MCLC: Mo Yan says censorship is necessary (4,5)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: Mo Yan says censorship is necessary (4)
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Prof. Kubin is right. Mo Yan should be criticized for making light of
censorhip in this way. Doesn't mean his novels aren't worth reading. The
only good thing about this prize this time around is more debate in China,
and more outside attention, to literature and other things.

Martin

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From: Wolfgang Kubin <kubin at uni-bonn.de>
Subject: Mo Yan says censorship is necessary (5)

Michael Day wrote:

"Does this mean that the defenders of Mo Yan and his literary values and
qualities must also defend censorship?"

No, of course not. Unfortunately writers as persons can speak nonsense,
but as writers they cannot. Ezra Pound is a great poet as a writer, as a
person he destroyed himself. I am afraid the same is true for Mo Yan. As a
person he lets us speechless, if he really said what China Daily reported
last Friday, as a writer - this is my hope, but I am not sure - we still
might take him seriously.

I do not say this as a defender, I say this as someone who hopes to know
what literary criticism (Literaturwissenschaft) is. I follow Seymour
Chatman who made a difference between the "real" author and the author
within the story or novel, i.e. between two total different voices. If,
however, one can show that these two voices in Mo Yan are the same, I have
to give in.

By the way, Mo Yan was probably censured on the mainland, too. But who is
meanhwile not censured including Mao Zedong? If I am right, Mo Yan as a
person would just be another example of what we find in Lu Xun's "Diary of
a Madman" called a "rabbit": The "Chinese" always submitting to power. But
what for?

Wolfgang Kubin (Gu Bin) from Shantou University