『붉은 수수 가족(红高梁家族)』을 통해 본 모옌(莫言)의 문학세계

Abstract

This writing, centering around Red Sorghum(红高梁家族) by Mo Yan, seeks to discover what the story Red Sorghum is actually about, by searching for the fountainhead of Mo Yan's creation and the meanings the story possesses. Mo Yan's literature has two strands of root experiences: One is his inner experience of playing with his own fantasy to soothe the pain of starvation and solitude he had suffered from during his youth, and the other is of hearing numerous legends and folk tales from his childhood. Red Sorghum is a story which Mo Yan wrote, by tracing the close past and distant origins through following the 'narrow path' his 'memory' guided him to. This story represents myriads of people's lives and deaths on this earth(land) and the history of love and fight, as a fantasy. In Red Sorghum, this 'memory' achieves a great unification of time, by blurring the borderline between the past and the present, restoring to life the moment of complete satisfaction, and waking senses that have been asleep for long, as well as reviving forgotten modes of life. Red Sorghum also represents the world of eros in which life instincts sway like rolling waves in everywhere. Eros, in Red Sorghum, manifests itself as a strong life instinct that creates a giant spatial unification, by linking everything in existence into one. In Red Sorghum story, it is the desire of eros that seeks to raise up the soon to be forgotten history of a generation's finite life to make it become a myth which forever lives, which is the central energy that drives the story. By looking at humanity and history from the viewpoints of primitive life force, erotic impulse, and infinity, and through bringing up 'heroic individuals' and 'history of species' that leads to these individuals, Mo Yan's literature throws a fundamental question at institutions, ideologies, and civilizations in which individuals are erased and life dries up.