In China, a Writer Finds a Deep Well
莫言：一个中国作家的黑色幽默和独特魅力

By Tom Shone 译/ 刘志良

In his brilliantly realistic and darkly funny short story Shifu, You'11 Do Anything for a Laugh, Mo Yan, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, portrays a model worker, a shifu, or craftsman, from northeast China who is laid off at the factory where he has one month to go before his retirement. After using up all of his money getting medical treatment, the devastated man, Ding Shikou, or Ten Mouth Ding, discovers the shell of an abandoned bus near a cemetery at the edge of a lake.

Ding had just before noted that you have to pay to enter the public toilets in his city, which, a friend tells him, is all right since otherwise "lower-class people like us would never have the privilege of relieving ourselves in such a high-class place," and this gives him the brilliant idea of transforming the abandoned bus into a little love nest, charging young couples in heat and no place to go hourly rates for its use.

The story, like most of Mr. Mo's work, is reminiscent of a comment once made by the Soviet writer Vladimir Voinovich that in his country "reality and satire are the same." In his half dozen or so novels and story collections, the prolific, fanciful, unrestrained, sometimes outrageous Mr. Mo has created a universe full of earthy and craggy characters all of whom are battered, bruised; almost crushed by the undignified outrages of ordinary life.

Or, as Mr. Mo himself succinctly described his Buddhist-like frame of reference, speaking at a Sino-American cultural conference in Berkeley, Calif., last year, "As long as humans live, there is pain." But, describing his literary philosophy, he added, "I think most readers would prefer to read humorous sentences about a painful life."

莫言作品

Humorous is one way to describe Mo Yan's sentences, and no doubt a certain amused distance makes it easier to take in his mostly rural Chinese universe, its unfairness, its casual violence, its stench, its tragedies, its Kafkaesque frustrations. But one senses, as with Mr. Voinovich, a caustic fury lurking just beneath the surface of his stories of ordinary Chinese lives. Most of them lived where Mr. Mo himself grew up, in northern Shandong Province, where, as he put it in a preface to one collection, "the people struggled to keep death from the door, with little to eat and rags for clothes."

Mr. Mo, daring as he is and devastating as his close, concrete examination of real conditions may be, is not a dissident. And yet Mr. Mo doesn't hold back when it comes to the Chinese bureaucracy, its petty privileges and his characters’ confrontations with it.

In Shifu, You'11 Do Anything for a Laugh (the title story of its collection), the city's vice mayor for industry shows up at the gate of Ding's factory driving a black Audi. When, in a gesture of false sympathy, he holds out his hand, Ding, who gets around in "a 1960s black and obstinate, clunky Grand Defense bicycle," notes its "softness ... like dough." When Ding goes to the municipal office, responding to the vice mayor's invitation to come see him any time, he is thrown into the street by a nasty guard at the gate.

But this battle between little people and capricious authority does not fully capture Mr. Mo's books—not his first novel, Red Sorghum (made into a movie by Zhang Yimou), nor his more recent Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, which a New York Times reviewer called "wildly visionary and creative."

山东省高密市大栏乡平安庄，莫言出生的地方

These novels are very different. As Mr. Mo's adroit translator Howard Goldblatt put it in an e-mail: "If you like Poe, you'11 love the forthcoming Sandalwood Death; if you're more Rabelaisian, The Republic of Wine will appeal, and if you're fond of a fabulist, I recommend Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out."

But at the center of all of Mr. Mo's work to date are the characters themselves, the very flavorful, raunchy, violence-prone, cruel, obstinately individualistic, all-too-human people who, in the end, get a bit of consolation, even some tattered remnants of victory, in the ingenious facts of their survival. Contrary to the title of the story of Ten Mouth Ding, they won't do anything for a laugh, but a little laughter is just about all they expect.

