The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature PDF
Preview The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature
the politics of cultural capital th e politics of cultur a l capita l China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature julia lovell university of hawai‘i press honolulu © 2006 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 06 07 08 09 10 11 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lovell, Julia. The politics of cultural capital : China’s quest for a Nobel Prize in literature / Julia Lovell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-2962-9 (hbk : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-2962-X (hbk : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-3018-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-3018-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chinese literature — Social aspects. 2. Intellectuals — China. 3. Nobel Prizes. I. Title. II. Title: China’s quest for a Nobel Prize in literature. PL2273.L68 2006 895.1'09 — dc22 2005036470 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by April Leidig-Higgins Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group contents Acknowledgments vii Prologue 1 chapter one Introduction: Diagnosing the Complex 3 chapter two The Nobel Prize for Literature: Philosophy and Practice 41 chapter three Ideas of Authorship and the Nobel Prize in China, 1900–1976 73 chapter four China’s Search for a Nobel Prize in Literature, 1979–2000 107 chapter five The Nobel Prize, 2000 163 Afterword 185 Notes 187 Glossary of Chinese Terms 223 Bibliography 225 Index 241 acknowledgments work on this book began in 1999 when I started researching a disserta- tion at the University of Cambridge. I owe enormous thanks, first and fore- most, to my supervisor Susan Daruvala for her constant generosity with her time and insights and for guiding me always judiciously with her inspiringly vast knowledge of Asian and Western literature and history. Many thanks are due as well to Michel Hockx, who has supported and encouraged the project from its beginnings as well as making extremely timely interventions and sug- gestions at important moments of thinking and writing. Bonnie McDougall most generously provided both crucial source material and a remarkably close and helpful reading of the manuscript at a moment that was extremely incon- venient to her. I have also profited from the comradeship of my fellow Ph.D. students at Cambridge, particularly Lim Song Hwee and Sy Ren Quah, both of whom provided me with invaluable source material and counsel at key points; and I am most grateful to Red Chan, for kindly sending me a copy of her thesis on Chinese literature in translation. I would like to thank especially Bai Ye, for offering me huge amounts of useful advice about navigating the literary scenes of Beijing and Shanghai and for generously opening up to me his address book and enabling me to make contact with a great many of the Chinese writers and critics I interviewed for the book. Thanks are owed also to these writers and critics, who patiently lis- tened to my interminable lists of questions. I am particularly grateful to Han Shaogong, who not only agreed to be interviewed, but in addition hospitably threw in a bonus tour around Hunan. The writing of the thesis was generously funded by research grants from the University of Cambridge and from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The completion of the book was made possible by a research fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Over the past two years I have benefited greatly from the relaxed, supportive research atmosphere of this college community. Many thanks also to Pamela Kelley, my editor at University of Hawai`i Press, for her thoughtful and stimulating responses to the manuscript and to Terre Fisher for the care with which she copyedited the manuscript. I am extremely vii grateful to the two anonymous readers who provided exceptionally thorough and helpful reports, both of which have much improved the book. The errors and shortcomings that remain are entirely my own. One of my largest debts is undoubtedly to my family: to my husband, Rob- ert Macfarlane, for his patient ruthlessness in hunting down faulty syntax and mixed metaphors (those that are left are exclusively my own doing) and for his invaluable guidance on European poetry and ideas of authorship; to my mother, Thelma Lovell, for her painstaking editing, for working out what I was meaning to say long before I had much of an idea, and for her insights, among many things, into Plato and Romanticism; to my brother, Stephen Lovell for help with Russian sources and advice about the painful business of thesis writ- ing. And in a broader sense, this book would never have been finished without the endless support and encouragement of my husband, parents, brother, and sister. an earlier version of Chapter Five appeared in Modern Chinese Litera- ture and Culture 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002) as “Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000.” An extract of a verse by Carl David af Wirsén from The Nobel Prize in Lit- erature by Kjell Espmark (G. K. Hall, 1991) is reprinted by permission of the Gale Group. viii Acknowledgments prologue O n 12 October 2000, when Gao Xingjian (1940 – ), a Chinese-born novelist and playwright then living in France, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, China’s century-long quest for Nobel glory finally came to an end.1 Chinese intellectuals and politi- cians had worried for decades over when a Nobel Literature Prize would come to China, but the lack of a Chinese laureate was now, it seemed, resolved and the mystique of the prize dispelled. A Chinese writer had been acclaimed “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.”2 Gao’s work, the Swedish Academy explained, was in touch both with Western modernism and the flow of sources from popular Chinese drama. Chinese literature could live happily ever after, basking in its global significance. Reactions to Gao’s prize soon dashed such hopes, however, as rumors and accusations of politicization began to circulate on both sides of the East-West ideological divide and throughout the global Chinese community. The gov- ernment in Beijing responded by denouncing the “political purposes” of the Nobel Prize, declaring the prize had lost legitimacy and calling Gao a “French writer.” Outside China, Gao was an unknown quantity. In the wave of panic that swept the Western media on the afternoon of October 12 — Who is he? What’s he written? How’s his name pronounced? — many reached for one of the first security blankets of nonspecialist reporting on contemporary Chi- nese culture and literature: Gao Xingjian is an exiled dissident. Writers in China displayed mixed feelings. Although pleased by this symbolic recogni- tion for literature in Chinese and critical of the government’s knee-jerk con- demnation of the prize, many were ambivalent about the political significance of honoring an exile who was relatively unknown in China at the time of the award.3 Chinese people in other parts of the world, meanwhile, were delighted that Gao as a Chinese had won a Nobel, even though Gao had for some time disassociated himself from China the nation-state and had shown little in- terest in being published or reaching readers there since his 1987 departure for France. Finally, a closer look at the Swedish Academy’s commendation of 1
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