Mo Yan Wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature
The Swedish Academy announced on Thursday that the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to China’s Mo Yan, “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. Mo said that he was “overjoyed and scared” at the announcement, which was greeted with cheers in the room and accompanied by a ‘biobibliography’ on the Nobel Prize website:
Mo Yan (a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write. His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a few years later with the novella Touming de hong luobo (1986, published in French as Le radis de cristal 1993).
[…] Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition. In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.
Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese Literature at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, wrote a ‘Beginners’ guide to Mo Yan‘ for the BBC, while Esther Bintliff compiled a reading list at The Financial Times. This includes extracts posted at Granta from Howard Goldblatt’s translation of Mo’s Frogs, in which “a bad-tempered and unwilling abortionist […], on the night of her retirement, falls victim to a bizarre and terrifying plague of frogs.” Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish collected a selection of particularly “juicy bits” from Mo’s work including lust, death and cannibalism, while translator and historian Julia Lovell wrote in praise of Mo at The Guardian:
In his 30-year writing career, Mo Yan has gained a reputation for speaking out with uncommon directness on the absurdities and corruption of modern China. Born in 1955, he won celebrity during the mid- to late-80s, participating in two key developments in the post-Mao literary thaw that, together, transformed the imaginative landscapes of mainland writing: the root-seeking and avant-garde movements. The root-seekers opened up fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture and aesthetics, countering decades of anti-traditionalism both before and after the communist revolution of 1949. The experimental avant-garde writers, meanwhile, released literary form and content from the stranglehold of socialist realism.
[…] Mo Yan is notable not only for his creative engagement with modern Chinese history but also, more simply, for his dedication to the craft of writing. As the catchphrase of the market economy-oriented 1990s became “wang qian kan” (“look towards the future”, which, in Chinese, neatly punned the word for “future” on the word for “money”), many writers who had found fame in the 80s joined in the capitalist free-for-all. Plenty of once-serious novelists shelved literary fiction in favour of profit-making: television and film scripts, song-writing, business ventures. In this febrile cultural context, Mo Yan stands out for his commitment to his literary vocation. He is one of the relatively few contemporary Chinese novelists who has stuck with the form long enough to attain intellectual maturity.
Greetings left for Mo on the Nobel site mostly offered congratulations, in some cases barbed:
Mo himself said at the London Book Fair that “Of course I care about politics, and I write about things that I see that I think are wrong - but I also think that the writer should not just be a political activist, a writer should be a writer, first and foremost.”
His critics feel, however, that he carries this approach too far. He said of the 2010 Peace Prize award to the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, for example, that “I don’t know much about this situation, and don’t want to talk about it.” In 2010, he told TIME’s Simon Elegant that “there are certain restrictions on writing in every country,” and suggested that censorship could actually help writers by preventing them from being too blunt: “One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety. A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.” Though his pen name, meaning “don’t speak”, is a reference to the strictly controlled political climate of the 1950s, he was among the Chinese writers who produced hand-written copies of Mao’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art to mark the speeches’ 70th anniversary this year.
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