A Study On Rhetoric In Yan Lianke's Fiction

Yan Lianke has constructed a unique "the Palou World" with his fiction series. From "Seeking Land", "Year Month and Day"to "Flying Days" and "Enduring living", Yan has been experimenting "implying meaning in form" by deliberately downplaying the plot and characterization, building on form structuring, exploiting linguistic expressiveness and thus highlighting the essential meaning of existence. The present paper makes use of the theories in WC Booth's groundbreaking "The Fiction Rhetoric" to make an analysis of the authorial voice in Yan's fictional stories and thus to reveal "for whom" and "how" they are composed.The choice of language and words is the primary rhetoric device. As a son of a farmer in Henan Province, the dialects of west Henan have become his ultimate diction. Firstly, Yan uses the "dialects" in his work to reveal the historical facts that have been screened by the "common language". Secondly, he mixes and contextualizes the dialectal garrulity with the text to blend and fuse the reality, history and legends. The contextualization of dialectal garrulity and the text lends an openness to the text and prevents the text from conveying an "absolute voice" of a closed text. Finally, the use of "carnivalized" language of the Cultural Revolution forms a unique historical context, in which men were actually controlled by the words they spoke, though superficially, they are the speakers of words. In this unique and absurd world he creates, the narrator tells maniac stories of a maniac time by reverting into the specific historical context with the time-marked carnivalized language, thus achieves a more profound understanding of the absurdness and sufferings of the specific historic period.According to Booth, the author must be able to arouse the feelings of the readers by means of symbolized "natural objects". In Yan's work, we find a most prominent "natural object"-the "body". Yan brings "body" on the scene, puts it in the centre of the ordinary everyday living and makes it the embodiment of all social symbols and meaning. He elaborates the relationship between men and the world from three perspectives. First, the physical body survives only with food and multiplication. Second, he creates a diseased world in which men are fighting an endless, desperate, yet ever-losing battle with sickness and disease. Thirdly, the inner desire of the body is constantly confronting the external oppression. The oppression of the body will result in emotional disorder or mania. By depicting individual sexual imagination and also the revolutionary incidents prompted by libido, he tells how body is reined and disciplined and how lust sometimes breaks the taboo and becomes a destructive force. Meanwhile, in Yan's body narration, the female body is materialized as a natural landscape from the perspective of the male instinct. And the male instinct will be either strangled or stimulated after it being disciplined by civilization, thus becoming a destructor of nature. The female body is identified with the wilderness and is excluded from history writing-a fate that mirrors the absolute authority of fate to human being.Yan Lianke has shown strong temporal and spatial awareness in rhetoric construction in his fiction. He has constructed a "plot and intellect double structure" for different types of readers. Firstly, he abandons the linear temporal sequence, and enters into the temporal space of mind of the characters, thus unfolding the "actual individuals" and "actual events" existing outside of the chronicle world. Therefore, in his fiction, time is a cycle, not linear but circular. In this way, he manipulates time to let history walk out from the chronicle sequence and guides the readers to the concrete events and living experiences, which constitute the actual state of living in history, though for long neglected or covered. At the same time, in this circular time space, he deliberately constructs a closed geographical world-the "Palou Mountain", in which the characters walk and talk. In this sense, we can regard his "Palou World", a unique and closed culture, as a metaphor for the vast countryside in China.Secondly, Yan shows a distinct "Reader Awareness". His novels are dedicated to the depiction of "human sufferings" and he has two types of implied readers in his mind. The first type is ordinary readers. In order to appeal to this type of readers, a plot structure is built and attractive stories are designed. Thus, the readers can realize the sufferings underling the stories and are aroused to sympathize with the characters and reflect on life. The second type of readers is the intellectual readers. For these readers, an inner "intellect structure" is finely built, through which the author is able to talk, in a subtext way, with the intellectuals who show an interest to the sufferings of the characters. Though both the two structures cannot be distinctly divided and both are presented by implied readers, we can still feel the presence of this "plot and intellect double structure" distinctly. Through these effective rhetoric devises, different discourse structures are designed for different reader groups. In this way, both the intent of the author is conveyed and dialogues are held through the texts.In conclusion, the present paper analyzes Yan Lianke's fiction based on Booth's theory on fiction rhetoric. Through concrete analysis of Yan's various rhetoric devices, grounded on the intent of the writing, it shows that Yan's text is three dimensional and constitutes a discourse space linking the author and the reader. The paper has provided a new perspective for the study of Yan's work.