林培瑞 2012年12月27日
本月初，诺贝尔文学奖颁给了中国小说家莫言。中国国内和国际舆论对此纷争四起。大约两周前，“中参馆”发表研究中国文学的学者罗福林(Charles Laughlin)的题为《莫言的批评者错在何处》的文章。这篇文章在很大程度上是对更早以前林培瑞为《纽约书评》所撰的《这位作家配得诺贝尔奖吗？》(Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?)一文的批评。中参馆在此特别邀请林培瑞回应罗福林的评论。
我认为，罗福林的文章提出了两个重要的问题：第一，莫言和其他中国当代作家有没有或者在多大程度上陷入了毛式语言，因此不仅限制了他们的文学表达也限制了他们的境界？第二，尽管他们生活在政治言论审查的制度中，这样的作家有没有办法写出漂亮的文学？
毛式语言的陷阱有多深有多广？
在这个问题上，罗福林不赞成孙笑冬(Anna Sun)在《凯尼恩评论》上发表的《莫言的病态语言》(The Diseased Language of Mo Yan)一文的观点。孙发现莫言所写的几乎每一页都充斥着农村方言、社会主义流行语的老生常谈，以及文学的装模作样的大杂烩。孙把这归咎于莫言上学时学到的共产主义术语和毛式语言，后者罗福林也提到。但是孙认为莫言陷入了毛式语言的陷阱，而罗则认为莫言置身其外，只是在讽刺它，而这种讽刺解释了孙所发现的“大杂烩”的存在。罗福林写道：“莫言的小说呼应了对‘毛式’那种荒诞的平庸乏味的讽刺，并把视角放在更广阔的历史与文化背景之中，而不仅仅局限在改革开放的社会主义文化之内。也正是因为这样，他的小说才显示出多种多样的语言来源。”
我赞成孙的观点。把莫言将不同语源的大杂烩称为“讽刺”的最大问题是：大部分他的大杂烩语言很难被读成讽刺，如果有讽刺的意味那也似乎比较偶然。比如，莫言的《檀香刑》是描写1900年义和团运动的小说，远早于社会主义流行语出现的年代，但小说中的人物却不断说出社会主义的术语。一个年轻女子说出她的“领导者”——这个词在1900年是不可能出现的。这是“讽刺”吗？讽刺什么？我认为更大的可能是莫言写得太快（通常作者写得太快就会有这样的问题），导致他的思维定式不经意地呈现在写出的文字中。孙笑冬正确地指出：葛浩文(Howard Goldblatt)的翻译在审美统一和确定性上比原作高明。
但是不经意的语言习惯在多大程度上反映，或者像孙所建议的那样，决定对世界的构思方法？孙引用了乔治・奥威尔(George Orwell)的如下引言：“如果思想腐化语言，语言也同样可以腐化思想。”这出自1946年出版的《政治和英文语言》(Politics and the English Language)，仅仅在著名的“沃尔夫假定(Whorf hypothesis)”出现的几年之后。 “沃尔夫假定”推进了不同的语言导致不同的世界观的理论。在西方的认知科学家中，沃尔夫(Benjamin Lee Whorf)一向都很有争议性。但是很有趣的是，中国共产党人（尽管没有证据表明他们借用了沃尔夫的任何理论）总是对同样的原则忠诚不渝。自从1950年代以来，中共宣传部总是根据政治的需要散发媒体所需的“强调”或者“避免”的词汇清单[1]，他们这样做的不变理由就是相信：对词汇的控制有助于“指导思想”。有很多的证据显示这一套确实有效。1989年我在北京见过一面的女子，现在已经成为一位中文语言老师，最近我又和她在普林斯顿大学重逢。试着想记起我们第一次见面的细节，她这样问我：“我们见面是在‘动乱’以前还是以后？”我笑着试探她：“你指的‘动乱’是什么意思？是学生动乱还是政府动乱？”她不假思索地回答：“当然是学生动乱。”然后她盯着我看了一阵，意识到我的问题所在，恍然大悟地说：“啊，对了！是政府动乱。是大屠杀！”然后她开始了一长串的抱歉解释：1989年，她自己也是上街抗议的学生，在屠杀之前的几天还一直呆在天安门广场，她站在学生一边，她支持我的观点。但是现在“学生动乱”这一个词，可以像说“星期三”那样，从她嘴里脱口而出。这在多大程度上是思维定势造成的？这种被引导的语言习惯在多大程度上加强了政府的权力？这样的事情在多大程度上影响了中国作家？罗福林和孙笑冬提出了很关键的问题。
1993年，文学评论家李陀发表了一篇精彩的关于著名作家丁玲（1904-1986）的文章[2]。丁玲在1920年代是一位先锋派的女权主义者，1930到1940年代是理想的共产主义者，1960到1970年代是政治犯。李陀指出，丁玲在其中年时候吸收了毛式语言，在经历了毛政权20年的迫害之后，显然还是无法从毛式语言脱身。李陀的结论是：“一旦一个人钻进了某种语境，要想脱离这种语境就异常困难”。
李陀说服了我。在我最近发表在《纽约书评》关于莫言的文章中，我认为，那些选择流亡的中国作家，尽管他们付出了巨大的代价，他们至少有机会让他们的语言变得自由。我写道，哈金“不仅离开了中国，也离开了中国的语言。他只用英语写作，部分原因是要保证哪怕是深藏在潜意识的影响也不要波及他的表达”。罗福林评论说，“还无法确定这就是哈金以英文写作的主要原因，但如果作家在面对母语中意识形态的包袱时竟会那么脆弱，以至于不能以母语创作出健康的文学语言，这实在是太可悲了”。这里的关键是，我们不能忘记我们所说的母语并非任何一种语言，而是毛式语言——它包含着比其他大多数语言更多的军事用语和政治偏见。毛式语言已经渗透进人们的日常生活而且今天还在中国被鲜活地运用着。莫言在他的大杂烩中用了毛式语言，哈金想逃脱它。（插一句，我不敢肯定罗福林所说的哈金想逃离毛式语言是他用英文写作的“主要”原因。哈金亲口告诉我了这个理由，但他并没有说是不是“主要”的理由。罗福林建议可能还有“更主要”的理由，但没有明确地说出来。如果他有更好的信息，我乐听其见。）
生活在政治审查制度中的作家能够找到方法写出漂亮的作品吗？
在我为《纽约书评》所撰的文章中，我反对莫言的下列写作模式：在他的描述20世纪中国历史的全景式小说中，每当描写到中国的大灾难时期，比如大跃进、大饥荒，莫言便诉诸“娴熟的调笑”笔法——比如把羊的精子射入兔子，或者强迫某人当众吃下一个削成假驴生殖器形状的萝卜，然而对导致三、四千万人死亡的大饥荒却只字不提，因此转移了读者的视线。这里罗福林误解了我的有关莫言写作的观点，但我对这样的误解也有部分责任。我的观点可能表述得不太清楚。我没有说，因为莫言陷入了毛式语言的陷阱，他只能用这种方式表达自己。如果是这样的话，避免禁忌话题就只是一个偶然——作者对此可能没有想得太多。但是对于莫言以及其他在中国体制内出版作品的作家，这不可能是真的。他们都意识到这些禁忌话题，要么避免这些话题，要么想办法侧面处理这些话题。莫言只是好几个用我所谓的“娴熟的调笑”的笔法写作的作家之一。这里再举一个例子，余华所写的全景式小说《兄弟》充满了“娴熟的调笑”笔法（余华的《十个词汇的中国》抛弃了这种技法，所以更诚实也更动人）。
我在别的文章中谈到在“后毛时代”中国作家的写作呈现出一种“反磁性症状”，这种症状的表现就是：这些作家瞄准毛主义的中心，然后开始向它推进，但是当他们快到中心的时候，他们就转移了方向[3]。1970年代后期的“伤痕文学”，张贤亮和从维熙的劳改营自传，以及1980年代的“先锋派”作家比如余华，韩少功，苏童和残雪，尽管他们各有不同，都有这种症状的表现。
