MCLC: Laughlin on Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Laughlin, Charles <cal5m at eservices.virginia.edu>
Subject: Laughlin on Mo Yan
***********************************************************

Dear Colleagues:

In case it hasn't been posted here yet, here are some of my opinions about
Mo Yan's Nobel Prize. This debate still has a long way to go.

Charles

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Source: China File (12/11/12):
http://www.chinafile.com/what-mo-yan%E2%80%99s-detractors-get-wrong

What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong
By CHARLES LAUGHLIN

When Chinese novelist Mo Yan accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature
earlier this week, the relationship between literature and politics
attracted much attention. The award is often given to writers who
forcefully oppose political repression. When authors are from countries
recently embroiled in political strife, or there are repressive
dictatorships or socialist regimes involved, sometimes the artistic
aspects of an author’s work receive less attention than they would for
more famous authors. Even authors from stable, economically advanced
countries are sometimes honored by the Prize as much for representing a
new, repressed, or marginalized voice as for their literary achievements,
leading many observers to conclude that the Nobel Literature Prize is
“political.” It is very rare for the prize to be given to a citizen of a
Communist country in good standing with his government; I believe Mo Yan
is only the second, after the Soviet novelist Mikhail Sholokhov in 1965.

The attention to this “politicized” quality of the Nobel Prize in
Literature has not been flattering to Mo Yan. In a press conference
shortly after he arrived in Stockholm, the author distanced himself from
his earlier statement that he hoped his countryman, the jailed Nobel Peace
Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, would soon be freed, and asserted that there is
censorship in every country and that it has positive uses. 2009 Nobel
recipient Herta Müller then denounced the awarding of the prize to Mo Yan,
citing the horrors of living under a repressive socialist regime and thus
suggesting Mo Yan’s complicity in Chinese political repression. Others
have attacked the author for his past statements and actions, in which he
is seen as failing to offer moral support for Chinese prisoners of
conscience or exiled writers.

Like many writers, Mo Yan is not accustomed to public speaking, and he has
seemed taken aback by the pressure on him to take a stand on issues such
as speech and press freedoms. If this is a prize for literature, shouldn’t
it be enough that Mo Yan is a prolific novelist with a large following?
Don’t his literary works speak for themselves? In his acceptance speech in
Stockholm, Mo Yan expresses his hope that they do. Although most of the
initial discussion surrounded Mo Yan’s politics, articles have appeared in
recent days that seem to focus more Mo Yan’s literary works. These
critiques are worth a careful read because they help answer the important
question of Mo Yan’s place in Chinese literature and in world literature,
and to what extent the problems raised by his critics detract from his
literary art.

In the most recent issue of the Kenyon Review, fiction writer Anna Sun
prefaces her article, “The Diseased Language of Mo Yan,” with a long
epigraph from Dr. Zhivagothat amounts to a passionate indictment of the
horrors of state socialism. Sun’s article tries to explain what is
artistically wrong with Mo Yan’s fiction and thus why it does not deserve
the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though Sun does not describe or interpret
specific works by Mo Yan, she makes the following series of points: Mo
Yan’s novels lack the “aesthetic conviction” of important English writers
who have documented hard times; his language is “diseased” because of the
damage Mao Zedong did to the Chinese language in the course of revolution
and by being cut off from the grand Chinese literary tradition; the
diseased quality of the language is manifested in its mixture of disparate
language registers (old, new, crude, elegant, revolutionary), and his main
translator, Howard Goldblatt, creates translations of Mo Yan’s work that
are artistically superior to the originals. Sun does not point to any
other deserving Chinese writers who might instead be considered for the
Nobel Prize, so in the end not only is Mo Yan’s award questioned, but by
her argument it seems doubtful that the prize could ever go to a Chinese
writer.

