiye Footnote 1 (表弟宁赛叶), The Poet Jin Xipu Footnote 2( (诗人金希普) (the first issue of 2018, Flower City magazine), Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西), the poem Aliens on the Expressway (高速公路上的外星人), Flying (飞翔), Who Dares to Die (谁舍得死) (the first issue of 2018, October magazine), the opera Sorghum Wine (高粱酒) (the fifth issue of 2018, People’s Literature magazine), the opera Sandalwood Death (檀香刑) (the fourth issue of 2018, October magazine, co-written with Li Yuntao) and the sketch story Yidou Study Short Notes (一斗阁笔记) (the first issue of 2019, Shanghai Literature magazine). Although there are no long novels among Mo Yan’s new works, they form a kind of dialogue with or variation with regard to the author’s own writing lineage and the development of contemporary literature, deserving our attention and research. Generally speaking, although these new works are numerous, they are experimental in nature. The author of this paper is to analyze Mo Yan’s new novels and welcomes the criticism of all scholars.

The “unfinalizability” phenomenon in Mo Yan’s novels

There is an interesting “unfinalizability” phenomenon in Mo Yan’s novels, that is, through the techniques of correlation, repetition, amplification and reproduction, he makes use of the “motif” elements of his previous works, which appear to be isolated, monotonous, omissible and simplified, and constantly repeats and rewrites them in a new way. This gives Mo Yan’s body of work complex internal relations in terms of characters, story motifs, and key narrative sources. Thus, his novels display a self-reproductive growth feature and an intertextual dialogic effect. Examples of recurring elements in his novels are a blacksmith, a grandfather, an aunt, Mao opera, a wheat-cutting competition, a sense of hunger and food, a boy’s special childhood experience on the river, fish, turtles and so on. The most interesting and distinctive representation of this “unfinalizability” phenomenon is Mo Yan’s “transplantation” of the literary figure “Mo Yan” in his novels. The figure is based on the author himself, and he mixes the real and the fictional in his works. Although other contemporary writers, such as Ma Yuan in his early stage, also have this kind of “metafiction” writing style, Mo Yan appears to be the one who uses this method the most. When a writer’s body of works reaches a certain size, this writing phenomenon will activate his previous works and produce new values for his novels. The simple world of novels will have a dialogic, reproductive and more complicated flavor, increasing the overall aesthetic and artistic values of Mo Yan’s novel system. This unfinalizability also includes the “draft revision” writing method. For example, Mo Yan admits in his new works that “first of all, I will search out the novel drafts in the past. They are the rough things, and I put them aside after they took their initial form. Now, I open the stove again, reheat the iron, and revise the drafts according to my present thinking. Some novels had already been finished, but times have changed and the hero’s stories in the novels have developed, therefore, these novels need to be reproduced as well. Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西) is an example of this” (Yan and Qinghua 2018).

If we examine Mo Yan’s comprehensive writing processes of different periods, we can interpret this phenomenon as an “unfinalizability” in literature. When we consider Mo Yan’s writings as an ongoing and ever-growing system, this unfinalizability will connect effectively Mo Yan’s writing experiences in the past with his writing tendencies in the future.

There are many instances of “unfinalizability” in Mo Yan’s previous novels. For example, in the short story Tunnel (地道) (the third issue of 1991, Yong Thinkers magazine), the author tells a story of giving birth in secret. Fang Shan and his wife had a child in a tunnel dug by themselves. They gave birth to a boy and their house was pulled down by government officials. However, the unfinalized literary imagination on the country’s family planning policy was represented and released in his later novel Frog (蛙). His novella The Red Locust (红蝗) also seems to be an amplification of his short story The Locust Miracle (蝗虫奇迹), and the “fat boy” image in The Republic of Wine (酒国) has a correlation with the “fat boy” Luo Xiaotong in Pow! (四十一炮). These novels of different periods indeed correlate with each other, be it in a covert way. Sometimes it is an emotional bond that needs to be released, for example, there are many Mao opera elements in Mo Yan’s novels. Sometimes it is an idea that is constantly growing, for example, the “fat boy” in The Republic of Wine (酒国) is a dish that people eat up, but in Pow! (四十一炮) it becomes a hero who is a little bit psychic and good at eating meat. It forms a complicated character dialogue and intertextuality of China’s “eating” culture and the culture of “eating human beings”.

