Abstract

Mo Yan’s stage play Crocodile (Eyu) marks a shift away from novel-centered scholarship in Mo Yan studies. Centered on a continually fed, ever-growing crocodile, the play moves the animal from a textual symbol to a stage image. Existing studies emphasize theme, symbolism, or genre but say less about how stage procedures establish the crocodile’s presence as a publicly perceptible fact and generate meanings around power, desire, and judgment. This article addresses that gap through a script-based, stage-oriented semiotic analysis. Drawing on Barthes’s denotation and connotation together with Hjelmslev’s expression and content planes, it analyzes how stage images organize perception and meaning. It argues that presence in Crocodile is produced through linked sensory, spatial, and verbal cues: at moments of concealment and disclosure, expansion, threshold, and loss of control, the play turns the crocodile into a collectively witnessable event rather than a mere symbol, while repeated cues consolidate associations around power, desire, and judgment, reorienting spectatorship toward the conditions of witnessing. By treating the stage image as an operative mechanism rather than a symbol to be decoded, the article shows how the play, through stage procedures, establishes the crocodile as a perceptible and witnessable stage presence that generates meaning.

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