Thoughts on Reading Red Sorghum

Red sorghum is a myth and legend. The whole novel eulogizes humanity and exuberant vitality with mysterious colors. Therefore, praising life is the theme of this book. "It is to praise life, the inexhaustible vitality of life and the freedom and stretch of life through the shaping of characters.

"Red Sorghum" is not a realistic work, nor is it the root of national culture. On the contrary, in this story related to the past tense of three generations, a personality with future significance is created, which transcends the specific social surface and has the depth of humanity and essence. The theme of Red Sorghum from beginning to end is vigorous vitality, that is, to promote an undistorted, unrestrained and frank outlook on life. Therefore, the works before readers are not an understood world, but an ideal of life in a world. This ideal is in the myth of "sun worship". Red Sorghum is different from any previous book reflecting farmers, and its perspective has changed from the traditional praise of land to the praise of life. The extraordinary characteristics of the story determine the unreality of the narrative, and the location of the story has also been diluted. In Red Sorghum, the village, the most basic structure of society, was even diluted. All narrative elements and audio-visual elements of Red Sorghum are serving this warm, free and stirring style of natural life.

Different from previous exploration novels, Red Sorghum also bears the author's thoughts on the theme of life, but it doesn't completely dilute the plot like Yellow Land, and directly expresses the director's thoughts with the shock of pure language. In the next novel, the author weaves a complete, wonderful and moving story frame from the actual situation and the specific characters in the specified situation, so that the thoughts naturally overflow through the twists and turns of the story, the behaviors and actions of the characters. Here, how does the author achieve the perfect combination of the two through specific methods?

First of all, Red Sorghum itself has a complete story line, but most of this narrative line is completed by the feeling of words. Red Sorghum begins with a narrative of "I"; "I'll tell you something about my grandparents, which was mentioned in my hometown." This is a reading point of the present tense, and this "I" is the narrator of a story here. Because he didn't appear in the story, he should be an objective narrator, but he is the descendant of the characters in the story, which gives him a sense of participation and thus has the meaning of being narrated. Therefore, this reading point is very strange and novel, which gives the author a very comfortable reading point reference when dealing with Red Sorghum. It is very free and comprehensive. At the same time, his narrative characteristics pull the story far away and have the effect of historical alienation. On the basis of this reader, Red Sorghum explains the fiction of the story at the beginning. "After a long time, some people believe that some people don't believe it." So it is very comfortable to integrate the story into unrealistic time and space.

Readers can almost feel the main plot turning points in Red Sorghum, such as the relationship between characters, the surrounding environment and the turning point of time. For example, the relationship between my grandmother and leprosy shopkeeper Li Datou, Gao Liang's "something congenial", the rules for the bride to return to her hometown after three days of marriage, the killing of Li Datou, the process of kidnapping my grandmother with a gun, the departure of uncle Lohan, the appearance of Japanese and so on. Red Sorghum also undertakes a kind of "pre-narrative" function. For example, in "The Sedan Set Out", he told the readers that the sedan chair style would become my grandfather, which increased the reader's "reading desire" and made the story more tense. The space and words in Red Sorghum can also be used freely, and most of them use words to express sedan chairs, road robbery, sexual intercourse, worship of gods and total solar eclipse, so that thoughts are attached to specific pictures and ceremonies with strong symbolic significance of life, thus achieving an artistic situation of coexistence of reality and reality. It "sews up" the past and the present, thoughts and stories.

Secondly, when we face red sorghum, we will feel that red sorghum is saturated with brilliant red. Red is the color of the sun, blood and sorghum. Here, the use of color in Red Sorghum is highly stylized. At first, grandma's rosy face was full of vitality, beautiful and young. Then, there is the red gauze skirt that fills the screen, the warm and full red sedan chair, the sun shines on the dancing sorghum stalks during sexual intercourse, the red sorghum wine like red rain, bloody human flesh, and the whole movie is shrouded in red. The author's choice of this tone almost completely deprives us of the plot of Red Sorghum and enters a pure emotional experience in a specific modeling space. This is a yearning and praise for the perfect and free natural life. This is not a completely realistic representation of time and space, but the spiritual externalization of our inner vitality. Red Sorghum ended in the mysterious total solar eclipse, and the expansion of red gained a solidified and almost eternal silence effect. Black and red sorghum flows continuously, filling the whole space of red sorghum, which is extremely brilliant, gorgeous and magnificent.

