MCLC: Lupke on Mo Yan (2,3)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Andrea Lingenfelter <ondi at speakeasy.org>
Subject: Lupke on Mo Yan (2)
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To correct Bill Goldman, it's Louis Zukofsky (with an "f", not a "w").

Andrea Lingenfelter

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From: Kevin Lawrence <klawrence at chinainstitute.org>
Subject: Lupke on Mo Yan (3)

I (like most other list members, I'm sure) have been thoroughly engaged in
the exchanges between Mo Yan's detractors and his supporters since the
announcement last year of his winning the Nobel Prize for Literature; but
I certainly appreciate Prof. Lupke's New Year resolution to move on and
allow Mo Yan to enjoy the prize that has finally been awarded and will
certainly not be revoked.  Having spent my adult life (like every other
list member, I'm sure) being engaged as consistently as time and resources
allow with Chinese literature and culture, I am at least pleased that the
award has brought a certain focus from both within China and from without
on contemporary Chinese literature and its relationship to the
institutional structures of literary production (again, institutions from
both within and without China).  Maybe that can be sustained and will mean
more thoughtful writing, more thoughtful translation, more thoughtful
reading -- but, then again, maybe not.

I must say that the casual equivalency that has sometimes been made
between writing in 21st century People's Republic of China and writing in
20th century Nazi Germany is incredibly bewildering to me and annoying
tendentious and inapposite.  I find the issues posed below by Pankaj
Mishra in his response to Salman Rushdie and Perry Link much more cogent:
if critics of Mo Yan fault him for being insufficiently critical of the
Chinese state power structure he resides in and writes from, aren't those
critics then similarly tasked with a moral obligation to criticize the
abuse of the state power structures they live in (such as the
indiscriminate use of drone warfare by the Obama administration)?  There
is, unfortunately, no end to the number of righteous causes in all sorts
of states that we could all be championing even as we write, read, teach,
and/or critique literature.  But for whatever it says about my character,
I know that I for one will not stop being engaged with literature simply
because of its political impotence in the face of egregious state abuse of
power; and obviously I'm not alone in that commitment to literature and
grateful for the writers who aren't choked by that feeling of impotence
but instead find creative approaches to keeping the literary imagination
vital even in morally challenging states (whether that is Mo Yan or Liao
Yiwu or Philip Roth or Gottfried Benn or Salaman Rushdie or almost any
other writer who has been bandied about in this debate -- but you can all
have your Ezra Pound, perhaps the most overrated American poet who every
published.)

At the end of the day, I'm sure Mishra won't convince Mo Yan's detractors
to moderate their criticisms of Mo Yan, but all the same I don't recall
seeing his response on the list and so share it for those who might still
be following this ongoing debate.

Happy New Year, MCLCers.
Kevin

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source: The Guardian
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/04/salman-rushdie-pankaj-mishra-y
an)

Why Salman Rushdie should stick to holding Obama to account
Pankaj Mishra replies to Salman Rushdie's criticisms of Mo Yan

Salman Rushdie (Letters, Guardian, 16 December) helpfully clarifies that
he approved of the assault on Afghanistan since he saw it as simple
retribution rather than, as I incorrectly if charitably implied, an
attempt at democracy-promotion. But my article was not about Rushdie's
strenuous justifications of his government's fiascos. It did not propose a
"moral equivalence" between what he calls "free" and "unfree" societies.
Nor did it advance the preposterous argument that, as the estimable Perry
Link puts it, "if A is a citizen of country Y, he or she should shut up
about country X."

I actually wrote about the perennially ambiguous relationship between
writers and power everywhere, and the unreasonably heavy burden of
political obligations placed on fiction writers in non-western countries,
particularly those – China, Pakistan, Iran – feared and disliked in the
west. I tried to point out that writers in the west are not rated by their
willingness to visibly denounce the violence and injustice perpetrated by
powerful institutions and individuals in their "free societies", or
expected to address them explicitly and exclusively in their fiction.

