MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (7)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (7)
Hi, colleagues.
I’d like to carry forward the conversation of the last few days by registering deep disappointment with Eric Abrahamsen’s 6/17 editorial in the New York Times. The core of my problem is factual; as I’m sure many of you know, the Sichuan poet Liao Yiwu was detained and eventually given a four-year sentence for writing the poems 《黃城》, 《偶像》 ,  and especially 《大屠殺》, about the Tiananmen Massacre. This last was self-evidently unpublishable—for fear of the government censors who still hold sway—so he recorded an audiotape of the poem, and circulated that, which earned him a four-year jail sentence. His account of the abuse he endured during that prison sentence is well worth reading and has been translated as For a Song and a Hundred Songs. Liao is not the only poet silenced directly or indirectly by formal state punishment: poet Li Bifeng’s 12-year sentence was reported on by the NYT on Nov. 20, 2012 (page A6). Nurmuhemmet Yasin, a Uyghur poet and short story writer, hasn’t been seen for several years, and may well have died in jail. Eric is certainly welcome to say that he doesn’t like the work of these people, but he can’t pretend like they don’t exist. Because these are people who suffer greatly, his factual error is also a moral fault.
I also have a series of questions about the piece that center on Eric’s role as the editorial director of Pathlight magazine, which is funded, overseen and published by People’s Literature 《人民文学》, a magazine founded in 1949 and still bearing Mao Zedong’s calligraphy on the cover. This means — and correct me if I’m wrong, because these things are very rarely transparent — that Eric is much more a part of the structure he’s describing than the average translator. It may very well be that he isn’t paid by the magazine, or that his work has no impact on his opinions, but I’m curious whether his position would be retained if he had argued, for example, that state censorship is throttling contemporary Chinese literature. I read and respect Pathlight, would gladly translate for it, and am glad it exists — but it’s not an ideologically neutral space, and its level of distinction from the rest of the official Chinese literary apparatus is a worthwhile matter for discussion. It also feels like something that’s appropriate to disclose in a public forum like the NYT — would those readers have been surprised by this information?
On a theoretical level, I was truly surprised at the thinness of the ideas Eric had to share, especially considering the richness of his experience. One does not have to imprison, kill, or exile very many members of a profession before its values change: self-censorship in the Chinese case is very obviously a direct product of state censorship. Cliquishness, manneredness, and extreme care not to offend are all self-defensive mechanisms pursued by writers who do not want to die in jail or be expelled abroad. A system in which rules are arbitrary, ever-changing, and offensive breeds corruption and cronyism, as those willing to rise in the system are the ones who are most attached to the sinecure and the banquet table. Perhaps his focus on large-market literary fiction in the Beijing scene has blinded him to the immense amount of heterogeneity and foment that never makes it even close to print, the way that freethinking Internet literature is subject to deletion, or the voices of pain and doubt that only find their way into the literary fiction market in a weakened, watered-down, inoffensive way.
China is certainly not the Soviet case: it’s often worse. The "hero poets" who survive their education rarely get the chance to have any career to speak of; the fact that Eric doesn't seem to know anything about Sichuan avant-garde poetry (similar to, but distinct from, the Han Dong group he cites) or similar scenes in other provinces reinforces how difficult it is for these poets to resist enforced invisibility. I say all this with a reasonable amount of respect for Eric, Paper Republic, and the authors he promotes. He and I are the same age, and I’ve benefited from his generosity more than once. I believe him when he says that cliquishness is to be avoided, though, so I can’t let the piece sit, because it’s weak.
I love Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village and I teach it and the students really react to it — Yan really is a truly great writer — but every time he speaks on the novel, he talks about the way in which the version we have is a crippled part of the original book he wrote. He didn't cut that book because he's too social or afraid to step on toes. The difference between the two is the role of the state! It’s the state, Eric. You just can’t tell because they haven’t come for you, yet.
Nick Admussen <nadmusse at yahoo.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 18, 2015
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