Thirdly, the spatial environment and modeling description of Red Sorghum are trying to find a simple color and a mysterious and spacious space. All trivial contrast, coordination and transition are abandoned, creating a noble, sacred and mysterious living space. Red Sorghum is mainly composed of two spatial environments: sorghum field and brewing workshop, which embodies the ancient life consciousness, such as the round door cave in 18th Li Po, just like a castle. And that piece of sorghum field, which is left to fend for itself, reveals the sacredness of life. When describing the sorghum field, red sorghum is a huge natural life symbol group, which is continuous, grand, intense, warm and generous. Red Sorghum has rendered sorghum three times, showing the integrity of human and natural life. When my grandmother was lying on the altar trampled by my grandfather in tears, there were four peaks dancing wildly in the red sorghum. Here, the sorghum field is the witness of the birth of life. When the Japanese forced the people to trample on sorghum, they felt the shock of life being destroyed. At the end of Red Sorghum, my grandfather and my father stood in the red sunshine like clay sculptures. Facing the high-speed flowing sorghum lens, what we evoke is a kind of confidence in life and a tribute to a warm and tragic life.

Of course, there are still some problems worth discussing about the ideological connotation and implication of Red Sorghum. There are two parallel clues in the book "Red Sorghum", that is, writing the love story of grandparents in the past tense; "The Present Tense" is about an ambush carried out by grandpa behind his father's back. These two lines crossed decades later, and both belong to the past and have nothing to do with the present. But surprisingly, Mo Yan can write War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, which he has never experienced before, so magnificent and colorful; Why does he have such a rich and magnificent imagination? How can his writing be so unrestrained? How can he write that thrilling scene full and hearty? Obviously, the historical description in Mo Yan's novels is unique.

Mo Yan was once classified as a "root-seeking" school, so Mo Yan found his roots in his hometown in Gaomi, Shandong. For Mo Yan, high density is a paradox. In short, it is undoubtedly the most beautiful and ugly place on earth, the most detached and secular, the most holy and filthy, the most heroic and the most asshole, the most capable of drinking and falling in love. In this mysterious land, Mo Yan erected a complex image-Grandpa (we can even forget his name). He is a laborer, a murderer, an adulterer, a bandit and an anti-Japanese hero. This image is completely different from the heroic image in the flat format in the Cultural Revolution literature, but it combines beauty, ugliness, good and evil. It provides a brand-new reading experience for contemporary readers. Grandma in the work is also extremely anti-traditional. As a woman who controls her own destiny, grandma rebelled against traditional values and morality. When she was betrothed by her parents to the leper Yamabianlang in exchange for a mule, she bravely chose to commit adultery with her grandfather to resist. Grandma's dying monologue is the best summary of her life:

"God, do you think I'm guilty? Do you think I slept with a leper and gave birth to a nest of rotten demons, which made this beautiful world filthy, right or wrong? What is chastity? What is the right path? What is kindness? What is evil? You never told me that I had to do what I wanted. I love happiness, I love strength, I love beauty, my body is mine, I make decisions for myself, I am not afraid of sin, I am not afraid of punishment, I am not afraid of going to your eighteen layers of hell. I have done everything I should, and I am not afraid of anything. "

It can be seen that Mo Yan's historical novels overthrew the binary opposition pattern in traditional anti-Japanese war novels, reconstructed history, and blurred the boundaries between past and history, death and existence, good and evil, and good and evil. Because of this, his works have such full and complicated characters.

Not only that, the school is full of deep admiration for parents in the thick homesickness:

"For decades, teams of dark red people have been trawling on sorghum trees. They plundered the goods and served the country faithfully. They performed heroic and tragic dance dramas, which put us living black sheep to shame. While making progress, I really feel the degradation of species. "

In Mo Yan's mind, grandpa (father) is full of fascinating male strength and beauty. Grandpa is a bridgehead, but for grandma's sake, for an affair, he dares to kill people. He was a farmer, but in order to resist the Japanese aggressors, he became commander Yu. Grandma is a woman, but she also has love and hate, understands the righteousness and is manly. Even her father, who was only in his teens, was a little hero who dared to pick up Browning and shoot him. This is the mysterious people living in the sorghum field. They represent a healthy spirit-and that "high density and brilliance".