Reading Notes W17: Mo Yan, Part X

Mo Yan, “The Old Gun” (1188-1198)

Mo Yan:

·         Born 1955

·         Burst onto China’s literary scene in 1986

·         “Much of Mo Yan’s fiction is set in his native Gaomi County, in Shandong Province-a real place, albeit one that Mo Yan’s fictions enhance and transform almost into myth” (1188).

·         “Roots Seeking”: “This movement arose in the 1980s, one of many waves of response in China to the collective experience of swift modernization in the preceding decades” (1188).

·         An anxiety over China’s eroding cultural identity, technological and economic lag.

·         The writers: “sought to turn from grand models of the future and instead to look for Chinese selfhood in the intimate, local, and rooted places around them: in the rural past, in family lines, in small-h history” (1188).

·         Roots school favor: masculine aesthetic, celebration of raw potency, toughness, and bravado.

The Story:

·         Younger generation trying to connect with their ancestors.

·         A boy and his relation to his dead father through the “old gun”.

·         “The story is typical of the movement, too, in its masculine emphases, narrating a young male’s relationship with the spirit of a lost, primitive, masculine past” (1188).

·         The boy being emasculated is a metaphor for unmanning of Chinese people by Confucian and Maoist pasts. Desire to perform an act like firing a gun, symbolizes compensation for wrongs done to him in the past and desire for control and power.

·         A World lost.

·         Search for something lost.

Quotes:

·         “He felt starving, his whole body limp. He snapped a piece of grass from the ground, rubbed the mud from it, put it in his mouth and began to chew on it, but this only made his hunger worse…” (1191). This only happened once he put the third measure of gunpowder and the third handful of shot into the barrel.

·         “In the days of the republic none of the three countries controlled these parts-there were more bandits round here than hairs on a cow’s back; men, women, they’d all turn violent at the drop of a hat, they’d kill a man as calmly as slicing a melon” (1197).