莫言已经不配

——敦请瑞典文学院收回对莫言的诺贝尔文学奖

范弓飞

尊敬的瑞典文学院：

当你们在2012年将诺贝尔文学奖颁给莫言的时候，我相信你们的眼光是准确的，你们的评奖是严肃的，你们对文学的态度是认真的。

但你们很难想象，在莫言生长的国度，很少有人能够阅读到你们当年的颁奖词全文。那是一篇充满敏感词和机锋的文字，更是一种独到眼光下对莫言作品的精准解析和透彻领悟。既然连颁奖词都难以看到全文的这群国人，自然很难知道你们为何将这个伟大的奖项颁给了莫言。所以，当莫言获奖之后，没有少招来国人的讽刺与抵制，说他迎合西方口味，说他自揭家丑，说他讨好非我族类等等，不一而足。

但无论如何，就当时来看，莫言获奖好像是实至名归，而且也是可以被大家拿来讨论的事件。与他比较起来，另一个华人获奖者则显得悲壮和不幸得多，他几乎是被有意埋没的金子，他发出的光芒被层层遮盖！

对于颁奖后获奖者的遭遇和变化，你们从来就不闻不问。尽管你们的专业素养不容质疑，你们的评奖机制严谨完备，但你们正在逐渐变成一个冷漠的颁奖机器，你们的权威和声望，仅仅体现在颁奖的那一刻而已！

在此，因为莫言最近领了另外一个所谓的文学奖，我敦请你们收回颁给他的诺贝尔文学奖，以证明你们并非冷漠的机器，也并非将权威和声望虚掷的机构。其理由如下：

1.你们的颁奖词里，开篇即这样说：莫言用讥讽和嘲弄的手法向历史及其谎言、向政治虚伪和被剥夺后的贫瘠发起攻击。莫言今天的所作所为哪里配得上这样的褒奖！他明明就是向一种政治虚伪投降，从侵略者的手中接过那毫无诚意毫无羞耻感的奖杯，这是对文学和正义的双重背叛。

2.你们的颁奖词里这样评价：他给我们展示的世界没有真相、没有常识、更没有怜悯，那里的人们都鲁莽、无助和荒谬。本来你们想表彰的是莫言对这些现象的批判与讽刺，但现在莫言自己变成了自己的讽刺对象。能够欣然地从侵略者手中领奖的人，他的眼里就真的失去了世界的真相，也没有了常识和怜悯，他明明知道在乌克兰土地上那些鲁莽的俄罗斯人都干了什么，但他依然不觉得自己的行为有丝毫的荒谬！

3.你们的颁奖词还有这样尖锐而精准的判断：在莫言笔下的**，我们从来没有遇见过一个理想具有合乎标准特征的公民。现在，请你们回答，莫言自己是一个合乎标准特征的公民吗？你们当年赞美他，是因为他笔下的人物打破了政治规划的牢笼，拒绝成为体制标准的“顺民”；而如今，他自己却主动去迎合、去符合某种被规训的、国际政治层面的“标准特征”，这何其讽刺！

综上所述，我敦请你们收回给他的诺贝尔奖项，因为他正在以自己的行为证明自己已经不配！他曾经用文字帮这片土地撕下了你们所谓的“程式化的宣传海报”，可到了晚年，为了在这座宏大的剧场里继续坐稳交椅，他终究还是像王朔笔下的唐元豹一样，亲手剥下了自己作为文学刺客的脸皮，血肉模糊地站在了另一个领奖台上。他去领的这个奖，是对你们奖项的最大讽刺和挑战！

Award Ceremony Speech

Presentation Speech by Per Wästberg, Writer, Member of the Swedish Academy, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, 10 December 2012.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Mo Yan is a poet who tears down propagandistic posters and elevates the individual from the human mass. With satire and mockery, Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications, political hypocrisy and collective poverty. With playfulness and an unmasked delight, he uncovers the darkest aspects of human existence, finding in the process images of strong symbolic power.

Gao Mi Northeast Township embodies Chinese folk stories and history. Few journeys can surpass these stories and history into a country where the clamour of donkeys and pigs drowns out human voices, and where love and evil assume supernatural proportions.

Mo Yan’s fantasy soars above all humanity. He is a magnificent describer of nature; he knows all the implications of hunger. The naked cruelty of 20th-century China has never been described with such force—with its heroes, lovers, torturers, bandits, and strong, indomitable mothers. He gives us a world without truth, without common sense, and without compassion, where people are reckless, helpless and absurd.

Evidence of this misery is the cannibalism that frequently recurs in Chinese history. In Mo Yan’s writing, cannibalism symbolises unchecked consumption, extravagance, waste, carnality and indescribable desires. He alone is able to cross taboo boundaries to interpret this.

His novel The Republic of Wine is a satire of China’s one-child policy, where girl babies are aborted on an astronomical scale: girls are not even good enough to be eaten. Mo Yan has written an entire novel, Frog, about this.

Mo Yan’s stories are disguised as myths and fables, placing all values within the theme of the story. In Mo Yan’s China, we never meet an ideal citizen with standard characteristics. The characters he describes are full of vitality, not hesitating to use unconventional steps and methods to achieve their life ideals, breaking out of the cages planned by destiny and politics.

The past described by Mo Yan is not the happy history found in communist propaganda posters, but a heavy, detailed reconstruction of fifty years of propaganda using exaggeration, parody, myth, and variants of folk stories.

In his most brilliant novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the female perspective always occupies the dominant position. Mo Yan describes the Great Leap Forward and the great famine of the 1960s. He mocks the pseudo-scientific revolutionaries who tried to impregnate ewes with rabbit semen, branding anyone who expressed doubt as a rightist. The novel ends with the new capitalism of the 1990s, where all the fraudsters grow rich selling beauty products, still trying to hatch a phoenix through heterologous insemination.

In Mo Yan’s work, a forgotten peasant world rises up alive before our eyes, where even the most pungent gases make one feel refreshed, and though it is a cold-and-calculated ruthlessness, it is filled with joyful selflessness. There is never a dull moment in his writing. This author knows everything and can describe everything—all kinds of crafts, blacksmithing, construction, ditch-digging, animal husbandry and the tricks of bandits. His pen-tip is attached to all human life.

He is a successor to Rabelais and Swift, and also to Jaroslav Hašek, but perhaps more comical and shocking than anyone else in our time. His spiciness is of the pepper variety. In his grand tapestry-like stories of China's last one hundred years, there are neither dancing unicorns nor skipping girls. But the pigsty-like life he describes is so unique that we feel we have stayed there for too long. Ideologies and reform movements come and go, but human egoism and greed remain. So Mo Yan defends the individual against all forms of injustice—whether Japanese invasion, Maoist terror, or the fanatic production-maximalism of today.

Mo Yan’s homeland is a place where countless virtues and the most despicable coldness battle each other. For those who dare to go, what awaits you is a stumbling literary adventure. When has China, or the world, ever been swallowed by such an epic spring tide? In Mo Yan’s work, the giant roar issued by world literature drowns out the voices of many contemporaries.