Exile Between Beauty And Ugliness

Mo Yan is an extraordinarily prolific writer and this is a significant literary phenomenon in China. Working in his own artistic kingdom, Mo Yan is keen to explore new means of artistic expression, therefore, his fictions have a unique feature in terms of means of artistic expression. This paper will have an overall review of his fictions from an aesthetic point of view. In general, his literary life can be divided into the following three stages: 1981 tol986, 1987 to 1995 and 1998 to the present. The fictions created in different stages bear different aesthetic styles because he has different aesthetic emphasis in relative stages. This paper falls into three main parts (the first, the middle and the last parts), which relatively analyze his fictions' aesthetic features in the three stages.The first part: the first stage focuses on aesthetic expression. Based on his sharp feelings toward life, Mo Yan expresses his understanding of the aesthetic of life by giving full rein to the worship and desire to life. Thus, fictions in this stage are radiating with beauty of life. Meanwhile, he also devotes to experimenting on and practicing literary styles and finally give birth to Mo Yan's aesthetic style.The middle part: in the second stage, Mo Yan spends more attention on writing the ugliness. The fictions express a kind of profundity in depicting ugliness by uncovering and examining the ugliness in society and human nature from many angles. In the meantime, due to the shift of criticism, Mo Yan indulges himself in wantonly displaying and playing with the social and natural ugliness. In this stage, Mo Yan also telegraphs an inclination of showing off ugliness.The last part: in the third stage, MoYan is influenced by the pan-aesthetic cultural circumstance and he adjusts his writing. So his fictions contain more popular factors like the features of stories, legends and jokes. In these fictions, the appreciation of beauty and the appreciation of ugliness flow together and they bear a pan-aesthetic style.With his perseverance to pursue art, Mo Yan employs fiction as an instrument to incessantly expose ugliness and discover beauty and exile himself in the permanent dealing with beauty and ugliness. Mo Yan's pluralism in aesthetic style makes him an indispensable figure in the contemporary Chinese literary arena.