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Narrating death in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village

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Abstract

Building on the real story of the tragic results of the blood-selling business in China’s Henan province in the 1990s, Dream of Ding Village (2006), the first Chinese novel to deal with AIDS in China, represents Chinese peasants’ complex relationship with wealth, power, desire, and death. In the novel, desires for wealth and power both lead to and fight against death. The novel also narrates an experience in which trauma is always folded within a duration that mixes past, present, and future, combining different perspectives. Through the depiction of an ill society filled with insanity and official corruption, the author Yan Lianke offers an existential parable that embraces absurdity and nihilism in contemporary post socialist China.

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Notes

  1. In addition to Ma Xianglin (Dream of Ding Village), Sima Nan [Riguangliunian (Life As It Is, 1998)] is also a salient illustration of this phenomenon, in which forms of delirium or unconsciousness substitute for intersubjective imagination.

  2. A host of writers who came upon the Chinese literary scene after the mid-1980s reacted strongly against the vestiges of the aesthetic of the sublime dominated in Mao’s time, expressing their disenchantment with Communist ideology, the party and the official narrative. With souls tormented with anxiety and driven by desire, with phantasmagoric dreams and the shady unconscious, they blasted the semi-religious doctrine of literature and art irrigated by vague Communist ideology and began to depict sex and sickness in the most disgusting, nauseating corporeality, smearing the public space of literature with images of the body intended to negate its sublime aspects: the body wallowing in filth and dirt, the body that farts and shits, the body dripping with urine and feces, and above all the body as rotting corpse (Wang 1997, p. 231). Dubbed New Wave Fiction (Xinchao xiaoshuo), their works initiated a writing tradition of the fantastic, the schizophrenic, and the grotesque in post Mao China. Yan Lianke belongs to this tradition of which Li Tuo, Su Tong, and Yu Hua are also representative.

  3. Yan (2005, p. 338).

  4. Yan (2011, p. 206).

  5. Foucault (1988, p. ix).

  6. Sontag (1978, p. 3).

  7. Yan (2005, p. 7).

  8. Yan (2005, p. 8).

  9. Yan (2005, pp. 13–14).

  10. Liang (2015, p. 64).

  11. Yan (2008b, p. 103).

  12. Wang (2007, p. 26).

  13. Yang (2014, p. 149).

  14. Deleuze (2012, p. 14).

  15. Yan (2005, pp. 34–5). These plaques are actually placed to rate household contribution in selling blood. The five-star plaques are reserved for those who have excelled at selling blood known as “Five-Star Outstanding Blood Donor Households.” This kind of rating also applies to Hotel rating in China.

  16. Yan (2005, p. 38).

  17. Yan (2005, p. 39).

  18. Yan (2005, p. 42).

  19. Yan (2005, p. 81).

  20. Yan (2005, p. 81).

  21. Yan (2005, p. 82).

  22. Yan (2005, p. 82).

  23. Yan (2005, p. 82).

  24. Yan (2005, p. 83).

  25. Yan (2005, p. 85).

  26. Yan (2005, p. 85).

  27. Yan (2005, p. 87).

  28. Chen (2010, p. 117).

  29. Yan (2005, p. 88).

  30. Yan (2005, p. 94).

  31. Yan (2005, p. 105).

  32. Yan (2005, p. 106).

  33. Yan (2005, p. 107).

  34. Yan (2005, p. 112).

  35. Yan (2005, p. 112).

  36. Yan (2005, p. 112).

  37. Yan (2005, p. 94).

  38. Yan (2005, p. 96).

  39. Yan (2005, p. 97).

  40. Yan (2005, p. 105).

  41. Vickroy (2002, p. 3).

  42. This kind of literary hallucination in Yan’s writing is quite similar to that of Gabriel García Márquez in his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his “Latin American Literature as midwifery of Chinese New Period Literature” (lameiwenxue: zhongguo xinshiqi wenxue de cuishengji), Yan expressed his admiration for and indebtedness to Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Mario Vargas Llosa, maintaining that they have influenced a generation of contemporary Chinese writers including himself (2011, p. 153).

  43. Yan (2006, p. 288).

  44. Yan (“What Is Truth” 2008c, p. 62).

  45. Yan (Dexterity 2008a, p. 17).

  46. Yan (Dexterity 2008a, p. 58).

  47. Han (2014, p. 119).

  48. Wang (2013, p. 267).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Foreign Literature, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, People’s Republic of China

    Jincai Yang

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  1. Jincai Yang
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Yang, J. Narrating death in Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village . Neohelicon 43, 105–117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0333-1

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