MCLC: Li Er on the future of the novel in China

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Li Er on the future of the novel in China
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (3/15/13):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/15/future-novel-china

Li Er: the future of the novel in China
China's mass media-connected society is more complicated than novelists in
the west could ever have imagined, requiring new forms of storytelling to
define our subjective experience
By Li Er

The novel, as we know it today, though its origins are in myths, epic
poems, fables, legends, is actually the product of capitalism and civic
societies.

Hegel came straight out and said it: the novel is the civic class's epic
poem, and it shows a realistic world using characteristics of the essay.
In the 1930s, Bakhtin further explored Hegel's point. He talked about the
novel as the epic poem's descendant and a burgeoning form, a new literary
form that accompanied the development of the citizen society and the
conflicts of capitalism. The novelistic form had yet to fix itself, and
was full of unlimited possibilities. Bakhtin emphasised the subjectivity
of the individual: Dostoyevsky's fictional world is, to Bakhtin, the world
of the individual. Each individual and each voice is accorded an equally
important status; everyone has their say. There are as many voices as
there are people.

But what's interesting is, almost during the same period, Walter Benjamin
published a famous piece of criticism called The Storyteller
<http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Storyteller>.
Benjamin's viewpoint was the opposite of Bakhtin's. He thought that in a
highly developed society the value of the individual depreciates. He used
a German proverb to explain: "When someone goes on a trip, he has
something to tell." Storytellers, people who have returned from afar, have
tales, different knowledge and values, and divergent experiences. The
German proverb is almost the same as a Chinese one, which goes, "A monk
from afar knows how to chant." The fundamentals of the novel are created
by relating different experiences. However, with the advent of capitalism
and modern media, Benjamin believed that faraway horizons have been
flattened, and differing experiences have cancelled each other out. How
the faraway monk reads his scripture has all but been shown on television;
on radio; on Weibo. In other words, the idea that novels have a duty to
express individual experience has almost lost its reason to exist. This
deeply saddened Benjamin. He went on to say that, with the development of
the media, people no longer needed to learn about the world or enhance
their accomplishments by reading works of literature. Bad news has become
good news, and the worst news the best news. Thus, people let an
increasing amount of negative news into their lives, and only the worst
and most evil will arouse our interest. When people aren't getting to know
the world through literature but through the news, they become more
superficial, and contemporary society becomes an "uncivilised
civilisation".

Bakhtin and Benjamin's assessments of literature are obviously tied to the
context of their lives: when Bakhtin was studying Dostoyevsky's novels and
emphasising the individual, he had just returned from exile imposed by
Stalin. And when Benjamin wrote The Storyteller, he was just beginning a
life on the run from Hitler. In this sense, critics' assessment of novels
and their history are closely connected to their own experiences. The
implementation of their criticism could, however, strike through the
limitations of their own beliefs. Bakhtin, a Marxist critic, had deep
feelings for capitalist civilisation; similarly, Benjamin, another
so-called Marxist critic, actually cherished the classical period. But
what's more interesting is, despite their opposing points of views, they
had this commonality: they both emphasised the value and the subjectivity
of the individual.

Everyone knows that, compared with when Bakhtin and Benjamin were still
alive, the current circumstances of Chinese society are more complicated.
This complexity is more than my novelist colleagues in the west can
imagine. We can say wholeheartedly that whatever crime and punishment
Bakhtin saw in Dostoyevsky's novels is ubiquitous in China, while at the
same time the influence of mass media now wholly permeates people's lives.
Chinese people who live in the remote countryside receive information from
the media practically at the same time as those living in Beijing, London
or New York. Censorship in publishing and the media has, by and large, no
effect on the reception of information. Chinese society has become a
combination of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies; it's just like
a sandwich.

The value of individual existence has never been as strong. But the power
of the system, the power of capital, the power of industrialisation and
technology, has formed a system-level force that can devour anything new,
and is constantly draining the individual's subjectivity. Facing it is
like facing a dinosaur of a system; it exists as a gigantic alienation of
the self. People in these circumstances – or more specifically "the
Chinese people's circumstances" – might make you laugh out loud. I'm told
that laughter is the highest wisdom of the human race. But this laughter,
better yet, this sound of wisdom, might as well be a sigh of pity.

For Chinese novelists, the complex problem is this: because of the
affirmation of the individual's value, story, plot, the characters, the
personalities, their actions, fate, the completeness of incidents, the law
of causality – these classic narrative modes remain effective still. But
on the other hand, when a person's subjectivity has been erased and is
made to live with the realities I've described, these narrative modes are
not real enough. The contemporary Chinese novelist, if they are a serious
novelist, must therefore look for a new narrative method in order to
establish a corresponding relationship between the novel and present
social realities, and must respond as best they can to the complexity of
Chinese reality. These responses first arise out of my questioning of how
to preserve my true self in contemporary society. What kind of method is
there to use in order to preserve at least a shred of the individual's
subjectivity? How to converse with others using personal experience is, I
believe, the most crucial reason for the existence of the novel under our
current heightened systematisation. In particular, this is the most potent
motivation for continued self-regeneration in the novel form.

• This is an edited version of Li Er's speech at the Edinburgh World
Writers' Conference 2012-2013, Beijing, translated by Alice Xin Liu,
presented by the Bookworm international literary festival and the British
Council <http://www.britishcouncil.org/english>. Full versions of all the
speeches are available on theEdinburgh World Writers' Conference website
<http://www.edinburghworldwritersconference.org/>.