Frogs (novel)

Frogs is a novel by the Chinese writer Mo Yan . The original edition was published in 2009 in Shanghai under the title Wa - this syllable denotes both frogs and small children in Chinese . The German-language edition was first published in 2013 by Carl Hanser Verlag in Munich . In 2014 a paperback edition followed on dtv . Martina Hasse carried out the translation.

In frogs the fates of a Chinese gynecologist will be described, in the times of the Cultural Revolution not only modern obstetrics has to practice, but also by all means the one-child policy seeks to enforce the ruling.

The novel has autobiographical references. Mo Yan reported in an epilogue to frogs of his phobia of frogs and of his correspondence with Kenzaburō Ōe , who had repeatedly asked him about the progress of his work on the novel. The main character Gugu, an old gynecologist and midwife, was also not a pure invention. He has an elderly aunt who worked as a gynecologist and midwife. He also has in common with his main character that he forced his wife to have an abortion for career reasons .

content

A Chinese writer who calls himself a “tadpole”, but is called “little runner” by his friends and relatives, corresponds with a Japanese colleague. This Yoshito Sugitani encouraged Tadpole for years to carry out a literary project and to tell the life story of his aunt Gugu, which is closely linked to his own fate. Tadpole, who had initially thought of a novel about Gugu, decides to leave this field to a talented competitor and to write a play about Gugu himself. In the end, Frogs presents itself as a letter novel to which this play Tadpole is attached.

Gugu belongs to the first generation of doctors who received a modern training based on Western medicine and is considered one of the best obstetricians beyond the borders of the northeastern Gaomi province , in which the novel is set. A brilliant marriage is also on the horizon, as she is in a relationship with the pilot of a fighter jet. But one day he settles in Taiwan. As a result, Gugu is politically compromised. In order to wipe out this gap, she is now rigorous as an advocate of the one-child policy, which she tries to enforce with all means.

Little Renner, whose first wife Renmei becomes pregnant again after the birth of their daughter Yangyang, is influenced by the prevailing doctrine. In order not to have to return to the peasants in the country as punishment, but to be able to pursue his career as an army officer, he finally advocates the removal of the already well-developed unborn child. Renmei did not survive the operation. The aunt then presses her nephew to marry her assistant, who is about thirty, who will raise his daughter. This assistant, called Little Lion, initially appears to him physically very unattractive. He also knows that one of his acquaintances has been in love with the young woman for years. Nevertheless, he finally gives in and marries her.

Little Leo, Yangyang, the daughter from her husband's first marriage, raises her husband's daughter conscientiously, but she also longs for a child of her own. When Wang Galle, a seven-month-old pregnant woman, gave birth to a little girl in the course of a wild chase by Gugu and her extras on a river and then died, she took over the baby. After six months, however, the child's father, Chen Nase, asked for his daughter, who was given the name Chen Eyebrow, back. Chen Eyebrow grows up with her older sister at the widowed Chen Nose and develops into a beauty. She and her sister leave their now alcoholic father to work in a plush toy factory. In an accident at this factory, she loses her sister and is severely disfigured by burns.

About two decades after Chen's eyebrow was born, when she was already beyond childbearing age, Little Lion takes sperm from her husband without his knowledge and uses it to fertilize a surrogate mother. This woman is Chen Eyebrow, who no longer goes publicly unveiled after her accident and is hiding in a clinic for surrogate mothers disguised as a frog farm. She needs the money to support her father, who threw himself in front of a police car with the intention of suicide and survived with serious injuries. Little Renner is initially outraged by the arbitrariness of his second wife and worries about his reputation. On the other hand, he is longing for a little son and also assumes that Chen Eyebrow will give birth to a beautiful child.

