In response to Guardian's reportage of Mo Yan's Nobel Prize win

The relevant article is here: Headline as of 18:47 UK time: "Mo Yan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature 2012: Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for 'hallucinatory realism'"

frothwrath

11 October 2012 3:37PM

The only reason Gao Xingjian no longer has Chinese citizenship is that his citizenship was revoked by the Chinese government after it expelled him from the country. It's very disappointing that the Guardian, presumably just for the sake of a headline, is legitimising the political persecution of Gao Xingjian in this way.

Since Gao was born and raised in China, writes in Chinese and never chose to give up his citizenship, it's ridiculous to say Mo is the first Chinese writer to win the prize. The most you could say is that he's the first PRC citizen to win it. Since Gao's citizenship was revoked precisely because of his writing, what is actually meant by "Mo is the first Chinese writer to win the prize" is "Mo is the first Chinese writer to win who doesn't annoy the Chinese government"

Disgraceful, Guardian.

Well said!!!

And despite Sarah Crown's later comment about how the Guardian has amended the story, the headline and the standfirst still unashamedly label Mo Yan as the "first Chinese" to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.


A bloody disgrace.

There is a lot more I could say about the Graun's CCP bias in its other reporting, but I shall refrain from saying anything here seeing as I am already pre-moderated and every single comment I made has to have first gone through Guardian censorship.

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The above comment was submitted at 6:44pm on the Guardian website. As expected, it hasn't gone through, at all. More importantly, the standfirst referring to Mo Yan as the "first Chinese" to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is still NOT CORRECTED as of 12 October, 2012. Says it all about Guardian bias, really. I rest my case.

In response to Mo Yan's win of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2012

In response to 11 October 2012 12:58PM typingfromwork's comment

Wat.

Red Sorghum was about the Sino-Japanese war. It had nothing to do with the cultural revolution.

A good place to start on that topic would be To Live.

The fact that 3 people recommended your comment shows how ill-read the average Guardian reader is of contemporary Chinese literature.

"To Live" is by Yu Hua, NOT Mo Yan. Jeez.

Yu Hua is way better than Mo Yan, IMO, so I would second your recommendation of "To Live", but not as an intro to Mo Yan's oeuvre.

Also, Guo XinJiang's Soul Mountain is a masterpiece in Chinese, but sadly, it has seriously suffered from a muddled and far-too-literal translation so that the magical realism (Mo Yan isn't the best exponent of this genre of Chinese magical realism, either) inherent in the novel is grossly inelegantly distorted.

I would also refrain from relying on Goldblatt's commendations -- yes, Columbia U is and has been a key institution in training literary Chinese translators ever since it was one of the few pioneering Western institutions that sponsored Chinese academics and students at the turn of the last century. However, Goldblatt's own Chinese-to-English translated works leave a lot to be desired, the use of inelegant Americanisms being the least of the problems.

I'm still looking for a translator who can render Chinese literature into English to the same standard as what Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker were able to do for Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows (original in Japanese). But I haven't been able to find that translator yet. (And don't mention Julia Lovell either, I'm still angry with her distortions of Lu Xun's writings). Murakami is "lucky" to be writing in Japanese, as generally the standard of literary translations from Japanese to English is far superior to those from Chinese to English.

As for a nominee for next year's Nobel Prize that fulfils the "non-European, non-male" criteria as suggested by a poster above, I would say: Banana Yoshimoto. Certainly she should be recognised before Murakami in terms of the beauty of her prose and the emotional depths of her novels, despite their languid pace and homely settings.

In response to "Will Self and Modernism"

In response to the "Will Self: Modernism and Me" thread on the Guardian (with minor additions and typos corrected). 

I have enjoyed Wil Self's writings on these pages before, but this particular piece, I must say, is unfortunately self-indulgent beyond words, even though I hate to agree with those naysayers who have an aversion towards so-called 'big' words. It is ironic that Will Self counts Franz Kafka as one of his literary heros, for it was Franz Kafka who said, in critiquing Charles Dickens:

" Dickens's opulence and great, careless prodigality, but in consequence passages of awful insipidity in which he wearily works over effects he has already acheived... There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style... his use of vague, abstract metaphors." (Kafka cited in Gabriel Josiponvici's -- yep, the same Josiponvici of whom Self waxed lyrical about in his article above -- introduction to Franz Kafka's "Collected Stories", Everyman's Library, p. xv, my emphasis.)