罗福林不赞成我的观点，至少在莫言的问题上。他说：“莫言的目标读者知道大跃进导致了灾难性的大饥荒，对历史创伤的任何艺术化处理都会有自己的变化和扭曲。”罗福林认为莫言是在讽刺，而非掩盖。如果罗是这样表述他的这种观点，我在比较狭隘的意义上是可以接受他这种说法的（尽管我个人理解的讽刺并不延伸到驴子的生殖器）。在我看来，问题出在罗福林所指的“目标读者”上。莫言在一次采访中说过，他写作的时候并没有想到谁会是他的读者，因此这里的“目标读者”可以理解为作者语汇中暗指的读者，而非真正的读者。在这一点上，“暗指的读者”在文学研究中是一个常用的术语，所以我就以此进行分析和理论。
我的担心在于真正的读者。“娴熟的调笑”会如何影响这些读者？我希望罗福林在这点上和我观点一致：莫言的真正读者数量众多，大多比较年轻，并且在中国的历史上相对来说并没有受到很好的教育。要达到罗福林所指的莫言的理想型“目标读者”的程度，一个年轻的中国人必须越过好几级中共教育体制设置好的智力障碍：首先，并没有什么大饥荒，这只不过是外国人杜撰出来的诽谤；第二，如果有大饥荒，这是恶劣的气候造成的“三年困难时期”；第三，如果大饥荒确实是人为的，那也不是毛造成的，因为毛很伟大；第四，如果真是毛造成的，人们只是因为饥饿而死，而不是像杨继绳在《墓碑》中所记录的因为殴打，活活被烧死（称为“点天灯”），或者用铲锹将脑浆迸裂（称为“开花”）而死。
对于真正的读者来说，莫言对历史的轻佻的处理方式转移了他们对难以正视的以及在深层文化中潜伏事情的关注。规避这些事情可能对某些、甚至大多数的读者来说是令人欢迎的。但是不管怎样，对于中国当局来说一定是值得欢迎的。莫言有没有可能并没意识到政府欢迎他的这种处理笔法？他怎么会呢？罗福林写道：“难道林的意思是暗示莫言这样的写作风格是在洗白历史，或者向共产党献媚吗？”但是，我确实如此认为，或者和这意思很相近。我只是会用“扭曲”而非“洗白”，用“为了确保他在党领导下的职业前途”而非“向共产党献媚”。
罗福林写道，我“好像希望文学创作在处理历史悲剧主题时应该采取忠实纪录的形式，还要附上统计数字、图表和大量叙事者的哀悼”。我想罗和我都知道这一表述只不过是个稻草人，他如此引申发挥一点儿也伤不了我的感情。在正视残酷的作家中，索尔仁尼琴(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)和萧红是我最喜欢的两位作家。他们两位既不引用统计数字，也远离那种“作者的自怨自艾”式的表达方式。正因为他们允许读者自己内生出与其作品强烈的共鸣，他们那种简约的文风尤其有力。
罗福林提出了一个与审查制度下的艺术相关的问题：作家是否有可能生活在政治审查中但是忽略它的存在――不遵从，不反抗，也不讽刺它，但是描写一些当局并不关心的生活领域，由此你既不用扭曲任何事情，也不用担心忤逆当局？他举出了周作人、梁实秋和张爱玲的例子。除了很偶然的时候，他们在1930和1940年代所写的散文和故事都很少涉及日本侵略中国的话题。那个时候的其他中国作家基本上都会写到日本的问题，要么他们生活在日本审查制度之下，要么他们生活在自由的中国，但是抗日的主题却异常迫切。罗福林提出了很好的问题，他所引用的三位作家确实有助于他的论点，即政治压力（除非它们像毛统治后期那样严厉）未必会灭绝精彩的写作。
将生活在1937年至1945年日本审查制度下的中国作家，和生活在1949年以后的中国作家并列比较，罗福林这样做的勇气令我敬佩。这是中国历史学家不愿意，中国出版商不可能去触碰的对比。大致而言，日本审查制度要比中共的审查制度有更多的机械化规定，更少的心理威慑。但是它们对作家的基本两难选择却很相似：我要合作吗？合作到多大的程度？我要去批评吗？怎样去批评？我几种选择的风险和收益各是什么？
这里有必要指出日本和中共审查制度在背景上的两大不同之处。中共放大其中的一种，试图抹杀另外一种。放大的一点是：日本人是侵略者，在世界的任何一个国家，如果压迫者是外国人的话都会有更痛的感觉。要抹杀的一点是：在毛统治时代，中共杀掉了超过日本人杀戮的八到十倍的中国人。有人会说日本人更残忍，因为他们在1937年的南京大屠杀的时候比赛削人头和活埋中国人。但是谁又能说这些比文化大革命时期1969年发生在广西的挖眼睛，杀死“阶级敌人”之后吞噬肝脏的仪式，就像郑义在他1993年的《红色纪念碑》［4］中所描述的那样，更残酷呢？后毛时代的中国教育体系放大日本统治期间的残酷性，但是却完全掩盖中共统治下所发生的残忍真相。美国的父母，如果他们想对这种巨大的扭曲有一种本能的领悟，可以试着想象如下的情景：他们的孩子放学回来，充满了对英国人在1775年到1783年以及1812年侵犯时的仇恨，但是却说，“内战”（发生在1861至1865年的美国南北战争）只不过是自然灾害或者不幸所造成的“五年困难时期”。（这样的历史比较不是特别完美，但是它显示的弥天大谎却比较相似。）
尽管有这样不同的背景，让我们也和罗福林一起把莫言和日本审查时期的作家如张爱玲比较一下。罗福林写道：“我并非说莫言可和这些作家相提并论”。希望确实如此。张爱玲鲜明的，精致编织的语言不仅比莫言不同语源的大杂烩要好，并且好得太多；而且她的深层心理描写让莫言狂欢节似的表象成为笑柄。但是罗福林想说的论点却与此不同。罗的论点是莫言“也坚持自己的独特看法，不愿为摆出政治姿态而承受压力”。但是这一点罗福林一定是错了。很清楚，莫言从1980年代至今，一直对政治压力异常敏感，而且在不断地调整他的政治姿态。他和其他同样在体制内的作家的主要不同之处在于，他计算得更聪明，他也有更多不同的层次。罗福林和莫言都要求我们把他的政治立场和文学造诣分开来看，但我们无法这么做。莫言的政治立场体现在他的艺术之内，也体现在他的艺术之外。他的作品描述了地方上的政治暴力和腐败（党中央也希望尊重人所共知的事实），但是他避免做出是整个体制的问题的结论。同样地，用“娴熟的调笑”来描写大跃进、大饥荒又是怎么回事儿？即便我们只提“暗指的读者”以及纯粹的讽刺，我们能够想象张爱玲用大笑话的方式去写南京大屠杀吗？她没有这样做过。她怎么可能这么做？
西方中心主义的问题
中文的“西方中心主义”不太好翻译，所以请原谅我用这个有点笨拙的词West-centrism。我在罗福林的文章中发现了西方中心主义，尽管并不是只有罗有这个问题。尽管并非故意有时也没有意识，西方学术界和文学政治评论广泛存在着西方中心主义。
当孙笑冬抱怨说，莫言的语言重复�嗦，是可以预见的，而且是不同语源的大杂烩。罗福林这样回答说：“对一个21世纪的作家做出这样的评价是很奇怪的”，因为“世界历史乃至世界文学逐渐悖离了狄更斯们(Dickens)的那种道德必然性，这正是工业革命兴起，以及帝国主义世界的道德基础崩塌所带来的后果”。现在的世界有沃尔夫(Woolf)，乔伊斯(Joyce)，品钦(Pynchon)，拉什迪(Rushdie)，德里罗(DeLillo)，等等。孙笑冬显然是落伍了。
当罗福林谈到“世界”的时候，他所指的不是“世界”而是西方。尽管西方的文学学者反对“霸权主义”和“后殖民主义”，但在建立理论动态以及考量非西方如何模仿西方上，他们在完全实践这些他们口头上反对的主义。（这种模式在文学“理论”上要比在文学评论上更清楚，更可鄙）。
