MCLC: irony of politicizing Mo Yan (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: irony of politicizing Mo Yan (1)
***********************************************************

I want to thank Charles Laughlin for his recent posts on the MCLC list and
on Facebook. His conclusion included these words: "Mo Yan’s critics are
expecting the same of him that Mao Zedong would have: the political
subservience of writers and their responsibility to serve as the political
conscience of the nation". Now I have written another blog post about
this. Luo laoshi duoxie !

Martin

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Source: Martin Winter's blog (10/22/12):
http://erguotou.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/mo-yan-%E8%8E%AB%E8%A8%80-and-mura
kami-haruki-%E6%9D%91%E4%B8%8A%E6%98%A5%E6%A8%B9%E3%80%80%E4%BA%8C%EF%BC%89
/

Mo Yan's situation is ironic, as Charles Laughlin says. But serving "as
the political conscience of the nation" is not the same as "political
subservience". It is rather the opposite. As we know, Murakami Haruki and
his colleagues can be "the political conscience" of Japan, making
"politically progressive gestures", but Chinese writers in China, because
of "political subservience" cannot be "the political conscience of China,
except obliquely in their fiction, poetry etc. Or in the first few days
after they win a Nobel.

Along with Charles and many other people I am very glad that after Mo Yan
was announced as a Nobel winner, he finally felt up to, or forced to open
his mouth as a public intellectual, in contrast to the meaning of his pen
name. Now he can be a public figure, like for Murakami in Japan, not just
an ambivalent functionary and a reclusive writer. Or can he? Is he going
to say anything more on China-Japan relations or political prisoners? Is
he going to mention Liu Xiaobo in Stockholm? He will certainly be asked
about other Chinese Nobel winners. That's the nature of this particular
prize, whether you like it or not.

Murakami and his colleagues can "serve" as public intellectuals, when
their conscience tells them to do something additional to their writing.
The irony is that under CCP rule, there are no public intellectuals in
China. There are occasional trouble-makers and commentators, like Ai
Weiwei and Murong Xuecun , Yu Hua and Wang Shuo. But can any of them speak
their mind in public at length about Sino-Japanese relations or other
sensitive topics? Apart from these writers and artists, there are
professors like Cui Weiping, who issued the call to turn back to reason in
Sino-Japanese relations, which got censored on Sina Weibo. She has often
been prevented from traveling abroad. And there are some civil rights
lawyers, who sometimes disappear.

Murakami and his colleagues can "serve as the political conscience" of
Japanese society in and out of their books. Mo Yan has to be very
circumspect with his topics. The Garlic Ballads was censored and supressed
for a while. Mao's "Talks" at the "Yan'an Forum" helped to make sure
writers and artists could not speak their conscience. Vague documents like
this have played an important role as instruments of obedience inforcement
in one-party societies, as Anne Sytske Keijser and Maghiel van Crevel have
shown in a recent article in "De Groene Amsterdammer" (10/17/2012). Mo Yan
knows about this dilemma. His comments after he won the Nobel, and even
some comments before, suggest he cannot find hand-copying and displaying
Chairman quotes quite as harmless as Charles. That would be the difference
between working with political realities in China and teaching about them
in the US. The conditions of these political realities are still
determined by largely the same factors as decades ago. As Keijser and Van
Crevel put it, Mao's "Talks" and other directives are up on the shelf,
rountinely mentioned in speeches by present leaders, and ready to be
enforced again as needed. Yes, Mo Yan and his colleagues fought
successfully for enough freedom to write great literature. Isn't that
enough? Not outside the realm of fiction, unfortunately. The cultural
achievements of the 1980s couldn't prevent the 1989 crackdown and
everything that stays vague and threatening in theory and practice today.

Mo Yan writes "stupendous" novels, as Charles says. Yes, he does. His
development as a writer was influenced by the threat of starvation, the
brutality in the name of revolution, and by the ideology. Yes, including
the Yan'an "Talks", as Charles shows. Now, Charles, says, "China’s writers
are receiving much-deserved international recognition simply because they
are devoting their souls wholly to literary art." Yes, they do. Liao
Yiwu's speech in Frankfurt was in Sichuan dialect. The text is available
on the Internet. Try to find a video not dubbed into German. The German
translation was fine, it just wasn't dialect or even colloquial German.
And it didn't sound half as humble as Liao himself did. Politics made him
into the writer, musician, poet and activist he is now. And his temper,
his foolhardiness, as he readily admits. Not a hero, as Jonathan Stalling
suggested. The German Book Trade's Peace Prize has often been awarded to
writers such as Orhan Pamuk.

The irony is that in theory, as taught by Charles, "Mao Zedong would have"
reminded writers of their "responsibility to serve as the political
conscience of the nation." In practice, he silenced them. Virtually all,
in time. So there would be no political conscience. That's what Orwell's
Nineteen-Eighty-Four is about. Words like "Ministry of Truth" are very
well-known in China. 1984 is a vision of the closed world of a one-party
state. Some moments of life in other societies can feel just as eerie,
like a progressive college professor who turns into a cult leader, as in
Murakami's 1Q84, or, even more so, the perfectly cultured killer with
secret roots in Korea. But on the whole, Japan in the 1980's, evocatively
and masterfully portrayed, is not ironic enough for connecting to Orwell's
1984. I guess Taiwan under martial law , in 1984, could have just made it.

Hu Ping , elected as independent candidate in Beijing's Haidian district
towards the end of the brief Beijing Spring over 30 years ago, recently
circulated an excerpt from Mo's "Life and Death Are Wearing me Out"
(Shengsi pilao ). The novel was already well-known before the Nobel. A
land owner who had his head blown off in the land reform in 1950 is born
again as a farm animal several times, most famously as a donkey. In this
excerpt, the donkey/landlord laments his unreasonable and unnecessarily
bloody execution, until the guy who shot him tells him he acted with
expressive backing from local and provincial authorities, to make sure the
revolution was irreversible. So was it "a matter of historical necessity"?
I don't know what Hu Ping meant by circulating the email that somehow
ended up forwarded in my inbox, because I don't follow Chinese exile
communications very closely. To me, the excerpt sounds just as absurd,
evocative, tragic and yes, "stupendous", as Mo Yan's novels usually do.
And thus rather close to Orwell's 1984, or Wang Xiaobo's 2015, in a way. I
don't think most readers would think that the author wants to commend,
recommend or even excuse such acts of brutality.

There is another irony. Gao Xingjian was awarded the Nobel prize for
literature in 2000 even though, or maybe because, he did not and does not
make himself available for political comments. Gao emigrated to France in
the late 1980s and rescinded his Party membership in 1989, and it doesn't
seem he wants to come to terms with the powers that be in China in his
lifetime. But on the whole, Gao has made about as many explicitely
political comments in the last 20 years as Yang Mu .

Chinese writing in 2012 is very complex. At least there is "much-deserved
international recognition", finally. Yu Hua's "China In 10 Words" were
serialized in the New York Times, among other international papers. And
now Yang Mu, Mo Yan and Liao Yiwu appear together in headlines, also in
the New York Times. What more could we wish for?

Martin