Coetzee in China

The Nobel Prize in Literature and Its Significance

In April 2013, J. M. Coetzee visited China for the first time as a participant in the second China Australia Literary Forum, hosted by the Chinese Writers’ Association (CWA).¹ On the agenda was a meeting with Mo Yan, who had been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature a few months earlier. A vice president of CWA, the official writers’ union, Mo Yan was the first Chinese author to receive the honor—excepting, arguably, Gao Xingjian, to whom it was given in 2000: Chinese-born Gao, who writes in Chinese, was by that time a French citizen. China’s “Nobel complex” has a long history, as explained by Julia Lovell in The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (2006). Mo Yan’s win, for which CWA and other state organs had worked hard, was a game-changer, assuaging Chinese cultural pride and hugely enhancing the author’s celebrity. It was a big deal, then, when Coetzee, who had won the prestigious prize in 2003, agreed to appear on stage with the new laureate.

In the lead-up to his Nobel win, Mo Yan had traveled widely, building an international reputation that dated back to Zhang Yimou’s film of his 1986 novel Red Sorghum.² When China was guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009, the author spoke at the opening ceremony, representing a literary culture that sought recognition on its own terms. He interpreted Goethe’s idea of world literature as a means of seeking “mutual understanding and mutual toleration”:

Literature cannot be separate from politics, but good literature is larger than politics. . . . Let us allow literature to play its key role in fostering communication between countries, nations, and individuals.

(Chinese Literature Today 20–22)

He treads a line between an instrumentalist view of literature as serving political ends and its potential autonomy if authors play their roles properly.³

While acknowledging Western influences on his work, as a Chinese writer, Mo Yan looks to the day when influence will travel in the opposite direction. On a visit to Australia for the first China Australia Literary Forum in 2011, he traced his origins as a writer to vernacular traditions of oral storytelling, as he would later do in his Nobel Lecture, “Storytellers.” It’s an approach he recommends to his colleagues:

Chinese writers who want to produce novels with Chinese characteristics, not only need to learn from the West, but more importantly they need to be nourished and to gather material from our own cultural traditions.

(Sydney Review of Books)⁴

In Sydney on that visit, Mo Yan asked me whether it was the male or the female kangaroo that had the pouch. It was an intriguing question from a man who has written so much about animals. He calls Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, his grandest novel, told from the perspective of a man reincarnated as a donkey, ox, pig, dog, and monkey in succession, “this lumbering animal of a story.”⁵ I suggested that he could slip away from the formal proceedings to visit the zoo and find out for himself, but he demurred out of respect for the official business. His name, a pen name, means “No Speech,” or more loosely “Stay Silent.” While prolific in his fiction, Mo Yan has been restrained in public utterance. He added to the controversy surrounding his Nobel Prize by defending censorship as sometimes necessary for a higher good—like the airport security checks he experienced on his way to Stockholm.⁶ Literature, for him, remains subject to the needs of the society that produces it, and to which the author is responsible.

For China the recognition of Mo Yan was a great national honor. It might have struck CWA as curious, then, that another Nobel literary laureate, labeled as Nan Fei (South Africa) on the covers of his books in China, should visit through a literary exchange with Australia.⁷ Yet if Coetzee and Mo Yan are located differently as authors, that is only one among many points of divergence...