Nearly all Mo Yan’s new novels display the unfinalizability phenomenon described above. Some of his new novels reuse “motif” elements from his previous works. For example, in A Peaceful World (天下太平), the big turtle image that acts as the narrative source and bites Little Ao’s finger tightly had also appeared in Mo Yan’s earlier short story Sin (罪过) (the third issue of 1987, Shanghai Literature magazine), and also in the way of an unforgettable childhood experience. Sin (罪过), puts forward a seven year old narrator who took his five-year-old brother Little Fu to watch a flood on the river bank. The two naked boys were baked by the scorching sun and were like the pikes in the river. The unfathomable river boasts many fancy stories on fish and turtles, and the story of turtle eidolon giving golden mung bean sprouts attracted Little Fu so much that he tried to grasp a red flower on the river. Sadly, he drowned. Hundreds of people came to watch and rescue. The boys’ parents became so angry that they beat the narrator without consideration to his feelings. All the other people also criticized the narrator, who felt that his own childhood had drowned along with his brother.

In A Peaceful World (天下太平), the author tells a story of Taiping village. Little Ao saw two people, a father and his son, fishing in the river in the west of the village. They caught a pricy wild turtle and wanted to get more fish. Therefore, they asked Little Ao to look after the turtle and promised him some fish. Little Ao wanted to set the turtle free but the turtle bit into his finger, and did not let go. Many people came to his rescue, including his grandfather, his aunt doctor Xingyun and his uncle office head Hou. The fishing father and son tried to escape after they found out about the accident, but they were stopped. The village party secretary Zhang Erkun dialed 110 and two policemen came to the scene. The story was developed further to reveal people’s hearts and reality. The policemen became angry and impatient after finding that the accident just involved a turtle biting a child’s finger. However, the villagers were recording the scene on their mobile phones, forcing the policemen to treat the accident seriously. The story then exposed the misdeed of Yuan Wu, who had opened a farm and polluted the water source, and there was hearsay of farmland expropriation to build villas. In the end, the policemen used pig bristles to set Little Ao free and the villagers saw the words “a peaceful world” on the back of the turtle. The novel ends with the villagers’ posting videos full of happiness on the internet, setting the turtle free and cheering for a peaceful world.

In many of Mo Yan’s novellas and short stories, there are representations of a village boy’s traumatic childhood experiences related to a river, fish and turtle eidolons, such as Golden Carp (金鲤), Night Fishing (夜渔), Dry River (枯河) and The Floods of Autumn (秋水). The novel A Peaceful World (天下太平) has also renewed and made use of this “traumatic childhood experience”, which is a kind of “motif” element. Mo Yan focuses on the accident in which Little Ao’s finger was bitten into by the turtle, which refused to let go, and introduces all the relevant characters. Meanwhile, he simplifies the details and presents what goes on in the various characters’ minds. The novel includes many new contemporary phenomena, such as taking evidence with mobile phones, internet disseminations, environmental pollution, village land use, the passive and slack attitudes and even corruption in grassroots government agencies. The content and mentality illustrated in Mo Yan’s new novels, including A Peaceful World (天下太平), is very familiar to people today, and displays a stronger dialogic and critical attitude towards the contemporary world compared to his previous novels. Mo Yan does not illustrate too much in his new novels so that he can keep a certain artistic distance from reality.

