MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (3)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (3)
If the day comes when I’m able to summarize such a sensitive subject as Chinese censorship in a scant paragraph of quotes, in someone else’s article, to the satisfaction of all, I will hang up my keyboard and become a garlic farmer!
But in the meantime, more ink is spilled. I have an op-ed appearing in the NYT this Wednesday, unless they’ve changed their minds about it, in which I attempt to address more or less this very issue: what are the political conditions under which Chinese writers are writing? I’m afraid it will satisfy no one, but I hope it will at least provide further grounds for discussion or argument.
To take up one point from A. E. Clarke’s cogent message: I do not see art as being on the same continuum as political speech and political action. Art may have political content, but it is not political speech. I think of this not as “art for art’s sake”, or the aesthetic position, but as something more like “the medium before the message”. Art falls apart for me the instant that the message (be that political, moral, religious, etc) pokes through the artistic fabric of the piece itself.This is why I believe that Yan Lianke is the best China’s got in terms of an artist working with political content: his novels are novels, first and foremost, and not mere delivery vehicles. It is why I appreciate Yu Hua’s “China in Ten Words”, as honest political commentary, far more than his later books, which feel like commentary disguised as fiction. It is why I still, despite its undeniable emotional content, and the quality of A. E. Clarke’s translation, do not consider Liu Xiaobo’s poetry to be art.
It may seem beside the point (or callous), when people are being put in jail, to insist that a given work of art should create and remain within its own world. But I do. I feel like this is probably a very old contention, and if I were better read I could marshal the words of better thinkers than I to explain where I’m coming from. But this is all I’ve got for now.
I will say that, while I regret nothing I’ve said, I regret the lack of sympathy apparent in the original quote. In fact, I hope that sympathy has been my prime motivation for joining into these discussions at all. Sympathy for the awful creative conditions that Chinese writers labor under, and also sympathy for China’s dissidents, though as I’ve said I don’t think there’s much overlap between the two.
Eric Abrahamsen <eric at ericabrahamsen.net>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 17, 2015
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