The Nobel for literature: A checkered history

London, Asharq Al-Awsat – For over a century, bibliophiles everywhere have considered the Nobel Prize for Literature as the ultimate tribute to outstanding poets and writers across national and cultural boundaries. It is with great anticipation that lovers of literature await news from Stockholm, announcing the name of the latest winner.

And this year was no exception.

Many had expected the prize to go to the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, known, and widely appreciated, for his psychedelic narratives. Failing that, the prize could have gone to two American novelists Philip Roth and Dan DeLilo.

However, it was a little known Chinese writer, Mo Yan, who snatched the prize, presumably at the eleventh hour. Mo Yan means “Don’t Speak” in Chinese and is a pen-name for Guan Moye, a low-profile writer who lives in Beijing.

I first came across Mo Yan’s name in 1986 in Beijing during a visit to China. We had been invited to a special performance a play based on one of Mo Yan’s short stories. The play told of the sufferings of Chinese peasants before the Maoist revolution and the formation of a guerrilla to fight the feudal lords. We were told that the author was a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and only “a part-time writer.”

However, it by the late 1980s that Mo Yan’s work had found an audience both inside and outside China. This was done thanks to his short story “The Red Sorghum” which was made into a feature film that ended up winning prizes in several major festivals.

Expanded into a full-length novel “The Red Sorghum”, tells the story of a young peasant girl virtually sold into slavery by being forced to marry a rich old man. The novel sets the tone for Mo Yan’s entire work which studiously avoids China as it is today and focuses on a slice of history covering the period between 1911, when Sun Yat-sen created the first Chinese republic, to the eve of the Civil War that was to determine the country’s fate with the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949.

Mo Yan’s strategy is astute. It allows him to deploy all his literary talent, pick any subject he wishes, and create any kind of characters he likes without risking the anger of the Communist authorities.

As Hartley said in his “Go Between ”: “The past is a foreign country. There, they do things differently.”

Mo Yan tested the limits of that strategy in his novel “Frogs” which puts the spotlight on the tragic and comic consequences of the one-child policy imposed by the Communist leadership from the 1960s onwards. Insisting that the writer should stay in his room and write, rather than go out to shout against the government in the streets, Mo Yan quickly reverted to the pre-Communist past where no subject is taboo.

When news came yesterday that Mo Yan had won the Nobel Prize one could not avoid feeling that some political shennanigans may have been involved. This was the second time that a Chinese author was winning the prize. The first was Gao Xingjiang in 2000. A critic of the Communist regime, Gao Xingjiang had been driven into exile and settled in Paris after being declared persona non grata in Beijing. News of his triumph had been censored in China and reference to his work forbidden. Even today, most Chinese do not know who he is, let alone that he has won the Nobel Prize for literature.

This year, however, official Beijing has greeted Mo Yan’s win with as much noise as possible. Well well, are we witnessing a political move by the Nobel Academy to re-balance relations with the Beijing leadership?

In a sense, the Academy has never been totally oblivious of the political implications of the prize. Since bestowing the first prize in 1901, the Academy has tried to recognize as many cultures as possible while acknowledging literary creation in all continents. So far 108 writers and poets have won the Nobel Prize for literature. A glance at the list would reveal a number of interesting points.

First, the list reflects the overwhelming global domination of Western cultures with special focus on Western Europe and the United States. This may be partly due to the fact that works produced in non-Western languages are often unavailable to the judges in Stockholm while there is no denying that Western nations produce far more literature than any other group of nations. Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that a strong pro-West bias is involved. For example, so far only one Indian, Rabindranath Tagore, and one Arab, Naguib Mahfoud, have won the prize.

The second point indicates a paradox. While the Academy is clearly biased in favor of Western literature, it often picks writers and poets who have a critical, not to say adversarial, approach to the political and economic system of the West. It seems that writers and poets of the left have a better chance of winning than those on the right. And, yet, such winners of “the right” as Rudyard Kipling, Francois Mauriac, TS Eliot and Hermann Hesse are among the best remembered laureates.

This bias in favor of the political left could produce results that range from laughable, in the case of the Italian stand-up comic Dario Fo, who won in 1997, to annoying as with the Austrian Stalinist Elfriede Jelinek the winner in 2004.

The third point is that the Nobel is no guarantee that an author would continue to be read, or even remain in print, in the years after winning. For example, how many people still read Henrik Pontoppidan or Verner von Heidenstam, not to mention Roger Martin Du Gard?

Some winners deserve to be forgotten. But there are some who merit being read and re-read, among them Wislawa Szymborska,  Jaroslav Seifert and Miguel Angel Asturias. And, yet, over decades Nobel has not managed to widen the narrow contours of their audiences.

Finally, the list of winners is full of surprises. Going by my personal, and thus necessarily fallible, taste, I cannot see why the work of such authors as Harold Pinter, JMG Le Clesio, Nadine Gordimer, Orhan Pamuk and Herta Muller could be regarded as high literature.

I also find it hard to regard the work of Sir Winston Churchill and Lord Bertrand Russel as literature. Instead, I could think of dozens of authors who should have won but didn’t, among them Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, Geoffrey Hill, Philippe Larkin and Raymond Carver. And that is not taking into account writers and poets outside the Western world, among them several contemporary Arab and Iranian and Turkish writers and poets.

All in all, however, the Nobel Prize for Literature continues to provide a service by reminding the world, even if it is for just a few days, that literature deserves attention.