Secularity And Myth: A Study Of Family Narration In Mo Yan’s Novels

As one of the most influential contemporary writers,Mo Yan’s literary world has always been rooted in the yellow land of Northeast Gaomi Township.With his rebellious attitude and free spirit,Mo Yan wrote the family history of Northeast Gaomi Township and set up a unique banner of family narrative in contemporary literature.After reading and summarizing the family narration in Mo Yan’s novels,it is found that the juxtaposition of the secular and the mythical is an important feature of Mo Yan’s family narration.This feature of family narrative realizes the full blend of folk myth and legend with secular ethics,enriches the range and dimension of expression of contemporary family narrative,and makes family narrative not only possess the spirit of critical realism,but also the color of transcendent romanticism.This article is centered on the narrative characteristics of this family.The full text is divided into five parts,namely the introduction,three chapters and the conclusion.The text focuses on Mo Yan’s family narrative strategy of the juxtaposition of secularity and myth,the content of family narrative and the causes of family narrative.In the introduction part,the related concepts of family novels and family narratives are defined,and the research perspective of this paper is put forward on the basis of summarizing and sorting out the research status of Mo Yan’s family narrative.The first chapter discusses the family narrative strategy in Mo Yan’s novels.Mo Yan is extremely free in the application of family narrative strategy.This paper discusses Mo Yan’s free family narrative strategy from three perspectives: free narrative perspective,free narrative structure and free narrative time and space.In terms of narrative perspective,the narrator uses the compound personal perspective of "self-oriented thinking" and "quasi-self",which makes the narrator "I" get rid of the rational logical thinking and turn to intuition,imagination and other emotional ways to carry out the family narrative.As the skeleton of narrative works,narrative structure is highly valued by Mo Yan,who once said: "Good structure can highlight the meaning of the story,but also can change the single meaning of the story." Mo Yan lays emphasis on the plot layout in family narration and uses multi-level narrative structure to tell family stories.The narrative perspective and multi-level structure arrangement of "I think to Me" enable the family narrator "I" to freely transform in the family space and time of "past" and "present".The family narrator "I" tells the family history and conveys the family spirit in this free transformation.In the tracing of the family history,the bidirectional figurative image narrative is also an important narrative strategy.The taboo image and totemic image in the family narrative respectively refer to the author’s thoughts on the existence of the world and the spiritual source of the family.The second chapter mainly discusses the family narrative content of Mo Yan’s juxtaposition of secularity and myth.First of all,in his family novels,Mo Yan focuses on constructing the patriarchal and maternal genealogy of characters in contrast to the secular and mythological ones,and often traces the family history with the weak descendants as the narrator.The narrator takes a critical attitude towards his father,who is stuck in the pale world and has become increasingly weak in vitality,while he worships and praises his father,who is a legendary hero in the family history.The two kinds of different matriarchal images,the suffering mother and the sacred daughter,is the two-way deductors of the grey reality and the beautiful myth of the family respectively.The descendants of those who become the "zero remnant" of the family can only seek the spiritual ideal sustenance in the trace of the ancestral myth.In the process of specific family narration,on the one hand,the narrator expresses the fable of secular family decline by deconstructing family order,that is,by examining and blaspheming the authority of paternalism and the blood vendettas within the family.On the other hand,it shows a return to the family of natural myths.The wild and free bioethics in the family,like red sorghum,are the full publicity of individual life,while the distinct consciousness of plant worship is their unremitting pursuit of the harmonious and endless natural life state.The reproduction of the family goddess expresses the pursuit of the family divine spirit that can bless and purify the descendants and sublimate the depraved human nature.It highlights his purview to transcend the difficulties of the secular family and publicize the divine spirit of the family.Chapter three explores the causes of Mo Yan’s family narrative of the juxtaposition of secularity and myth.Mo Yan’s unique family narration is the result of the joint action of Chinese and foreign literary traditions and his own deep psychology.From Mo Yan’s acceptance of foreign literature,Faulkner and Marquez are the two writers who have the greatest influence on Mo Yan.Their free narration of the family,the "mythic mode" of narration and the offside writing style full of magic realism are in line with Mo Yan’s free and rebellious personality temperament.This is instructive to Mo Yan’s family narrative thinking.From the local point of view,Mo Yan was born in Qi land,which is full of magic and mythology.Qi land folk legend and Pu Songling’s ghost fox flower demon world,which gives Mo Yan’s spiritual world a layer of mythology.At the same time,Mo Yan pays much attention to and prefers the traditions of history telling,folk legends and Chinese classical novels,among which the family narrative tradition of both history and myth has influenced his family’s choice of narrative mode.With the absorption and re-creation of Chinese and foreign literature,as well as the promotion of his rebellious spirit and free childlike innocence,Mo Yan finally generated the family narrative features of juxtaposition of cruel and secular and beautiful myths.The value of Mo Yan’s family narration lies in one aspect of breaking away from the shackles of some contemporary grand family narration,but transcending the traditional order by deconstructing the family’s secular ethics.On the other hand,it is different from the one-way deconstruction of family in some contemporary personalized family narratives.Instead,it seeks and discovers folk ethics again with the attitude of civilians.In the return of free bioethics and natural life consciousness,it constructs a natural mythic family that fully reveals the subject spirit.Therefore,the conclusion puts Mo Yan’s family narrative in the context of the whole family narrative since the new period,and further excavates and summarizes the new narrative changes and unique value of Mo Yan’s family narrative.