The Nobel Prize for Literature has an august tradition of selecting authors for their political beliefs. Herta Muller roundly condemned Nazism and Fascism in her works. Orhan Pamuk thrashed Turkey so soundly over the genocide of Armenians that he was brought up for trial and ended up in exile. J.M. Coetzee excoriated South Africa for apartheid. Jose Saramago is a name synonymous with resistance to authoritarian regimes.
This isn’t bad. The political dimension is an important addition to literary merit. It makes the Nobel prize committee into activists rather than mere coronaters. And what’s more, Mr. Nobel’s instructions on how to choose the winner hinted at such a broad interpretation: It should be awarded “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Which is why the choice of Mo Yan is inexplicable.
Mo Yan is not just apolitical, as he claims. He is a man with bad politics, politics that go right in the face of what the Swedish Committee has long stood for. The most charitable reading you could give him is one of cowardice in the face of Chinese atrocities.
- His pen name means “don’t speak,” which is exactly the stance he has taken when confronted with Chinese human rights violations.
- He did not speak up in defense of fellow writer Liu Xiaobo when Xiaobo was imprisoned.
- He contributed to a book commemorating Mao Zedong’s speech — a speech that said writers who did not support the Revolution should be punished.
- As the vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association, he is bed with the government.
If you read the reviews of his works (Washington Post has a nice sum-up), you’ll see that he does critique social aspects of China, most notably the one-child policy, but these critiques are given with too soft a hand, as though Yan is always careful never to alienate powerful political figures.
According to the CS Monitor, the Nobel Prize Committee “did not take politics into account.” No, clearly they didn’t. And they should have. This is the first Chinese winner who was not critical of the authoritarian regime and I hope it’s the last.
This is not the stance of an artist. This is not the stance of someone who is courageous. And shame on the Swedish Committee for anointing such a man. They have disappointed the world, disappointed literature, and failed their founder.