In the play that closes the novel, Chen Eyebrow appears as the accuser: firstly, she did not receive the agreed wages for bearing the child; attempts were made to deceive her into claiming that the baby did not survive the birth. Second, she wants to raise her child herself. In a scene that corresponds to Solomon's judgment or the corresponding situation in the Caucasian Chalk Circle , a judge must decide whether Little Lion or Chen's eyebrow should raise the little boy. Chen Eyebrow reaches for the child so bravely that the judge immediately awards it to her competitor Little Lion.

Chinese clay figures

Gugu, who has meanwhile married the artist Hao Große Hand, is meanwhile persecuted by remorse or the ghosts of the aborted children. It was probably triggered by a situation in which, at the end of her professional life, she got drunk in a swamp and felt pursued by frogs whose croaks reminded her of the screaming of newborns. Now Hao Große Hand enumerates each of these children and describes the physical characteristics of the parents. Hao Big Hand, according to her, forms clay children who resemble the babies that Gugu has on her conscience.

Such clay children, called Niwawa in the novel, are the harbingers of real babies according to the belief of the locals. They are bought by couples who want to have children and after a donation in the temple, they are provided with a red ribbon, which is supposed to attract the desired children into life. Gugu, who is persecuted in the play by disabled frogs, who are portrayed by children, now claims that the killed children, which she has portrayed by Hao Big Hand, were wanted by new parents and were born again. Little Lion also bought one of these clay figures before she took Chen's little eyebrow son.

reception

Mo Yan is controversial as an author and the acceptance of the novel by criticism in the West was rather ambivalent.

Perry Link coined the term “daft hilarity” for Mo Yan's style. This method could be used to depict grievances in Chinese society without coming into conflict with the authorities and without falling victim to state censorship. According to Mark Siemons in a review of the novel, the method of “hallucinatory realism”, which the Nobel Committee claims to have established in Mo Yan, gives the author the opportunity to criticize the system, but at the same time get his head out of the loop to pull and relativize the grievances. However, in Siemons' opinion in Frogs , Mo Yan has largely abandoned these literary means.

Detail from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

In this novel, he makes use of hallucinatory realism for the first time after several hundred pages to describe the swamp scene: “This picture of the woman attacked and covered by frogs, a truly surreal vision worthy of Hieronymus Bosch , is in this context Romans, however, is not a relativizing embellishment, but rather the opposite: a radicalization of the moral thesis of the novel, which is not allowed to evaporate through abstraction. [...] A more precise accounting is not possible within the framework of this philosophical system. ”In the first part of the novel, the story is“ told with a twinkle in the eye, which could be understood as trivializing ”, but then step after the first-person narrator the unsuccessful abortion and the death of Renmeis himself had to feel concerned, a turning point "which has an even more lasting effect because it is hardly dealt with psychologically [...] Everything that is supposedly humorous and relativizing is in turn subverted by something that can optionally be called Can interpret speechlessness, insensitivity or weakness. "

The first-person narrator now comes to the fore, his long-suppressed feelings of guilt are the second essential plot of the novel, alongside the description of Gugu's fate. Tadpole's remorse is not an individual problem, but a highly political issue. Although the one-child policy is now viewed critically by government advisors, mainly for economic reasons, it has so far "not been discussed as a problem of conscience, just as little as the case of the participation of large sections of the population in the crimes of the cultural revolution, which has again been different." The fact that Mo Yan is addressing this repression policy is new and contradicts the official state discourse. Siemons feels that the first-person narrator is drawn rather pale, but sees it as an advantage or a deliberately used literary medium: “This paleness could even be an indication of the honesty of the introspection. In any case, Mo Yan's figure drawing mostly obeys less the laws of psychological plausibility than the principle of satirical metaphor suitability . ”Siemons sees the accumulation of travesties towards the end of the novel and the attached play, which adds nothing to the plot, as superfluous. Overall, in his opinion, the novel changes not only the image that readers have so far had of Mo Yan, but also the ideas that one has of what is going on in the heart of Chinese society.