Sun begins by placing Mo Yan’s award into a context of literary and
political history, and provides an illuminating meditation on how
“hallucinatory realism”—the description of Mo Yan’s style by the Nobel
committee in its announcement of the award—might be understood. Sun thus
appears to approach Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize from the perspective of literary
art. She says the problem with Mo Yan is that

unlike the great novelists who grapple with the harsher side of the human
condition—Dickens, Hardy, and Faulkner, for example—Mo Yan’s work lacks
something important which these authors have, although it is seldom spoken
of: aesthetic conviction. The aesthetic power of these authors is the
torch that illuminates for us the dark and painful truth of humanity. The
effect of Mo Yan’s work is not illumination through skilled and controlled
exploitation, but disorientation and frustration due to his lack of
coherent aesthetic consideration. There is no light shining on the chaotic
reality of Mo Yan’s hallucinatory world.

Sun makes it abundantly clear that she does not like the language of Mo
Yan’s fiction, which she calls “diseased.” In one sentence, she says it is
a jumble of disparate linguistic registers; two sentences later, however,
she describes it as “repetitive” and “predictable,” but emphasizes that in
any case to her it is “mostly devoid of aesthetic value.” This is a
strange argument to make about a twenty-first-century writer. English
writers of a century or more before could no doubt afford to shed light on
their worlds from a single moral and cultural perspective. However, the
subsequent history of the world and its literature have departed from the
kind of moral certainty of Dickens, precisely because of the crumbling of
the moral foundations of the world of imperialism and the industrial
revolution. One thinks of the emergence of avant-garde techniques like
stream of consciousness or psychological realism in the wake of World War
I (employed by authors such as Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and James
Joyce) as a means of coping with historical trauma, of the landmark
absurdism of a Franz Kafka, George Orwell, or Jorge Luis Borges to deal
with the specters of socialism, bureaucracy, and alienation.

Piling up aesthetic objections to conceal ideological conflict is a
familiar tactic. I had the opportunity in 2000 to discuss the Nobel Prize
in Literature with members of the Chinese Writer’s Association (of which
Mo Yan is now Vice Chairman) after it was awarded to the Chinese author
Gao Xingjian, who was by then a French citizen. It was then I learned that
the Chinese Writer’s Association’s “line” on the Gao Xingjian award was
not that his works contain politically unacceptable ideas (in fact, his
novels published after leaving China are very critical of the Chinese
government); rather it was that Gao Xingjian is a mediocre writer, and
there are many superior to him in China more deserving of the award. The
writers I was talking to did not exactly say that Gao’s work lacked
“aesthetic conviction,” but their criticism of Gao looked very similar to
Anna Sun’s criticism of Mo Yan, even though they are supposed to be
defenders of state socialism.

Sun goes on to explain that Mo Yan’s language is diseased because of its
disconnection from the grand Chinese literary tradition. But she
reconstructs that tradition purely from its exquisitely lyrical side (the
Book of Songs, poets like Li Bai [Li Po] and Su Shi, Tang Xianzu’s
romantic Ming play Peony Pavilion and Cao Xueqin’s Qing dynasty
masterpiece of love and manners Dream of the Red Chamber), while
neglecting the extravagantly epic legacy of Sima Qian’s Records of the
Grand Historian, and adventurous, bold, and humorous novels like The
Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. To be sure, there are as
many literary canons as there are readers, but the balance between the
lyrical and the epic in the history of Chinese literature is widely
recognized. Sun is deliberately leaving out widely accepted masterpieces
of Chinese literature that were surely among the imaginative and stylistic
resources for Mo Yan’s work. Mo Yan may have grown up during the Cultural
Revolution, but when he emerged as a writer in the 1980s, both the lyrical
and epic sides of the Chinese literary tradition would have been available
to him, as well as translations of Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez,
not to mention Dickens and Hardy.

But the real problem with Sun’s proposition of “diseased language” is that
it deprivesmodern Chinese writers of their creative agency. To Sun, Mo
Yan’s “diseased language” disqualifies him from the comparison to Pynchon,
Rushdie, and DeLillo that the Nobel committee’s term “hallucinatory
realism” invites, and he is measured instead against writers of much
earlier eras (Dickens, Hardy, and Faulkner), and still found wanting. Her
argument is that Maoism irreparably damaged the Chinese language, infusing
it with artificial terms and concepts and crude perspectives.

