Instead of communism’s poster-happy history, Mo Yan describes a past that, with his exaggerations, parodies and derivations from myths and folk tales, is a convincing and scathing revision of fifty years of propaganda.
In his most remarkable novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, where a female perspective dominates, Mo Yan describes the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine of 1960 in stinging detail. He mocks the revolutionary pseudo-science that tried to inseminate sheep with rabbit sperm, all the while dismissing doubters as right-wing elements. The novel ends with the new capitalism of the ‘90s with fraudsters becoming rich on beauty products and trying to produce a Phoenix through cross-fertilisation.
In Mo Yan, a forgotten peasant world arises, alive and well, before our eyes, sensually scented even in its most pungent vapours, startlingly merciless but tinged by joyful selflessness. Never a dull moment. The author knows everything and can describe everything – all kinds of handicraft, smithery, construction, ditch-digging, animal husbandry, the tricks of guerrilla bands. He seems to carry all human life on the tip of his pen.
He is more hilarious and more appalling than most in the wake of Rabelais and Swift — in our time, in the wake of Garcia Marquez. His spice blend is a peppery one. On his broad tapestry of China’s last hundred years, there are neither dancing unicorns nor skipping maidens. But he paints life in a pigsty in such a way that we feel we have been there far too long. Ideologies and reform movements may come and go but human egoism and greed remain. So Mo Yan defends small individuals against all injustices – from Japanese occupation to Maoist terror and today’s production frenzy.
For those who venture to Mo Yan’s home district, where bountiful virtue battles the vilest cruelty, a staggering literary adventure awaits. Has ever such an epic spring flood engulfed China and the rest of the world? In Mo Yan’s work, world literature speaks with a voice that drowns out most contemporaries.
The Swedish Academy congratulates you. I call on you to accept the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature from the hand of His Majesty the King.
