MCLC: Mo Yan and Nobel expectations

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Tue Oct 16 09:16:32 EDT 2012


MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Mo Yan and Nobel expectations
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Source: Wall Street Journal (10/15/12):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443675404578056532654231220.h
tml

OPINION ASIA

Mo Yan and Nobel Expectations
Mo Yan has dodged politics up till now, but the Nobel confers new
responsibility.
By ILARIA MARIA SALA

When the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to the
Chinese writer Mo Yan last Friday, there was wild celebrations in some
quarters, but strong disappointment in others. When writers from countries
without freedom of expression are awarded important prizes, we expect them
to have artistic merits, and to be capable of standing up to repressive
governments. Mo Yan certainly is a worthy writer, but disappoints some on
the second count. He is, after all, vice president of the
government-sponsored National Writers Association and a Communist Party
member.

Liu Xiaobo, honored with the Peace Prize in 2010 for his unflinching
courage, was the last Chinese citizen to win a Nobel. He is now serving an
11-year jail sentence for advocating democratic reforms (freedom of
expression among them). So, was this year's award an attempt by the Nobel
Committee at making peace with Beijing, which has been lashing out
furiously at Norway for awarding a dissident the honor the whole country
had been pining for?

First, let's look at Mo Yan's work. Born in the small city of Gaomi in
Shandong province, he is so prolific and puts such creative force on the
page that one imagines him living with myriad characters always buzzing
around his head. When I first interviewed him a few years ago in a Beijing
hotel lobby, I was surprised at not seeing an oversized man, as if only a
very large body could contain that unceasing explosion of stories.

"I write about my region, the countryside in which I grew up," he
explained. "I heard so many stories from Gaomi's peasants that I had an
irrepressible urge to write them down. Today, Gaomi's peasants know that
they have become famous around the world through my writings, but I think
they are a little puzzled by this."

His books often have an epic feel to them. They can be generational sagas,
like the novel "Red Sorghum," made into a movie by Zhang Yimou, in which
history happens to those whose lives are usually forgotten, like peasants,
bandits, beggars, mercenaries and even noodle-stall owners. Each character
is doggedly busy in countless acts of daily heroism in order to stay alive.

In "Big Breasts and Wide Hips" it is the turn of a spoiled illegitimate
child to narrate everything that happens in China during a few decades of
turmoil, once again in a whirlwind of events and encounters. He has a
breast-obsession (not uncommon in modern Chinese literature) and a rather
skewed moral compass, but a powerful story-telling voice.

Mo Yan writes feverishly, with the abandon of one who is answering a need
("I could not do anything else," he said) putting on the page the violence
of history and the pettier, but certainly no less cruel, violence of man
against man, or woman, or even beast. Wars, prisons, famines and family
feuds all conspire to make life at once a torment and a triumph.

The powerful are often corrupt and insensitive, the poor are exhausted in
the constant struggle to feed themselves and their families, but also
cunning and resourceful, adding up to supremely humanistic frescos. Love
is a human hunger. Time is often measured by popular songs and ballads.
And the uncultivated peasant or worker is the centre of this literary
universe.

Like many contemporary Chinese writers, though, Mo Yan is often profane
and scatalogical. This may be a byproduct of communist literary education
that instructs art should be "for the people" and close to them, eschewing
artificial, bourgeois refinement.

Yet most of the atrocities Mo Yan's heroes must endure and fight against
are from a pre-Communist era. One of the exceptions comes in the more
recent work "Frog," which addresses the brutality of the one-child policy.

But in the bulk of his work, horror is represented by the Japanese
invasion. Other writings purposefully avoid all mention of historical
facts in order, he says, to keep an "ancient, timeless feel in my
stories." But most of the time this also allows him to steer clear of
directly describing, and criticizing, the current regime.

Mo Yan joined the People's Liberation Army's artistic section in 1976. "In
those years," he explained, "for a country boy, poor as I was, whose
constant worry was to be able to have enough to eat, the Army guaranteed
one's survival." After he became a writer in 1981, belonging to the PLA
offered cover so that, paradoxically, he could write more freely than
others. Readers were free to interpret his descriptions of corruption or
famine as references to more recent decades. He remained under the army's
protective wing until 10 years ago.

In 1987 the Hungarian writer Miklòs Haraszti described the problem of
creativity under state socialism in "The Velvet Prison." The state censors
in the name of "the masses," says Mr. Haraszti, while also offering
protection­a monthly salary, health and old-age insurance, and social
belonging­to artists. This coziness means overt criticism is akin to
breaking with one's parents, and would inevitably force an artist to
become an outcast, shunned by all who do not wish for trouble.

Mo Yan, a real writer regardless of his politics, now finds himself the
recipient of a complicated honor. It has pleased Beijing, which ardently
desired it for a non-dissident writer. But it also immediately confers
great responsibility. Which is how, just 24 hours after receiving it, Mo
Yan did something quite unthinkable by openly wishing for Liu Xiaobo's
release.

Perhaps the world's expectation of Nobel laureates, that they have the
courage to speak truth to power, will not be disappointed after all.

Ms. Sala is a Hong Kong-based writer.





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