Characteristics of Mo Yan's novels

The artistic evaluation of Mo Yan's novels is "the creator should be bold and unconstrained". No matter in creative thinking or artistic style, we should be a little evil. -Mo Yan: Someone commented on him in "A Powerful and unconstrained style": If there is anything important in China's literary world of 1985, it is Mo Yan. Perhaps Mo Yan's name is not well known to quite a few people. Before 1985, he had published no more than a dozen novels, and lacked obvious personality in art. At first, some short stories with characteristics, folk music, were favored by senior writer Sun Li because of ethereal, but they just thought that their "themes were artistic", so it was natural that they were not known. But in the middle of 1985, he suddenly burst into five novellas, Transparent Carrot, Ball Lightning and Blonde Baby, and eight short stories, Swing Up, Harvest and Zhongshan. It is a great sight that an unknown young author has dedicated a group of works with hundreds of thousands of words in just one year. But that's all. At best, we can only call him a "faster car". Fortunately, the quality of his creation is almost as high as the output (if it can be compared in this way). He came to the literary world not only with "wild and uninhibited", but also with "evil spirit" based on inheriting tradition and deliberately breaking the shackles of tradition, and with a unique novel style born from the infiltration of Chinese and foreign novel art. Therefore, it is indeed an arduous and even dangerous thing to conduct a comprehensive aesthetic criticism and cause analysis in time. Therefore, this paper can only make a superficial analysis and discussion on the ten characteristics of Mo Yan's novel art with a large number of examples, but this is about the artistic ontology. I hope it can inspire readers' aesthetics and the author's "creating beauty" activities. One morning, I dreamed of a carrot field ... carrots shone strangely in the sun. This is an interesting dream that Mo Yan once had, which changed his creation as he heard the sound of nature and realized Zen. From this dream, he got a beautiful and strange image full of poetry. This image, like a movie, like a fairy tale, has sprouted an inexplicable feeling. He thought it was wonderful, so he had to turn to the pen for help. As a result, this image continues to expand, and this feeling gradually ferments and finally becomes a novel. This is the novella Transparent Carrot, which was later praised by people. Let's not discuss the dream feeling in the novel and the blood relationship of this dream. We just want to point out how different this novel is. For many years, we have been used to a so-called "injection from the outside to the inside", that is, we often "tailor-made" a certain demand, or even "tailor-made". Over time, a "brain dynamic stereotype" has been formed. Today, many people still unconsciously imprison themselves in a fixed mold, which is a terrible loss of creative freedom. Mo Yan, on the other hand, either got an image from his dream, which led to a transparent carrot and three horses. Or from Kawabata Yasunari's "Snow Country", the sentence "A big black Akita dog squatted on a stepping stone and licked hot water for a long time" evokes a distant and desolate emotional memory, thus capturing a narrative "tone". In short, they all melt and cast the accumulation of life with the activated subject mind, thus showing the writer's distinct aesthetic personality. We call this method "radiation from the inside out" and think it is closer to the law of artistic creation than "injection from the outside in". A writer can use it freely, and he has gained relative freedom of creation. Dana has long discovered: "People with artistic talent have two characteristics: one is a strong and spontaneous impression; Second, the advantage of this impression can change all the impressions around. " Of course, all "images" or "impressions" are just yeasts, which can only be fermented in harmony with life. Then, what about the part of life that is insufficient in the process of "fermentation"? Mo Yan's experience is "to make up for it with imagination." Imagination is the greatest feature of Mo Yan's art .. Second, "the writer's genius and aura are concentrated in his imagination." The girl grabbed his clothes, upturned her face, and looked at Poplar slowly tilting her head and slowly turning to herself. In a trance, she saw the boy with bare back and bare feet hanging down the thick poplar trunk like a bow, and the poplar seemed to eject him at any time. The girl was shivering under the tree. Later, she saw the poplar suddenly stand up straight again. In the late autumn sunshine, glistening poplar branches gather on their fingers, rustling light blue air. In the clear sky like ice, a wisp of slender poplar branches is flying; The handfuls of poplar leaves left on the treetops seem to have withered, but the dark blue color still does not fade; Dead leaves creak when the branches swing. -"The Dry River" It is hard to imagine that a writer without rich imagination can write such exquisite words. Writer: The feeling of poplar reclining in girls' eyes is as smart and vivid as that of boys' cats. What to write: as big as "the branches of poplars gather on their fingers and rustle in light blue air", as small as the color and sound left by withered poplars on the treetops, "the sky is as clear as ice". You can see the brushwork and the flash of the gas field everywhere. This is the role of imagination. With it, you can put wings on the life you have experienced and let it soar; You can also inject spirituality into a life you have never experienced and make it full of vitality. Let's look at the opening of Goldilocks again, and write that the blind woman and the old woman touched the satin quilt cover of The Prince and the showgirl at night until the dragon hissed and the phoenix crowed, and the dragon and the phoenix resonated; Listen to the sound of the dark night until the stars collide, the Tianhe River overflows and the waves are noisy. There is also a long passage about Sun looking at the "fisherman's portrait" through a telescope. With the help of the subtle changes of sunlight during the day, he vividly wrote the skin color, body temperature and breathing of a stone, so that "the fragrance of Sanxian jiaozi is blown out from his strong lips." This is the crystallization of amazing imagination. Brandeis believes that imagination is a writer's microscope. "Through the microscope, a spider looks bigger than the biggest elephant, and its organization is more complicated." It was with the help of a microscope that Mo Yan changed himself from an excellent observer to a profound perspective. Successfully broke through the general plane simple description, and went deep into the interior of things for three-dimensional observation and description, not only wrote the shape of a drop of water, but even dissected and analyzed its light, color and even basic particles. Therefore, he can often go on indefinitely at one