MCLC: Mo Yan's creative space

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Mo Yan's creative space
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Source: NYT (12/15/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/opinion/mo-yans-creative-space.html

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Mo Yan’s Creative Space
By JULIA LOVELL

LONDON — Literary prizes, wrote Kingsley Amis, are “all right if you win
them.” China’s political establishment takes a far less relaxed view of
the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Since the country reintegrated into the global community after the death
of Mao, its government has long craved a literary Nobel for a Chinese
citizen living, working and thriving in China as proof that the People’s
Republic has arrived as a modern world power. China’s longstanding Nobel
envy has turned the prize into a symbol of collective achievement, rather
than of individual creativity.

In theory, the awarding on Thursday of the prize to Mo Yan — Communist
Party member and vice chairman of the government’s official Writers’
Association — should have put an end to China’s Nobel complex. An elated
People’s Daily, the national organ of the Communist Party, and Li
Changchun, the country’s propaganda supremo, hastened to congratulate Mo.
China Central Television’s news broadcast interrupted its regular
programming with a special report.

The contrast with reactions to previous ethnically Chinese Nobel winners
was marked. When the exiled author Gao Xingjian was awarded the literature
prize in 2000, Beijing denounced the Nobel Committee’s “political
purposes.” After the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo — a
political dissident still serving an 11-year prison sentence for
pro-democracy campaigning — the Foreign Ministry described the decision as
“blasphemy.”

Despite official jubilation, Mo’s prize has generated political
controversy. Dissident voices in China have complained that the award was
an “insult to humanity and to literature,” in Ai Weiwei’s words, on
account of the writer’s compromises with the political establishment and
silence over the incarceration of Liu Xiaobo. Critics brought up an
episode from earlier this year when Mo joined a group of authors in
hand-copying Mao’s 1942 “Talks at Yan’an”
<http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/chairman-mao-in-their-own-han
d/> — the ur-text of Chinese socialist realism — for a special
commemorative edition. One angry netizen simply posted online an image of
himself giving a photograph of Mo the finger.

Mo’s Chinese attackers — those who live with the daily reality of
authoritarian censorship — have some grounds for criticism. In recent
years, Mo has sought to dodge political controversy. At the Frankfurt Book
Fair in 2009, when China was the “market focus,” he allowed himself to
serve as an anodyne literary figurehead for the official Chinese
delegation. Along with the rest of his group, he dutifully boycotted
events that included exiled Chinese writers. He stayed similarly
on-message at the London Book Fair in April of this year. Rumor had it
that every member of the Chinese delegation was issued a long list of
topics they were forbidden to discuss with the foreign press — most
notably the purge of Bo Xilai, a scandal that was breaking around the time
of the fair.

But it would be intellectually lazy for distant Western observers of this
situation to dismiss Mo as a literary stooge, or to assume that his
several historical novels set in post-1949 China offer an officially
sanitized view of China and its recent past. Since the publication of “The
Garlic Ballads” in the late-1980s, Mo’s fiction has sought to lay bare the
brutality, greed and corruption that has flourished under Communist rule.

Set in an invented Chinese province of the same name, “The Republic of
Wine (1992),” for example, is a biting satire on the spiritual vacuum of
China’s burgeoning market economy. Mo’s novels might not be technically
perfect or broach contemporary China’s most sensitive taboos, including
the suppression of the pro-democracy protests of 1989 or the
responsibility of Communist leaders and institutions for many of China’s
political inequities. But the grotesquerie of his narratives expresses an
acerbic vision of the People’s Republic and, by logical extension, of its
political architects. Although his criticism of the status quo since 1949
is rarely direct, it is implicit and ubiquitous.

Rather than condemning Mo for his political accommodations, we should
expend our energies instead on fathoming what he and his fiction tell us
about China today. Contemporary Chinese literature is, for the most part,
not a Manichaean struggle between spineless appeasers of the regime and
heroic, dissident resisters (although China has no shortage of
exceptionally brave individuals willing to speak truth to power). Rather,
a spectrum of voices strives to operate within a realm of political
possibility that is at times surprisingly broad; some (including Mo)
periodically push at its edges.

Mo alluded to this ambiguous situation himself when he answered his
critics in a post-Nobel press conference: “Many of the people who have
criticized me online are Communist Party members themselves. They also
work within the system. And some have benefited tremendously within the
system ... If they had read my books they would understand that my
writings [have taken] on a great deal of risk.”

Mo is a writer who plays a public game with authority while maintaining a
creative space that enables him to present an indirect challenge to this
same authority.

Intriguingly, the attacks seem to have nettled Mo out of his habitual
political reticence. Since winning the prize, Mo has publicly expressed
hope that Liu Xiaobo would “achieve his freedom as soon as possible.”
The 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature may augur interesting times for its
laureate.

Julia Lovell is an author, literary translator and lecturer in modern
Chinese history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her most recent
book is “The Opium War.”