Yan Lianke and Italo Calvino on the absurdity of urban life

In this chapter, we will compare the description of the absurdity of urban life as presented by Yan Lianke with the one provided by the Italian Italo Calvino. Both authors’ writing careers debuted from neorealism but gradually shifted to a surrealistic style, which is named by Yan “mythorealism” (shenshi zhuyi) and presented as the only way to look lucidly at the deepness of the contradictions present in contemporary human life. In 1972, at the peak of the Italian economic boom, Calvino wrote Invisible Cities as a narrative reflection on the utopian and dystopian aspects of urbanism. He presented fifty-five unrealistic cities, each one described by Marco Polo to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Each city is a reflection of humanity, culture, development, memory, and, finally, unlivableness. In a similar, but even more excessive economic and urban context of development, Yan wrote the fiction The Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi, 2013). His aim was the “epic description” of the immoral beginning and despicable development of a metropolis, where economic growth and power alone constitute the unique human search at all costs, a kind of sacral faith. Opposed to this “extreme reality” of the city, Yan introduces natural elements, such as flowers, plants, insects, and clouds that always emerge as unrealistic reactions to human events. Their descriptions shed some light on human relationships with both cities and nature. However, while Calvino maintains, thanks to Polo, a detached and “light” narrative mood, Yan himself is the narrator or historian writing this tragic chronicle, and his truth-bearing act is rejected by authorities, therefore, for him, truth is always a “heavy task.”