Taking Mo Yan in Context by strategy: yes, grist for the mill!

Abstract

ABSTRACTGuan Moye, better known today by his pen name, Mo Yan (meaning ‘don’t talk/speak’), is the Chinese writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. One commentator in the London Review of Books (29 August 2013) has suggested that the ‘good life is his’, and ‘Mo Yan is in no danger … of becoming anything other than a child’. Following Shelley Chan’s study, A Subversive Voice in China (2011), Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s anthology, Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller (2014), offers the second book of commentary and analysis in English on Mo Yan’s so-called ‘hallucinatory realist’ works. As the title of Duran and Huang’s collection clearly proposes, the contributions to this book recognise the importance of reading Mo Yan’s texts ‘in context’. Taking ideological analysis seriously in what Marx and Engels call the ‘material surroundings’ (The German Ideology) of the ‘entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime’ (Capital), the question for radical critique becomes: what is ‘context’, how is ‘context’ understood and dealt with, why is ‘context’ significant, and what should ‘contextual’ reading/writing aim toward and justify through critical qi di (启迪, enlightenment)? Bearing these questions in mind, this essay offers a critique of the notion of ‘in context’ in Duran and Huang’s Introduction by resituating it ‘from without and within’, which is the dialectical materialist lesson of the Chinese model revolutionary opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.