MCLC: the diseased language of Mo Yan (3)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
 
From: Jeff Kinkley <jkinkley at verizon.net>
Subject: the diseased language of Mo Yan (3)
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Anna Sun writes:  "Mo Yan’s language is striking indeed, but it is
striking because it is diseased. The disease is caused by the conscious
renunciation of China’s cultural past at the founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949."

 
I find this rankling.  Conscious renunciation of China's cultural past
began decades before 1949, and iconoclasm has been an important, even if
not always the main, trend in Chinese literature and culture for over two
millennia.

 
Mo Yan's language is "diseased”?  Is it “poisonous,” then, like a "big
poisonous weed"?

 
It is true that the Swedish Academy has now honored two writers of Chinese
fiction, and so far no poets. We find echoes of Dante's language in Ezra
Pound and allusions to Shakespeare in T. S. Eliot.  Are their
contributions to English literary expression therefore superior to those
of less historically and classically trained authors?  (Let’s not hold
their politics against them.) Faulkner is known for Shakespearean
influences, but not on his language, so far as I know.  I find it
surprising when Mo Yan claims influence from Faulkner and so many others,
but for him, and for so many of his colleagues, it was often the
liberating linguistic or intellectual idea contained in a snippet of a
world classic, translated into Chinese, that sent their imaginations
soaring above the cultural desert in which they were raised. Mo Yan
famously says he got all the way through One Hundred Years of Solitude
only on the third try, but he also claims, as one of ten major influences
on him, a short story by García Márquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings” (reference courtesy Shelley Chan’s book). Perhaps that, and a debt,
indeed, to Pu Songling, Lu Xun, and other Chinese writers and storytellers
in older styles, was all he need to sprout his own wings.

 
Not to see Mo Yan’s deployment of Maoist terminology and political logic
as ironic is willfully to blind oneself.  Speaking of the classics, I
salute Mo Yan as a modern reincarnation of Apuleius (I have never heard
that Mo Yan ever read him), a writer who can manufacture multiple tales of
mischief—and delight—by turning a human into a donkey.  We don’t write in
Latin any more, and most Chinese no longer write in classical Chinese.
Actually, some do.  Yu Guangzhong is a favorite of Malmqvist’s isn’t he?
Bring on the next prize! There are many languages yet to be acknowledged.
And if writers want to mix styles, “languages,” and discourses, more power
to them. 

 
How precisely to define a literary “language” is one of the questions with
which we must still grapple, for the concept is used very loosely. In the
1980s, China's new writers were widely credited with writing in a new
“language.” That was not of course literally true, and we can agree with
Anna Sun (Sun Longji, Bai Yang, etc., as well as Bonnie McDougall and
others who saw the continuities more positively) that linguistic
continuities between Maoist and post-Mao times are greater than we
typically acknowledge.

 
Jeff