Another representation of the “unfinalizability” of Mo Yan’s novels is that he repeats and rewrites the characters and key plots of his previous works, such as The People and Their Stories in My Hometown (故乡人事), which includes three short stories: Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神), The Warrior (斗士) and The Left-hand Sickle (左镰). Let’s take The Left-hand Sickle (左镰) as an example. At the beginning of the novel, Old Han, a blacksmith, took his two apprentices, Little Han and Old Three to the village. These three characters had also appeared in his short story My Aunt’s Treasure Sword (姑妈的宝刀) (written in the summer of 1991). Mo Yan is fond of writing about a blacksmith, and his blacksmith often has many companions. For example, in The Moonlight Saber (月光斩) (the tenth issue of 2004, People’s Literature magazine), the blacksmith Li has three sons, who with their lives made a treasure sword called “the moonlight saber”, that could kill without a splash of blood. The novel My Aunt’s Treasure Sword (姑妈的宝刀) even includes the literary figure “Mo Yan”, as the author writes: “quenching is very mysterious. I have written about it in Radish (透明的红萝卜), but the critic Li Tuo said that he had worked on heat treatment half of his life, and my illustration of it is nonsense.” Besides the blacksmith, the wheat-cutting scene in Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神) is also a recurrent element in Mo Yan’s novels, such as Strong Wind (大风) (the ninth issue of 1985, Novel Writing magazine) and The Son of Leprosy (麻风的儿子)(written in the summer of 1991).

The recurrence and constant portraying of the literary figure of “Mo Yan” is not only a characteristic of Mo Yan’s writings, but also provides an important literary figure for contemporary Chinese literature. The transplantation of the real “Mo Yan” has always been a characteristic of Mo Yan’s novels, and also a sign of his novels’ “unfinalizability”. In Child Abandonment (弃婴) (the second issue of 1987, Chinese and Foreign Literature magazine), the author writes: “I have a white dog as my guide on my way home and come across my friend Warm Aunt, whom I have not met for a long time, and it brings about lots of stories. Then I rewrote these stories and turned them into the novel White Dog and the Swings (白狗秋千架), which is still one of my favorites.” In this novel, the aunt, who works at the department of gynecology and obstetrics of the hospital has become the character prototype of Frog (蛙), with which they form an “unfinalizability” relationship. In Messy Impressions on War (凌乱的战争印象) (written in November of 1986), the author illustrates in the mouth of Third Grandpa different characters in General Jiang’s guerilla. In the novel, the author writes: “the Lieutenant Ren you mentioned in Red Sorghum (红高粱) once lived in our home. General Jiang and others called him Little Ren at that time, and he was said to be a college student. He carried a harmonica in his pocket and usually played it with his mouth, like eating a pig’s trotter. Why didn’t you include his harmonica in your novel? You idiot!” In the long novel The Republic of Wine (酒国), “Mo Yan” even becomes a key figure that cannot be replaced. At the end of the novel, Mo Yan wants to go to the republic of wine by train. When the author introduces the middle-aged writer Mo Yan in the novel, he explains the relationship between the two: “I know I have many similarities as well as differences with this Mo Yan. I am like a hermit crab, and Mo Yan is the shell in which I can reside.” These are all the direct appearance of the literary figure “Mo Yan”. There are also other characters that have been created according to the real Mo Yan, such as the writer in Frog (蛙) whose pen name is “tadpole”.

The new novels The Poet Jin Xipu (诗人金希普), Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西) and My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶) have all transplanted the real Mo Yan into their plots. For example, in The Poet Jin Xipu (诗人金希普), the author writes: I had finished the draft of this novel in the spring of 2012, and five years have passed. Not long ago, I went to Jinan to watch the opera Sandalwood Death (檀香刑), which was adapted from my novel. In the entrance, I came across Jin Xipu, who cordially called me Third Brother and added me as a contact on WeChat. He told me that he had paid twenty thousand yuan to help his cousin become the deputy director of the TV station, but he failed because of the government’s anti-corruption campaign. The novel Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西) begins during the Cultural Revolution period, when Liu Moxi changed his name to Weidong. I joined the army in 1975, and in 1983, when I came back home for a leave, I heard that Moxi had disappeared. In 2012, when Moxi had been gone for thirty years, there were only hearsays. Then, in the first of August, 2017, the author writes:

I was in room 801 of Eight Immortals hotel, Penglai. I came back from a party and opened my computer in a hurry. I searched out this unpublished novel, which had been written in Hu County, Shaanxi Province in May 2012 (it is called a novel, but in fact it is a report). I have not published this novel because I always feel that this story was not finished. How could a living person disappear for no reason? We have seen neither this person nor his corpse. That does not make any sense.

