ABSTRACT
As Yan Lianke explains in his poetological volume Discovering Fiction (Faxian xiaoshuo), mythorealism is a way of writing that aims at making an irrational reality accessible again by unveiling its “inner truth” and “inner causality.” Mythorealist works, like magical realist writing, convey an alternative conception of history, marked by frequent use of legends, myths, folklore—in short, what is usually called “the imaginary” as opposed to “the real.” Embracing this dichotomy, magical realism, in the vein of what Eugene Arva calls “traumatic imagination,” creates new meaning for historical events by raising the imaginary and the real to the same ontological level. Yan, in contrast, claims that mythorealism goes one step further, aspiring to fuse the two ontological states, striving to arrive at a new understanding of historical truths. By comparing the defining aspects of both magical realism and mythorealism, this chapter focuses not only on analyzing two of Yan's novels, The Explosion Chronicles and The Four Books, and their respective representation of history but also aims to answer the question of whether mythorealism is merely a local adaptation of magical realism or instead should be seen as a new literary mode.