莫言真的是以狄更斯开始直至哈代(Hardy)，最终演进为福克纳(Faulkner)、加西亚・马尔克斯(García Márquez)这一流派中的一员吗？为什么他应该是其中之一呢？为什么他的“幻觉现实主义(hallucinatory realism)”就不能植根于山东的民间故事？这些民间故事已经有会说话的动物以及吊丧的鬼怪这些志怪想象。在莫言的诺贝尔领奖词中，他特别提到清代蒲松龄《聊斋志异》鬼怪故事对他的影响。对我而言，他描写的血腥打斗以及男子汉气概让我想到《水浒传》，也是发生在山东的故事。他的小说《天堂蒜薹之歌》和《蛙》所显示的道德确定性和狄更斯的小说一样有自信。我们真的要说莫言其他小说中所表现出的想象力是他吸取了西方包括后现代主义经验的结果吗？如果他的“不同语源”不是“工业革命兴起以及帝国主义世界的道德基础崩溃”后的“21世纪结果”呢？为什么我们非要把他划入西方的话语兜袋中呢？
自从1980年代中国对外“开放”以后，那里的文化精英提倡“走向世界”。中国作家喜欢说他受到这位或那位著名外国作家的影响，尽管他可能没有读过或者读过很少他的作品。莫言在他的诺贝尔领奖词中也说到这一点：他受到福克纳和加西亚・马尔克斯的巨大影响，但是他马上加了一句：“尽管我并没有广泛地阅读他们的作品”。西方人和中国人一样，也喜欢并且要保持西方中心主义。那些来自世界另一端的神秘的社会主义国家的有天分的作家把我们西方看作是文学的主流和前沿是多么荣光的事情啊！
有时候西方人用“社会主义”这个词来描述中国也显示了那种居高临下的态度。中共政权当然称自己是“社会主义”。但是所有生活于其中的人都知道他们的社会在疯狂地追逐金钱，存在着巨大的贫富差距，公信力极低，社会福利制度支离破碎或者根本不存在，以及为了政治上的安全，当政治表演需要的时候，操纵使用像“社会主义”这样的词汇。中国社会几乎是瑞典那样的社会主义国家的反面。但是当罗福林（我在此并非针对他个人，这种情况广泛存在）好几次用“社会主义”来描述中国的时候，我不仅担心这种用法的不准确性，而且也担心其中暗含的微妙的居高临下态度：你们生活在大洋另一端的人居然有我们这边自由派所指的“社会主义”。真不错啊。
刚刚过世的天体物理学家和人权活动家方励之先生，正确地指出西方态度的双重标准。当欧洲的共产主义失败时，冷战被认为是“结束”了。但是中国，朝鲜和越南呢？如果相反的事情发生了—-亚洲的专制主义失败了，但却在欧洲存活了——华盛顿和伦敦还会欢呼冷战的结束吗？假如索尔仁尼琴，不是去揭露古拉格，而是对它去开玩笑呢？那么我们还会为他的“艺术”唱赞歌，因为他的目标读者都知道古拉格是怎么回事，并且也欣赏他的黑色幽默？或者，令人悲哀的是，只有非白人才能以这种方式赢得诺贝尔奖？
潘杰拉・米什拉(Pankaj Mishra)在最近发表在《卫报》的一篇题为《为什么萨尔曼・拉什迪应该停止在审查问题上谴责莫言》(Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship)中承认莫言给予中国的统治者令人不齿的支持。但是米什拉文章的主旨却是：西方的作家同样也是压迫远方人民强权的帮凶。因此，他向拉什迪（还有我，他文中也提到了）叫“停”。我年轻的时候反对过美国对越南的战争；我从来都没有替美国政府帮过腔，而且我也赞成米什拉的一些透彻观察，比如，“简・奥斯汀(Jane Austen)高雅的相对封闭的世界”有赖于加勒比地区“地狱般的奴隶庄园”的存在。但是所有这些为什么会意味着我应该在批评北京及其追随者时“停止”呢？
在关于人权的论争中我们常常听到一种论调。这种论调有几种版本，但大致都是这样的思路：
A: X国有问题P。
B: 与人们的印象相反，Y国也有问题P。
在一般的言谈中，人们通常忽视B的荒谬逻辑，因为B的真正用意是他给A的建议：如果A是Y国的公民，他或她最好在X国问题上闭嘴。但是，在我们这个日益全球化的世界，为什么我们要像B所建议的那样行事？是否只有等伦敦一尘不染，萨尔曼・拉什迪才可以对北京发表意见？我猜，如果你真的去撼动他的肩膀，米什拉会说（就像我一样）任何国家的任何人都应该自由地批评压迫任何人的任何政府。但是他的文章没有给人留下这样的印象。
中国和其他地方的专制者经常要求外国人停止对他们的批评，他们这样做的理由很明显。但是西方的自由派为什么也这样做就不那么明显，所以值得对此进行探讨。我在有关中国人权问题演讲之后，经常有听众提出这样的问题：“我们自己的政府如此糟糕的时候，为什么你要批评中国政府？”我想，尽管有其表象，这样的观点有赖于我上面提到的西方中心主义的态度。我下面就此再解释一下。
当同样的问题出现在世界上任何地方的时候，问题严重的程度常常是非常不一样的。莫言和刘晓波所呈现出的问题——压制言论，骚扰和囚禁“反抗者”以保证国家权力——也有可能发生在民主社会，但是发现了这一点然后断言：“你看，这世界哪里都一样，所以我们不要说了”，就不仅仅是弱智的表现了；如果说这话的人远离那些真正受苦的人，他们这样说就更经不起道义的考验。想象一下，如果一个坐在单调囚室里一条冷板凳上的中国自由派人士，听到一个手拿《卫报》坐在沙发上的美国自由派人士这样的话：“我的朋友，你我都有各自爱寻衅的政府，所以我不能批评你的政府”，这位中国人会是怎样的感受？实际上，我们没有必要去猜测答案。来自很多国家的前政治犯，包括来自中国、捷克斯洛伐克、南非、缅甸等等国家的前政治犯，都已经充分地表示：当他们呆在监狱的时候，他们期望得到来自外国给予他们的任何支持。
当我发现他们这样做的主要目的是为了安慰自己，这种带着优越感表示关心的态度就更让我生厌。在美国的自由主义文化中，如果他们批评了他自己的社会，就自我感觉良好。这样就显示他们具有“批评性思维”，“独立性”，以及思维开阔，他们欣慰自己具备这些特质而心安自喜。（实际上，真正的独特常常很稀有；人们常听到的所谓“批评性”观点其实有很大的趋同性。我所指的心安的主要来源就是，人们有自信觉得他们表达的趋同观点不会遭到同伴的攻击。）心安理得当然是好事，我也不反对。但是，对一个坐在扶手椅上的人的心理舒适度的考虑，多过对一个被监禁者精神和肉体上所受到的折磨，那就令人作呕了。
罗福林担心我们西方的旁观者，在为像刘晓波那样的英雄加油鼓劲（因此而得到心理安慰）的时候，想当然地认为那些选择留在体制内工作的人就是懦夫。罗福林认为这是一个错误的判断。我完全同意罗的观点。其实，刘晓波本人也这么看。在2006年发表的《通过改变社会来改变政权》一文中，刘晓波这样写道：
“当从事高调反抗政府的人（包括我本人在内）看待那些留在体制内低调周旋的人的时候，高调反抗应该把低调周旋当作一种补充，而不是自以为绝对英雄而横加指责……。一个人自愿为自己选择的理想而付出巨大代价，并不构成去强制别人也为理想而作出同等牺牲的理由。”
刘晓波可能不会像罗福林那样认为莫言属于体制内推动人权民主的人。莫言所做所写的某些事情是在推动，没错；但是有些其他的事情又非常明显地是在默认政府的反击。我肯定，刘晓波会觉得莫言没有必要地软弱。
莫言配得诺贝尔奖吗？
罗福林注意到我发表了一篇题为《这位作家配得这个奖吗》的文章，但并没有给出答案。罗的观察比较公允。我文章的标题是《纽约书评》的编辑加的，我也是直到发表才看到。我现在给出我的答案。
“X是否配得诺贝尔”的问题，在自然科学领域，测定优秀与否有比较客观的标准，因此回答这样的问题会比较有信心（但从来就没有一定性）。但是在文学奖和和平奖方面，这个问题就取决于个人偏好，人人共识是不可能的。亨利・基辛格(Henry Kissinger)都得过和平奖。如果这已经是事实，还有什么不可能的呢？
