I am reminded of a moment in the otherwise forgettable movie Art School Confidential. The center of the narrative is jealous of the attention being given to another artist, one who produces startling simple and childish pictures that scarcely seem to be pictures, let alone Art. Another character gives him the paraphrased explanation, "Yes, your work is good, but this other guy--it's as though he's never even seen a painting before."
Mo Yan does not seem to have read a book before. Nothing that one expects from Literature is present in this collection, no narrative, no plot, no theme. The characters are vivid but distant, and the events are indelible but meaningless. What is this even? What am I reading? What is the author saying?
And it is presumably for this reason that he won the Nobel Prize. If nothing else, it is new and unbound by the rules of literature. But it is not nothing else. Yan is not an innocent, unsullied novice; he knows exactly what he is doing. "Facts," he asserts in "Man and Beast", "are superior to eloquence, and lies cannot cover up facts" (66). He abandons both style (eloquence), and truth in the pursuit of something deeper: life.
The result is the very pinnacle of deconstructionist fiction. It doesn't mean anything, and defies the very notion of meaning. "I could find no such symbol on which to pin my sorrow and bring this chapter to an end," observes the narrator in "Abandoned Child". "The sunflowers? The locusts? The ants? Crickets? Worms? Absurd, all of them. None of them represented the true face of life" (188). Life has no symbols, and neither does Art. The only way to capture life is to present it as it is, filled with lies and fantastic invention, unadorned by "the shallow, insipid business of writing" ("Abandoned Child", 159).
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