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Mo Yan Shares His Literature
Experience
PKU NEWS 2009--11—24
http://ennews.pku.edu.cn/news.php?s=259121230
Peking University. Nov 24, 2009: on the afternoon of Nov 20, the famous Chinese
writer Mr. Mo Yan, was invited to give a lecture at Peking University‘s Yingjie
Exchange Center, as the 7th lecture of the lecture series of ―Chinese Writers at
PKU‖.
In modern Chinese literary criticism, Mo Yan has been regarded as one of the
pioneers of Neo-historicism novels. Though his works are so different from the
historical novels about the revolution published since 1949, Mo Yan stressed that he
was not completely against the Revolutionary Literature, the so-called Red Classics.
―I think my works are more influenced by those Red Classics than by western
thoughts such as Magical Realism.‖
Speaking of his motives for writing Red Sorghum, which was later adapted by
Director Zhang Yimou for the big screen, he said: ―I just wanted to write a novel
which was different from all the novels about the anti-Japanese war.‖ Then he
elaborated on how he made his novel different.
―First of all, I did not regard war as the only subject. I did not write to represent the
war. I wanted to show how people react under special circumstances, and to depict
their emotional and psychological disturbances and changes.‖
―I think the writer should not be bounded by the position of his/her own class, but
should observe history objectively, particularly when the writer‘s personal relations,
emotions, and positions are involved in that part of history. Struggles with things
such as class, economic and political struggles, are all subject to emotional struggle.
Therefore, what I wanted to write was to depict the history of personal emotions.‖
As for language, Mo Yan said, ―there are complex factors affecting a writer‘s
language, such as all the life experience he/she has had. Take me for example, I‘m
particularly fond of Yuanqu Opera; therefore you can see them a lot in my own
works. ‖
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