First, the reality symbolized by "Two Cities" and "Wutong Temple"

The narrative of "Forty-one Artillery" is unfolded through a young man named Luo Xiaotong who is nearly twenty years old. This young man named Luo Xiaotong is sitting in the Wutong Temple near an important road in his hometown city at the moment. He tells his life experience to the Buddhist monk sitting in front of him. The initial motivation of this story is to gain the recognition of the Buddhist monk and accept himself as a Buddhist. This life experience told by Luo Xiaotong constitutes the main clue of the novel. When this gushing story is finished, the novel is over. In the mid-199s, the social life in China changed dramatically, and the tide of commodity economy surged and swept across the country. At that time, the production and living conditions in rural areas of China were, in the words of the characters in the works, "The peasant households are not what they used to be. Once upon a time, the farmers scraped food from the soil. "So, this village near the city became a well-known slaughter village under the leadership of Lao Lan. Lao Lan made a fortune by selling meat mixed with water. "When he became the village head, he taught the villagers the high-pressure water injection method without reservation and became the leader of getting rich with a dirty heart." So, "in the specialized slaughter village, his eyes are all the meat that walks alive, and the meat that can't walk, the meat smoked with sulfur and the meat smoked without sulfur, the meat mixed with water and the meat that has not been mixed with water, and the meat soaked with formalin and the meat that has not been used.

Later, the social adverse reaction caused by the problem meat became more and more serious, and the government began to strengthen supervision. Due to the further development of the market economy, the slaughter village in the form of individual butchers was in danger of being banned and eliminated. The village chief Lao Lan, who has a keen sense of smell, set up the Changhua Meat Joint Processing Factory in time to publicize that he would resolutely refuse to inject water into the meat, and held a coordinated publicity campaign to burn the water-injected meat on the opening day. The Municipal Animal Quarantine Bureau also set up a special one at the gate of Changhua Meat Joint Factory. But later, the meat joint factory found that the meat without water injection is still difficult to stand on the market, and if it continues to refuse water injection, it will face the danger of being crushed by water injection meat. Therefore, they invented a new water injection method, that is, the original water injection for meat after slaughter was changed to water injection for living livestock, which not only maintained the promise of refusing to produce "water-injected meat" but also euphemistically called it "washing meat" before slaughter. In order to turn Changhua into a meat brand in the whole city, the whole province and even the whole country and the whole world, the leadership headed by General Manager Lan not only bribed the director and staff of the meat health and quarantine office, but also turned the reporters who came to make a thorough investigation and unannounced visits into effective propagandists who enjoyed the interests of the meat joint factory through clever means. In this way, the slaughterhouse is not only thriving, but also developed into a famous joint-stock enterprise. In order to expand the influence of enterprises, with the support of provinces and cities, they founded a large-scale "meat festival", which turned the meat festival into an order meeting and trade fair for various meat products in Changhua, and became a carnival for people to taste all kinds of meat food. During the festival, various academic seminars on meat were also held in many hotels in the city. In order to encourage eating meat and vigorously advocate meat culture, a meat-eating competition was held to attract the meat-eating experts from the whole province, even the whole country and the whole world to have a face-to-face contest, so as to create a warmer atmosphere for the meat festival and create a new climax. Moreover, with the increasing and more magical rumors about the meat-eating expert Luo Xiaotong, people even regarded him as a "meat god". Therefore, with the support of the provincial and municipal cultural authorities, the city decided to repair and worship the god of fertility and sex.

During Luo Xiaotong's story about his life experience in his hometown 1 years ago, many things are happening outside the temple. For example, a grand and lively "Meat Festival" is held in the square in front of the temple, such as float performance, animal performance, meat parade, meat eating competition, barbecue tasting, meat processing technology products display and exchange, meat academic seminars, preparations for the construction of the "Meat Temple" and singing in front of the temple. These plots that happened in the process of Luo Xiaotong's telling, together with what Luo Xiaotong saw and heard during his wandering and working in the city, the legendary stories that Luo Xiaotong heard in his hometown, and so on, were interspersed together, and became the auxiliary clues that complemented the stories that Luo Xiaotong told the readers. The two clues, the main clue and the auxiliary clue, are discharged in different fonts, forming an intertextual relationship of mutual contrast, interpenetration and mutual connection in the works. If the main clue is Luo Xiaotong's first-person account of my childhood and adolescence, that is, the life years I spent in my hometown slaughter village in the 199s, the content of the secondary clue has broken through the scope of this decade, and the content of the novel has been extended to almost the whole history of contemporary China in the 2th century. In particular, the novel is told through this extended secondary line, collating the family history of Lao Lan, one of the central figures in the novel, in a montage way. Lao Lan's proud ancestors and the legendary and confusing stories of Lao Lan's three uncles are all told through this sub-line. The two clues are intertwined, vividly and profoundly depicting the social life picture of contemporary China and people's real living situation and situation.

