MCLC: Sabina Knight on Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sabina Knight <sabinaknight at gmail.com>
Subject: Sabina Knight on Mo Yan
********************************************************

List members may be interested in the following article on the
political context and import of Mo Yan's fiction:

Sabina Knight, “Mo Yan’s Delicate Balancing Act,” _The National
Interest_ 124 (March/April 2013): 69-80.

The essay appears in both the print and online editions of _The
National Interest_, an American magazine of foreign policy and
international affairs. The essay can be seen online through the end of
April 2013, after which it will be accessible only to subscribers.

http://nationalinterest.org/article/mo-yans-delicate-balancing-act-8148

(Opening paragraphs appended below)

TWENTY YEARS ago, on my first day in a PhD program, my mentor Joseph
Lau gave me a stack of ten novels. When I expressed doubts about
fitting in this leisure reading on top of my coursework, he held up Mo
Yan’s Republic of Wine and shook the book at me. “This writer is going
to win the Nobel Prize,” he said. Such was the impact of Mo Yan’s
writing on those familiar with it long before he won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 2012. Yet, since winning the prize, Mo Yan has become
a scapegoat for the sins of the regime in which he must survive. Mo’s
literary range and philosophical depth have received little attention
in the recent flurry of press coverage, which has concentrated on his
apparent acquiescence to the Chinese government’s repression of
dissidents. Secure in the comfort of Western freedoms, myriad writers
have lambasted Mo for his public statements and silences. Few writers
have noted that Western authors seldom are judged on their politics or
that writers in China have reasons for working within as well as
outside of the system.

In any event, Mo Yan now operates under heightened scrutiny. Indeed,
the honor was triumphantly embraced by Beijing as the long-awaited
global acknowledgement of China’s return, not only as an economic
powerhouse but as a cultural leader. Mo’s was the first Nobel Prize in
Literature ever awarded to a Chinese citizen. (The dissident Gao
Xingjian had taken French citizenship by the time he won the 2000
prize.) Its belatedness was much discussed in light of China’s rich
literary heritage and cultural renaissance of recent decades.
Literature is a fundamental part of what Chinese officials call their
country’s “national rejuvenation.”

Mo’s literary legacy offers a rare window into this larger
cultural-political mission, and to judge him by his public actions
neglects much that can be learned from his work, which traces China’s
history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. . . .