Don’t speak!

Over the holidays, I’ve had the opportunity to read Red Sorghum, the masterpiece novel by last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan. Set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the novel tells the stories of people trying to survive with some form of personal dignity under conditions of social collapse and extreme violence. I found it an unflinching novel exploring how the characters cope with living in a cruel and depraved world that is partly of their own making. Red Sorghum easily makes it onto my personal top-100 list of best books ever.

After I’d finished the novel I went onto the web to learn a bit more about the author, Mo Yan. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the English-speaking commentariat seem to whole-heartedly dislike the man and seem to be in unison that the Nobel Prize was undeserved. For instance, Salman Rushie is on record as calling Mo Yan “craven” and “a patsy” and Princeton sinologist Perry Link has a review with the title “Why We Should Criticize Mo Yan.” These negative assessments seem to derive almost exclusively from Mo Yan’s political position as a writer in contemporary China and I’ve found little critical engagement with his actual writing.

Where does this leave me as a reader of Red Sorghum? Was I seduced by the text of an author of questionable morality? Theoretically, of course, the author is dead and the person of the author should not come in to any judgement about their work. Practically, the English-speaking commentariat has ditched theory and claims that Mo Yan’s work is not worth reading because of the author’s moral failings.

It all reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago when I was a graduate student in Germany. I was taking a unit about Goethe and happened to tell an international student from another faculty about it. He told me that he would never read Goethe and held him in total contempt because of his servility. Speechless at this dire verdict on Germany’s national poet, I asked for more information. My interlocutor reminded me of the anecdote when Goethe and Beethoven both holidayed in Bad Teplitz and went for a walk together. They met the empress and her cortege of nobles who were also out walking. Goethe drew his hat, bowed deeply and let the imperial group pass while Beethoven ignored them and kept on walking. When they met up again, Beethoven said to Goethe: “I have waited for you because I respect you and I admire your work, but you have shown too great an esteem to those people.”

Does Goethe’s lack of courage, his obvious servility devalue all his work? At the time, I was nettled: Beethoven had obviously behaved much more courageously and in line with the modern democratic habitus that was second nature to my interlocutor and myself. Even so, dismissing Goethe’s writing out of hand because he behaved differently from what we hoped we ourselves would have done under similar circumstances seemed trivial and small-minded. In fact, it is Goethe’s arrangement with the feudal powers of his time that made his writing possible.

From a distance the view is different than close-up. The law of relativity applies in intercultural communication, too.

The Nobel committee has often been criticized for its Eurocentrism. In fact, Mo Yan is only the second Chinese-language author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Gao Xingjian in 2000). This Nobel Prize is like an invitation to Western audiences to engage with Mo Yan’s work and, more broadly, with Chinese, Asian, non-English-language literature.

I did find out a few non-judgemental things about Mo Yan. Most importantly, the fact that “Mo Yan” (莫言) is actually a pen name and means “Don’t speak!” In a 2011 interview, Mo Yan explained his choice of pen name as follows:

In Chinese, Mo Yan means don’t speak. I was born in 1955. At that time in China, people’s lives were not normal. So my father and mother told me not to speak outside. If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and I did not speak.

I imagine that a writer calling himself “Don’t speak!” must be a bit of a subversive. For Western audiences, another way to translate the pen name might be with reference to the biblical injunction not to judge:

For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? (Matthew 7, 2-3).