The “unfinalizability” of Mo Yan’s new novels is also represented by his critical reflections on the contemporary world and realities, which have been strengthened and obtained a continuing effect. Many writers have shown the tendency to engage with the present world in recent years, for example, Jia Pingwa’s The Lantern Bearer (带灯), Ge Fei’s Spring Ends in Jiangnan (春尽江南) and many other new novels of 2018, such as Han Shaogong’s Life: A Revising Process (修改过程), Zhang Wei’s The Secret History of Aiyue Castle (艾约堡秘史) and Li Er’s Brother Yingwu (应物兄). Mo Yan may have been restricted by the volume and techniques of short stories and therefore not have adopted the frontal assault method in his new novels in practicing “contemporary writing” (Jiangkai 2013). Yu Hua has used this method in Brother (兄弟) and The Seventh Day (第七天), but Mo Yan has mostly adopted methods of sideway illustration.

When reading Mo Yan’s new works, especially his novels (including some poems), one has a strong impression that they have sideway illustrations of the times, both those that have died out and those that are contemporary. “Sideway illustration” refers to using personal life experiences or other typical plots to present the development history of all of contemporary Chinese society in a sideways manner. It looks like a light description, but it can easily arouse readers’ sympathy and give the novel as a whole a “simple depth and abundance”. For example, in My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶), the narrator’s cousin’s name is Qiu Sheng, whose pen name is Ning Saiye and nickname is Monster. The novel begins with a conversation between this drunken cousin and the narrator. The cousin believes that his Black and White Donkey (黑白驴) is much better than Red Sorghum (红高粱), but he cannot get it published and acclaimed. The novel, after illustrating the evaluation of each other between a famous writer and an unsuccessful literary youth, who is only fond of empty talks, portrays the social development from the 1980s to the present through only one person’s perspective.

Even though Mo Yan’s new works are about stories in the past, they can still “grow” close connections with the present. This is the method of “sideway illustrating social development through personal life”, which can also be found in Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西) and Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神). We can clearly see from these works that some people and time features are dying out in the course of history and some others are flourishing. Although nearly all of these novels adopt the narrative methods that alternate between past and present with insertions and connections, their “contemporary” nature is very evident, and their stories and characters have strong connections with the contemporary world. That does not mean that Mo Yan’s previous works lack this sense of the real and contemporary world, but his new works display a different representation method of “contemporary” nature.

In fact, Mo Yan has works that connect closely to the social realities from the early stage of his writing career. Those works can be divided into two parts: the first part includes works that are very close to the contemporary times and reality, such as The Road for Selling Cotton (售棉大道) and Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (师傅越来越幽默), and long novels that directly and positively reflect social realities, such as The Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜薹之歌). The other part includes works where “critical realism spirit” has been inserted into the grand narrative art. For example, in the long novel The Republic of Wine (酒国), which combines avant-garde narrative experimentation with Chinese stories, we can read different expressions of the Chinese literary circles and social realities around the 1990s. Likewise in the long novels, such as Big Breasts and Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (生死疲劳) and Frog (蛙), which contain long historical narrations, the author still grasps present Chinese social realities precisely, and displays in-depth conveyance of people’s mental as well as their spiritual condition.

In contrast, Mo Yan’s new novels take a different representation approach compared to the above mentioned ones, as they are not only very close to reality but also represent reality in an artistic way. The author maneuvers more precisely the distance or degree between the novels and reality, and the novels include a “familiar defamiliarization” effect, that is, the motifs, character personalities, group mental images and times features are very familiar and very “contemporary”, while the plots, character portrayal and narrative methods on the other hand keep a certain distance from real life. This reflects the author’s strong capacity of balancing literary art with social reality.

