Contemporary World Literature” (Norton, Volume F, pp. 875-881)
“Mo Yan” (Norton, Volume F, pp. 1100-1101)
“The Old Gun” by Mo Yan (Norton, Volume F, pp. 1101-1110) – reading assignment
1: Mo Yan burst onto China’s literary scene in 1986 … Since then, he has published a host of novels and short stories. Much of Mo Yan’s fiction is set in his native Gaomi County, in Shandong province – a real place, albeit one that Mo Yan’s fictions enhance and transform almost into myth. Rich language and creative description are hallmarks of his style, which serves to create a mythic and surreal world that it once romanticizes and mourns the past.
In response to Excerpt 1, consider the ways in which the text of “The Old Gun” presents a “mythic,” “surreal” (or dream-like), “romantic,” and “mournful” view of the Chinese past – and especially traditional Chinese society and culture before the era of the Civil War, a type of society and culture the ghosts or spirits of whose traditions still haunt rural, exurban, and non-metropolitan areas like the one in which this story is set.
2: Many critics describe Mo Yan’s work as exemplary of the literary movement called “Roots Seeking.” The movement arose in the 1980s, one of many waves of response in China to the collective experience of swift modernization in the preceding decades. The optimistic narratives of revolutionary progress that had buoyed the nation through the middle part of the century had declined by this point, giving way to fresh anxieties over China’s eroding cultural identity as well as its continuing technological and economic lagged behind the West. The writers of the Roots movement, most of them young men, sought to turn from grand models of the future and instead to look for Chinese selfhood in the intimate, local, and rooted places around them: in the rural past, in family lines, in small-h history. These sources, they argued, are the strongest materials for building a cultural identity on which a modern China can rise.
In response to Excerpt 2, consider the ways in which the text of “The Old Gun” supports the view that this is a story concern with the “seeking” of “roots.” Questions to answer in the course of such an exploration would include: “What roots is the protagonist Dashuo seeking out? How, when, where, and why were they lost? And where, when, why, and how does he hope to find those roots?” The issues in play here overlap with some of the issues in play if you respond to Excerpt 1. But there is also the matter of the “small-h history” of “family lines” to take into account, not only the ghosts or spirits of tradition more generally.
3: “The Old Gun” is in many respects a typical Roots text, since it portrays a younger generation trying to reconnect with its ancestors. Narrated in the third person, the story revolves around a boy and his relation to his dead father through the trope of the old gun. The story is typical of the movement, too, in its masculine emphasis, narrating a young man’s relationship with the spirit of a lost, primitive, masculine past. The boy has been in a sense emasculated, a condition that offers a metaphor for the general unmanning of the Chinese people by their [history.] His desire to perform a difficult and symbolically charged act, namely firing a gun, represents compensation for wrongs done to him in the past, but it also represents the larger desire for control, vitality, and power. In the end, after the narration of the events surrounding his low estate, he manages to fire the gun in a violent explosion. Like much of Mo Yan’s fiction, the story expresses a desire for a world lost, a world that possessed a vitality that the present lacks. That the protagonist’s victory is a pyrrhic one, leading to ultimate failure, reflects the mood of pessimism and despondency that pervades so much of the work of this school. There is a sense of fatality to the quest these writers portray, as though it were a final test of resolve, or as though from a suspicion that the search for paradise entails the search for something lost.
In response to Excerpt 3, begin by defining what a “pyrrhic victory” is and then consider how the text of “The Old Gun” supports the view of Dashuo’s story as one involving “victory” – whether “pyrrhic” or not. This exploration of Dashuo’s fate will entail some prior consideration of his sense that he has been “emasculated” or “unmanned” by the course of history, both “small” and “large.” Questions to answer in the course of such an exploration include: “By what parts of large-scale Chinese history does Dashuo feel emasculated or unmanned? By what parts of his small-scale family history over several generations does he feel emasculated or unmanned in a parallel way? And how do those sense of unmanning and emasculation motivate him to do what he does as the story proceeds?” Once you’ve answered those questions, you will be able to respond to the excerpt’s claim that his course through the story leads to “victory” but only a “pyrrhic” one.
