Village Worlds: Yan Lianke’s Villages and Matters of Life

ABSTRACT

Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China’s foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories, winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2000 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. This paper will examine the villages in Yan’s three novels, Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998), Lenin’s Kisses (2013) and The Explosion Chronicles (2016), and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a rural—urban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan’s works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan’s novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers’ bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.

KEYWORDS:

• Yan lianke
• Chinese literature
• biopolitics
• growth
• urbanisation

Notes

1. Yan Lianke, ‘Preface’, in Ri Guang Liu Nian [Time That Flows] (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 1998). 阎连科. ⟪日光流年⟫. 天津:天津人民出版社 (1998). In this preface, Yan describes his style as a confrontation of the reality and the real connections beyond the reality.

2. Yan Lianke, ‘Miandui Gushi de Taidu he Miandui Xiaoshuo de Zhenshi’ [‘On the Attitude towards Storytelling and the Truth of Fiction’], in Yan Lianke Wenlun [Yan Lianke Essays on Literature] (Kunming: Yunan People’s Publishing House, 2012). 阎连科. ⟪阎连科文论⟫. 昆明:云南人民出版社 (2012), 67. In this article, Yan argues that the presence of truth in fiction, particularly in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, reflects a writer’s world view that the unconditional connections of reality can only manifest in the fictional world.

3. Yan Lianke, ‘Shenshi ZhuYi’ [‘Mythorealism’], in Yan Lianke Wenlun [Yan Lianke Essays on Literature] (Kunming: Yunan People’s Publishing House, 2012). 阎连科. ⟪阎连科文论⟫. 昆明:云南人民出版社 (2012), 155.

4. Yan Lianke, Ri Guang Liu Nian [Time That Flows] (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 1998). 阎连科. ⟪日光流年⟫. 天津:天津人民出版社 (1998).

5. Yan Lianke, Lenin’s Kisses, trans. Carlos Rojas (New York: Grove Press, 2012). 阎连科. ⟪受活⟫. 沈阳:春风文艺出版社 (2004).

6. Yan Lianke, The Explosion Chronicles, trans. Carlos Rojas (New York: Grove Press, 2016). 阎连科. ⟪炸裂志⟫. 上海:上海文艺出版社 (2013).

7. This phrase was widely used during Mao’s rural reforms to denote collective ownership in cooperative societies.

8. See Michel Foucault’s discussion on the features of liberalism in his lecture on 24 January 1979. See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 51–74.

9. I have argued elsewhere that enchanted temporality is characteristic of Yan’s mythorealism. See Xuenan Cao, ‘Mythorealism and Enchanted Time: Yan Lianke’s Explosion Chronicles,’ Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 10:1 (2016): 103–12.

10. See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998).

11. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

12. Ann Anagnost, ‘The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi).’ Public Culture 16: 2 (2004): 189–208.

13. Yan Hairong, ‘Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China,’ American Ethnologist 30: 4 (2003): 579. Also see the study on ‘suzhi’ as a mechanism for the population management of neo-liberal governmentality in Yan Hairong, ‘Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow Through Labor Recruitment Networks,’ Cultural Anthropology 18: 4 (2003): 493–523.