MCLC: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (10)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Haiyan Lee <haiyan at stanford.edu>
Subject: Mueller says Mo Yan choice a 'catastrophe' (10)
***********************************************************

Some commentators on this list seem unable or unwilling to forgive Mo Yan
for being a Chinese Communist Party member and serving the government in
an official capacity. I’d like to invite list members to consider two
mitigating factors: One, being a card-carrying “communist” in today’s
China doesn’t carry the same ideological freight as the phrase might have
done in a bygone era; and two, government service has traditionally been
and still is a desirable career choice for the educated elite. Although
Chinese society is becoming more open and pluralistic, there are
relatively few alternative avenues in which to realize one’s leadership
aspirations.

The problem then is the ill repute, to put it mildly, of Mo Yan’s employer
in the eyes of a broad swath of international critics, who find it hard to
fathom why any thinking Chinese could go on tolerating or even supporting
the Party’s autocratic/authoritarian/totalitarian (pick your modifier)
rule. What seems to elude these critics is that the Party is also a
nationalist (with a small n) party whose power and authority are
legitimated in large part by its leadership role in ridding China of
foreign encroachment and ending the so-called “Century of Humiliation.”
For this it has evidently earned the undying allegiance of the
intellectual elite for whom foreign aggression is a far greater evil than
internal persecution or abuse. China’s fiercely patriotic intelligentsia
(both domestic and diasporic) are apparently willing to overlook a great
deal and ready to rally behind the Party so long as it is perceived to be
the only viable player to chaperon China’s “rise” while warding off
disorder, separatism, and territorial challenges.

 
By contrast, Herta Müller’s reaction can be explained by communism’s
association with Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, not national
liberation. No European communist party has ever become so ineluctably
bound up with the fate of the fatherland/motherland and claimed (and
fanned) the citizens’ love of country the way the Chinese Communisty Party
has.

 
There are at least two interconnected assumptions sleeping behind much of
the objection to awarding the Nobel Prize to Mo Yan: 1) that the prize
confers distinction on a whole package: a writer’s lifetime literary
achievements as well as his/her moral and political probity, which,
however, don’t necessarily go together and are often measured by very
different yardsticks—ambiguity and open-endedness vs pointedness and
steadfastness; 2) that a writer of integrity should not be affiliated with
any political entity that has a highly tainted, even atrocious, record of
governance; rather, the proper stance should be that of a romantic
non-conformist, a free-spirited soul, a voice of conscience, a thorn in a
nation’s side, a gadfly forever buzzing around a regime’s sacred cows.
Both assumptions should be interrogated, in my view, before we pass
further judgments on Mo Yan’s worthiness.

 
Wolfgang Kubin asks us to make a distinction between a writer and a
person. The question is, which does the Nobel Prize recognize?
Understandably, we want a Nobel laureate to share our most cherished
values (esp. freedom of speech) and give voice to our favorite causes. But
is the Nobel committee really in the business of honoring moral paragons
and adjudicating the relationship between art and life?

 
P.S. I admit that it is difficult to draw a sharp line between writing and
writer, or art and artist, hence the afore-mentioned assumptions are
likely to persist. In that light, we might want to send a memo to Mo Yan:
Accepting the Nobel Prize means you’re now a “public intellectual”
answerable to the expectations of a variety of constituents.  You will be
judged not just by the yarns you spin, but also by every utterance you
will be called upon to make on every conceivable subject, again and again
and again. Ignorance, fence-sitting, or indifference is not an option. And
fretting (or being made to fret) about whether to wear a tuxedo or an
antiquarian Chinese robe to the award ceremony is only the beginning of
your troubles. Welcome to superstardom! Welcome to the global village!

Sincerely,
Haiyan Lee