On Narrative Mode of Historiography in Chinese Fiction in the 1980s
Xiaoping Song

Abstract
Mo Yan and Su Tong are Chinese writers whose literary works have become the milestones. The two novellas, Red Sorghum (as in contrast with the novel) by Mo Yan, and Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes by Su Tong provide compelling examples for that thematic and formalistic literary revolution. In Red Sorghum, the first person narrator is able to put a full stop to the end of the historical drama of the red sorghum clan. For his counterpart in Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, however, the story of the Maple-Poplar Village and the Bamboo-ware Town refuses to make its closure. The first person narrator has to keep his house door open for shadows, souls and ghosts of his ancestors who are still wandering like black fish. Through the intense exercise of mind and the manipulation of narrative structures, they achieve moral, intellectual and spiritual transcendence which involves the narrators as well as the readers.

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