我只能回答这样的问题：“我个人会选择莫言吗？”另外再加上下列的限定语：“在活着的中国作家之中”。（只有活着的作家才能得诺贝尔奖。）
我的回答是否定的。莫言不会在我的名单的顶端。在中文语言的真实性和控制力上，我认为钟阿城，贾平凹，王安忆，廖亦武和王朔比莫言优秀；在小说构思的技法上，我认为白先勇和哈金显然要比莫言高明；在开阔的精神境界上，郑义是我的首选；最后我认为余华和金庸（写出风行的历史武侠小说的香港作家）也要高于莫言。但这只是我个人的观点。你也可以有自己的选择。
注释
1. 见Michael Schoenhals：《中共中央宣传部‘宣传动态’选集》（1992， M.E.Sharpe 出版）。
2. 李陀，《丁玲不简单：毛体制下知识分子在华语生产中的复杂角色》。《今天》1993年第三期。
3. 《序言》，《共产中国的无辜人生》，康正果著 （诺顿， 2007）。
4. 《红色纪念碑：现代中国人吃人的故事》 （Ross Terrill 和T. P. Sym翻译，Westeview出版, 1996)。
本文最初于2012年12月24日以英文发表于中参馆(ChinaFile)，这是亚洲协会(Asia Society)中美关系中心最新出版的在线杂志。
本文作者林培瑞(Perry Link)是普林斯顿大学(Princeton University)东亚研究的荣誉退休教授、加州大学河滨分校(University of California at Riverside)的教学创新主任讲座教授(Chancellorial Chair for Innovative Teaching)。林培瑞学术涉猎广泛，主要研究中国现代文学、社会史、大众文化、20世纪初中国的通俗小说和毛泽东时代以后的中国文学。他的最新一部著作是《解析中文：韵律，隐喻与政治》(An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics)。
翻译：林丹霜
——纽约时报中文网
【原文】
CHINAFILE
Politics and the Chinese Language
December 27, 2012
The awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan has given rise to energetic debate, both within China’s borders and beyond. Earlier this month, ChinaFile ran an essay by Chinese literature scholar Charles Laughlin called“What Mo Yan’s Detractors Get Wrong.” That essay was, in large part, a critical response to an earlier piece in The New York Review of Books by Perry Link. We invited Link to respond.
In my view, Laughlin’s essay raises two important questions: 1) To what extent, if any, are Mo Yan and other contemporary Chinese writers trapped in a Maoist language that constricts their expression, and perhaps their vision as well? and 2) Can writers who live under political censorship nevertheless find ways to write to write well?
按图放大
Fredrik Sandberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mo Yan during a public reading at Stockholm University earlier in December.
How Pervasive Is the Maoist Language Trap?
On this question, Laughlin takes issue with Anna Sun, who has written an essay in The Kenyon Review called“The Diseased Language of Mo Yan.” Sun finds Mo Yan’s language, on virtually “any page,” to be “a jumble of words that juxtaposes rural vernacular, clichéd socialist rhetoric, and literary affectation.” Sun attributes much of the problem to Mo Yan’s schooling in Communist jargon and in Mao-ti (Maoist literary form), which Laughlin also refers to, calling it MaoSpeak. But Sun thinks Mo Yan is stuck inside MaoSpeak and Laughlin thinks he is outside, satirizing it, and that the satire explains the “jumble” that Sun finds. Laughlin writes: “Mo Yan’s fiction is a resounding of satire of the absurd banality of MaoSpeak from a much broader historical and cultural perspective than that of socialist culture before Reform and Opening, and this is why one would expect his fiction to manifest a variety of linguistic registers.”
