The Nobel prize in literature
A Chinese Dickens?
A prestigious award for a Chinese writer sparks debate about literary freedom
CHINA has long fretted that it lacks a great modern literary voice with international appeal. In 1917 Chen Duxiu, an influential intellectual and later founding member of the Communist Party, asked: “Pray, where is our Chinese Hugo, Zola, Goethe, Hauptmann, Dickens or Wilde?” In recent years this has developed into a full-blown “Nobel complex”. For a period in the 1980s the quest for a Nobel prize in literature was made official policy by the party, eager for validation of its growing power and cultural clout.
Now, at last, the Chinese have something to crow about. On October 11th Mo Yan, a Chinese writer, won the 2012 prize. The Nobel committee lauded what it called the “hallucinatory realism” of his works, which mix surreal plots with folk tales and modern history.
Mr Mo is the first Chinese citizen to win the coveted prize. Gao Xingjian, a Chinese-born dissident with French citizenship, won it in 2000, but Chinese leaders thought him too political, banned his books and declared the prize had been awarded with “ulterior political motives”. China’s other Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize in 2010, is serving a long prison sentence for his political writings and activities.
Mo Yan is the pen name of Guan Moye, who was born in 1955 into a peasant household in the eastern province of Shandong (his pseudonym means “don’t speak”). He left school aged 12, and started to write after joining the People’s Liberation Army in 1976. He is regarded, together with Yu Hua and Su Tong, as one of the most influential authors to emerge during the 1980s. Mr Mo’s rural stories feature an absurdist brand of magical realism and opaque images which highlight the greed and corruption that prosper under Communist Party rule. His best known works include “The Republic of Wine”, a satire which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction; and “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out”, the story of a landowner reincarnated in the form of various animals during the Chinese land-reform movement of the 1950s.
Mr Mo writes within a system of state censorship, but unlike exiled dissident writers—who enjoy recognition abroad but little influence at home—he is widely read and respected within China. He is also a Communist Party member and vice-chairman of the state-run China Writers’ Association. When the Nobel award was announced, Chinese television channels interrupted their programming to announce the news. Thousands of China’s microbloggers congratulated Mr Mo. A publisher under the Ministry of Education says it was already planning to include a Mo Yan novella in a school textbook.
He has attracted criticism, though, for what some call his cosy relationship with the Communist Party. Earlier this year he contributed to a commemorative edition of Mao Zedong’s infamous “Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art”, a seminal 1942 speech which preached that art and literature should serve the revolution. When asked in the past to comment on the jailing of Mr Liu, the peace prize laureate, he has demurred. Chen Xiwo, a maverick author whose banned short story, “I Love My Mum”, uses incest and matricide as metaphors for the decay of society, believes the prize sends a dangerous message to other Chinese writers that it is acceptable to co-operate with the party.
Mr Mo himself has batted away similar criticism, once saying that “censorship is great for literary creation”. And his ability to navigate the system within China, sometimes compromising, sometimes criticising bluntly or obliquely, makes his experience much more representative of life for most people in modern China today. His latest novel, “Frog”, tells the story of a midwife who has been complicit in forced abortions under China’s one-child policy. She has a hallucinatory vision of thousands of frogs, whose croaks sound like the cries of new-born babies. Hardly the stuff of party propaganda.
And perhaps the award has given him space to speak more freely: a day after receiving the news, Mr Mo said he hoped that the jailed Mr Liu can “achieve his freedom as soon as possible”.
From the print edition: China