The absurd as method: The Chinese absurdist hero, enchanted power, and the alienated poor in Yan Lianke's military literature

Abstract

As one of the most prolific and outspoken of contemporary Chinese writers, Yan Lianke has won international recognition for his writing from the margins. However, while his novels have been extensively studied, Yan's military literature has received much less scholarly attention. This paper explores Yan's adaptation of the absurd in Western literature to Chinese military literature, investigates how he constructs Chinese absurdist heroes, and reconstructs the concepts of "the poor" and "power" in his narratives. Focusing in particular on his 2009 collection of military novellas Sihao jinqu (Prohibited Area Number Four), this paper argues that the absurd in Yan's military texts serves not only as a formal experiment for exploring the alternative imagination of the alienated and marginalized peasant soldiers in contemporary China but also as an implicit means of articulating Yan's own socio-political commentary, one which cannot allow itself to be explicitly political.