I agree with Sun. The problem with labeling Mo Yan’s jumble of registers as “satire” is that much of it is hard to read as satire and at least some of it seems quite inadvertent. Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death, for example, is set during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, well before the advent of socialist jargon, and yet characters in the story spout socialist jargon. A young woman refers to her lingdaozhe, or “leader”—a word no one used in 1900. Is this satire? Of what? I think it is more likely that Mo Yan was writing too quickly (which seems to me often the case), and allowed his own conceptual habits to seep out unnoticed. Anna Sun is right to suggest that Howard Goldblatt’s translations are “superior to the original in their aesthetic unity and sureness.”
But how much do unnoticed linguistic habits reflect conceptual approaches to the world—or even, as Sun suggests, shape them? Sun quotes George Orwell that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This is from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” published in 1946, just a few years after the famous “Whorf hypothesis” advanced the notion that different languages lead to different world-views. Among Western cognitive scientists, Whorf has always been controversial. Hence it is interesting that Chinese communists (although there is no evidence that they borrowed anything from Whorf) have always had faith in the same principle. Since the 1950s, the Party’s Propaganda Department has disseminated lists of words for the media “to stress” and “to downplay” as political needs come and go, [note 1] and the unchanging assumption has been that this word-engineering helps to “guide thought.” There is much evidence that it works, too. I was recently talking with a Chinese-language teacher whom I had not seen since 1989 in Beijing. Trying to recall our first meeting, she asked me, “Was that before or after the dongluan [turmoil]?” Teasing her, I asked, “What do you mean bydongluan? Student dongluan or government dongluan?” She replied reflexively: “Studentdongluan, of course.” Then she peered at me for a moment, realized what I had meant, and said: “Oh, yes! Government dongluan. The massacre!” Then she went into a long apology to me: she herself had been a student protestor in 1989, had been in Tiananmen Square in the days before the massacre (but not during it); she was on the students’ side; she agreed with me. And yet the phrase “student turmoil” now rolled off her tongue as easily as “Wednesday.” How much conceptual baggage went along with it? How much does this kind of induced linguistic habit reinforce state power? And how much does this sort of thing affect Chinese writers? Laughlin and Sun raise a crucial issue.
In 1993, the literary critic Li Tuo published a brilliant article on the famous writer Ding Ling (1904-1986). [note 2] Li argues that Ding Ling, a pioneer feminist in the 1920s, idealistic communist in the 1930s and 40s, and political prisoner in the 1960s and 70s, absorbed the outlook of Maoist language during mid-career and apparently could not extricate herself from it even after suffering two decades of punishment by Mao’s regime. “Once a person enters within a certain discourse,” Li concludes, “to exit it becomes extremely difficult.”
