The red cornfield
The red corn field (original title Chinese 紅高粱家族 , Pinyin Hóng Gāoliáng Jiāzú , German for example: Red Millet Family) is a novel by the Chinese writer and Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan in 1986. It was his first novel and is one of his greatest successes .
Form and structure
The novel is loosely divided into five chapters and each of them into shorter sections, most of which do not form complete units of content. In the novel, the story of the narrator's family (generation of the grandparents and parents of the narrator) is presented, the setting is the Chinese province of Shandong , in particular the hometown of the author Gaomi , the story period extends from the 1920s to the early 1940s occasional digressions in later times.
The plot is described from the point of view of a first-person narrator who reports on the experiences of his parents and grandparents and their contemporaries. The narrator has extensive knowledge of details, including the feelings of the people involved. The plot is told in short episodes that are not chronologically or in terms of content and refer to each other within a largely closed action space, like a puzzle or a mosaic .
The five chapters were initially published individually in magazines and published as a novel in 1987.
Contents in chronological form
Dai Fenglian, the author's grandmother, is the daughter of a long-established but impoverished family and is married to Shan Bianlang, the son of a very wealthy distillery owner, at a young age. While she is being carried to her still unknown husband in the bridal litter, she becomes aware of the litter-bearer Yu Zhan'ao. This intelligent young man of about the same age comes from a humble background and has been used to inconsiderate violence since he was a child. In the distillery, the rumors prove to be true that Shan Bianlang is seriously ill with leprosy . After the wedding, Zhan'ao sleeps with Fenglian in the millet field, with Douguan, the narrator's father, being fathered. In the evening, Zhan'ao kills Shen's father and son, so that Fenglian suddenly becomes the owner of the distillery.
Years follow in which the two very self-confident characters Zhan'ao and Fenglian maintain an eventful relationship. Zhan'ao is at times a worker in the distillery, at times he rises as a bandit to become a robber captain. He begins a relationship with the distillery employee Lian'er, the betrayed Fenglian takes revenge through relationships with other men, including Zhan'ao's boss, the bandit and militia leader Schwarzauge. Even during this time, conflicts are often resolved through the shedding of blood.
When the Japanese marched into the area at the end of the 1930s, they proceeded with immense brutality against the local population. Zhan'ao organized a resistance group that successfully carried out a raid on a Japanese convoy. Two weeks later, the Japanese take revenge by destroying the entire village and its residents, littering the millet fields with corpses. The few survivors, including Zhan'ao and Douguan, now have to defend themselves against packs of corpse-flinging dogs.
Two years later, Zhan'ao is again a powerful militia leader, but he and the leaders of two other militia have jealous hatred for one another. The funeral of Fenglian, celebrated splendidly by Zhan'ao, ends with the Chinese militias slaughtering each other in the millet fields.