ABSTRACT
To capture the elusiveness and absurdities of life in contemporary China, Yan Lianke has proposed the idea of mythorealism (shen shi zhuyi), which elucidates the invisible truth underlying Chinese reality. According to Yan, the connection of mythorealism to life is constructed through three types of spirits (shen): the spirit of god (lingshen) invoked by folk culture and shamanism, the human spirit (jingshen) reflected through the connections between human souls, and the writer's spirit (chuangzuozhe de teshu yisi) based on the writer's engagement with material reality. Mythorealism manifests Yan's ambition not only to probe the nature of reality and the depths of the human spirit but also to transcend the commonly accepted tradition of realism in world literature. As a writer inspired by Western modernists including Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Gabriel García Márquez, Yan is generally considered a rebel against mainstream Chinese realism. In particular, he is seen as rejecting the dominant discourse of socialist realism, a literary trend that first flourished in Soviet Russia. However, as a child, Yan grew up reading revolutionary literature, which is rooted in canonical Russian realism. As a result, his writing cannot avoid profound engagement with that literary tradition. In fact, the relationship among the three key figures in Yan's mythorealism—God, human being, and author—is also central to the work of many classical Russian realists such as Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Moreover, the relationship between everyday life and realism, which is crucial to Yan's definition of mythorealism, was a subject heavily debated in Russia as well. By placing Yan's literary criticism and creative writing parallel to Russian discussions of realism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter attempts to shed new light on Yan's mythorealism, which represents a powerful Chinese contribution to the polymorphic and volatile world realist movement.
