Allegorizing History

Abstract

In his four quasi-historical novels, Red Sorghum (1987), The Republic of Wine (1992), Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996), and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), Mo Yan weaves history and fantasy into a narrative mode, which he dubs “magical realism.” Told predominantly in the manner of family saga, the stories try to sketch a historical period from the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s to the Reform Era in the 1980s and 1990s, and share an approach to history that blends realist and fantastic elements. Tending toward the episodic, the narratives draw from China’s cultural, literary, and folkloric traditions against historical settings to foreground human sufferings. In these four novels, Mo Yan writes about China’s contemporary history by allegorizing the here and now. He adopts fantasy to serve as an artistic means to an etiological end, ultimately satirical and antiprogressive, that is achieved in finally saying unsaid or prohibited messages – a self-styled mission signaled by his pen name.