MCLC: Mo Yan wins the Nobel lit prize (16)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Stalling, Jonathan C. <stalling at ou.edu>
Subject: Mo Yan wins the Nobel lit prize (16)
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“Can great lasting literature find a reader in America?" I think so, do
you?


“Literature is not a boxing match, though sometimes it can appear that way
given the polarizing passions it can generate.” So begins yesterday
morning’s Times “View from Asia,” piece by the reporter Didi Kristen
Tatlow entitled “In 3 Awards, 3 Ways of Seeing China.” This is the second
and more balanced piece she has published in the Times in a week. Indeed,
over the last two months, three Chinese writers have won prestigious
international awards, including the novelist Mo Yan (Nobel Prize for
Literature), the writer/journalist Liao Yiwu (Peace Prize for the German
Book Trade), and the Taiwanese poet Yang Mu (Newman Prize for Chinese
Literature), but Tatlow’s piece misses some important opportunities that
need to be addressed in one of the few forums where readers have access to
such discussions. Tatlow’s piece includes fantastic comments from Hong
Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan (aka PK) and scholar Michelle Yeh that go a long
way toward complicating the “either/or” nature of her first piece which
now rather famously ends with the hyperbolic question, “Can great, lasting
literature come from there [China]? The Nobel committee thinks so. Do
you?"  Xiaobing Tang, Michel Hockx, Kirk Denton, Michael M. Day and many
others have already responded to that first letter and I don’t have much
to add to that discussion, however, Tatlow’s more recent piece, still
gives the impression that Mo Yan’s award was given to the PRC ruling party
rather than an author. Tatlow simplifies her discussion of Mo Yan with a
single quotation from a government official, and she implies that the
other two awards were somehow less ideologically implicated—i.e, awarded
fairly. I cannot speak to the selection process of the Peace Prize for the
German Book Trade, but as the Juror Coordinator for this year’s Newman
Prize, I would agree that the Newman Prize represents an important,
transparent international award for Chinese Literature. This award is
conferred by the University of Oklahoma (named for Ruth and Harold Newman
and established by Pete Gries), where a jury of leading international
literary scholars weighs literary merit to find the writer who best
represents the human condition in written Chinese (from anywhere in the
world). Yang Mu won the award because the jury saw his work as a
reflection of these high ideals. What Tatlow did not mention is that the
Newman Prize honored Mo Yan in 2008, the year a Newman jury selected him
for representing the pinnacle of these humanist ideals.

Now, one week later, it seems as though it has been decided that this
year’s Nobel committee has forgone the category of literature and simply
awarded two peace prizes. Peace prize winners are heroes (to many though
perhaps not all) as their lives reveal brave choices under unimaginable
conditions. These choices and their ramifications become public record,
and that record is the primary text of their cultural production (their
writings, then often become paratexts that derive their import from the
centrifuge of their lived experiences).

Novelists and poets, on the other hand, simply are not heroes in this
sense, and they receive awards according to the cultural prestige they
accrue based on their creative contributions to literature and culture.
The Nobel Prize for Literature like the Book Prize, Pulitzer Prize as well
as the Newman Prize and the Neustadt Prize (for which Mo Yan was a nominee
in 1998), are conferred upon literary merit, an artistic basis that does
not diminish Peace Prizes but complements them by way of further
clarifying the work (and sacrifices) of political figures (who often are
writers and/or orators). Such a distinction is essential and should be
vigorously protected at such times as these. The value literature lies in
its innovative, creative labors, and running sensationalist pieces that
reduce authors to simplistic pawns in geopolitical chess matches
discourage people from engaging this labor (especially when it comes in
the form of literature in translation) and this is simply not good
stewardship of our common culture. This does not mean that geopolitical
conversations should not take place, but that literaturists need to be
bolder and assert the importance of the work writers do and why it is
deserving of (critical) attention, for authors are linguistic technicians
building the languages we need to describe the shifting, multiple worlds
around us. I think that moments like these should entice literary critics
to engage the public culture more directly and defend not Mo Yan alone,
but literature more generally from the grip of language unable or simply
un interested in digging into the work literature is/does.

Jonathan Stalling
Chinese Literature Today
University of Oklahoma.