On The Free Spirit In Mo Yan's Works

From 1981 to 2011, in these 30 years, Mo Yan has written 11 full-length novels, over 20 novellas and more than 80 short stories. In those works, freedom has always been what the author pursues, though sometimes clear, sometimes vague. Here vagueness means that Mo Yan has never openly talked about or written about freedom in the western culture and Chinese tradition in any of his talks, speeches, interviews, or his works. Sometimes he may mention freedom, but what he refers to is the freedom in broad sense rather than that he is clearly aware of or even in pursuit of. On the other hand, freedom is considered as the constant topic in his works, because the characters pursuing freedom have always been the protagonists in his works, and the special and mysterious stories, the diverse ways of narration have always been the special features of his novels. Besides, what is even more conspicuous is words full of passion and conveying the true feelings of the personalities. What's more, the connotation of freedom and liberty has been greatly enriched and deepened in Mo Yan's works. So for such an important writer, it is worthwhile to do some research about his works and himself. But scanning the studies and comments concerned, I find that almost all of them focus on one, two or several artistic features of his works, and there is no general understanding of his writing and no study concerning the source of his creation. This paper aims to explore the essence of Mo Yan's writing with the spirit of freedom and liberty expressed in his works as the clue and meanwhile by putting him in the western and Chinese culture and analyzing the background he was and is in to explore the source of it.Because the researches concerning Mo Yan and his works are not only limited in mainland China, but also are done overseas. Unfortunately, currently almost all the researches concerned come from mainland China, and there is not much material from other countries and districts from the world. So Chapter one is about the literature review home and abroad, in which the main questions are classified and analyzed. What is worth mentioning is that roughly all the materials concerning researches overseas are the first-hand materials, from which I translate into Chinese and then do the analysis. As can be seen, there are two stages in the research carried out in mainland China:before and after the year 1992. In the first stage, there were three important topics discussed. One is the study on the artistic creation in Mo Yan's works, focusing on such features as the special artistic feeling, the literary images, the fantastic language, the different narrative styles, the description of something ugly and even disgusting and the changeable structure. The second topic is concerned about the vitality conveyed in Mo Yan's works. And the third topic is the influence of western and Chinese cultures on Mo Yan, among which the comparative studies between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Faulkner and Mo Yan is given special attention to. In the second stage, two topics are focused on. One is the vitality and vogor reflected in Mo Yan's works, another is the continued comments on the artisitic values of Mo Yan's works. Overseas, the researches are mainly carried out in America, Japan, France, Vietnam, England, Canada and some other districts like Taiwan and Hong Kong etc. The academic researches mainly cover five aspects, such as the theme of the novel, the characters, the recreated history, the artistic features, and the studies on the influences. Moreover, there are a lot of studies on certain novel or story, which can show the influence of Mo Yan's works overseas. Comparing the studies home and abroad, it can be concluded that most of the studies in mainland China are on the artistic features of Mo Yan's works, while the ones overseas concentrate on the analysis from the political angel, so there are inevitably some misunderstandings existing. In chapter two, the paper first presents some typical protagonists with the spirit of freedom in some of the most important novels written by Mo Yan, and analyzes their performance and behavior in this aspect from the linear order. What Yu Zhan'ao represents is the freedom without any limit, and what Sima Ku expresses is the freedom full of wisdom, while what Sun Bing shows is the freedom without considering himself and any difficulties. Then Lan Lian firmly insists on his belief, and Gao Ma enjoys the obedient freedom. As for the female characters, they are different from the images in the Chinese revolutionary works as well as the females influenced by the western concepts like liberty and fraternity. They demand the kind of freedom they seek for. Altogether, the "free" personalities run through many of Mo Yan's works, and have their own special interpretation of the spirit of freedom, which also reflects what Ma Yan thinks about freedom.Apart from the depiction of characters, Mo Yan explores different narrative styles and creates many fantastic stories. Chapter three is mainly about the