The literary figure “Mo Yan” gives fictional novels a strong sense of reality, and forms a more complicated intertextual relationship between literature and the reality. Mo Yan, therefore, has created a very special aesthetic space for his writings that are half real and half fictional. For example, in The Poet Jin Xipu (诗人金希普) and My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶), the author forms directly an “intertextuality” relationship through the characters of “Mo Yan”, the poet and the narrator’s cousin. These two novels are connected with each other through the literary figure “Mo Yan”, and with the plot of “cheating for twenty thousand yuan and the deputy director of the TV station”, the characters and stories of the two novels are also connected with each other. This has naturally strengthened the novels’ sense of reality. Mo Yan’s artistic criticisms of the novel characters in these two novels were also mutually verified, creating an aesthetic effect of intertextuality. If we take the literary figure “Mo Yan” as our clue to analyze the writer “tadpole” in Frog (蛙) and the writer “Mo Yan” in The Republic of Wine (酒国), we will easily realize how the literary figure of “Mo Yan” has been growing in Mo Yan’s novels and how rich self-dialogues and self-criticisms have been formed. It is my hope that Mo Yan will continue to strengthen the portrayal of the literary figure “Mo Yan” in the future. This “Mo Yan” should become an important character in contemporary literature and even in world literature, not only for the sake of narrative convenience and complexity of artistic space, but also for the sake of the story and the typicality of the character prototype. The existence of this figure and Mo Yan’s unstopped writing will give the “unfinalizability” of his literature more appealing aesthetic space.

If we examine literary works by other writers, we will find that “unfinalizability” appears to be a common feature of literature. If we only read the texts, we will find literary “unfinalizability” phenomena in Lao She’s Beneath the Red Banner (正红旗下), Lu Xun’s novels in planning, Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone (红楼梦) and other famous foreign writers. From the perspective of the readers, all literary works are unfinalized as they can be reopened and activated by readers of different times. From the internal characteristics of contemporary literature, the primary meaning of “contemporary” is ongoing and constantly growing. Contemporary literary works, including Mo Yan’s works, have always been an open system that are unfinalized and waiting to be tested in the process of canonization. Therefore, “Unfinalizability” is probably an important topic for contemporary Chinese literature that has not been discussed thoroughly, and it is one of the fundamental features that we cannot overlook when we read and analyze contemporary literature.

Uncertainty and Mo Yan’s literary capturing techniques

The ongoing and constantly growing nature of the word “contemporary” determines to some extent the “unfinalizability” of contemporary literature, and this nature inevitably leads towards another keyword of contemporary literature, that is, “uncertainty”. With the rapid development speed witnessed in contemporary China, the meanings of many Chinese words have become uncertain, such as “Xiao jie” (小姐), “Gong zhu” (公主) and “Tong zhi” (同志). The word “master” (大师) is almost certain to become the next victim of language corruption.Footnote 3 Laozi said: “The lack of faith on the part of the words, leads to the lack of the people’s confidence in them” (Shangkuan 2006). When words and things cannot form stable correlations in meaning, this leads to ambiguity in the words’ meanings. Communication becomes unclear, the expression system takes on double sides: Yin and Yang, decreasing the value of words. Therefore, people will no longer believe the words’ meanings. Fortunately, literature is an art of language. Writers can to a large extent fill people’s cognitive fracture with their imagination and even combine different fragments into one (Anderson 2008). When they observe and illustrate the uncertain world, literary writers begin to possess a certain special power.

Mo Yan has been a witness of the development of the contemporary Chinese society and literature, therefore, we can find the clue of the development of the contemporary Chinese society and some interesting stories of personal life and destiny in his writing lineage. Mo Yan’s new novels apply a method of life intuition and integrally represent the “uncertainty” of literature, reality and even philosophy.

In an interview, Mo Yan explained how he had made a play into a chapter of his novel Frog (蛙) and it formed an intertextual relationship with the novel’s previous chapters. The reason for this arrangement was to “provide room for readers to think by themselves, thus increasing the uncertainty of this novel.” He also proposed that “structure is politics. The uncertainty of the novel’s narrative will make the plot confusing and ambiguous. The dreamed and the real have been mixed together. This has not only broadened the room for readers to think by themselves but has also become a test for the writer’s narrative capacity. It has other advantages as well. It is my goal of the past decades to combine different genres and make a breakthrough in using different genres in the same work. This time begins with the attempt to use different genres and various types of writing and then comes back to the novel writing” (Yan and Qinghua 2018). It is Mo Yan’s conscious artistic pursuit to broaden his literature’s aesthetic space through the uncertainty in his narration.

