The Explosion Chronicles

by Yan Lianke

  The nation has come to acquire a new logic and a new rationality, as it becomes characterized by the ubiquitous presence of something that could be called the mythoreal. At one time, the Chinese people may have been suspicious of this mythoreal, but they have gradually grown accustomed to it, and have even come to identify with it. As the entire world stares incredulously at contemporary China’s miraculous transformation, the nation’s authors feel they have reached a point where literature can no longer directly reflect reality. Even the ideologies and techniques associated with world literature would emit a collective sigh of despair if confronted with China’s extraordinary events.

  China’s reality is currently driving the creation of what could be called a mythorealist literary practice—which is to say, a literature that uses an innovative set of techniques to reveal an otherwise invisible region beneath perceivable reality. By having literature follow a spectral path of ghosts and spirits, mythorealism seeks out these invisible regions in order to explode reality’s façade.

  2.

  Just as it is inconceivable for conventional novels to lack a story, plot, or basic character development, they must similarly be grounded on a scientific and logical causality consisting of interlocking elements, such that sunlight makes objects visible, sex results in pregnancy, and the invention of the engine yields new modes of transportation. Here, causal logic’s rationality is perfectly obvious.

  In works by realist authors, the development of characters and objects is based on a strictly reciprocal, logical relationship. The causal relation may be hidden or implicit, but in these sorts of texts it is definitely not possible for it to be missing altogether. The correspondence between cause and effect is narrative’s preeminent logical element. Realism relies on this sort of reciprocal logic, which it then elaborates and develops—and if a work deviates, it can no longer be considered pure realism.

  In the opening of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the narrator famously describes how, “One morning Gregor Samsa awoke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.”* Nowhere in the remainder of the work, however, does Kafka ever tell us how or why Samsa was transformed from a human into a “verminous insect.” In this way, the result remains, though the original cause has completely disappeared. This is Kafka’s most powerful betrayal of realism, whereby he was able to discover (or even create) within literature an extra-realistic “acausality,” in which there is effect without cause, and result without reason. In this way, in works like The Trial and The Castle, Kafka created a new kind of writing out of which an entire new literature was born.

  Similarly, the first paragraph of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude describes how:

  He [the gypsy Melquíades] went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades’s magical irons.**

  Summoned by these magnetic ingots, the nails and screws in the floor struggle to respond. Here, we find a playful return of the sort of causal factors Kafka had previously discarded. However, these causal factors do not have the same relationship with their effect that we would expect to find within realism, but rather they are linked by more of a “semi-causal” relationship. After One Hundred Years of Solitude adopted this sort of semi-causal narrative, the rest of the world began to demand a similar narrative structure, thereby bestowing glory on Latin America and its authors like someone handing out steamed mantou buns in the middle of a famine.

  3.

  If it was indeed contemporary China’s reality that spurred mythorealism into existence, then under what causal logic does this mythorealism now exist?

  It is only recently that the Chinese people have finally begun to understand the absurdity of China’s Great Leap Forward. After all, if the only thing you have is a bundle of kindling and a handful of sand, how could you possibly smelt steel? And if all you have is a mu of land, how could you possibly produce ten or twenty thousand jin of grain? It turns out, however, that even the most absurd aspects of China’s history and contemporary reality contain an invisible internal truth, and this truth is grounded on one or more “internal causalities.”

  These internal causalities dictate the most absurd reality, history, and humanity. Although God, in the Bible, said, “Let there be light,” and there was light; then said, “Let there be water,” and there was water; and finally separated the light from the darkness, and there was day and night—in China’s reality and history, absurdity, disorder, chaos, and incomprehensibility (together with the emotional confusion and spiritual pain they may generate) all remain hidden within an internal causality. When an author finally succeeds in grasping this internal causality, mythorealism’s “myth” becomes a reality that cannot be apprehended directly but which may be perceived through literature. Rather than confirming that 1 plus 1 equals 2, mythorealism instead helps people appreciate why 1 plus 1 doesn’t equal 2—which is to say, it confirms that the occurrence of B is completely unrelated to A. In other words, mythorealism not only demonstrates why people in China came to believe that one mu of land could produce more than ten thousand jin of wheat or rice, it also reveals the origins, process, and underlying “reality” by which this phenomenon became possible in the first place.

  In my novel The Four Books, the protagonist is an author who has been sentenced to compulsory re-education, and in order to plant a crop of wheat that would yield ten thousand jin of grain per mu of land, he selected an unusual plot of land. It turns out that the plot was located over the tomb of a former emperor who, when he was alive, enjoyed virtually unrivaled power, and it was in the soil over this tomb that the Author planted his wheat. When the wheat began to sprout, the Author irrigated the sprouts by repeatedly cutting his fingers and mixing his blood with water, and even slicing open his veins and allowing the blood to spurt out and mix with the rain. As a result, by harvest time the plot’s ears of wheat were as large as ears of corn, and a single mu of land did indeed yield ten thousand jin of wheat. In this way, the inner causality of the mu of land that yielded ten thousand jin of grain was able to reveal humanity’s innermost pain and hardship.

  While realism rigorously accords with a set of logical causal correlations, absurdity discards this causality, and magical realism rediscovers reality’s underlying causality—though this is not precisely the same causality that we find in real life. Mythorealism, meanwhile, captures a hidden internal logic contained within China’s reality. It explodes reality, such that contemporary China’s absurdity, chaos, and disorder—together with non-realism and illogicality—all become easily comprehensible. In the chaos of today’s China, once novels succeed in grasping the wild roots growing under the soil of reality, the significance of reality itself pales in comparison.

  Fumbling around in the darkness, The Explosion Chronicles attempts to grasp the “most Chinese” cause, like a painter who attempts to paint the uneven contours of an invisible riverbed. Under these circumstances, what is the point of discussing whether or not the river’s water is tumultuous or peaceful? What mythorealism seeks is this invisible riverbed; it wants to reveal the nine-tenths of an iceberg that lies hidden beneath the ocean waves, and demonstrate why the minute portion of the iceberg that people can see is the way that it is.

  Mythorealism was not created for the sake of an ideology or out of an author’s imagination, but rather it is a product of contemporary China’s incomprehensible absurdity. Mythorealism is not merely a methodology or worldview, but rather it articulates the most basic spirit of contemporary Chinese history. In fact, mythorealism is not even strictly speaking a literary perspective at all, and instead it marks the very nature, origin, and identity of Chinese reality itself.

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nbsp; —Yan Lianke

  * Franz Kafka, The Essential Kafka, John R. Williams, ed. and trans. (Herts: Wordsworth Editions, 2014).

  ** Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gregory Rabassa, trans. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006).