MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (5)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (5)
My thanks to Mr. Abrahamsen for clarifying the distinction he draws between politics and art.
Let me summarize his argument. "Political Content" is OK with him, if it lodges in a work (a 'medium') that has artistic integrity; by "political speech" on the other hand he means a 'message' which, even if clothed in the forms of literature, is a kind of expression that lacks artistic value.  He reports that artists in China whose work has political content may suffer a slap on the wrist. Those subject to prison or sustained harassment, on the other hand, are being punished for activities outside the realm of art, and if they have been producing what are ostensibly works of art, these are in fact only propagandistic hack-work.
It is remarkable that those to whom Mr. Abrahamsen imputes artistic merit never suffer the full wrath of the state, while he is able to identify all those who do suffer it as less creative minds whose efforts do not even qualify as art in his eyes.  This cannot be a coincidence.  How could it have come to pass?  I have it! The Administration of Press and Publications, the Public Security Bureau, and the Ministry of State Security are all staffed by discriminating literary critics whose judgment is almost as good as Mr. Abrahamsen's!  In other countries, the security services are typically made up of hard-eyed men concerned only with power, men who have no time for art, but in China, no -- pay no attention to the nasty things PEN says -- in China the authorities will stay their hand and temper their chastisements in deference to artists (provided they are true artists), even when the poor dears stray into forbidden content.
You are skeptical?  Well, let me see if I can come up with an alternative explanation.
When Mr. Abrahamsen writes "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," I think he is onto something.  The key question, however, is this:  why does it "poke through"?  The politics might "poke through" what Mr. Abrahamsen calls the 'artistic fabric' because the fabric is flimsy.  This is often the case, and it is the case Mr. Abrahamsen focuses on to the exclusion of other possibilities.  But politics may also poke through -- or let me change the metaphor and say, make itself felt -- because it is strong, because it is rooted in the concerns of the time and the meaning of the story, because a political vision gives energy to an artistic fabric that is also strong.  Consider the following works, off the top of my head:
    Sophocles, Antigone
    Hugo, Les Misérables
    Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
    Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
They are all deeply and intensely political.  No one can read them without reflecting with emotion on the power relationships of human life -- and not in the abstract, either, but in the particular context of the society in which each work originated.  Start a discussion about any of these works and it can't help being political.  By Mr. Abrahamsen's reasoning, this disqualifies them as art, much less as the classics most people take them to be.  Since Mr. Abrahamsen's principle applies to all the arts, shall we demote Picasso's Guernica, too?
So we have two cases:  politics can make itself felt in a work when that work's artistic fabric is flimsy, and also when it isn't.  Either way, if the work's political values are inimical to an authoritarian regime in a way that could prove influential, then that regime is not going to be amused and will likely take steps to neutralize it (and, possibly, its author).  The regime won't care which of the two cases it is, or how much artistic quality it has.  Could it influence people against us? Could it cause trouble? That is all that matters.
This is why the expression of oppressed minorities is so harshly controlled: because the underlying situation is explosive.  This is why poor Zhu Yufu, old and sick, was given a long prison term for writing "It's Time" -- because that simple poem (it's not high art) was exactly the sort of thing that appeals to the masses, that could catch on, and might -- at least in the apprehension of authorities fearing a Jasmine Spring -- have led to trouble.  This is why Such Is This World was bowdlerized, and soon after its release the authorities realized it could still cause trouble and the director of Press and Publications angrily told the publisher that the book never should have been brought out: the story moved many readers, and they identified with Ru Yan's search for truth in a time of overbearing mendacity that they easily recognized as their own time.
But wrap your work in enough magical realism and arch ambiguities and baroque obscenities and the postmodern ironies dear to Western critics, and its power to influence the many dwindles fast.  Add prudent self-censorship (about which Yan Lianke has spoken candidly), and you'll be safe.  The work may (and in Yan's case, does) still have considerable artistic merit, but it is for its innocuousness in the eyes of the Stability Maintenance crew, and not for its artistic merit, that it or its author are spared.
That's my hypothesis. If I'm right, then official suppression indicates only that the regime perceives a threat of countervailing influence.  Persecution is not proof of artistic merit, but neither is it an indicator of mediocrity.
A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 18, 2015
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