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Chapter One: Introduction: Diagnosing the Complex
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3 ch a p ter on e Introduction Diagnosing the Complex T he question of why China—a country, so it is often claimed, with five thousand years of culture and a language spoken by one fifth of the world’s population—had failed for almost a century to win a Nobel Prize began to be raised with increasing urgency during the 1980s, following the Mainland’s reentry into the international political, economic, and cultural realm. The quest for a Nobel Prize was promoted to the level of official policy and Nobel anxiety evolved into a “complex” (Nuobeier qingjie) that drew in writers, critics, and academics. The task of securing a Nobel Literature Prize—viewed as a passport to world recognition as a modern civilization—generated conferences, a national literature prize, delegations to Sweden and countless articles. In the 1990s, following changes in the national politico-literary climate after the crackdown of 4 June 1989, the Nobel question was dislodged from its prominent public position but continued to rumble underground, reemerging on periodic waves of media hype. Through both decades the issue also mobilized worldwide interest among diasporic Chinese communities. There was a resurgence of Nobel anxiety in 2000: as the prize approached its centenary, Chinese journalists once again prepared articles on why a writer from China had still not won what was seen as the literary Olympics, on how the great modern Chinese writers Lu Xun (1881–1936), Lao She (1899–1966), Shen Congwen (1902–1988), and Ba Jin (1904–) missed out by a hair’s breadth, and so on and so forth.1 The question invites the rebuttal: why should China win a Nobel Prize? With due respect, how can any committee of individuals effectively judge the “most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency” that has conferred the “greatest benefit to mankind,” as stipulated vaguely in Alfred Nobel’s prize testament? Why should China care about, or even find anything illogical or unfair in the fact that a group of Swedish judges—almost all lacking the ability to read 4 chapter one Chinese—had failed to appreciate its modern literature? In the West, public debate about Nobel rights and wrongs is seldom heard outside the media coverage that erupts around the annual announcement made in October (the private hopes of writers are, of course, another matter). The fact that some European countries have failed to win a prize hardly makes a story, let alone a book. Dutch commentators, for example, are not embarrassed to admit that a prize would be desirable, but the issue does not annually generate dozens of articles in academic and literary circles. But the question takes on a larger significance when we note similarities between the “Nobel Complex” and the preoccupations that have engaged the dominant Chinese intellectual experience of modernity: anxiety about China’s international status, ambivalence towards Western influences and values, and the relationship between Chinese intellectuals (especially writers) and national politics. The plausible barriers between China and the Nobel Prize, namely, ignorance on the part of the outside world, the workings of different literary value systems, and linguistic differences, have often been forgotten in face of the broader anxieties of significant numbers of Chinese intellectuals in the global arena: what is so wrong with Chinese literature that it cannot join the modern world literary order symbolized by the Nobel Prize? The term “complex” started to be used in the 1980s to discuss Chinese Nobel anxiety and is in itself revealing of the broader context of modern Chinese history. It first of all suggests a psychoanalytical path of enquiry. The Nobel Literature Prize had become a cause of a psychological disorder, a token whose value and authority as imagined in China was inflated out of all proportion to its real importance or exchange value in international letters. In Freudian terms it was an object of desire, the lack of which became a larger symbol for the impotence of Chinese intellectuals in the modern world. Secondly, in addition to its general significance in psychoanalysis, the word “complex” carries very particular connotations in the modern Chinese context. It taps into powerful discourses of sickness and the inferiority of the Chinese character first formulated by modern intellectuals such as Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) and Lu Xun that have survived into intellectual discussions of the post-Mao period. Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century imbibed imperialist views of Chinese racial inferiority, and the project of curing the diseased national character underlay much...