New Age Artists

Chapter 635 Breakup 2
Shen Santong criticized Mo Yan not only because of his disgust, but also because he had to do so.

Mo Yan's winning of the award has little impact on the country and it may not be a bad thing.

With the economic development and cultural strength of Southeast University, it has the ability to export ideological discourse in reverse.

It is polite of the University of Tokyo to allow iron ore to go home and have a look.

Literary characters can go back in time to see what’s happening in their past lives. The same is true for past lives.

Mo Yan’s main interest market is Southeast University, and Southeast University can also organize high-level conferences.

Tokyo University is also capable of serving up shit produced under Western ideology, forcing the West to taste the recycled shit.

Mo Yan also cooperated.

Shen Santong had previously expressed the view that Mo Yan was a typical Chinese person, a microcosm of an era, and a pure profit-seeking animal.

Ideals, spiritual beliefs and the like are all empty. All we care about is survival. It's naked survivalism.

It's not that he is without dignity, but when he sees himself wearing a tuxedo and winning the Nobel Prize by whoring - a sign that the Western public opinion hegemony has been building for many years.

It will definitely be good for book sales, so no one cares about the obvious insult in the award speech.

Mo Yan has literary level.

The Nobel Prize citation highlighted works such as "Wine Country" and "Frog" that dealt with sensitive political issues, but ignored the exploration of historical complexity in "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" and "The Sandalwood Death", which in itself is a denial of Mo Yan's own literary pursuit.

Mo Yan’s originality in fusing folk narrative, magical realism and historical criticism is simplified into a negation and criticism of Dongda.

This insult is not only to the University of Tokyo, but also to himself, but judging from his choice, actual interests are obviously more important.

If that were all, Mo Yan would be no different from some converts.

But after he won the Nobel Prize, he chose to cut it off, came back and changed his words directly, and no longer urinated, but spoke "fair words".

This has led to some people who previously supported him, who viewed him as a tool for resistance and a totem, and who had high hopes for him, to start cursing at him.

Don't act it doesn't matter.

After he won the Nobel Prize, he no longer had to worry about selling his books, and there was no passive relationship before the award.

The main market for his books is Dongda. If Mo Yan continues to move forward like Chai Jing, Dongda can completely ignore it.

The Nobel Prize is nothing great, and it’s not difficult to ignore it.

If someone really believed it or was a little hesitant, they wouldn't be able to make as much money as Mo did and change their stance so smoothly.

Dongda people don't have this kind of burden in their bones.

Mo Yan couldn't even talk about the loyalty of those who supported him.
Mo Yan has his own considerations, and Shen Santong also has his own considerations.

The influence of Western ideology in the field of film is more overbearing and naked, and the narrative direction of Zhang Yimou's works is affected by this.

It's not just Zhang Yimou, this is basically the case for all five generations of directors.

The cyclical view of history holds that history is static, repetitive and cyclical, which means that the West must take the initiative to break this static state, and that further aggression will be advantageous.

This is the so-called source of the narrative of progress brought by the Opium War.

Compared to the movie, the narrative of the original novel of Red Sorghum is more diverse, but it is still deeply influenced by Western ideology.

In order to illustrate this issue, the small account "Li Zhongke" which is updated every year made a video.

The title is "Latin American magical realism literature is actually realistic literature."

The local roots of Latin American magical realism originate from the self-expression of Latin American reality. Magical realism was born in the historical and cultural soil of Latin America.

The mixture of Indian mythology, African witchcraft and Catholic tradition forms a unique "surreal" cognition, such as the Day of the Dead in Mexico and the natural spirituality of the Andes.

The cruelty and absurdity of colonial rule, military coups, and economic exploitation have become a daily routine in Latin American countries. Latin American writers use magical techniques to reveal the truth. For example, Asturias's "The Maize Man" uses Mayan mythology to accuse the colonists of plundering the land.

However, under the Western narrative, it has become a weird story of "exotic wonders" and a "magical realism" with a strange narrative.

But the soil for magical realism is the rebellion against Western narratives and the subversion of Eurocentrism and Citi-Monroe Doctrine.

Reconstructing history in the local language, such as Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, using ghost narratives to deconstruct the colonizers' "civilizing" lies.