Li Tuo persuades me and, in my recent essay on Mo Yan in The New York Review of Books, I argued that Chinese writers who have chosen exile, while paying a fearsome price, at least have a chance to pull their language free. Ha Jin, I wrote, “took the unusual step of departing not only China but the Chinese language; he writes only in English, in part to be sure that even subconscious influences do not affect his expression.” Laughlin says he is “not yet convinced that this is the main reason Ha Jin writes in English, but it would be a sad state of affairs if writers were so vulnerable to the ideological baggage of their native language that they are unable to create a healthy literary language with it.” Here it is crucial to remember that we are speaking of not just any native language but a specific one—Mao-language—which is much more freighted with military metaphors and political biases than most. Mao-language has seeped into daily-life Chinese and is still very much there. At the ends of banquets, even today, mainland Chinese sometimes urge their friends to xiaomie [annihilate] the leftovers; a mother on a bus, the last time I was in Beijing, answered her little boy, who said, “Ma, I really need to pee!” by saying, “Jianchi![Be resolute!] Uncle bus driver can’t stop here.” Mo Yan includes Mao-language in his jumble. Ha Jin wants out. (I cannot comment, by the way, on Laughlin’s question of whether escape from MaoSpeak was Ha Jin’s “main” reason for writing in English. Ha Jin told me his reason in person, but did not say whether it was “main” or not. Laughlin suggests there may be other, more main reasons, but does not name them. If he has good information, I would be glad to hear it.)
Can Writers Living Under Political Censorship Find Ways to Write Well?
In my piece in The New York Review, I objected to Mo Yan’s pattern of presenting panoramic surveys of twentieth-century Chinese history but then, arriving at catastrophic episodes like the Great Leap famine, deflecting attention by resorting to “daft hilarity”—shooting sheep sperm into rabbits or forcing someone to eat a turnip carved to be a “fake donkey dick”—while making no mention of starvation that cost 30 million or more lives. Here Laughlin misunderstands my point about Mo Yan’s writing, and I will take part of the responsibility. I may not have been clear enough. I am not arguing that Mo Yan can only express himself this way because his is stuck in the Maoist language-trap. If that were so, the avoidance of taboo topics would be inadvertent, something the author does not think about. But that cannot possibly be the case with Mo Yan or with the many other Chinese writers who publish “inside the system” in China. They all have to be aware of taboo topics, and either avoid them or find ways to deal them only glancing blows. Mo Yan is but one of several writers who use what I have called “daft hilarity” as a method. To name just one other example, Yu Hua’s Brothers, another panoramic novel, is full of daft hilarity. (Yu’s China in Ten Words, which discards the technique, is more honest and considerably more moving.)
I have written elsewhere of what I call the “reverse magnet syndrome” in post-Mao Chinese writing, by which writers “aim at the heart of Maoism and begin to move toward it, but as they draw near are deflected in one direction or another.” [note 3] Late 1970s “scar literature,” the labor-camp memoirs of Zhang Xianliang and Cong Weixi, and 1980s “avant-garde” writers like Yu Hua, Han Shaogong, Su Tong, and Can Xue can all be shown (despite all their other differences) to exhibit the pattern.
Laughlin disagrees with me, at least for Mo Yan’s case, arguing that “Mo Yan’s intended readers know that the Great Leap Forward led to a catastrophic famine, and any artistic approach to historical trauma is inflected or refracted.” Laughlin sees Mo Yan as doing satire, not cover-up, and when the point is put this way, I can, in a narrow sense, accept it (even though my personal taste in satire does not extend as far as donkey dicks). The problem, in my view, turns on Laughlin’s phrase “intended readers.” Mo Yan has said in interviews that he does not write with any particular readers in mind, so “intended readers” here needs to be understood not as actual readers but as the kind of reader that is implied by the writer’s rhetoric. In this meaning, “implied reader” is a well-established term in literary studies, and it is fair enough to analyze things this way.
My own worry is about the actual readers. How does “daft hilarity” affect them? I hope Laughlin will agree with me that Mo Yan’s actual readers are numerous, mostly young, and not very well schooled in Chinese history. To reach the level of what Laughlin sees as Mo Yan’s ideal “intended reader,” a young Chinese must leap a number of intellectual hurdles that Communist Party education has put in place: first, that there was no famine, because the story is only a slander invented by foreigners; second, that if there really was a famine, it was “three years of difficulty” caused by bad weather; third, that if the famine indeed was man-made, it still wasn’t Mao-made, because Mao was great; fourth, that if it was Mao-made, people died only of starvation, not beatings, burnings-alive (called “the human torch”), and brain-splatterings with shovels (called “opening the flower”), as Yang Jisheng’s book Tombstone documents.
For actual readers, Mo Yan’s giddy treatments of history divert attention from things that are hard to look at but that still lurk in the culture at deeper levels. Escape of this kind may be welcome to some readers, perhaps most. In any case it is certainly welcome to the regime. Can Mo Yan be unaware that the regime welcomes it? How could he be? Laughlin writes: “surely Link doesn’t mean to imply that Mo Yan, by writing in this way, is trying to whitewash history out of loyalty to the Communist Party?” But I do, I’m afraid, mean something very close to this. I would use the word “distort” instead of “whitewash,” and instead of “loyalty to the Party,” I would say “in order to preserve his career prospects under Party rule.”
Laughlin writes that I expect “creative literature to approach historical tragedies in the form of a documentary exposé, with statistics, graphic images, and generous doses of authorial lamentation.” I think both he and I know that this is a straw man, and that my feelings are not hurt to see him impale it. Among writers who look honestly at cruelty, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Xiao Hong are two of my favorites. Neither employs statistics, and both are about as far from “authorial lamentation” as one can get. Their spare prose is especially powerful precisely because it allows its enormous implications to be born and to grow inside the reader.
Laughlin raises a related question about art under censorship: Isn’t it possible to live under political censorship and just ignore it—not obeying, not defying, not satirizing, but writing about the very large areas of life where the authorities don’t care and therefore you don’t have to distort anything and don’t have to worry? He cites examples of Zhou Zuoren, Liang Shiqiu [Liang Shih-chiu], and Zhang Ailing, who wrote essays and stories in the 1930s and 1940s that did not, except occasionally and tangentially, have anything to do with the Japanese invasion of China. The Japan issue dominated most other Chinese writers at the time, either because they lived under Japanese censorship or because, living in free China, the imperative of resistance was so strong. Laughlin asks a good question, and the three writers he names establish his point that political pressures (unless they are severe, as during the late Mao years) need not exterminate excellent writing.