Ijoma Mangold came in time to the conclusion frogs is not the novel of opportunists . "Without ideological blinkers" Mo Yan tells "of the coercive violence that emanates from Chinese collectivism and the politics imposed from above." He describes "coldly and ruthlessly how ideologies bestialize human nature." Mo Yan's image of man is marked by pessimism . The people portrayed, like the author, felt guilty at times, but they decided that they were just mediocre and tolerated the wretchedness of not defending themselves against measures recognized as wrong and cruel. Mangold would like to shake up the characters because of their indolence . The quality of the novel lies in the relentless portrayal of the fatalistic attitudes of the characters. While Siemons believes he is looking into the heart of Chinese society through the novel (and Hasse considers the translation of the novel to be very successful), Mangold feels a “peculiar foreignness”, which is heightened by the translation. One looks at a world "in which psychological individualism is a luxury" and "in which the narcissism with which one pampers one's own soul ego is not yet rampant".

Sebastian Hammelehle described it in Der Spiegel as “Mo Yan's method not to accuse the regime across the board, not to draw guilt-laden negative characters, but to describe the creeping failure of the individual with reserved, slightly fatalistic skepticism. The first-person narrator may be cowardly and indecisive. Mo Yan's view of him remains just as humane [sic!] As that of the development of society. ”Mo Yan wrote“ lively and lively, rustic burlesque ”and by no means conveyed the feeling of looking into a strange world. Rather, according to Hammelehle, “one has to ask oneself whether Mo Yan is not much closer to the West in his worldview than his critics in this country believe: he relies on forgiveness of guilt and love of developing life - virtues that are commonly shared with one other value system than that of communism. Christianity. "

expenditure

• 蛙 (wā, in German: Frosch), 450 pages, 麥田 出版 (Catcher Publishing), Taipei 2009, ISBN 9789861735900 or 340 pages, 上海 文艺 出版社 (Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House), Shanghai 2009, ISBN 9787532136766
  • Frogs. Roman , translated from Chinese by Martina Hasse, 506 pages, Hanser Verlag, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24262-3 or Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-423 -14346-2
    • Audiobook: frogs. Novel , 8 CDs (627 min.), Abridged reading by Gert Heidenreich. Translated from the Chinese by Martina Hasse. Editing: Regina Carstensen. Director: Kirsten Böttcher, audio book Hamburg, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89903-852-1
    • E-book: frogs. Roman , 385 pp., Divibib, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24294-4

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Sebastian Hammelehle, Nobel Prize Winner Mo Yan: Monstrous Child Hunt , March 13, 2013 at www.spiegel.de
2. ^ Mo Yan, Frösche , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-423-14346-2 , pp. 497-502
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Mark Siemons, Mo Yan: Frogs. I am guilty myself , February 26, 2013 on www.faz.net
4. ↑ Matthias Eder explained in a publication published in 1947 that Ni-wa-wa were clay figures that children could throw rings out of rods at. Cf. Matthias Eder, Play Equipment and Games in Chinese New Year's Customs. With a display of magical meanings , in: Folklore Studies VI, Issue 1, Peiping 1947, p. 1 ff. ( Digitized version ), here p. 7 f. At another point in this study, p. 114, he goes into the original meaning of the clay puppets: According to their actual meaning, they are a means of obtaining children's blessings, but this meaning has meanwhile "faded strongly". On the etymology, Eder writes on p. 115: “The clay figures, as far as they represent children, are called ni-wa-wa [...], ie“ clay babies ”. Wa means pretty, cute. The word wa-wa , which is used to describe very small children, can be rendered as “pretty”. The imitation of the voice of a crying baby may also have played a part in this designation. ”There is also a Chinese children's song with the title Ni wa wa , cf. Recording and translations of Ni wa wa on www.youtube.com
5. ^ Ijoma Mangold, novel "Frogs". A great bestiary. Mo Yan's novel "Frogs" is not the work of an opportunist , April 24, 2013 on www.zeit.de