(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Yan Lianke:
The Four Books
Chatto & Windus, 2015
Yan Lianke's debut novel, which in English is unofficially called The Sun Goes Down, was the first of the author's books censored in China. Not only was it censored; the man who had worked for the Communist Party for much of his life was forced to write self-critical texts for six months. Four of his books, including The Four Books, has later been censored in his home country, and Yan has admitted that he sometimes deliberately writes to circumvent the censorship. However, in his latest novel, which was published in English last year, he has completely unleashed the reins on one of the darkest chapters in Chinese history – a chapter that is still taboo and denied. IN The Four Books the power men burn forbidden books, and the censorship of Yan Lianke's work ironically illustrates why novels can still be combustible in more than one sense.
The Four Books consists of four fictional books and is composed of "excerpts" of these. The action takes place from Mao's "big leap" up to the extreme famine, ie from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Critics of the regime have been sent to so-called Re-Education Camps, and we meet those in the 99th District, located in a rural setting near Huangelven. No one is mentioned by their real names, but by their professions, and the most prominent ones are "The Author," "The Musician," "The Theologian," "The Learned," and "The Technician" (my translations). They are led by "The Child", which the Financial Times' reviewer aptly described as a mixture of Stalin and Prince Myshkin. On "Re-Ed" everyone is forced to melt steel and grow wheat at a completely unrealistic pace, and because of Mao's megalomaniacal production ambitions, the earth is depleted.
Literary representation. The one book, "Criminal Records", Is the Child's version of the events – a book he has ordered the Author to write for him, while the other three books,"Old Course","Heaven's Child'and'The New Myth of Sisyphus", All can be read in accordance with this version of the story. «Old Course"Is the book the author writes in hiding, while both"Heaven's Child'and'The New Myth of Sisyphus»Are anonymous texts full of religious references, symbolism and subtitles. As the book's skilled translator writes in his note to the text: "Each manuscript is written in a different voice and from a different perspective, and the tensions between them mirror those that characterized the Re-Ed compound itself. Furthermore, at least three of these manuscripts were composed in response to the Child's attempt to shape the narrative about the Re-Ed compound under his command, suggesting that the novel as a whole may be seen as a symptom of these broader struggles over knowledge and literary representation. » For example, in "Criminal Records," we know that the child burns all books that are not explicitly loyal to the regime, while toward the end of the book, in "Heaven's Child", It turns out that he has only burned the ones he has copies of, and that he has been specifically associated with some of the biblical texts.
Russian literary scientist Mikhail Bakhtin launched in his reading of the Dostoevsky concept the polyphonic novel. At Yan Lianke there are many of the Bakhtin characteristics, and it is perhaps not surprising that a writer who has worked with Communist party propaganda is concerned with the novel's ability to be an anti-totalitarian counterpart. In exploring Christian and Buddhist symbolism, and by mixing so many different representations of the same story, Yan illustrates that reality is enormously complex and that truth can only be glimpsed glimpses, like rays of sun hitting the sea. Bakhtin also pointed out that humor is a dialogic and an anti-totalitarian approach, something the Chinese author often uses in his novels. Besides The Four Books three of his books have been translated into both Norwegian and English: The village blood, Lenin's kiss og Earn the Peopleand they are all full of satirical depictions of the Communist Party.
The symbolic use and description of the attraction to the religious texts are elegant grasp because both illustrate man's natural aesthetic impulse.
Flowers and blood. The symbolic use and description of the attraction to the religious texts are elegant grasp because both illustrate man's natural aesthetic impulse. In the 99th District, the Child distributes red flowers to anyone who deserves an appreciation and promises them that 125 such red flowers allow them to leave the camp and go home to their family. The child is obsessed with the red color and dreams of flowers with this color and being shot in the chest so that he can die a kind of martyr death, falling forward in his own "flower of blood". When he occasionally gets to meet some higher up the Kafka system, these meetings are characterized by pomp and splendor and little else. Yan Lianke shows that the communist system is neither better than the extravagances of religion nor the present-day religious cultivation of money, which may explain the Communist Party's smooth transition to a market economy.
The latest book in The Four Books, "The New Myth of Sisyphus," is a poetic tale with references to Greek mythology. In this version, the man pushing the stone up the mountain side is greeted by a child at the top, and the pleasure of talking to this child outweighs the hopelessness of having to push the stone up again the next day. The gods, however, discover that he no longer experiences the punishment as painful, and therefore decides that he must push the stone down the hill, and then it will roll upward by itself. The child disappears and the despair returns. But one day, the man sees a Buddhist monastery and "a lovely image of the mortal world." This time he realizes that he cannot reveal that the feeling of hopelessness has disappeared. Yan Lianke's novel thus ends hopefully. There is still beauty in the world, though some are trying to monopolize it.