The uncertainty in Mo Yan’s new novels is represented by the unmanageability of people’s destinies under the changes of the times, such as Liu Moxi in Waiting for Moxi (等待摩西) and the old landowner Sun Jingxian in Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神). It is also represented by the worries about current conditions and future development, such as Fang Mingde in The Warrior (斗士) and Qiu Sheng in My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶). But most importantly, the uncertainty seems to entail a sense of fear of the complication of human nature. Nearly all of the new novels are filled with a sense of fear, be it illustrated in a light way—this is true even for the drama script Brocade Clothing (锦衣) and the poems. This is probably the kind of artistic philosophy that has been distilled from ordinary lives by means of the writer’s life intuition.

In The Warrior (斗士), the author portrayed a cruel but weak literary figure, whose name is Wu Gong and who will take revenge even for the trivial things. The cousin Wu Gong (whose elder brother is Wen Zhi) is a coward who disturbs others incessantly and makes light of his own life. He does not show kindness, neither in his mouth nor in his heart, and he seems full of hatred all his life. If people provoke him, they will undergo trouble for a long time. He will curse those who have provoked him and force them to leave their hometown in deep humiliation. He uses steamed bread soaked in pesticide to poison a three-hundred-pound pig, and he chops his foe’s one mu of corn, which has been growing very well, off in one night. What’s more, he will light a fire in the haystack and spit on the roof of the car. However, in the end, some people have died and others have been taken ill, but he has successfully obtained the “five guarantees” (food, clothing, housing, healthcare and funeral) from the government. It seems that he is the only one who laughs last. In My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶), the narrator has tried his best to help his cousin, who had failed the college entrance examination, to find a job. However, he caused a loss of a hundred yuan in just one or two days of brushing bottles in the brewery. Then he worked as a secretary in the forging equipment factory for one year but fell in love twice. He then enrolled in the army but was found seducing local young women. After leaving the army, he ran a newspaper with Jin Xipu, but he swindled in his hometown with his press card. He then wanted to run a business and borrowed thirty thousand yuan, but he pretended to be a rich man and invited others to dinner and donated computers. Finally, he found a job and a wife and had a child. But he was misled by Jin Xipu and fell back into his old bad habits. I have helped him for so many years, but in the end I only received his complaints and dissatisfactions in return. In The Poet Jin Xipu (诗人金希普), Jin Xipu lived in his uncle’s home for the Spring Festival. He never spent money, eating and drinking for nothing. He promised his cousin Ning Saiye to make him the deputy director of the TV station and cheated his uncle for twenty thousand yuan. His uncle later died of a heart attack. As the old saying goes “frauds do not hope their relatives to be too kind to them”, but in these years, “cheating relatives” are not rare, and frauds have already crossed their red lines.

Short stories require a high level of abilities on the part of a writer in terms of managing structure, language, narratives, characters, details and motif expressions, forcing writers to focus their attention and write with care and precision to avoid any flaws. They will portray the typical characters and social mentalities in order to present the big picture with only a small scene and to illustrate with simple lines the intrinsic mental state of current Chinese society, which has experienced historical changes. Thus, they will reflect and criticize in an artistic way the bad phenomena that have arisen in development over time. This artistic criticism also includes intellectuals’ self-criticism, which is represented by irony, ambiguity, simple description, the typifying of contemporary society’s “mental” state, and a new writing technique that is similar to “hitting an acupoint”.

