Mo Yan: Pow!

With POW ! my only option was to do things in opposite fashion. When my protagonist, Luo Xiaotong, is in the Wutong Temple narrating his childhood to Wise Monk Lan, he has matured physically but not mentally—he is now an adult but his mental growth stopped when he was a boy. Someone like that would usually be considered an idiot. But Luo Xiaotong is no idiot. If he were, there would be no need for this novel to exist.

The desire to stop growing is rooted in a fear of the adult world, of growing old and feeble, of dying and of the passage of time. Luo Xiaotong tries to recapture his youth by prattling away with his tale; writing this novel was my attempt to stop the wheel of time from turning. Like a drowning man grasping at straws, I was desperate to keep from sinking. While I knew that my attempt must end in failure, it had a comforting effect.

While it may seem that the protagonist is narrating the tale of his childhood, in reality, I have employed this ‘narration’ to create my own childhood, as a way to hold on to it. Making use of the protagonist's mouth to recreate the days of my youth and to contend with the blandness of life, to counter the futile struggle and the passage of time may well be the sole source of pride for me as a writer. Narration can bring satisfaction to all the unsatisfying aspects of real life, and that fact has provided me with considerable solace. Relying upon the splendour and fullness of a narrative to enrich one's bland life and overcome character flaws is a time-honoured tradition among writers.

Seen in that light, the story line of POW ! isn't all that meaningful. Throughout the novel, narration is the goal, narration is the theme and narration is its construct of ideas. The goal of narration is narration. But if I were forced to make a story out of this novel, I'd settle for the story of a boy prattling on and on about a story.

A writer's existence is found in narration, which is also the process in which he finds satisfaction and absolution. Like everything else, a writer is by nature a process. Many writers are children who have never grown up or who are afraid to. Not all of them, of course. The conflict between a fear of growing up and its inevitability is the yeast that gives rise to a novel, and from that can sprout many more novels.

Luo Xiaotong is a boy who endlessly spouts lies, a boy whose utterances tend to be irresponsible, a boy who gains satisfaction through the act of narration. Narration is his ultimate goal in life. In that muddy stream of language, the story is the conveyor of language and a byproduct of it. What about ideology? About that I have nothing to say. I've always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I'm writing.

At first there is an element of truth in the story Luo Xiaotong is telling, but that gives way to an improvisation that swings between reality and illusion. Once the narration begins, it establishes its inertia, propelling itself forward, and, in the process, the narrator slowly evolves into a tool of narration. It is not so much him narrating a story as it is a story narrating him.

The affected tone of the narrator's prattling makes it possible for the ‘unreal’ to become ‘real’. Finding the means to exhibit that ‘affected tone’ is the key to unlocking the sacred door of fiction. To be sure, this is only something I've recently come to realize, and I'm willing to state that candidly even if it is thought of as shallow or biased. Actually, I cannot claim it as my discovery. Many writers have thought the same but have stated it in their own way.

During the course of writing this novel, Luo Xiaotong was me. He no longer is.

Seagull Books, 2012

Chinese original © Mo Yan, 2012

English translation © Howard Goldblatt, 2012

E-ISBN 978 0 85742 115 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in Constantia by Seagull Books, India