It is heartening to note that Guan Moye (better known by his pen name of Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak” in Chinese), who won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, is the first China-based individual to be accorded this honour, not counting jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, who got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 in what many believed was part of a campaign to further the West’s political agenda.
It’s now likely that Mo’s books will be translated into many languages, including Indian, to give us a chance to read about the real China of the 20th century rather than dramatised versions seen in films like the Last Emperor, buried in a China of the distant past. Having no clear-cut idea of the country, besides reading about its economic success in the media, people worldwide can now hope to see past China’s “mystery” and get a glimpse into how its society has evolved.
Mo’s fascinating background in rural China and the characterisation of his writing by the Nobel Committee as the weaving of hallucinatory realism into “folk tales, history and the contemporary” makes the award seem a special moment for Asia, the continent of larger-than-life folk tales and a rich but tumultuous past, not just China. The fact that the Chinese establishment is likely to welcome the recognition given to Mo, unlike the frosty reception the Peace Prize evoked in 2010, makes it particularly significant, and may yet show that the pen is mightier than the myths it creates.