I salute Laughlin in particular for his courage in juxtaposing the two cases of Chinese writers under Japanese censorship between 1937 and 1945 and under communist censorship after 1949. It is a comparison that Chinese historians are loath to make and that Chinese publishers would find utterly untouchable. In general, the techniques of Japanese censorship were much more mechanical, and less psychological, than those of Communist censorship, but the fundamental dilemmas for writers were similar: Do I collaborate? How much? Criticize? How? What are the risks and rewards of my several options?
Two large differences in the background situations of Japanese and Chinese Communist Party censorship need to be noted. The CCP magnifies one of these and tries to obliterate the other. The first is that the Japanese were invaders, and, anywhere in the world, there is added sting when oppressors are foreigners. The second is that the Mao years of the CCP killed about eight to ten times more Chinese people than the Japanese did. One might say that the Japanese were crueler, with their head-lopping contests and buryings-alive during the Nanjing massacre in 1937; but who can say whether that was crueler than the gouging of eyes during the Cultural Revolution or, in Guangxi in 1969, the ritual eating of livers of slain class enemies, as Zheng Yi has documented in his 1993 book Red Memorial? [note 4] Chinese education in the post-Mao years has magnified outrages under Japanese rule and utterly repressed those that happened under CCP rule. American parents, if they wanted an intuitive sense for the enormity of the distortion, would have to imagine that their children come home from school filled with hatred of the British for their affronts of 1775-83 and of 1812 and saying that the Civil War was a matter of “five years of difficulty” occasioned by natural occurrences or some other kind of bad luck. (The historical analogy is not perfect, but the size of the lie is similar.)
Background differences notwithstanding, let’s join Laughlin in putting Mo Yan side-by-side with writers like Zhang Ailing, who wrote under Japanese censorship. Laughlin writes: “My point is not that Mo Yan is these writers’ equal.” Let’s hope not. Zhang Ailing’s glowing, finely wrought language is not just better, but far, far better than Mo Yan’s jumble of registers, and her deep psychological perception makes a cartoon of Mo Yan’s carnivalesque surfaces. But the point Laughlin wants to make is different. It is that Mo Yan “forcefully asserts his particular vision without regard to pressures to adopt and convey a political posture.” But this point is just plain wrong. It is abundantly clear that Mo Yan, beginning in the 1980s and continuing to today, is highly sensitive to political pressures and calibrates his postures accordingly. The main difference between him and the average inside-the-system Chinese writer is that he is cleverer in his calculations and has more layers. Both Laughlin and Mo Yan ask that we separate his political stances from his literary art, but this cannot be done. Mo Yan’s stances are inside his art as well as outside. His work shows political violence and corruption at local levels but (respecting what everyone knows are the wishes of Party Central) avoids conclusions about the system as a whole. And what about daft hilarity as an approach to the Great Leap famine? Even if we speak only of the “implied reader” and pure satire, can we imagine Zhang Ailing treating the Nanjing massacre as a big joke? She did not do this. Could she?
The Problem of West-Centrism
The Chinese phrase xifangzhongxinzhuyi does not translate easily, so please pardon my awkward term “West-centrism.” I find West-centrism in Laughlin’s essay, but the problem is by no means his alone. It is widespread (albeit often unintended and unnoticed) in academe and in liberal political opinion in the West.
When Anna Sun complains that she finds Mo Yan repetitive, predictable, and a jumble of disparate registers, Laughlin parries: “This is a strange argument to make about a twenty-first-century writer,” because “the world and its literature have departed from the kind of moral certainty of Dickens, precisely because of the crumbling of the moral foundations of the world of imperialism and the industrial revolution.” The world now has Woolf, Joyce, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, and others. Anna Sun apparently is lagging behind.
What Laughlin calls “the world,” however, is not the world, but the West. Literary scholars in the West rail against “hegemonism” and “post-colonialism” but in fact practice these very things by establishing trends and then measuring the rest of the world by how well it imitates them.
Is Mo Yan really part of a flow that began with Dickens and Hardy and has now come to Faulkner and García Márquez? Why should he be? Why is it not quite all right for his “hallucinatory realism” (as the Nobel committee called it) to be rooted in the storytelling tradition of his native Shandong, which itself includes flights of fancy like talking animals and aggrieved ghosts? In his Nobel lecture, Mo Yan paid tribute to the ghost stories of Pu Songling’s Qing dynasty collection, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. To me, his scenes of bloody fighting and machismo recall Shuihuzhuan, a fourteenth-century collage of stories about rollicking outlaws set in his native Shandong. His novels The Garlic Ballads and Frogs show a moral certainty just as confident as Dickens’; do we want to say that his flights of imagination in other works show how he has catapulted himself through the experience of the West all the way to post-modernism? What if his “disparate registers” are not a “twenty-first-century response” to the “crumbling of moral foundations after imperialism and the industrial revolution”? Why do we put him in a Western bag?
After the “opening” of China in the 1980s, cultural elites promoted the watchword “walking toward the world.” Writers liked to claim influences from this or that famous foreign writer, even if they had read little or nothing of the foreign writer’s work. Mo Yan illustrates the point in his Nobel lecture when he says he “was greatly inspired” by Faulkner and García Márquez, but in the next sentence says “I had not read either of them extensively.” Westerners as well as Chinese have enjoyed and perpetuated this West-centrism. How flattering that gifted writers from that mysterious socialist country on the other side of the world see us as the literary mainstream and forefront!
Westerners’ use of the word “socialist” for China sometimes illustrates the same kind of condescension. The regime does, of course, call itself socialist. But everyone who lives inside the society knows that it runs on wild money-making, has huge income inequality, is very low in public trust, has social safety-nets that are tattered or non-existent, and manipulates words like “socialism” only when public performance, which is done for the sake of political safety, demands it. Chinese society is nearly at an opposite pole from socialism in a country like Sweden, and yet Laughlin (again I don’t mean to pick on him personally; the practice is widespread) several times uses the word “socialist” to refer to today’s China. I worry not only about the factual inaccuracy of the usage but about the subtle condescension in which it is embedded: You people on the other side of the wide ocean have what we Western liberals call “socialism.” Nice.
