“I have always been independent. I like it that way. When someone forces me to do something I don’t do it.”

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/12/the-novel-prize-winner-mo-yan-and-the-hazards-of-hollow-words-in-china.html

And yet:

“…when Chinese authorities ordered a boycott of a session where the freethinking writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling appeared, Mo Yan joined the walkout, later explaining that he “had no choice.””

Surely a Nobel Prize winner should be more subtle than this?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?pagination=false

Personally, I find Mo Yan to be somewhat bit disingenuous. For example:

“At the opening ceremonies of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2009, he read an officially vetted speech in which he claimed that literature should be above politics; but, when Chinese authorities ordered a boycott of a session where the freethinking writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling appeared, Mo Yan joined the walkout, later explaining that he “had no choice.””

Anyone raised in a Communist system knows very well that literature and politics are invariably linked: Either you chose to work within the system and recognize that literature has a certain propagandistic function (to help advance “the revolution”), or you chose to reject the system, and thereby adopt the position of a dissident, which is itself inherently political. Mo Yan seems to want to have it both ways, or more precisely, neither way: In effect, “Literature with Chinese characteristics.” Lol.

He also said of Liu Xiaobo this past October:

“I read some of his writings on literature in the 1980s…later, after he left literature and turned to politics, I haven’t had any contact with him, and I don’t understand much of what he has been doing since then.”

Again, this strikes me as highly disingenuous. If Mo Yan has no clue about what Liu Xiaobo has been doing since 1989, he’s a moron and lacks the kind of insight that any “great writer” by necessity brings to his work.

Not impressed.

I, too, have found Yu Hua’s fictional language, at least in translation, to be rather plain and “vernacular,” or “folksy.” Yet he claims that this was a conscious shift after his earlier attempts at avant-garde storytelling in the 1980s, which “failed to connect ordinary readers.”

Is Mo Yan’s writerly evolution as simple and direct as Anna Sun argues, or like Yu Hua, has it followed a more circuitous path?