On The Artistic Exploration Of Yan Lianke’s Palou Series

The Palou Series refers to a number of works written by Yan Lianke since the mid-1990s, which take the Palou Mountains as the background of stories and pay a lot of attention to artistic exploration. Compared with Yan Lianke’s other works, the most significant feature of this series is the various explorations of literary form, literary language and narrative. The explorations of literary form are as follows:Riguang Liunian begins with Sima Lan’s death and ends with his birth, creating the Suoyuan Form; Shou Huo and the1st volume of Riguang Liunian structure the text with the style of note, creating the Xuyan Form; the4th volume of Riguang Liunian brings in fragments of the Bible at the beginning of each chapter, creating the Bingxing Form. The explorations of literary language are as follows:Shou Huo attempts to write in Western Henan dialect; Jianying Rushui adds a variety of political discourses to character and narrative language, creating the Red Language; besides, in all works of this series, various rhetorical devices are used to improve the expressiveness of literary language. As for narrative, what Yan Lianke explores is extreme writing, it is reflected in selecting extreme themes, creating extreme characters and arranging extreme plots.In general, there is absence together with redundance in the exploration, and some are successful while some are problematic. Specifically, focusing more on general language is the absent; writing in Western Henan dialect and creating the Red Language are unnecessary; creating Suoyuan Form, using various rhetorical devices, selecting extreme themes and arranging extreme plots are successful; creating Xuyan Form, Bingxing Form and extreme characters is ploblematic.Exploring so much tells us that YanLianke has realized the importance of exploration; the apprence of two unnessary innovations shows that Yan Lianke has over-valued being different; the existence of ploblematic ones explains that, sometimes Yan Lianke is satisfied with the apprence of newness or difference without caring about whethe they are well handled or not; the existence of successful ones reveals that Yan Lianke has really devoted a lot to artistic exploration.