Mythorealism or Pararealism? Yan Lianke's short fiction as a key to enter the author's representational world

esides being a prolific novelist, Yan Lianke is also well-known for his efforts to reflect upon and theorize his fictional approach. Deeply convinced of the inaptitude of Chinese realism to fully grasp the “invisible truths” of Chinese reality, he developed a writing style that he himself called shenshizhuyi, a play on words that is now usually translated in English as “mythorealism.” However, while we do find in several of Yan's novels a layer of mythical significations, the purpose of Yan's writing is definitely not that of transcending reality in a mythical way. Rather, as he emphasized numerous times, his purpose is to find a form able to bring to the surface the most hidden aspects of the Chinese historical and social reality, especially highlighting the profound elements of absurdity that for him constitute the most significant and pervasive realities of contemporary Chinese society. Whereas Yan's novels tend to portray sweeping allegorical parables of modern and contemporary Chinese history and society, his short stories and novellas are instead mostly vignettes of rural life sketching out the mishaps of wretched individuals faced with unsustainable situations in their backward village settings. This chapter will analyze a number of these short stories to observe the functioning of Yan's critical representation of the rural structures of power and cultural psychology, highlighting as an important rationale of his representational style, which I prefer to define in the case of his short fiction as “pararealism,” the effort to use distorting fictional techniques as a means to grasp what he views as the objective distortions of reality.