Although Dickens' and Self's verbosity are of very different kinds, I think Kafka's trenchant critique against heartless overfloridity can be equally stinging where Self's writing in the above piece is concerned. Many commenters have already pointed out passages of "awful insipidity" and heartless, overwrought style in Self's writing above, so I won't belabour them here. I just want to say that it is a bit unfair to portray those critical of Self's style above as brainless philistines who can't be bothered learning big words. I myself love reading philosophical tracts by Continental philosophers in my spare time (yes, really); that doesn't mean that I am not allergic to overly florid writing that wants to wear the stamp of cleverness so earnestly on its sleeve. I can stomach, nay, actually admire, playful cleverness; but Self is just too woodenly displaying his learning (evidenced by the number of thesaurus words conspicuously showcased) in the above article for me to enjoy this piece. Sorry Will.

I also must agree with quite a few commenters here and say that Will Self has got his idea of modernism arse-backwards. What he's straining for is actually not modernism, but post-modernism. What he perceives as his "modernist" critique of pre-modernist writing (or Romantic writing) is actually postmodernist critique of modernist writing (linearity of structure; idea of straightforward progress; technical mastery -- all these are stylistic markers not just of modernist architecture but also of modernist literature, fuelled by a postwar optimism that in retrospect could look trite and naive and non-human.)

So unfortunately Self's bellyaching about not being able to find a 'modernist' way forward is precisely because he's misunderstanding about the task that lays before him. Sure, he made a side note about postmodernist writing not being up to the job by merely "copy-and-pasting" narratives. But that's doing postmodernism a disservice, since bricolage and pastiche are not the only tools at the postmodernist's disposal.

The things that Self admits to hankering after -- chief amongst which being the insertion of authorial will inside the story as a way to destablise and democratise text -- is something that another British novelist, the unabashedly postmodernist Mr. Gilbert Adair, does extremely well. Unfortunately, Will Self gave no indication that he's ever read the late Mr. Adair's work. And this omission seems especially jarring when Self goes on and on about how much he is hoping to find a way out of the modernist morasse to which English fiction has descended. And especially when he wrote about how JG Ballard found a way out via science fiction; he seems to have not realised that another British novelist has also found a way forward via pastiching genre fiction (in Adair's case, it's detective fiction), where Adair entertainingly inverts the well-worn tropes of detective novels to create wonderful spaces not visible in conventional narrative arcs and characterisation.

So whilst I applaud Will Self for nailing the malaise of English novels on its head by arguing that the avant-garde is not about saying the 'unsayable' by merely injecting the taboo into the conventional a la Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh; that it is actually about writing the 'unwritable' by boldly experimenting with form and confounding readers' narratival expectations; Self is entirely mistaken by casting himself as the Lone Mariner in the above article struggling against the tide where none had gone before him. Not only has the late Gilbert Adair already shown us the way through the murky waters of English fiction by his rhetorical brilliance; other contemporary writers are also figuring out ways to move the English novel forward (cf. Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell). Although Egan and Mitchell may well be described as 'bantamweight' writers (to borrow another commenter's useful metaphor), and Adair's novels are sadly neglected by the mainstream (not unexpected given that he was one of the very first to have bravely swam against the conventional tide), it is completely disingenuous (and self-indulgent) of Self to portray himself as a lone voice in the wilderness and forget to pay his debt to others already shining the beacon before him.Rather than being the first truly 'modernist' (or 'postmodern') English novel as Self is so painstakingly portraying his latest work as, 'Umbrella' will have to compare itself with the benchmark set by the late Adair.

The Great American Novelists -- my preliminary list

There is a recent "literary tournament" mooted regarding the "Great American Novel" (later morphed into the "Great American Novelist" with an arbitrary, and much criticised, 4-book rule) on the Guardian book threads. This is just to record the names of novelists I nominated myself, or nominations from posters I agreed with, or simply look intriguing to investigate further. This is a preliminary list and will be updated once I have more time to delve into the threads in more details. (The numbers are not to be interpreted as rankings but simply to allow me to count to 16):

1. Toni Morrison
2. Carson McCullers
3. Kurt Vonnegut
4. Annie Proulx
5. Joyce Carol Oates
6. Jhumpa Lahiri / Louise Erdrich
7. Chang-Rae Lee
8. Norman Mailer
9. William Burroughs
10. Ursula K. Le Guin / Philip K. Dick (unfortunately discounted after further thought due to the universality of their speculative / science fiction that are not really about the American experience as such)
11. Saul Bellow / John Steinbeck / John Updike / Philip Roth
12. David Foster Wallace / Don DeLillo / Thomas Pynchon
13. Truman Capote / Raymond Chandler / Henry Miller 
14. Charles Bukowski / Bret Easton Ellis / Jonathan Franzen / Chuck Palahniuk
15. Edith Wharton
16. Ernest Hemingway / William Faulkner / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Even in this little exercise it's clear that there are different leagues within the same field, if not determined by talent then at least by period and subject matter or angle. Not to mention the many, many authors not included simply they didn't fit the 4-novel arbitrary rule.

