The Associated Press reports that earlier today, the Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo in absentia. The last time this award was bestowed in absentia was 1936 when Hitler prevented Carl von Ossietzky from traveling to Oslo. No doubt China is smarting at the nasty association with Nazi Germany.
The Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, is a literary critic by profession. So how do we get from literary criticism to political activism?
On its face, a literary critic’s job is to interpret text. He approaches the text, hat in hand, and asks of it: what do you mean? But inevitably that takes him beyond the text. The task of eliciting meaning from a text is a political task that ultimately summons everything the critic knows about the context. What can he say of the world which gave rise to this text? He can’t very well evaluate the text without also evaluating the world. How did meanings in the text order themselves from meanings at large in the world? Was it an accident? Or was it an exercise of power?
A literary critic is like a judge, but in casual clothes. A judge asks of his texts: what do you mean? But the question carries him beyond the words in his lawbooks to the land that gave birth to those words. He asks what were the intentions of the lawmakers when they wrote these words. He asks how is it possible for mere words to bind people in chains. If a judge has courage, he may even ask whether there are numinous regions where meanings are more durable that the whims of those who hold power.
In the West, our educational policy makers tend to deride the arts, preferring a more utilitarian approach to education. So while our students learn to be competent players in the global economy, they may spend little time asking why. But this year’s recognition of Liu Xiaobo stands as a reminder that the arts do not exist in a sphere separate from the rest of the human endeavor, but engage it at its very heart. Thinking critically about the arts brings us inevitably into conversations about meaning, power and freedom.
Congratulations to Liu Xiaobo.
Photo is from wikicommons.