narration in Mo Yan's works, trying to dig out the free spirit embraced in it. It starts from analyzing the works and finds out the fantastic plots in them, and then traces back to Pu Songling and goes across the national border to reach Marquez to summarize the characteristics of his stories. On the other hand, this paper takes many of his works written between 1985 to 2009 from Qiuzhuangshandian to Wa for example to explore the narrative styles from the time of narration, the angel of narration and the structure of narration. We can say that Mo Yan not only successfully applies the different narrative angels and the different time order in his works, but also introduces other artistic expressions such as drama and letter writing into his works, and meanwhile he shows his respect to Chinese traditional novels by using the ways of classifying the whole stories into different chapters and to tell the stories like folklore tellers. What's more important, he understands the essence of using ploynarrators popularly used in western world and endows it with his own special characteristics.The words chosen by Mo Yan have always been the focus of book commentator and literary critics. In his works, language as the medium conveying one's thoughts matches perfectly with the free spirit and rebellious ideas. His words can be exaggerated, twisted, fantastic, as well as sensitive and emotional. Almost any words can appear in his works, like some disgusting things:excrement, fleas, as well as some beautiful words describing the beautiful scenery like the high mountain with water flowing by at the foot of it. No matter what they depict, these ugly, beautiful, classical, and truth-reflecting words are swarming up. So in chapter four, the paper analyzes how the words used by Mo Yan have such strong impact on people's senses and what is the relationship between Mo Yan's novels and the New Sense Perception Novels in 1920s and 1930s. Also this chapter studies how Mo Yan combines the words popularly used by authorities, the intellectuals and the general publics together in his works, creating a free and exciting reading effect. But there is no clear-cut between the language and the detailed descriptions of the stories, so in this aspect, Mo Yan learns the ways of writing in traditional Chinese literary works, representing his respect for traditional literature.However, what the writer creates in his works is inevitably influenced by the western culture as well as traditional Chinese culture. At the same time, his family background, his life experience, the social environment has equally important effect in helping his form his own writing style. So in section one chapter five, the paper introduces the four important stages in western history of philosophy and the representative figures and their ideas in each stage. It is clear that in the western world, people interpret freedom as the life significance that each individual pursues, and consider that it is concerned about the political system reflecting social freedom and democracy and the abstract searching for the meaning of philosophy. The second part analyzes the Chinese pursuit of freedom from the philosophy of Zhangzi to modern understanding of it. Different from western concept of freedom, in China, mainly because of the troublesome reality, people seek for freedom to help them escape from the social, political and ethical bandages in their lives, so this is concrete and has clear goal. Besides, the third part talks about the liberal literary works and the representative writers. From this the comparison and contrast analysis is made between their works and Mo Yan's works. Apparently, Mo Yan inherits some of the traditions those writers, but at the same time he has his special understanding of freedom. Certainly, as a social person, he couldn't live separately from his family, his work and the society, so all those factors are explored in the second section.In all, Mo Yan seeks for change in his works concerning language and organization etc and tries to make each one unique, so this diversity makes his works colorful and splendid. Last but the most important point is since Mo Yan insists on his pursuit of freedom in thirty years, is he a transitional writer holding the flag of liberal literary works between 20th century and 21st century? Can his pursuit bring something really useful to Chinese literary realm and promote the development of liberal literature in China? I believe what Mo Yan seeks for is, in some sense, different from the freedom in western concept, and it mainly comes from the heritage of philosophies of Taozi and Zhangzi and is related to crude and rash rebellious spirit conveyed in such traditional Chinese literary works as Shuihuzhuan. But this is just the special feature of the freedom sought after by Mo Yan in his writing. Mo Yan has done a lot in realizing artistic freedom and free spirit, and he has inherited and explored the potentials of liberal literature in modern China, and has contributed to the liberty and diversity of literature creation, thus a respectable and great writer.