point, writing beautifully and with great feelings. Such three-dimensional and in-depth detail description skills are rare among contemporary writers. What many of us lack is this kind of Wang Yang's arbitrary subjective creation, which often leads art to stumble over the reality of life, blindly "describing" and "taking pictures", making the vivid life like water dry and boring. Mo Yan's special imagination endows him with a high degree of freedom in drawing materials, refining ideas and even describing details. He is like a duck to water in the "free kingdom" created by himself, almost reaching the realm of calling the wind and calling the rain, scattering beans into soldiers, and turning the stone into gold. With this skill, of course, he can be completely forgiven in the structure of the novel. He is talented. Three: "connect a number of unrelated things together, melt them in the furnace, stew them in the pot, knead them into a ball, and keep cutting, tearing and moving." Has anyone read "three-dimensional time-space novel"? As far as my limited reading range is concerned, Mo Yan's novella Explosion is one of them. The novel is about how I took my wife to the hospital for an abortion. It's simple. It's only half a day. But he raised a flying unit in the sky, and many planes circled all over the sky and made love repeatedly; On the ground, dozens of people with a group of dogs tried their best to drive a fox and scurry around the grass; He also ordered a young man and a young woman to ride motorcycles back and forth on the highway. Really inside and outside the delivery room, worlds apart, connected in one breath, four clues intertwined. The author seems to come clean about all the people and things that happened in this time and space intentionally or unintentionally, which not only makes you feel that the scene is magnificent, but also makes you feel that these complicated things are interrelated. Yes, the complexity of the structure naturally brings the ambiguity of the theme of the novel. You can say that it reflects the "explosion" of population, or that it shows the "explosion" of the contradiction between old and new moral concepts, or even that it is the "explosion" of information of various times. Different people have different opinions, whatever you want. In addition, Mo Yan's novels also boldly tried various structural techniques, such as multi-angle narrative structure (spherical wind), contraposition structure (blonde baby), time sequence inversion and time sequence juxtaposition. Or make the work more layered and realistic, or make the work colorful and fascinating. In short, in order to "make the characters and environment get the greatest possible three-dimensional sense" and "make the story active and gain a life force" (Vargas Lu Sa), he showed great randomness in how to come and go. This randomness is even reflected in his leisure time that often goes beyond the norm. For example, the paragraph about the troops crossing the river in Swing can be said to be a complication. If it can't be completely deleted, it can at least be greatly compressed. But he wrote nearly a thousand words magnificently here. In order to facilitate the explanation, a section is specially selected for a brief analysis: ... the soldiers crossed the river on the bridge one by one, and the cars waded across the river one by one. ("The river is clear, the crops are full of ditches") Snow-white spray is aroused in front of the car, and yellow turbidity is left behind the car. ("The People's Liberation Army went into the mountains to help us with the autumn harvest") After the big truck passed, two small jeeps also got into the river in a daze ... ("How many memories come to mind when you pull up the family talk") "Oh!" A chief said. Another officer said, "Fucking idiot! Let the Monkey King send someone to lift the car. " ("We ate a pot of rice and lit a lamp of oil") Soon, a dozen PLA soldiers pushed the cut-off jeep into the river ... ("You are our own flesh and blood, you are our caring people") Those people in white coats carried the wet driver onto a car painted with the Red Cross. ("The party's kindness is endless, and I always feel very close when I see you") ... If the whole paragraph of Crossing the River is a bit complicated, then the lyrics inserted here are even more oblique. It is through the insertion of lyrics in this letter that he naturally causes the short and slow narrative rhythm through the cross narrative of the tense and chaotic military vehicle crossing the river scene and melodious lyric lyrics. Rhyme and prose in language form; The vision and hearing of sensory images; The inner meaning of four groups of contrast between history and reality, and these four groups of contrast have produced a four-fold combination of sublime and funny, cheerful and heavy, loyal and ignorant, sweet and bitter. In the end, it will give readers a strange bean soaked in the military-civilian relationship, social psychology and characters' emotions in that specific historical period, so that you can get a strange aesthetic pleasure while chewing. Mo Yan is so arbitrary in the structure of his novels. He will never be a slave to "simplicity" and "concentration", as long as there is a "taste", write it there. So it avoids monotony and rigidity. On the contrary, it's often interesting to look around, and there is a kind of carefree stroke of genius. In art, the most likely place to be wiped out by the whole army is despair and surprise. Gorky said that the coat of all thoughts and facts is words. So, I picked out all kinds of silk threads to knit for her. "Looking at Mo Yan's novels, you can start with any line on any page. It is not the stories and characters that conquer you first, but the language itself. Every word seems to be shouting, laughing and jumping, pulling you alive and dragging you, and unconsciously, you follow them into the colorful waves of that language and swim happily. How can I put it? They are vivid, elegant and exquisite, full of momentum, chic and fluffy, flexible and changeable. In a word, the language features of Mo Yan's novels are difficult to be summarized in a few words, but we might as well analyze what kind of "silk thread" he uses to weave the "coat" of his novels. Application of modern synaesthesia in 1 The artistic synaesthesia, which once brought lyricism to poets, also shows its talents here. It comes and goes like the wind. Through metaphor and exaggeration, all kinds of information show a radioactive conduction, and its speed, depth, breadth and density are infinite, making people feel that they are opening every pore and accepting all the colors, lines, sounds and smells between heaven and earth. At the same time, all kinds of complicated and subtle feelings that are difficult to express in words have been expressed most vividly. Here are some examples of Goldilocks: "She has a loud voice and has the charm of stinky tofu. "Smell becomes vision:" The fragrance of Sophora japonica fills the sea ... The wind blows and blows the fragrance into strips. " "