Also, no figures of comparable influence in the non-west hold them to
account, or point out the correct path to moral redemption and literary
glory. Such are the imbalances of geopolitical power that it is hard even
to imagine Mo Yan, or any writer in China for that matter, attacking Perry
Link and Salman Rushdie for failing to be sufficiently critical of Barack
Obama's routine executions using drones (which have killed many times more
children than have died in random domestic massacres by crazed gunmen).

In fact, when Salman Rushdie, in his early incarnation as a radical,
protested the general indifference among American writers to their
country's "immense power in the world", he earned a severe reprimand from
Saul Bellow. "We just have inspirations," Bellow declared, "We don't have
tasks," adding that "tasks are for people who work in offices". Fair
enough. Nonetheless, the extensive condemnation of Mo Yan in the west
assumes that writers in the "unfree" world should devote themselves to
specific "tasks", most importantly, human rights abuses by their
governments – a peremptory apportioning of literary duties that is worthy
of Marshal Zhdanov, the hatchet man of socialist realism.

Rushdie himself briefly resembled the Soviet taskmaster when he suggested
that John Updike should "stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write
about wife-swapping, because it's what he can do". Rushdie now seems keen
to affirm the American writer as a champion of "open society", and so he
tries to airbrush himself out of the "considerably bewildered audience of
world writers" that, according to his own eyewitness report, was exposed
to Updike's views on blue mailboxes at the PEN conference in 1986.

Rushdie's self-presentation as a stern literary ombudsman to errant
politicians is not much more persuasive. Asserting in 2002 that "America
did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done and did it well," he commended
Hamid Karzai's CIA-sponsored cabal of warlords – apparently, it was
"surprising people by functioning pretty well". For someone persecuted by
a violent theocracy, Rushdie has shown a disturbing affinity in the last
decade with the neo-con right's ideological crusades, whether announcing
that "veils suck", or claiming, absurdly in 2002, that "in this strange,
unattractive historical moment, the extremely strong anti-Saddam argument
isn't getting a fraction of the attention it deserves" and that "a war of
liberation might just be one worth fighting."

Indeed, vigorously defending Ahmed Chalabi, another of the CIA's shills,
from "rude remarks", or hailing Paul Wolfowitz as "a very nice man",
Rushdie went further than any novelist in recent decades in bestowing a
prestigious literary imprimatur on state violence and its enforcers. Of
course, Rushdie's political decisions, which were presumably made without
fear of reprisals by the American government, shouldn't distract us from
assessing his fiction. The critical reception of Martin Amis's recent
novels has not been determined by the British writer's impetuous fantasy
about subjecting Muslims in the west to collective punishment. Rushdie,
however, seems strangely unwilling to make the same concession to Mo Yan
as, from the vantage point of his "free" society, he repeatedly condemns a
fellow novelist working in an "unfree" one.

Perry Link is more to the point in actually reading – however stringently
– Mo Yan's fiction even as he deplores, as I do, the latter's political
choices. Contrary to his belief, he would not have to "shake" me "by the
shoulders" to secure my assent to the bland proposition that "any citizen
of any country should be free to criticize any government anywhere that
oppresses anyone". I can only hope I have not abused that essential
freedom, arguing in this New York Times op-ed, among many other articles,
that "the ruling elites of India and China may soon make the world
nostalgic for the days when America claimed, deeply hypocritically, its
moral leadership."

Far from asking them to "pause" – a presumptuous counsel superimposed on
my article by my Guardian editors – I wish the American and European
critics of Mo Yan would make fuller and bolder use of the liberties
available to them. It is easier, after all, to upbraid a Chinese writer
from afar than to risk public scorn and official disapproval in America by
upholding the rights of Bradley Manning. And one hopes, too, that those
who abhor Mo Yan's timidity would manifest a finer awareness of