2012年度诺贝尔文学奖的获得者是莫言。他的小说《师傅越来越幽默》是一篇非常优秀的现实主义短篇小说，具有黑色幽默的风格。小说刻画了中国东北的一位模范工人，一个师傅，或者说一个技工。他差一个月就要退休了，工厂却让他下了岗。他叫丁十口。为了治病，他花光了自己所有的积蓄，走投无路之时，他在湖边一个墓地旁发现了一辆废弃的公共汽车外壳。

之前，丁师傅曾注意到在市里进公共厕所要付费，一位朋友告诉他说这没什么不好的，因为如果不收费，“像我们这样的下等人只怕在梦里也用不上这样高级的厕所呢”。这使他想到了一个绝妙的主意：把这辆废弃的汽车改造为一个小小的爱巢，专供那些欲火焚身却又无处可去的情侣使用，按小时收费。

这篇小说和莫言的其他作品一样，让人想起苏联作家弗拉基米尔·弗因诺维奇所说的话，他说在他的国家，“现实等同于讽刺”。莫言是一位天马行空、自由奔放但有时又惊世骇俗的多产作家，在他创作的六七部长篇小说和短篇小说集中，他创造了一个个充满乡土气息、性格粗犷的人物形象，他们遭受一次又一次的打击，遍体鳞伤，被平凡生活中那些丑恶不堪的暴行折磨得几近崩溃。

或者，如莫言自己所说：“人活着就有痛苦。”这话是去年他参加加州伯克利举行的中美文化研讨会时说的，当时他正在简要阐述自己那有点像佛教徒似的观点。但在谈到自己的文学思想时，他又补充说：“我想大多数读者在阅读有关痛苦生活的文字时，都更喜欢读幽默的语句。”

幽默是莫言文字的特点之一。而且毫无疑问，如果你被他的文字逗乐了，由此产生的某种距离感会让你更容易接受他大部分作品里所描写的那种中国农村的生活，接受那里发生的种种不公平现象、不时出现的暴力行为、乌烟瘴气的恶臭、各种悲剧事件和卡夫卡式的失意挫败。然而，和弗因诺维奇一样，莫言的作品让人觉得他笔下那些普通中国人的生活故事背后潜藏着一种啃噬心灵的愤怒。这些人大多生活在莫言成长的地方，在山东省的北部。那里，正如他在一部小说集的序言中所说的那样，“人们挣扎在死亡边缘，食不果腹，衣不蔽体”。

虽然莫言无所畏惧，对现实状况细致入微的观察也可谓辛辣犀利，但他并不是异见人士。不过，在描写中国的官僚机构、他们小小的特权以及他所塑造的人物与他们的对抗时，莫言并没有退却。

在《师傅越来越幽默》（收录该小说的集子就以此为书名）中，分管工业的副市长开着一辆黑色奥迪车出现在丁十口所在工厂的大门口，而老丁的坐骑则是“一辆20世纪60年代生产的又黑又不听使唤又老旧笨重的大国防牌自行车”。当副市长装模作样地摆出一副同情姿态，伸手和老丁握手时，老丁感到“副市长的手柔软得像面团”。副市长许诺说老丁有事随时都可以去找他，可当老丁信以为真地去市政府办公室找他时，却被可恶的门卫一把推倒在大街上。

但莫言作品所描写的并不全是这种小人物和变化无常的当权者之间的斗争：他的第一部小说《红高粱家族》（已被张艺谋拍成电影）就不是这样的内容，他最近的作品《生死疲劳》也不是这类题材。《纽约时报》的一位评论家认为《生死疲劳》“充满狂野的想象力和创造力”。

这些小说风格迥异。正如莫言的娴熟译者葛浩文在一封电子邮件中所说的那样：“如果你喜欢爱伦·坡，你就会喜欢即将出版的《檀香刑》；如果你是拉伯雷的崇拜者，你会发现《酒国》对你很有吸引力；如果你喜欢寓言式作品，我推荐你去读《生死疲劳》。”

但迄今为止，在莫言的所有作品中，居于核心地位的还是人物本身，是那些各有情趣、邋里邋遢、喜欢动粗、冷酷无情、自私自利、拥有人性所有缺点的人。这些人最后竟然还能活下来，简直就是个奇迹，不过这也给了他们稍许的安慰，甚至是一丝残存的胜利的喜悦。和丁十口那个故事的标题不同的是，他们不会变得越来越幽默，但些许的欢笑大概就是他们全部的期望。