What is the background of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum?

Red Sorghum is not only the end of "root-seeking literature", but also the origin of "new period" family novels and "new historical novels". A strong sense of life and the historical marginality of characters have injected fresh blood into novels in the new period. Strong sense of life: (1) Red sorghum is a living individual with love and hate. Mountains and rivers, vegetation, breeze and white clouds, and even drowning in urine all have a sense of life. In the Red Sorghum Family, "my grandmother" seems to have doomed her tragic fate from the day she got married, but she broke through with strength and courage, thus gaining a new life and her own love and career. Uncle Lohan knew that he had no hope of survival in the face of torture, but he didn't despair. He still fought to the end with his endurance, and his heroism was passed down as a story by later generations. Although the irregular army led by "my grandfather" failed in the Anti-Japanese War, his frankness and his brilliant achievements were recorded as a story in history books, "dwarfing us black sheep." Here, the social orthodox ethics and right and wrong concepts have failed, and what we feel is only the shocking beauty of powerful life forces. (2) Plants are alive, which is understandable, but plants are spiritual and emotional, only in fairy tales and fables. But in Mo Yan's works, the spirituality and feeling of plants are so natural that people don't feel abrupt at all. Red sorghum knows astronomy above, geography below, and there are also joys and sorrows, and it will also be "silent", "emotional agitation" and "going to the mountains to talk". Together with the black land rooted in their hometown, they have been integrated with "my grandfather" and "my grandmother". Mountains and rivers, blue sky and white clouds, wind and rain, thunder and lightning are all psychic and emotional. Rivers will be angry, punish people and sob because of sadness. (3) Death is natural. In this paper, the process of uncle Lohan being skinned alive is written to the extreme, the moment of the end of his life is infinitely elongated, and the death process itself is vividly displayed. Describing torture does not necessarily mean that the author suffered or carried out torture, but a fiction based on artistic imagination. Its purpose is to show people's life feelings and the state of life itself under extreme circumstances, rather than focusing on the meaning of death. Here, Mo Yan puts people at the critical point of life to investigate, that is, to "downgrade" death to "material-body" level, "restore reputation for the body", and transfer "all advanced, spiritual, ideal and abstract things to the inseparable material-body level, earth and body level", which is an inversion of the "death taboo" in traditional literature. In Mo Yan's literary world, all beings are becoming the symbol of the heroic, unyielding and tenacious spirit of Chinese children and the soul of the Chinese nation. The protagonists in Mo Yan's novels are often not heroic so-called historical subjects recognized by orthodox civilization, but ordinary people who are excluded from mainstream history. They are rude and stupid, have nothing to do with orthodox civilization, and are often destructive. However, it is these uncivilized and unorthodox marginal figures who often have strong vitality.