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Eulogy for the Mobel

Assuming that the exception only proves the rule, the Nobel Prize academy?s rule is to award its highly coveted and always controversial prize to litt?rateurs who aren?t too ?popular? and who are a ?surprise?.

Critics who see Mo Yan?s penchant for historical romance as eclipsing the struggles of today need to brush up on China?s local context, the world?s literary history and Toni Morrison

Assuming that the exception only proves the rule, the Nobel Prize academy?s rule is to award its highly coveted and always controversial prize to litt?rateurs who aren?t too ?popular? and who are a ?surprise?. Mo Yan is definitely an exception. While he may be little known outside specialist circles outside China, few contest his vast circulation within China. In fact, it seems that he is ?one of the country?s richest authors despite lost revenue from literary piracy?. Plus, the Nobel committee seems to have let the cat out of the bag early, by inviting China?s state broadcaster to cover the announcement of this year?s winners. The punters had also pushed Mo?s name to the top. But it must be admitted that a variety of people were also betting on a variety of other folk, ranging from Japan?s Haruki Murakami, Kenya?s Ngugi wa Thiong?o and Egypt?s Nawal El Saadawi to eternal bridesmaids Philp Roth and Bob Dylan!

Alfred Nobel?s will directs that the literary Nobel be awarded to a ?person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction?. Given how human conflicts have so consistently derived from a conflict of ideals, the pursuit of the above directive was never going to go uncontested. When Vidia Naipaul won in 2001 shortly after the 9/11 attacks, this was widely seen as supporting the discursive obsession with the topic of Western vs Islamic civilisations. Critics wondered, wasn?t Salman Rushdie the greater writer? Edward Said would ascribe the award to pandering the West with the thesis of self-inflicted wounds, ?which is to say that we non-Whites are the cause of all our problems, not the overly maligned imperialists?. Every time the Nobel seems to serve up a ?compromised? candidate, Albert Camus?s 1957 acceptance speech is thrown at it: ?Because the writer?s task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude. ?

Well, Mo has been thrown right into the centre of this soup, causing the biggest whirlpool around the literary Nobel this century, actually since the last Chinese won it, which was Gao Xingjian in 2000. Except, Gao left China in 1987 and has since been disowned by its communist leadership. When this year?s London Book Fair focused on China, it got to host writers like Mo only in exchange for shunning ?non state-approved? writers like Gao. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009, Mo is said to have walked out of a seminar because it also invited exiled Chinese writers.

Why I became the sort of writer I am and not another Hemingway or Faulkner is linked to my childhood experiences. They have been a boon to my writing career and are what will make it possible for me to keep at it down the road.

Looking back some 40 years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China?s most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism. On one hand, those years saw the country in the grips of economic stagnation and individual deprivation. People struggled to keep death from their door, with little to eat and rags for clothes; on the other hand, it was a time of intense political passions, when starving citizens tightened their belts and followed the Party in its Communist experiment. We may have been famished at the time, but we considered ourselves to be the luckiest people in the world. Two-thirds of the world?s people, we believed, were living in dire misery, and it was our sacred duty to rescue them from the sea of suffering in which they were drowning. It wasn?t until the 1980s, when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream.

(Preface to ?Shifu, You?ll Do Anything for a Laugh?)

As a child, at times poverty forced Mo Yan to satisfy his appetites with weeds and tree bark (some accounts even suggest coal). His characters have similar histories. A self-named one in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is described thus: ?Lowborn, he dreamed of becoming rich and famous; ugly as sin, he sought the company of pretty girls; generally ill-informed, he passed himself off as a knowledgeable academic. And with all that, he managed to establish himself as a writer, someone who dined on tasty pot stickers in Beijing every day.?

Sure, he was forced to drop out of school around the age of ten, and then to join the People?s Liberation Army. But why does he continue to take a salary from the Ministry of Culture? Because he also gets social and health insurance from them, Mo has said. Self-righteous folk with short memories should also refer to the long history of great literature produced in circumspect proximity to the powers of the day. Begin with William Shakespeare and Alfred Tennyson. Go on to wonder why the Nobel committee kept its distance from Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.

This is not to say that Mo hasn?t gotten his share of bad reviews over the years. Prize-winning Chinese translator Julia Lovell, for example, dismissed his Big Breasts and Wide Hips with the adjuration that remaking the rigid mould of Chinese Communist Party-sponsored history with any meaningful degree of literary sophistication needed much sharper instruments than he had deployed. She went on to lament the novel?s swaying from the hackneyed to the distractingly bizarre. John Updike also noted how the protagonist?s bosom fixation has nipples being likened to the mouth of a hedgehog, dates, cherries, button mushrooms, oilcan hangers, etc. But Updike went on to derive much meaning out of all this too-muchness: ?Both worlds, ancient and twentieth-century, are stews of slaughter, torture, famine, flood, and, for the peasant masses, brutalising overwork. Both protagonists are immature weaklings. Still, unlike many braver and more engaged characters in these fictional annals, they survive to tell their tales. Their wanton weakness and self-absorption, and the natural poetry both are capable of, rebuke the societies that have made life on earth hellish. Bad societies offer no incentive to grow up.? Call that orthodox or conformist?

Zhang Yimou & Howard Goldblatt

The director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, from which Steven Spielberg withdrew to protest China?s politics, Zhang Yimou has occasionally been pilloried for his proximity to the communist state and his alleged refusal to critique its policies, like Mo. His defence echoes that of Mo: ?The Chinese censorship system has been in practice for many years. I don?t think there will be much change in society in the short run. This situation has been present for a long time and it is a reality in China. I work and live in this system.? And, in a sense, he really put Mo on the global map with his adaptation of Red Sorghum, his d?but film. He has done the same for other Chinese writers like Su Tong, whose Raise the Red Lantern also he has adapted into a globally acclaimed film.

Both novels, significantly, have been translated by Howard Goldblatt, who learnt Chinese because Uncle Sam sent him to Taiwan, and whom Vietnam turned into a pacifist. That?s the globalisation of art in a nutshell. And the Nobel deeply partakes the oils of this nut. As soon as this year?s award was announced, its website was flooded with messages like: ?Mo Yan, I don?t know you.? But people with such knowledge would assuredly have sky-rocketed by the time the 2013 prize is announced. As of now, Mo?s next book to be published in English is Sandalwood Death, by the University of Oklahoma Press, which had hitherto planned a print run of 5,000 copies. Expect both publisher profile and print numbers to change. Expect Amazon to boast more digital copies by then.

Expect dissertations comparing Mo?s mammary-loving Jintong to the last American literary Nobel winner Toni Morrison?s Milkman. For where to begin exploring Mo?s oeuvre, take his translator Goldblatt?s advice: Begin with Sandalwood Death if you like Poe, with the The Republic of Wine if you?re more Rabelaisian, and with Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out if you?re fond of a fabulist.

Finally, expect a critical fightback against those who cavil that writing about the past is not as political as writing about the present. Remember Morrison?s advice in Playing in the Dark: ?It has been suggested that romance is an evasion of history (and thus perhaps attractive to a people trying to evade the recent past). But I am more persuaded by arguments that find in it the head-on encounter with very real, pressing historical forces and the contradictions inherent in them as they came to be experienced by writers.?

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First published on: 14-10-2012 at 01:13 IST
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