Moreover, in Sun’s account, this apparently happened in one fell swoop,
some time in the 1940s. In fact, there has been a rich and fascinating
modern Chinese literature built on linguistic and cultural iconoclasm
since the aftermath of World War I, well before Chairman Mao tried to
press it into the service of his revolution. By Sun’s standards, one would
have to consider a cultural icon like Lu Xun and accomplished novelists
like Mao Dun and Wu Zuxiang afflicted with diseased language as well.
Moreover, while it’s true that the Chinese Communist Party under Mao
Zedong’s influence used language and culture, among other forms of
coercion, to violently assert control over the masses and their writers,
and that in some ways, the resulting damage to Chinese culture was
irreparable, Sun’s attribution of Mo Yan’s diseased language to Chinese
Communism and to Chairman Mao is highly ironic: the very concept of
“MaoSpeak” (Mao wen ti) was coined by cultural figures in Mo Yan’s cohort
in the 1980s to designate the new literature’s target of attack. If
anything, Mo Yan’s fiction is a resounding of satire of the absurd
banality of MaoSpeak from a much broader historical and cultural
perspective than that of socialist culture before Reform and Opening, and
this is why one would expect his fiction to manifest a variety of
linguistic registers.

Perry Link, writing in the New York Review of Books, provides us with a
glimpse of several of Mo Yan’s novels in his overview of the author in an
essay entitled “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?” Link is a leading
scholar of modern Chinese culture, so he does not seem to blame Mo Yan for
betraying the Chinese literary tradition, but he does appear to agree with
Anna Sun that the Mo Yan’s language is diseased. Link writes: “The deeper
question, though, is how and to what extent a writer’s immersion in, and
adjustment to, an authoritarian political regime affects what he or she
writes. The issue is both subtle and important, and Mo Yan provides a
useful example of it.” It is a deep, psychological affliction that for
some requires a clean break with the Chinese language altogether: “Ha Jin
took the unusual step of departing not only China but the Chinese
language; he writes only in English, in part to be sure that even
subconscious influences do not affect his expression.” I am not yet
convinced that this is the main reason Ha Jin writes in English, but it
would be a sad state of affairs if writers were so vulnerable to the
ideological baggage of their native language that they are unable to
create a healthy literary language with it.

In Link’s view, this distortion of consciousness and language manifests
itself mainly in the treatment of sensitive historical episodes like the
famine following the Great Leap Forward (1959-1962) and the Cultural
Revolution (1966-1976), which “poisoned the national spirit with a
cynicism and distrust so deep that even today it has not fully recovered.”
The natural desire to speak out against repression, then, is tainted by
the environment and transformed into a cynicism that finds expression, in
Mo Yan’s case, in the trivialization of these historical tragedies with
humor:

Mo Yan has great fun with the craziness [of the Great Leap Forward] but
leaves out the disaster. Cross a rabbit with a sheep? Why not? A volunteer
in Big Breasts speaks up: “Sheep sperm into a rabbit is nothing. I don’t
care if you want me to inject Director Li Du’s sperm into the sow’s womb.”
Everyone present then “broke up laughing.” Meanwhile there is no sign of a
famine. When the breast-obsessed protagonist needs some goat’s milk,
somebody just goes out and buys it.

Historical traumas must be documented, and must be remembered, but art and
literature, particularly since the traumas of the twentieth century, never
simply document experience. Like most contemporary Chinese writers, Mo Yan
is writing primarily for a Chinese audience, not to instruct foreign
readers about the tragedies of Chinese history. Mo Yan’s intended readers
know that the Great Leap Forward led to a catastrophic famine, and any
artistic approach to historical trauma is inflected or refracted: surely
Link doesn’t mean to imply that Mo Yan, by writing in this way, is trying
to whitewash history out of loyalty to the Communist Party? Mo Yan writes
about the periods he writes about because they were traumatic, not because
they were hilarious; it is basically all anybody of his generation writes
about. What is revealed in Link’s presentation of the issue is a
perplexing literalism, as if he expects creative literature to approach
historical tragedies in the form of a documentary exposé, with statistics,
graphic images, and generous doses of authorial lamentation.