I want to explain in detail here the writing technique, which I named “hitting an acupoint”. “Hitting acupoint” means that the writer notices a certain problem and touches upon it lightly. He does not elaborate on it too much but yet manages to shock the readers suddenly and convey the implied meanings of the words. The writer can hit either explicitly or implicitly when “hitting an acupoint”. It looks like a simple description but in fact it is stable, forceful and precise. This writing technique is related to the style of short stories, and it is linked to the writer’s writing methods. It is an economical way for short stories to become deep and grand, and deserves our further discussion. For example, in The Warrior (斗士), Fang Mingde, who had worked as the village party secretary, asked the narrator eagerly: “My nephew, who do you think is greater? Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping?” This question in fact represents many Chinese people’s perplexity on the great changes of the times. Fang Mingde said: “we have enough money now, but I do not feel reassured in my heart.” This sentence probably represents the general feeling of a whole generation. Also in Eyesight of the Landowner (地主的眼神), the narrator asked Sun Laiyu: “What has happened to the land of eight hundred mu in the farm?” “It was said that it had been bought by the brother-in-law of one of the city leaders ten years ago, at a price of four hundred yuan per mu.” When it comes to the uncertainties of people’s destinies and a sense of fear towards human nature, which we have mentioned above, Mo Yan has used the method of “hitting an acupoint” to illustrate accurately the small figures’ destinies in this big era. There are the cousin, Wu Gong, Moxi and the narrator’s close relatives and hometown fellows, their stories filled with betrayal and swindle. A person’s destiny can be destroyed or remodeled by others at will. In analogy with Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg” theory, there are even more “ice water” phenomena in our lives: those things that have happened and existed but cannot be retrieved, verified or recounted are like an iceberg that has melted and become water. Mo Yan writes of the things that we feel but cannot express ourselves. He has touched many people’s life experiences, the pain of an era and even the essence of a life philosophy. Therefore, his writings have made me pause when reading in lengthy contemplation.

In The Poet Jin Xipu 诗人金希普) and My Cousin Ning Saiye (表弟宁赛叶), the above-mentioned features are particularly evident. These two novels are like literary twins and their “growth” is almost in tandem with the growth of the Chinese people since the 1980s, especially when it comes to intellectuals and literary enthusiasts. Mo Yan’s portrayal of them, as in his previous novels, is a continued observation and reflection of contemporary Chinese literary circles and intellectuals. He has also incorporated himself into the novels for self-satirization and self-criticism. In a sense, the cousin Ning Saiye in Mo Yan’s new novels represents the losers of the “gold rush” since the literary golden times of the 1980s. “Third Brother Mo Yan” represents the winners and Jin Xipu, who has missed the golden times, represents the “hypocrites” (poets, scholars, professors and other people with titles), who can achieve a level of success through devious means. Intellectuals have a kind of mysterious self-hypnotism, and they will “legitimize” their own defects in their own minds through self-satirization, self-denial or limited recognition. Thus, they will adapt the facts into their desired “real fake facts” or “fake real facts”. This subconscious is so stubborn and profound that it makes us forget our character defects that exist in reality or in other people’s mouths, and we truly believe our moral standards to be higher than others’. That is why it is so praiseworthy that Mo Yan has dared to write himself in his novels and criticize himself multiple times.

In The Poet Jin Xipu (诗人金希普), the author portrays a cultural blackguard who makes use of every opportunity to hype and package himself, boast and even swindle. For example, Jin Xipu was in a party of hometown fellows in Beijing, when he entered the room:

He went directly to party secretary Hu, shook hands with him and gave him his business card. Then he shook hands with several generals and hometown fellows of deputy ministerial levels, and gave them his business card. When he shook hands with these leaders, he said repetitively: “Sorry, I’m late. I just come from Peking University. The traffic jams in Beijing are terrible……”

When the party secretary Hu asked him what he was doing recently,

He stood up amid the laughter of the people and bowed his waist: “During the past year, I have lectured in a hundred universities around the country, published five poetry collections, and run three poem reading parties. I want to launch a climax of poem rejuvenation, and I want to introduce Chinese poetry to the outside world.”

