MCLC: Liu Jianmei on Mo Yan, etc. (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: Liu Jianmei on Mo Yan, etc. (1)
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Source: Martin Winter's blog (1/7/13):
http://erguotou.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/not/

My favourite comments on Mo Yan in the last few months are in the article
by Liu Jianmei (刘剑梅), published in FT Chinese on Dec. 11 and posted to
the 
MCLC list on Dec. 19. The title asks something like 'Does literature still
work like a shining light?' Maybe my translation is not too bright. Should
literature be a shining lantern? That's one of the questions in Liu's
article. Literature and art were thought of as relevant to society and the
nation in the 1980s. Liu talks about different approaches and relationships
of life and art. Mo Yan deserves careful reading, just like Yan Lianke and
Lu Xun. Nothing more or less. Liu uses "Save the cildren", the last line
from Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, for a close look into Mo's works as well
as Yan Lianke's latest novel Four Books (not published in Mainland China).
The main characters of Republic Of Wine and Frogs are unable to save the
children, like Lu Xun's narrator. Republic of Wine features cannibalism
and a riotous carnival of language. It's my favorite among Mo Yan's
novels, along with The Garlic Ballads. What is art? What is it for? A
little more than 100 years ago now, the Dadaists (in voluntary exile in
Switzerland and other places) concocted a virtual antidote to the First
World War. Words, ordinary and exalted speech, had lost any meaning in the
collective carnage.

Not much later, Hu Shi, Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun etc. attempted to change the
Chinese language, in written form and on stage. Yomi Braester shows in
Witness Against History how Lu Xun's most famous passages retain
Ambiguities that belie any straight nationalist reading, even if the
author himself would have read them that way. I like the crazed language
of the Madman. Republic of Wine, more experimental than any other works by
Mo (to my knowledge), goes into that direction. In Bei Dao's Rose of Time
(Shijian de meigui), a collection of essays that appeared in Shouhuo
(Harvest) magazine in the early 2000s, when Bei slowly became acceptable
in China again, he writes about Pasternak and Mandelstam. When he was
young, Pasternak praised Stalin. Later he tried to extricate other writers
from the Gulag, with mixed success. Mandelstam believed in Communism all
the way to his death in a labor camp. Bei Dao doesn't say that. But the
chapter on Pasternak invokes Russian Formalism and Structuralism that grew
out of the abortive 1905 revolution. Art makes reality appear strange and
different, enabling the spectator to perceive it more clearly. And the
flag of art is always different from the flag on the citadel. Republic of
Wine is wilder than the real Mo Yan on the Nobel stage. When the real Mo
(sounds funny, doesn't it? The real NO, or the real NOT, like NOT A WORD),
when the real Mo Yan talked about his mother, I was moved. It sounded like
my grandmother in rural Austria around 1920. Sometimes she couldn't go to
school in winter because she had no shoes. But Mo Yan also said his mother
was afraid he would "leave the collective" with his storytelling. Junti,
the masses, the collective, could be called an example of Mao wenti or
Mao-ti, Mao-Speak in this usage. On the other hand, I was rather baffled
when Perry Link related how a mother would tell her child on the bus to
"jianchi", to hold it until the driver could stop and let the child out to
go to the bathroom. Would "jianchi" really sound strange outside of
Mainland China?

I was a little surprised when Chinese critics of Mo Yan talked about the
'carnevalist language' in his novels. As if you had to be careful not to
lose yourself in there. I did think of Bachtin and his concept of carnival
in Dostoyevsky's novels when I read Republic of Wine. But as far as I
remember, Bachtin had defended language and storytelling that would sound
strange and crazy, as opposed to Socialist Realism. So when was Mo Yan's
writing first associated with carnival? Maybe in the 1980s? And how did
This association evolve?

A few days after the recent massacre in a primary school in Connecticut,
Ross Douthat in the New York Times talked about Dostoyevsky's Brothers
Karamazov. Although Dostoyevsky was Christian, Douthat says, the senseless
cruelty against children in the novel is just cruelly senseless, there is
no "rhetorical justification of God’s goodness". You have to look at the
behaviour of characters who show "Christian love" to find any
counterpoint. Below this op-ed, there are 121 reader's comments, all
within one day. Many say they want to talk about guns, not literature.
What is literature for? Why is there a Nobel for literature, but not for
music or fine art? Or films? Nobels make for debate. Very much debate, in
this case. Great.

Martin