Link is right that every serious artist had to make a decision about
whether to work outside or within the system; thanks to his own work we
have a good idea about the legacy of those who decide to work outside the
system. But I think the question that is not being addressed is: why do
people decide to work inside the system? Is it because they are devoted
communists, committed to the glory of the party and socialism? Is it that
they are cowards, in that they do not take up the cause of using their
writings to promote the overthrow of the Chinese government? Or are there
other explanations? Is it possible, in some cases, that they prefer not to
live in exile, are devoted to literature, and belong to a stimulating and
diverse cultural community in China, composed of people who are forging a
unique contemporary culture through literature, art, music, and film?

Some of the most interesting and, I would say, important Chinese authors
of the twentieth century did not accept the idea that literature is for
the purpose of fighting for national self-realization, for social
revolution, and against political oppression, and they suffered in varying
degrees for their convictions. Lu Xun’s younger brother, Zhou Zuoren, went
from being one of the most iconoclastic voices of the May Fourth Movement
in the 1920s to stepping back from the political front and turning his
energies to the pursuit of liberal thinking through the composition of
elegant, yet informal, essays. During World War II, partly for personal
reasons and also partly out of a devotion to the preservation of
antiquities, he stayed in Beijing after its invasion by the Japanese while
almost all other cultural figures retreated with the Nationalist
government or with revolutionaries, and became an official in the puppet
government. He has been excoriated for decades as a traitor, and yet his
influence on Chinese letters continues to be felt to the present day.
Another essayist, Liang Shiqiu [Liang Shih-chiu], was ostracized by the
wartime literary community for suggesting that contributions to his
literary supplement in the Central Daily News did not always have to be
about the war. His most influential work, most of which was written near
the wartime capital of Chongqing during the early 1940s, is a collection
of humorous essays about the simple pleasures of life that he wrote while
the war and political division in China were tearing his world apart. And
Eileen Chang’s literary reputation has grown since literary critics like
C.T. Hsia recognized the profundity of her literary vision, even as she
wrote fraught stories of love, greed, and betrayal in early-1940s Shanghai
under conditions of strict censorship.

My point is not that Mo Yan is these writers’ equal, but rather that like
them, he forcefully asserts his particular vision without regard to
pressures to adopt and convey a political posture. Literature like this is
not apolitical—no literature can be—but it is not written to serve a
political agenda. Mo Yan’s fiction satirizes the inhumanity of
self-serving and hypocritical government officials while also depicting
the senseless suffering of their victims; it also satirizes the style and
narrative conventions of the orthodox socialist literature of the past,
with its celebration of unbelievable heroes and cartoonish
oversimplification of society and history. He indicts the One-Child Policy
and forced abortion. The orthodox literature of socialism made politics
sacred, but Mo Yan’s fiction shows orthodox politics to be profane in the
face of humanity. All literature is political, but each writer figures
politics in a different way.

Social revolutions and their attendant cultures are a large part of the
modern human experience—a painful one, and one that may in retrospect have
failed to bring liberation and fulfillment to their populations, but one
that is nevertheless part of our collective human experience. The idea
that art is essentially the expression of the indomitable human spirit
struggling to break free of the chains of oppression is very appealing,
and it has circulated throughout the commentary on Mo Yan. From this
perspective, Mo Yan’s status as a citizen of a socialist nation that is
ideologically repressive, and moreover a Party member and a government
official, disqualify him from the possibility of creating such art.

