The announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Chinese author Mo Yan, points to a growing emphasis in world literature on fantasy and imagination. Like his predecessor Gao Xingjian, the only other Chinese Nobel Laureate in Literature (2000), Mo places his characters in the landscape of contemporary China, by using fantasy to suggest new postures for tale-telling. The Nobel citation describes his work this way:
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.
To the two names cited above we might add the American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (1993), who in her work similarly is happy to move seamlessly between the real and the fantastic.
All these writers use fantasy in their novels in order to draw the reader into a perspective that in ordinary life is simply unavailable. As novelists, they continue in the tradition of moderns like James Joyce, seeking to push the boundaries of what sort of story can be told, using media previously unexplored. In Mo’s case, for example, it is the voice of a man reincarnated as different animals, commenting on the state of China during the Cultural Revolution.
What fascinates me by the techniques of fantasy in postmodern literature is the fact that it stretches the imaginary world of the reader. I came upon this observation first by reading Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude some years ago; it was a delicious experience, lush and throaty, as if my own senses were being excited by the descriptions of the South American landscape that he evokes so beautifully. Reflecting upon the experience of reading that novel, I am struck by its parallel to a technique of prayer advanced by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who suggested that one ought to apply the five senses in meditating on a text of sacred scripture. His point, and the related point that is implicit in Márquez’s magical realism, is that there is a kind of sensual wisdom that is altogether different from the rationalism that is the hallmark of modernity. Ignatius himself lived at the cusp of the Medieval and Modern worlds (1491-1556), but his imagination was thoroughly Medieval, shot through with images of knights as a youth and later, after a profound conversion experience, with images of Christ and the saints.
Mo and the other great novelists who employ fantasy, inviting us to see the world in ways we have previously not imagined, do us a great service. They expand our horizons, pointing our slowly adjusting eyes toward the kinds of truths we can perhaps only sense in dreams. With the ancients, though, we can discern in dreams and fantasies what is good and beautiful, or repugnant and terrifying, long before we can give words to those experiences. Perhaps in this postmodern world, with its pitfalls of language and an overly rational view of reality, a cultivated imagination is the way forward.
Works by Mo Yan in English:
· Red Sorghum (see also the film by Zhang Yimou)
· Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
· The Garlic Ballads
· Change
· Big Breasts and Wide Hips
· Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh
· The Republic of Wine
Tim Muldoon is a theologian and author of several books, who works in the Division of University Mission and Ministry at Boston College.
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.
To the two names cited above we might add the American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (1993), who in her work similarly is happy to move seamlessly between the real and the fantastic.
All these writers use fantasy in their novels in order to draw the reader into a perspective that in ordinary life is simply unavailable. As novelists, they continue in the tradition of moderns like James Joyce, seeking to push the boundaries of what sort of story can be told, using media previously unexplored. In Mo’s case, for example, it is the voice of a man reincarnated as different animals, commenting on the state of China during the Cultural Revolution.
What fascinates me by the techniques of fantasy in postmodern literature is the fact that it stretches the imaginary world of the reader. I came upon this observation first by reading Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude some years ago; it was a delicious experience, lush and throaty, as if my own senses were being excited by the descriptions of the South American landscape that he evokes so beautifully. Reflecting upon the experience of reading that novel, I am struck by its parallel to a technique of prayer advanced by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who suggested that one ought to apply the five senses in meditating on a text of sacred scripture. His point, and the related point that is implicit in Márquez’s magical realism, is that there is a kind of sensual wisdom that is altogether different from the rationalism that is the hallmark of modernity. Ignatius himself lived at the cusp of the Medieval and Modern worlds (1491-1556), but his imagination was thoroughly Medieval, shot through with images of knights as a youth and later, after a profound conversion experience, with images of Christ and the saints.
Mo and the other great novelists who employ fantasy, inviting us to see the world in ways we have previously not imagined, do us a great service. They expand our horizons, pointing our slowly adjusting eyes toward the kinds of truths we can perhaps only sense in dreams. With the ancients, though, we can discern in dreams and fantasies what is good and beautiful, or repugnant and terrifying, long before we can give words to those experiences. Perhaps in this postmodern world, with its pitfalls of language and an overly rational view of reality, a cultivated imagination is the way forward.
Works by Mo Yan in English:
· Red Sorghum (see also the film by Zhang Yimou)
· Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
· The Garlic Ballads
· Change
· Big Breasts and Wide Hips
· Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh
· The Republic of Wine
Tim Muldoon is a theologian and author of several books, who works in the Division of University Mission and Ministry at Boston College.
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