Jin Xipu knows very well how to package himself. He shamelessly calls himself “the greatest poet after Pushkin” on his business card and adds some big titles underneath. He claims that his personal photographer has a master’s degree and his personal videographer has once worked in Hollywood in the United States. He has successfully raised his status and attracted the attention of many people. Even the retired general who is experienced and informed asked the narrator what a kind of person Jin Xipu is and the narrator could only “smile and say nothing”. Jin Xipu proposed to read a poem and publicized himself again:

Up until now, I have published fifty eight poetry collections and won one hundred and eight important literary prizes home and abroad. I am now the chair professor of thirty eight national as well as international renowned universities. Last year, when I visited the United States, I gave a speech with the former U.S. president William Clinton at the Lincoln Center and we were welcomed by an audience of about eleven thousand people……

People are very easily getting confused by this ostensible propaganda, and they will not examine the things themselves to explore the true facts. Jin Xipu went to his uncle’s home later and cheated for food, drink and even money, which shows that he has at least successfully swindled many people who do not know the facts. This literary figure is not new to some contemporary intellectuals and men of letters. Some talents or idiots form their own small circles and establish a connection with some big figures. They boast themselves, praise each other, speak nonsense conscientiously and collaborate to stage a play for propaganda. As they are so serious and conscientious in staging the play, the frauds themselves have eventually come to believe that all these things are true. In my opinion, cousin Ning Saiye, Third brother Mo Yan and the poet Jin Xipu are “three aspects of the same body” of contemporary intellectuals. This is the representation of the stratification of contemporary social development, and nobody can get free of it completely.

What will Mo Yan’s next long novel look like? This is a most uncertain literary question. However, if we guess from Mo Yan’s writing lineage, I think his creative writing will continue his novels’ path of “unfinalizability”. Mo Yan’s novels also have a “foreseeing nature”, that is, some of his novels’ capture of contemporary Chinese society can be extended from the past to the future. For example, in The Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜薹之歌), a young military officer delivered a long argument in the court.

“I think ‘the garlic incident’ has rung the alarm for our party.” “If a party or a government does not work for the benefit of the common people, the people have the right to overturn them; If a party cadre or a government official does not work as the servant of the people, but acts as their master and becomes a bureaucrat riding on their heads, then the people have the right to overthrow them! In fact, the Communist Party of China is right and great, and she serves the people wholeheartedly. After the rectification, our party has become better in her working style. The majority of party cadres in Tiantang County are also good. I want to say this: one bad apple spoils the barrel. One party member or one cadre’s bad behavior will always ruin the reputation of the entire party and government. The common people are not totally fair, they always consider their dissatisfactions with one official the result of the behavior of the entire party and government. But does it also remind us that the cadres and officials of our party and government should be more cautious, and to avoid damaging the reputation of our party and government?”

While Mo Yan’s previous works reflect social reality directly, his new novels’ concerns for the Chinese social reality are in contrast represented in a more stable manner, leaving more room for artistic maneuvers. In The Garlic Ballads, the young military officer’s emotional words form a fictional echo in the history of China’s current anti-corruption campaign, reflecting the “foreseeing nature” of his novels.

Mo Yan has many excellent long novels, such as Big Breasts and Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀), Sandalwood Death (檀香刑), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (生死疲劳) and Frog (蛙), which have their own irreplaceable importance and characteristics. However, The Republic of Wine (酒国) is my personal favorite. Even though we read this novel from today’s perspective, it is a rare long novel that combines pioneering, criticizing and story-telling nature into one, not only in Mo Yan’s writing lineage but also in the contemporary novels lineage. It is regrettable that this novel did not receive sufficient attention and discussion in China.

We can find the writer’s ability to reflect contemporary reality and to have a foreseeing nature in The Garlic Ballads (天堂蒜薹之歌) of the late 1980s, which is more realistic and reflects social life directly, but also in The Republic of Wine (酒国) of the early 1990s, which is more pioneering and absurd. Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City (废都) is also a novel of this kind, capturing the mentalities of a generation of intellectuals. I have thought about the reason. It is either because the writer has grasped the essence of social development with his keen artistic abilities, or the social reality itself has not changed in essence no matter how this society has been developing. Either way, we can safely say that the writer is faithful to reality as well as to art.