But the remarkable thing about the People’s Republic of China is that
after the death of Chairman Mao, in the subsequent period of Reform and
Opening under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successors, there
has been a cultural renaissance in the areas of literature, fine art,
film, music, and beyond. The achievements in these areas have been
internationally recognized for a quarter of a century and continue to
impress the world, without being required to be bolder in their opposition
to rule by the Communist Party. Because of language barriers,
international awareness of the progress of Chinese literature since the
1980s in China has not kept pace with other artistic endeavors, even with
the herculean efforts of translators like Howard Goldblatt (translator of
Mo Yan’s work into English) and a few others. Even so, contemporary
writers are attracting a growing number of talented young translators. Mo
Yan is one of the pioneering voices in these new generations of Chinese
writers; he and other novelists of his generation like Wang Anyi, Yu Hua,
Su Tong, Yan Lianke, and Zhang Wei, or the poets Zhai Yongming, Xi Chuan,
Yu Jian, Ouyang Jianghe, and many, many others after them, have since the
1970s devoted their lives to literary creation as much as writers all over
the world. They have increasingly engaged with the writers and literatures
of other countries and created a diverse corpus that reflects a unique
cultural and historical experience. Am I to understand from Mo Yan’s
critics that unless Chinese writers and artists are more “politically
courageous” and invite imprisonment and exile—or worse—by speaking out
directly against their government and political system, their lifetime of
artistic labors and achievements will never be worthy of international
recognition in the form of a Nobel Prize in Literature?

Perry Link ultimately does not answer the question “does this writer
deserve the prize?” But he does make an important point in his concluding
paragraph: “It would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy
the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu
Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference
between the two.” Indeed, Liu Xiaobo is a literary scholar and a public
intellectual who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Liu is an admirable
and important figure in modern world history, but he is not a literary
author. The Nobel Peace Prize is not awarded for literary achievements,
nor is it awarded by the same committee that awards the Nobel Prize in
Literature. Thus when discussing the merits of Mo Yan’s receiving the
Nobel Prize in Literature, I think it is misleading for us to compare its
validity to that of awarding the Peace Prize to Liu. In fact, it’s
precisely this confusion that lies at the heart of the debates about Mo
Yan: he is being evaluated by the criteria of the Peace Prize (which
raises a whole different set of contentious issues), as a public
intellectual, and for his contribution to the advancement of humanity,
when we should really be talking about his literary accomplishments.

All literature has political meanings. No literary accomplishments are
purely aesthetic. It is not conceivable to me that a morally indefensible
novel could be outstanding artistically. Mo Yan writes about political
tensions in Chinese society and the tragic mistakes of the Chinese
Communist Party with humanism and conscience, even if he does not write
about them in a manner that gets him exiled or imprisoned. I disagree with
Perry Link and many other of Mo Yan’s critics’ sense of how literature is
political. They want all or nothing; to them, a Chinese writer redeems
himself only by incurring the wrath and punishment of the government,
otherwise his writing is too soft on socialism.

Mo Yan’s choices, when given the opportunity to publicly push back against
tyranny, have been disappointing. Many critics point out that he
participated in the creation of a handwritten anniversary edition of Mao’s
1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” which are largely
blamed for the culture of repression in Chinese literature and art ever
since. This criticism implies that Mo Yan, Vice President of the official
Chinese Writers’ Association, should have conspicuously refused to
participate in what in effect is an unremarkable act of political ritual.
Writing some passages of the “Talks,” part of the People’s Republic’s
cultural iconography, is akin to singing “The East is Red” or visiting
Mao’s mausoleum—a mild gesture of patriotism even less surprising when
performed by a government official. Does such an act really imply an
affirmation of Mao’s worst atrocities?

In his acceptance speech, Mo Yan told a series of stories from or about
his own life, stories that demonstrate his narrative flair and may even
look charming to some. But if you look closely at the picture they paint
of Mo Yan (whether it is accurate or not), it is not a picture of a noble,
heroic, or even necessarily likable man. He grew up in cruel times and at
times treated people with cruelty, only reflecting on or regretting it
much later, too late for his remorse to remedy the damage. We can see
resentment towards those who mistreated him as well. Some of the stories
reflect on the present, implying petulance or hostility toward those who
attack him for being honored with a Nobel Prize. The fact is that we want
Nobel laureates, especially those who were born in repressive societies,
to be heroes, but if the horrors of revolution and particularly its
culture have taught the Chinese anything, it’s that the appearance of
heroism often disguises human frailty and even cruelty. If artistic
expression requires courage, it also requires honesty, it requires being
painfully honest, and such honesty is not beyond the reach of contemporary
Chinese literature.