CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Wendy Larson Mo Yan: China’s Cultural Apocalypse and World Literature
Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan’s 莫言 (Guan Moye 管谟业, 1955-) approach to writing demands the recognition of devastating social change and the apocalyptic destruction it has inflicted on individuals, groups, and culture. Always alert to space and place, Mo Yan immerses the reader in an intense local lifeworld, an approach that sets his entry into world literature apart from fellow Nobel Prize winners such as Gao Xingjian (1940-). As part of a larger work on Mo Yan’s fiction, this project focuses on the author’s most violent work, the 2001 novel Sandalwood Death (Tanxiang xing 檀香刑). I show how the author creates Sandalwood Death as arising directly from both apocalyptic brutality and, simultaneously, out of the Chinese storytelling tradition. This style, the author claims, is unlikely to be enjoyed by those who favor Western literature, just as the local opera Cat Tunes cannot be performed alongside Italian opera. In the process of Mo Yan’s self-styled “step backward” and out of the destruction of one lifeworld in favor of another, he creates a new kind of writing.