MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (12)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (12)
Scott Savitt mentions Bei Dao’s line about wanting to be a man in an age of heroes; I also thought of this line in relation to this discussion, when I read Eric Abrahamsen write that “The Chinese poet-hero does not exist.” The irony being, obviously, that eventually Bei Dao was exiled, and turned into a hero-poet, for writing poems that are not that overtly political. Now, however, he is free to travel in the PRC, for medical purposes but with a guarantee from the Writers’ Association that he will not participate in large gatherings either political or poetic in nature. So some things change, and some stay the same.
My friend Eric has taken a lot of heat for his comments about censorship and literature in China—some of it rightly so. While at times I’ve also felt that, as he says, “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” (though I don’t think I’ve ever put it so elegantly), I don’t in the end find such a separation philosophically tenable.
But I think we can understand what Eric is saying without suggesting that he’s morally compromised as editor of a journal funded by People’s Literature (for what it’s worth, my experience knowing a few of the editors there is that they’re exactly the ones who are clearest on how censorship works and how nefarious it is; and as someone who’s given them a number of translations, I have both been censored, and had the English-language editorial team save my work from censorship). That is, I think we can look at whom he’s talking to, rather than or alongside where he’s talking from.
In short, I understand Eric’s NYTimes editorial and his standpoint overall to be directed at readers of literature in English, not specialists on China and its current cultural productions already used to the idea that China is a complex and often contradictory cultural field. We’re an audience that can take Eric’s point that “When you are a Chinese author, being anti-authoritarian means being anti-social” and respond, as Nick Admussen does, that “Cliquishness, manneredness, and extreme care not to offend are … the role of the state!” (I myself find both these points, Eric’s and Nick’s, quite compelling, and not at odds). But as I see it, the audience for Eric’s comments are the people for whom it’s newsworthy to report that China is “Not as Authoritarian as We Thought” (to refer to another recent article we received). The audience, that is, who would be willing to believe that because censorship and political repression exist in China, China must not be able to produce anything of high literary value. I certainly don’t think that’s true, and while I disagree with some of the points Eric makes en route to demonstrating the possibility of literary merit in China, I’m very glad that he’s made such an important argument so visibly.
So should literature always serve the principles of free speech? Should literature serve the people? Should it only serve its own purposeless purposiveness? I find these propositions to rely on or reflect each other, in at times depressing ways. The more interesting questions come, I think, not in whether they should, but in how they do serve freedom, equality, purposelessness, and so on—to what degree and in what combination. And when it comes down to any individual writer, we’ll all probably disagree. But if we do agree, at least, that there is good literature—however we care to define it—being written in China today, then we should probably appreciate Eric’s argument as a push beyond the simplifications that so often saturate the media. If nothing else, I think a lot of our work depends on it.
Lucas Klein <lklein at hku.hk>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 23, 2015
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