On Yan Lianke 's Novels

The full-length novel, is the best way to observe and study a writer’s artistic achievements. Combing the works of a writer’s different periods can not only help to find his variation on writing theme and style, but also help to explore the change of society history and cultural psychology. Yan Lianke, as one of the most influential and powerful authors of contemporary Chinese literature, his full-length novels which based on the background of contemporary modern life since the new Chinese Government was built, has tended from farms and soldiers to intellectuals, from physical miseries to spiritual sufferings, from the revelation of miseries and the critic of society and history to the salvation ways of human. We can perceive this trend from his first novel Affection Prison written in 1991 to the latest novel Crack Annals written in 2013. Yan lianke connects the contemporary history by his expression of miseries and sufferings. He shows the changes of people’s values and ethics in the progress of Chinese modernizing which charactering as tends from sealing to open, poor to rich. On the one hand, Yan Lianke depicts both the sufferings and miseries of starvation, handicapped and disease as well as death, shows his critic to the inhumanity or anti-humanity things including rustic authority and power centralization, materialism development model and the binary counter pose between urban and country. On the other hand, he also uncovers the deep reasons of Chinese spiritual misery through the surface of history and explores the spiritual enslaved conditions of Chinese people. In the area of power, ethic, and custom, people suffers much spiritually. Yan Lianke is strong-hearted to face the misery reality and cultural trauma directly.Yan Lianke is a creative author and speaks highly of art forms. His writing method and technique has changed from “reappearing” to “rebuilding”, and his novels feature to poetic, cultural and holy characters. The rich imagery system, grotesque style and nested structure make his novel full of the poetic picturesque. The Confucian ethical codes including feudal etiquette between the monarchs and ministers, parents and children, husband and wives; the Taoist thoughts with concepts of obedience to fate and happy to live, faith in ghosts and gods, and equal treatment to all creations of the universe; the Christian culture embodied by the cite to the Bible language, the use of the words of “haven” and “salvation” compose of his cultural novels. His seeking to the Primary worth of human living, highly speaking of the tenacity of life and the responsibility, his thinking of redemption ways make his novel feature to holy characters. Those aesthetic characters make his full-length novels more meaningful and profound, provide new thinking angle and cultural conception for contemporary local novel writing.Present studies contain theme, narration skills, image characters and type of one or several novels of Yan Lianke, which is not enough for all the full-length novels. My Paper based on the present studies; studies the novels as a whole, using the theory of sociology, culture, narration, trauma and so on.This paper contains five parts. The instruction part includes the background of Yan Lianke’s works, his writing resource, present study of his novels, and my paper’s study methods and construction. The second part discusses the body misery writing including starvation, disease, and death. The third part discusses his sprit reality writing to explore the sprit sufferings of Chinese people from the fields of power, ethic and customs. The forth part discusses his aesthetic from three dimensionalities: poetic, cultural and holy characters. The last part tries to evaluate the novels as a whole and estimate his value to our society.