The novel summarizes the main contents of the main clue and the deputy clue, and it can be seen that the story centered on Luo Xiaotong in the main clue is mainly a legendary story about how a child who has no meat to eat has become an expert in eating meat, while the story in the sub-line is mainly about the romantic life story of a legendary figure with extraordinary sexual functions who can have sex with 41 women in one day. Together, the two stories give a vivid and playful expression of human's extreme imagination and endless desire for food and color, and of course, they are also extremely pungent sarcasm. More importantly, through these two stories, the novel shows the reality of social life in China at present, and exposes how political corruption with power and money as the basic content contributes to the flood of social desires, and how the human ideal of social political clarity, clean government and virtue of officials, which has been universally believed and yearned for throughout the ages, has been trampled, humiliated and humiliated. This point can be further confirmed by the special map drawn and arranged by the novel for the birthplace of the story. We know from novels that this emerging county is divided into two urban areas, east and west. The wide road in front of Wutong Temple is the main road connecting the two urban areas, and the whole city is like a dumbbell connected by this main road. Wutong Temple and the open square opposite the temple where the meat festival is held are at the midpoint between the two urban areas! And this endless story about the slaughter village happened during this carnival-like meat festival, in this unusual Wutong temple. The Wutong Temple naturally worships the "Wutong God", which is actually a "prostitute god". The novel also points out that the "Wutong God" comes from Wutong of Liaozhai. At the beginning of Wutong of Liaozhai, Pu Songling wrote: "There are Wutong in the south and foxes in the north of Judah. However, the fox in the north is precious, and it can still be driven away; The five links between Jiangsu and Zhejiang are the beautiful women of the people, and they need to be occupied by prostitution. Parents and brothers are afraid to rest, which is particularly harmful. " From Liaozhai, it can be further clearly known that Wutongshi was changed by the cultivation of five kinds of animals into demons, which not only had extraordinary sexual ability, but also ordinary people were unable to kill insects after eating yabakui. But in the Forty-one Artillery, the desperate subject and the "vicious" elegy.

Second, the "vicious" catharsis narrative in the form of reduction to absurdity

Generally speaking, Forty-one Guns is another masterpiece of Mo Yan's novels, which has made new creations in the overall structure and narrative methods and made new achievements. On the whole, or as far as the main part of the narrative is concerned, this is a story that is as smooth and vivid as flowing water. Although waves are folded and eddies come back one after another along the way like a rushing river, it is hard to cover the castle peak, but it flows down and flows east. As far as the story described by the main clue of the novel is concerned, Forty-one Cannon is one of Mo Yan's best-read and hearty novels, because this part was originally a "cannon child"-a child who used to lie, be good at bragging, and like to talk about god, and told her life story about ten years ago. For this child, "telling is the purpose, telling is the theme, and telling is the thought." The purpose of telling is telling, so this part of the story was originally a story told by a teenager. Mo Yan also said in the postscript: Part of the plot of this novel was once published as a novella. But this doesn't affect the novelty of this novel at all, because those 3 thousand words are just a piece of yeast compared with these 3 thousand words. When I prepared enough flour and moisture to provide the right temperature, it expanded violently. The main part of this novel is really like the product of "preparing enough flour and moisture and providing appropriate temperature" and "expanding violently". It has a very wonderful reading taste. If we examine and appreciate it carefully, we will find that the narrative of this main line actually adopts a narrative strategy of "reducing to absurdity".

