ABSTRACT
As an outstanding heir of Lu Xun, Yan Lianke regards himself as a rebel son of mainstream realism and coined the term shenshi zhuyi (mythorealism) to elucidate the influence of Kafkaesque and Márquezan combinations of reality and absurdity on contemporary Chinese literature. His banned yet acclaimed works bravely enter the politically sensitive zones, fiercely confront the taboos of sex and politics, and vividly display the unhappy marriage of communism and capitalism. Yan's configurations of literary settings, from the metamorphosis of his rural hometown in Henan Province to the transfiguration of post-Maoist Beijing, illustrate his grotesque, comic, spectacular, miserable, absurd, and deformed imaginative world. This chapter considers Yan Lianke's literary method of “mythorealism,” a novel and creative way of storytelling about silent China, especially evidenced in his Lenin's Kisses and Garden No. 711: The Ultimate Last Memo of Beijing, and examines Yan's post-Maoist representations of macro- and micro-mythoreality, political dystopia and ecocritical utopia, the articulated silence of the humiliated and insulted, and the large-scale ferocity and “slow violence” being committed in both the country and the city.
