Peking University. Nov 24, 2009: on the afternoon of Nov 20, the famous Chinese writer Mr. Mo Yan, was invited to give a lecture at Peking University’s Yingjie Exchange Center, as the 7th lecture of the lecture series of “Chinese Writers at PKU”.

In modern Chinese literary criticism, Mo Yan has been regarded as one of the pioneers of Neo-historicism novels. Though his works are so different from the historical novels about the revolution published since 1949, Mo Yan stressed that he was not completely against the Revolutionary Literature, the so-called Red Classics. “I think my works are more influenced by those Red Classics than by western thoughts such as Magical Realism.”

Speaking of his motives for writing Red Sorghum, which was later adapted by Director Zhang Yimou for the big screen, he said: “I just wanted to write a novel which was different from all the novels about the anti-Japanese war.” Then he elaborated on how he made his novel different.

“First of all, I did not regard war as the only subject. I did not write to represent the war. I wanted to show how people react under special circumstances, and to depict their emotional and psychological disturbances and changes.”

“I think the writer should not be bounded by the position of his/her own class, but should observe history objectively, particularly when the writer’s personal relations, emotions, and positions are involved in that part of history. Struggles with things such as class, economic and political struggles, are all subject to emotional struggle. Therefore, what I wanted to write was to depict the history of personal emotions.”

As for language, Mo Yan said, “there are complex factors affecting a writer’s language, such as all the life experience he/she has had. Take me for example, I’m particularly fond of Yuan Qu; therefore you can see them a lot in my own works. ”

Though the official language and the folk language co-exist in the language system, he prefers the latter. “The folk language is very rich and vivid in vocabulary, with limited grammatical changes, and full of witty metaphors. The writer needs to stay in contact with common people and collect material from the folk language to be productive and innovative.”

At the end of the lecture, Prof. Chen Xiaoming presented a memorial poster of the lecture series to Mo Yan as a gift, on behalf of the Dept. of Chinese Language and Linguistics and We Literature Club.

Edited by: Connie Chang

Translated by: LIN Jingxian