The subject of Forty-one Guns is a talkative "cannon boy", and this "cannon boy" is a teenager who has attempted revenge, wandered for many years, and wants to break away from common customs and retire to Buddhism. His confidences and catharsis are full of "vicious" grievances, which are full of uproar after brewing and fermenting in the passage of time. Therefore, these narratives are also this "cannon boy". In addition to the external characteristics of the expansion, the author's narrative of the social content revealed by the novel adopts a mischievous strategy of reducing to absurdity, which is also deeply revealing, or "there is always an unspeakable sadness and indignation" behind this strategy of reducing to absurdity. Reduction to absurdity, as a theoretical proof method, is characterized by not denying the wrong viewpoint, proposition and view at the beginning, on the contrary, at the beginning, assuming that it is correct, and then putting this wrong viewpoint, proposition and view on a logical processing instrument for processing, extending it, magnifying it and pushing it away, so as to show itself in a new scale, a new angle and a new environment. There is an idiom called "The Legacy of Culturing Illness". With the help of the expression "logic" implied in this idiom, we can make a modification, which can also be well used to illustrate the advantages and characteristics of this narrative strategy of reducing to absurdity, that is, the narrative method of reducing to absurdity is actually a kind of "nurturing illness", that is, first put "logic" Specifically, in order to profoundly reveal the corruption and degeneration in real life, the author has made an extreme performance of the desire to promote and catalyze people to go to corruption and degeneration. Under the action of such extreme amplification, exaggeration, rendering and expansion, the real social situation of material desires and corruption and degeneration has been reflected more clearly, clearly and accurately, which is like "the method of raising money" and "the method of reducing absurdity". Stripping out and highlighting those grandiose and gorgeous languages and the real "abscess" covered by various packages, while Luo Xiaotong, a young adult, tells his own experience and sends out such feelings, isn't it a unique stripping and positioning of the abscess in the real society? -"In this society, industrious people can only make a small fortune, some can't even make a small fortune, and they can only barely get enough food and clothing. Only those shameless people who are bold and heartless can make a big fortune. Bad guys like Lao Lan want money, fame and status. Do you think there is justice in the world? " A strong mother will save money to build a bright big tile house through frugality and hard work, and her son will not get oil and water, but he is a child who can eat meat, and his appetite for meat has reached an unusual level, so that when he has the opportunity to eat meat and can let go of his belly, his ability and ability to eat meat has reached an amazing level.

Thus, the child became a legendary figure by eating meat. Eating and appetite are treated as "carbuncle-nourishing" here. The people in the slaughter village made a big fuss about eating, eating meat and slaughtering in order to eat, for money, so there were various physical technologies and chemical secrets of water injection, water injection for animal carcasses, water injection for living animals, and so on. With the meat festival, the meat parade, the exhibition and exchange meeting of meat processing machinery and equipment, the academic seminars on various aspects related to meat production, the meat eating contest, the barbecue festival, and finally the on-line and fantastic worship and belief of the meat god-because of the meat god, there is the meat temple. This meat god is the child of the slaughter village-Luo Xiaotong-who is greedy for meat, good at eating meat, can eat meat and even talk to meat, and love meat. At the same time, there is a grand drama "The Story of the Ascension of the Fairy by the Meat Child" which tells and performs this legend and myth. Undoubtedly, the root of all corruption is human greed, and human greed is undoubtedly the first to bear the brunt of appetite, while carnal desire is the representative of appetite. When Mo Yan adopted the above narrative logic and narrative strategy to put "eating meat" in real life and made such a hype, he undoubtedly inserted the scalpel in the brightest and most vivid social abscess like a cold surgeon. However, the novel's sub-line is a confusing and extremely exaggerated rendering of the five gods and the sexual ability of Lan Daguan. Its narrative methods, strategies and intentions are consistent with those of the "meat god". The two clues, one main and one detailed, complement each other and set off each other. * * * has completed the realization of the artistic motivation of this novel. As far as the book of two cities is concerned, when the lust for food and sex is pursued and vented without restraint, moral legitimacy, conscience of justice and fairness, etc., when the unrestrained desire and social corruption collude, collude and urge each other, "there is justice in the world."

Therefore, the author's grief and indignation, a kind of vicious narrative pleasure, and an evil pleasure of putting real life on its absurd track and letting it run to the opposite side of the meaning of life are also felt in the narrative of Forty-one Artillery, thus forming a "exposing shortcomings" of it. If the main part and main narrative part of Forty-one Artillery make people enjoy a happy reading, its auxiliary part and sub-line narrative content are another matter. The stories and scenes described and displayed inside and outside the temple of Wutong Temple have painted the works with special psychology, philosophy, hallucinations, dreams and other colors and mysterious emotional appeal, greatly increasing the scope of time and space and the content of life included in the novel, such as the beginning of the story, the mysterious figure of women appearing in the gaps in the temple wall and outside the temple before and after the storm, which is also true and illusory, creating a mysterious atmosphere and meaning, full of. Of course, it is also full of realistic vulgar interest and reading interest, especially under the oil lamp at night, the plot of this charming mysterious woman cooking, the fox in the temple, attracted by the aroma of rice porridge, entered our hut generously. The female fox is in front, and the male fox is in the back. Among them, there are three furry little foxes staggering. They are stupid and very cute. At the moment of thunder and lightning and heavy rain, animals like to give birth