The book challenges the Western "progressive" discourse through magical metaphors, such as the massacre of the banana company in "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which alludes to the exploitation of the United Fruit Company of the United States.

The West commercially assimilated "othering" and used the asymmetric transmission of cultural power to reshape Latin American literature.

After being screened by the Western literary market, writers such as Marquez and Borges have had their works touted as "representatives of Latin America" ​​after winning awards in the West, but many equally outstanding writers, such as Roa Bastos, have been ignored because they do not meet the "magical" label.

The West has also added the filter of "Orientalism", and Western readers often simplify magical realism into "tropical exoticism", ignoring its political criticism and the tearful cries of Latin America.

Cultural commodification further deconstructs the attribute of seriousness.

The magical elements have been stripped of their social context and become a selling point for tourism promotion and film adaptations. For example, "Love in the Time of Cholera" was packaged as a love epic, weakening the criticism of the colonial legacy.

Through powerful Western narratives, the evils of colonialism are dispelled, the suffering of Latin America is aestheticized, and the questioning of historical responsibility is diverted.

Faced with the distortion of powerful Western narratives, Latin American writers have also actively carried out cultural resistance.

Marquez explicitly opposed the West's simplified interpretation of his works, emphasizing that "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was an accusation against Latin America's century of solitude, marginalization and plunder.

In House of Spirits, Chilean writer Isabel Allende (whose uncle was Salvador Guillermo Allende Gosens, who died in the line of duty) interweaves magical narratives with the cruel reality of Pinochet’s dictatorship, pointing directly to the shadow of Citizenship’s intervention.

Marquez once said: "In Latin America, madness is a normal state and needs to be expressed in a magical way."

He also said: "My work is a precise realism, but you Europeans find it magical."

Llosa, author of The Green House, once said: "We Latin Americans don't need to imagine magic - we just need to open our eyes."

Magic realism is essentially Latin America's creative response to its own suffering. It was born out of local reality rather than being shaped by the West.

During the process of dissemination, the West partially deconstructed it into a commercial spectacle through the cultural market, weakening its sharp edge in criticizing colonial crimes.

Latin American writers have always used this genre as a base to expose hidden historical truths and resist internal and external oppression.

The essence of this cultural castration is to transform the narrative of suffering of the Third World into a “safe other” in the cultural consumption market.

When Asturias exposed the United Fruit Company's "Mr. President" as being packaged as an introductory book on Latin American fantasy, its reality-critical nature had already been pre-sanitized in the topic planning of the multinational publishing group.

How sad!
Having experienced the information explosion of later times, especially after watching the programs about Southeast Asia and Latin America produced by Shipindao, Shen Santong felt complicated.

Those damn Western colonizers are so bullying!
Shen Santong forwarded the video and commented: "When Latin American writers enter the international field of vision, they strengthen the magical elements that meet Western expectations, such as fantasy scenes and primitive customs, and weaken sensitive political issues."

"The editorial tendency of Western publishers may delete the radical criticism in the works to make them more universal. They use their power in global communication to assimilate this genre as much as possible, making it a harmless exotic style and weakening its critical nature."

Shen Santong raised a question: "Western narratives use magical wonders to whitewash colonial aggression, confuse Latin American magic and reality, and eliminate the anti-humanity of colonial violence."

“Why is it that for the same narrative technique, the West tries to depoliticize Latin American magical realism as much as possible, while for Eastern magical realism, it emphasizes politics and critical expression in the opposite way?”

Shen Santong's words pierced through all the hypocrisy.

How to explain the blatant double standards in the same narrative?
The West's "depoliticization" of Latin American magical realism and its intensified political criticism of similar works in the East are self-evident. The West dissolves Latin American resistance narratives through cultural hegemony, while instrumentalizing Eastern literature to serve ideological confrontation in order to maintain its own discourse power.

Shen Santong personally tore off the champagne silk at Mo Yan's celebration party and slashed at the foundation of Mo Yan's existence. He did not make an angry accusation or simply criticize, but used different contrasts of the same narrative.

This is the dividing line between cultural roots and postcolonial narratives, and it is also where Shen Santong strikes a knife into Dongda's current literary narrative, creating an unbridgeable rift.

Given the influence of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles in awards, it is almost certain that Shen Santong will not be able to win various awards in the future, but he still resolutely made this move.

(End of this chapter)