Reading Notes W17: Mo Yan, Part X

Extra Credit - Mo Yan (1188-1198)

• Mo Yan burst onto China's literary scene in 1986 with the publication of his novel Red Sorghum, which won high critical praise and was subsequently made into a film directed by Zhang Yimou
• since then he has published a host of novels and short stories, many of which have been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, his longtime laborator
• much of Yan's fictions is set in his native Gaomi County, in Shandong province- a real place, albeit one that Mo Yan's fictions enhance and transform almost into a myth
• many critics describe Mo Yan's work as exemplary of the literary movement called "Roots Seeking"
• this movement arose in the 1980s, one of many waves of response to China to the collective experience of swift modernization in the preceding decades
• the Roots school tends to favor a masculine aesthetic, celebrating raw potency, toughness, and bravado, a tone that some feminist critics have challenged 
• the story, "The Old Gun" (1985), is in many respects of a typical Roots text, since it portrays a younger generation trying to reconnect with its ancestors
• narrated in third person, the story revolves around a boy and his relation to his dead father through the trope of the "old gun"
• the story is typical of the movement too, in its masculine emphasis, narrating  a young male's relationship with the spirit of a lost, primitive, masculine past
• the boy has been in a sense emasculated, a condition that offers a metaphor for the general unmanning of the Chinese people by their Confucian ans Maoist pasts
• his desire to perform a difficult and symbolically charged act, namely firing a gun, represents compensation for wrongs done to him in the past, but it also represents the large desire for control, vitality, and power