The late astrophysicist and human rights activist, Fang Lizhi, was good at pointing out double standards in Western attitudes. When Communist dictatorships fell in Europe, the Cold War was declared “over.” But what about China, North Korea, and Vietnam? If the reverse had happened—if dictatorships had fallen in Asia but persisted in Europe—would Washington and London still have hailed the end of the Cold War? What if Solzhenitsyn, instead of exposing the gulag, had cracked jokes about it? Would we have credited him with “art” on grounds that his intended audience knows all about the gulag and appreciates the black humor? Or might it be, sadly, that only non-whites can win Nobel Prizes in this mode?
Pankaj Mishra, in a recent essay in The Guardian called “Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship,” acknowledges that Mo Yan has offered deplorable support to China’s rulers. But the main point of Mishra’s essay is that Western writers have also been the handmaidens of power that oppresses people in distant places. He asks, therefore, that people like Rushdie (and me, whom he also mentions) “pause.” As a young man I protested the U.S. war in Vietnam; I have never been a handmaiden to U.S. power and I admire some of Mishra’s penetrating observations, for example that “Jane Austen's elegantly self-enclosed world” depended on unseen “hellish slavery plantations” in the Caribbean. But why does any of this mean that I should “pause” before criticizing Beijing or its acolytes?
A certain kind of argument is often heard in debates over human rights. It has several versions but they all fall into this pattern:
A: Country X has problem P.
B: On the contrary, country Y also has problem P.
In most conversations, people overlook B’s logical absurdity because the real point is the advice that B is giving to A. If A is a citizen of country Y, he or she should shut up about country X. But why, especially in our increasingly globalized world, should this be? Must Salman Rushdie hold his tongue about Beijing until London is squeaky clean? My guess is that Pankaj Mishra, if you could shake him by the shoulders, would say (as I would) that any citizen of any country should be free to criticize any government anywhere that oppresses anyone. But his article does not leave that impression.
Authoritarians in China and elsewhere regularly take the position that foreigners should keep criticisms to themselves, and the reasons for their position are obvious. The reasons why Western liberals often take the same position are far less obvious but well worth probing. When I give public lectures on human rights in China, I very often get questions from audiences that ask, one way or another, “Why are you criticizing the Chinese government when our own government is so bad?” I believe that, despite its surface appearances, this kind of view depends on West-centric condescension of the kind I discussed above. Let me explain.
In cases where a problem is found everywhere in the world, it hardly follows that it is the same size everywhere. The kinds of problems that Mo Yan and Liu Xiaobo present—suppression of speech to protect state power, harassment and prison for “offenders”—can be found in democratic societies, but to stand on that discovery and say “look, the whole world is the same, so let’s calm down” is not only intellectually feeble but, when uttered by people who live at comfortable distances from the true suffering, is morally indefensible. How do you think a Chinese liberal, sitting on a bench in a drab prison, would feel to hear an American liberal, sitting on a couch with the Guardian, say, “You and I both live with aggressive governments, my friend; I must pause before criticizing yours”? Actually we don’t need to guess at the answer. Former political prisoners from many places—China, Czechoslovakia, South Africa, Myanmar, and elsewhere—have made it abundantly clear that during stays in prison they craved any support they might get from the outside world.
I find the condescending attitude especially distasteful because its main purpose is to comfort the condescender. In American liberal culture people feel good when they express criticism of their own society. It shows “critical thinking,” “independence,” and a generous broad-mindedness, all of which one can congratulate oneself for having. (True independence, in fact, is rare; the “critical” views one hears often show great conformity, and one major source of the comfort I am referring to is the confidence that one’s conforming expressions will be safe from attack by peers.) Comfort is a good thing; I am not opposed to it. But to make the mental comfort of someone in an armchair a higher priority than the spiritual and physical torment of a prisoner is disgusting.
Laughlin worries that we bystanders in the West, while cheering heroes like Liu Xiaobo (and again deriving comfort therefrom?), assume that anyone who opts to work within the system is automatically craven. This is a mistake, in Laughlin’s view, and here I entirely agree with him. So does Liu Xiaobo, by the way. In his 2006 essay “To Change a Regime by Changing Society,” Liu writes:
When people [like me] who engage in high-profile confrontation with the regime hear about people who are [staying inside the system], perhaps pursuing matters in more low-key ways, the high-profile people should view the efforts of the low-key people not as errors but as contributions that are complementary to their own. … The decision by one person to pay a heavy price for the ideals he or she has chosen to pursue is insufficient grounds to demand that any other person make a similar sacrifice.
Where Liu would disagree with Laughlin is on whether Mo Yan in particular is one of those people pushing for human rights and democracy inside the system. Some things Mo Yan does and writes look like pushes, yes; others, far too obvious, look like acquiescence to the counter-pushes of the regime. I am certain that Liu Xiaobo would find Mo Yan unnecessarily weak.
Does Mo Yan Deserve the Prize?
Charles Laughlin notes that I have published an essay called “Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?” but do not answer the question. Fair enough. The title of my essay was written by editors of The New York Review of Books, and I did not see it until the piece came out. Let me address the question now.
Ways to measure excellence in the natural sciences are objective enough that the question “Did X really deserve a Nobel?” can be answered with some confidence (if never certainty). For the literature and peace prizes, though, the question is so beholden to personal impressions that consensus is impossible. Henry Kissinger won a peace prize. If that happened, what is not possible?
I can answer only the question, “Would I personally have chosen Mo Yan?,” and I would like to restrict it further by adding the phrase “… among living Chinese writers.” (Only living writers are eligible for the prize.)
The answer is no, Mo Yan would not have been at the top of my list. For authenticity and control of language, I would rate Zhong Acheng, Jia Pingwa, Wang Anyi, Liao Yiwu, and Wang Shuo more highly; for mastery of the craft of fiction, Pai Hsien-yung and Ha Jin are clearly superior to Mo Yan; for breadth of spiritual vision, Zheng Yi is one of my favorites. I would also have put Yu Hua or Jin Yong (the Hong Kong writer of popular historical martial-arts fiction) above Mo Yan. But those are only my views. Please help yourself to your own.
Notes:
1. See Michael Schoenhals, ed., Selections From Propaganda Trends, an Organ of the CCP Central Propaganda Department (M. E. Sharpe, 1992).
4. See T.P. Sym’s translation, Scarlet Memorial: Stories of Cannibalism in Modern China(Westeview, 1996).
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