So sod the rules imposed by TenuousFive. For meaningful comparisons for my personal enjoyment of great American literature, I would actually sub-divide the above list (which comprises way more than 16 anyway as I started categorising authors in similar leagues as I perceive them with each other) into the following divisions (of at least four authors per group and in some instances, five authors each):

Division A: Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-Rae Lee, Louise Erdrich (non-white American writers)

Division B: Joyce Carol Oates, Carson McCullers, Annie Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver (white female American writers)

Division C: Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe (white male American writers)

Division D: Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Hunter S. Thompson (dissenting America)

Division E: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton (the gilded age)

Division F: Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, Henry Miller, William Burroughs (America's underbelly)

Division G: David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy ("morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" in the words of DFW of a disillusioned contemporary America)

Division H: Thomas Pynchon, Bret Easton Ellis, Charles Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk ("transgressional American fiction")

Division I: Joan Didion, Larry McMurtry, Susan Sontag, Tobias Wolff (authors who traverse the ground between fiction and faction).

To my mind's eye this is a far more meaningful list, not just tidier in terms of category but better in terms of allowing for some sort of like-for-like comparison (although some of the divisions themselves would also logically cluster together into a bigger group). I do now realise also how much more American literature I need to read in order to just be able to cover the recognised "bests". I know I may never be a completist regarding American literature though, but I do hope to be able to cover enough writings from the above authors to be able to make an informed judgement as to the quality of their writing vis-a-vis one another.

I would say though that I definitely have read enough of Anne Tyler to know she doesn't make the grade (And "Digging to America" is one of hers that I've read, when this was mooted as already Tyler's greatest by one of her fans), much as her supporters would love her to be recognised as a GAN. Unlike another poster though, I wouldn't call her a "chick-lit" author, just as I wouldn't call Amy Tan herself a "chick-lit" author, but I would put her in the same literary pen as Amy Tan, and that's no disrespect to either Tyler or Tan.

I know the very best of Chang-Rae Lee could equal a Toni Morrison, but the lack of Asian American writers with heft is indeed one of those ignored-but-hard-to-miss-bald spots on the Great American literary landscape, if not indeed, the Great English literary landscape itself. Unfortunately Asian American writers are also far more easily dismissed and discounted than other ethnic American writers, at least in Britain, where ethnic novelists apparently only come in the black or brown variety, and so the history of Chinese / Korean / Japanese Americans, and British people with East Asian heritage, continued to be told from the perspective of White novelists (a la J.G. Ballard) or even Black novelists (cf. Zadie Smith in "Autograph Man"). However sympathetic or even empathetic those novelists might be, they are not the genuine, authentic voices we seek.

Bookish quotation 3 for deckchair competition

Roddy Doyle:

"I knew all the books in the house. I knew their shapes and smells. I knew what pages would open if I held them with the spine on the ground and let the sides drop."

-- Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, p.75 (and what a beautiful argument against e-books!) (by the way, apropos of the Julian Barnes thread, this was one of the first hardback books I got, it was a bargain-priced £1.99 and it still has that sticker on the jacket to prove it! Hard-back, with dust jacket still intact, alas, it was only a reprint edition in 1993, so not a first edition, oh well (it probably wouldn't have been just 1.99 even in early 90s bargain prices!). Anyway, this is one of my favourite books ever and I like having it physically with me, and now, opening the book again to locate the quote after all these years, I'm a little sad to see the pages slightly yellowing around the edges already, even though it still looks pristine outside. But then I got reading one of my favourite passages again, that quietly heart-breaking part about how Paddy was trying so hard to mediate between his da and his ma by remembering his spellings and syllables, which had so much resonance for me when I first read it and still finds the passage resonating again after all these years... thanks for the chance to revisit a lost country.)

Bookish quotation 1 for deckchair competition

Yiyun Li

"I want to interfere with history, making things up at will, adding layers to legend... The scenes always move me, as they are the central scenes of a hero's story. I want the story to be about bravery. But always I am stopped."

(excerpted from "What has that to do with me?", first appeared in the Gettysburg Review, vol. 16 no. 2, re-printed at the end of the "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers". Here Li was not referring to her stories, but about the difficulty of recounting history, specifically that from her own experiences before she left China for America. It struck me that, as the powers-that-be have no qualms about re-writing history, the writers themselves conversely become ever more cautious about the way they tell their stories.)