Village Worlds: Yan Lianke’s Villages and Matters of Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT Yan Lianke (b. 1958) is one of China’s foremost contemporary writers of fiction and short stories, winning the Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2000 and the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014. This paper will examine the villages in Yan’s three novels, Ri Guang Liu Nian (Time That Flows, 1998), Lenin’s Kisses (2013) and The Explosion Chronicles (2016), and will discuss how life and death are at times synonymous in these villages and how these sites are unbounded by a rural—urban distinction. In his original style off mythorealism (shenshi zhuyi 神实主义),Yan exposes the flesh and blood of peasants against the historical backdrop of traumatic urbanisation in China through a rhetorical excess of both monstrous bodies and inanimate mannequins, showcasing a paradoxically professed non-existence of biological limits, such as illness and death. Yan’s works challenge the framework of biopolitics and its theoretical implication on the topic of neo-liberal governmentality in post-1949 China. Biopolitics works on the basis of keeping life and death in binary opposite categories. Yet in Yan’s novels, the sharp distinction between life and death is destabilised.The villagers’ bodies are neither secure nor precarious. These liminal existences drive economic growth in the space between the rural and the urban.