MCLC: Lupke on Mo Yan (4,5)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Bill Goldman <billgoldman at mac.com>
Subject: Lupke on Mo Yan (4)
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Kevin Lawrence writes that the "the casual equivalency that has sometimes
been made between writing in .... the People's Republic of China and ...
Nazi Germany has been incredibly bewildering to me and annoying
tendentious and inapposite." He goes on, in the next paragraph, to make
the casual equivalency between such police states as those and the Obama
administration - a casual equivalency I must say I find incredibly
bewildering and annoying tendentious and inapposite. He apparently ignore
completely the fact that in the US a writer is free to criticise the
administration (the late Gore Vidal even wrote an article alleging that
George W Bush and his family were in specific cahoots with the 911 bombers
- allegations which I have never since seen seriously discussed by anyone
but which Vidal was allowed to make), without being sentenced to a decade
in prison or worse. I do not believe that everything about the West is
right, but I do not believe that Mao or his successors have a better
alternative, and I think the evidence supports my view very strongly.

Thanks to Andrea for correcting my spelling of the poet's name.

Speaking of poets, I consider Pound to have authored at least a handful of
marvellous poems, and of course he was responsible for editing Eliot's
Waste Land into the form everyone has known and dare I say Loved since. He
was in fact a great encourager of talent, as my example of Zukofsky
illustrates.

Bill

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From: Lucas Klein <LRKlein at cityu.edu.hk>
Subject: Lupke on Mo Yan (5)

I'd like to add that the only mentions of Ezra Pound with regard to Mo Yan
on this list were by Wolfgang Kubin and Jeff Kinkley, both of whom held up
Pound, if I understand them correctly, in defense of Mo Yan and the
separation of an author's explicit politics and personality from his or
her literary contribution and value. Kubin wrote, "From the political
point of view these persons [Gottfried Benn, Martin Heidegger, Peter
Handke, Ezra Pound] were and are unbearable, but from the aesthetic point
of view are their writings as well problematic? Probably not" (Mo Yan says
censorship necessary (2), Dec. 9), and "Ezra Pound is a great poet as a
writer, as a person he destroyed himself" (Mo Yan says censorship is
necessary (5), Dec. 10); Kinkley wrote, "We find echoes of Dante's
language in Ezra Pound and allusions to Shakespeare in T. S. Eliot.  Are
their contributions to English literary expression therefore superior to
those of less historically and classically trained authors?  (Let’s not
hold their politics against them.)" (the diseased language of Mo Yan (3),
Dec. 31). As I understand it so far, Pound has only been invoked to point
out the double standard often at work in decrying the politics of Chinese
writers (this is also, I believe, Pankaj Mishra's point).

As far as that double standard goes, though, perhaps Pound is not the best
case for a defense of Mo Yan? I agree with Chris Lupke that Pound and Mo
Yan are not quite equivalent cases, but the fact is that of all modern
American poets, Pound's views have been the most damning to his reception
and reputation as a poet. I do not believe, for instance, that comments
like Kevin Lawrence's, that Pound is "perhaps the most overrated American
poet who every published" are only in response to the obstinate difficulty
of The Cantos or the translational errors of Cathay, and have nothing
whatsoever to do with his support and propagandizing for Mussolini and
constant association of Jews with usury. The MCLC list is not the space to
delve into Pound's poetics and reputation and so forth, but he is of
course very important for understanding the presentation of Chinese
language and history in the American imaginary and American poetry. To my
mind, one of the most interesting things about Pound is how often certain
aspects of his writing are at odds with and work against so much of his
stated politics; there's his relationship with Louis Zukofsky, as Bill
Goldman mentioned (not only Jewish but a Marxist, with membership to the
Communist Party sponsored by, of all people, Whittaker Chambers), but also
the fact that most Poundians--that is, poets, translators, and scholars
who find great value and interest in his work--have always been
individuals with political views almost entirely antagonistic to those
Pound himself espoused. To keep this broadly related to Chinese
literature, I should bring up John Cayley and Yang Lian's point about how
"Pound—notoriously—against his will” wrote to deconstruct centrism
(“Hallucination and Coherence,” in Positions no. 10:3 (2002), pp. 773 –
784).

The notion that one's writing could work against one's will does, however,
bring us back to Mo Yan. Anna Sun, Perry Link, and Charles Laughlin have
mentioned Mao-ti / Mao-wenti (the former is Sun's formulation, the latter
Li Tuo's) to describe the discourse within which Mo Yan writes; for Sun
and Link, such a discourse limits the integrity, and, I gather, the
ethics, of Mo Yan's fiction, but they do not seem to consider that the
discourse itself could allow for the possibility of counter-discourse, or
that Mo Yan's fiction could work against Mo Yan's stated views, or the
views stated by Party leadership that Mo Yan endorses. I have submitted an
article to the Kenyon Review in response to Sun's piece, in which I
elaborate on discourse and ideology and how I think they play out in
response to and in translations of Mo Yan, and if it gets published I'll
share it with the MCLC list. But until then, I have to ask: is the point
to judge, or to understand? For me, judgment is easy, and understanding is
hard; judgment comes quickly, but understanding takes work. I certainly
have no desire to give up my judgments, but I hope they can both lead to,
and stem from, understanding.

Lucas