Sunday, October 14, 2012

China’s Literary Nobel Complex Is Defused


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Today’s announcement that Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize is certainly historic. Since the 1980s, China has held a complicated “Nobel complex”—in which the nation’s consistent lack of a Nobel laureate in literature has elicited passionate discourses critiquing both the Nobel establishment (for not awarding China the prize) and China’s literary establishment (for not earning it). If anything, these conflicted attitudes were exacerbated when Gao Xingjian (a Chinese-born author, who at the time was already a naturalized French citizen and who explicitly distanced himself from Chinese discourses of cultural nationalism) was awarded the Nobel for Literature in 2000, and when Liu Xiaobo (a literary scholar who has established himself as a prominent human rights activist, and who is currently a political prisoner in China) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
China’s obsessive fascination with the Nobel Prize for literature actually predates the ’80s. As early as 1944, the acclaimed Chinese author and literary scholar Qian Zhongshu published a bitingly satirical story entitled “Inspiration,” about a fictional Chinese author who has his works translated into Esperanto in an attempt to increase his chances of winning the Nobel. The author’s failure to win the prize unleashes a media firestorm, and Qian Zhongshu’s protagonist passes away shortly afterwards (literally crushed under the sheer weight of his personal library). He is reincarnated as an “inspiration” for a young writer in the mortal world.
The 2006 novel by new Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, ends on a similar note. On the first day of the new millennium, the central character, Ximen Nao, a wealthy landowner who is executed in 1948 as part of Mao Zedong’s Land Reform Movement and subsequently reincarnated several times as various animals, is reincarnated one final time—as a human boy, who is described, in Howard Goldblatt’s authoritative English translation of the novel, as having “a remarkably big head in which near-total recall and an extraordinary gift for language existed.” This big-headed boy with preternatural literary abilities might be seen as an ironic reference to the “Mo Yan” character that inhabits this novel. But it could also be read as a commentary on the future promise of Mo Yan’s evolving oeuvre, together with that of the overall Chinese literary field.
Full piece at The New Republic

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