MCLC: Pathlight and Peregrine (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Bill Goldman <billgoldman at mac.com>
Subject: Pathlight and Peregrine (1)
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Julia Lovell writes:

"Since the 1980s, the country [i.e. China] has suffered from a full-blown
Nobel complex: an anxious desire for one of its citizens to win the Nobel
prize for literature."

In reality, of course, a Chinese citizen did win the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2000. That was Gao Xingjian, specifically for his
extraordinary novel Soul Mountain (translated from "Ling Shan"). Since Gao
maintains his freedom to criticise the CCP (though Ling Shan does not
focus on the CCP), his novel is banned in China and he himself is persona
non grata there. I discovered, to my disappointment, that even my class of
English MA students in Beijing not only had never heard of him but denied
that a Chinese writer had ever won the Nobel - denied it until they
searched the web after I gave them his name, that is. Thus the Communist
Party acts against the interests of Chinese culture, even convincing most
of its citizens that no Chinese has ever won the Nobel for Literature,
when in reality that is simply not true.

Gao Xingjian is a really interesting character, whose main 'crime' was
merely being interested in writing in a 'modernist' vein, influenced by
Beckett, as I understand it. He was mainly known as a playwright in
Beijing in the early 1980s. Soul Mountain is like no other book I have
ever read switching between 1st, 3rd and 2nd person singular for its
narration.

Bill