Xingjian, Gao (4 January 1940 - )
Gao Xingjian (4 January 1940 - )
Mabel Lee
University of Sydney
2000 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech
Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000
Gao: Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2000
This entry has been expanded by Lee from her Gao entry in DLB Yearbook 2000.
BOOKS: Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan (Guangzhou: Huacheng, 1981);
You zhi gezi jiao Hongchunr (Beijing: Beijing Publishing House, 1985);
Gao Xingjian xiju ji (Beijing: Qunzhong, 1985)–includes Juedui xinhao, translated by Shiao-Ling S. Yu as Alarm Signal, in Chinese Drama After the Cultural Revolution, 1979–1989, edited by Yu (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1996), pp. 159–232; Chezhan, translated by Yu as The Bus Stop, in Chinese Drama After the Cultural Revolution, pp. 233–289; also translated by Kimberley Besio as Bus Stop, in “Bus Stop: A Lyrical Comedy on Life in One Act,” in Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, edited by Haiping Yan (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 3–59; and Yeren, translated by Bruno Roubicek as Wild Man, in “Wild Man: A Contemporary Chinese Spoken Drama,” Asian Theater Journal, 7, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 184–249;
Dui yizhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu (Beijing: China Theater Publishing House, 1988);
Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe, 1988); expanded as Gao Xing jian duanpian xiaoshuo ji (Taipei: Lianhe, 2001); six stories translated by Mabel Lee as Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 2004)–comprises “The Temple,” “In the Park,” “Cramp,” “The Accident,” “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather,” and “In an Instant”;
Lingshan (Taipei: Lianjing, 1990); translated by Lee as Soul Mountain (Sydney: Flamingo, 2000; New York: HarperCollins, 2000);
Au bord de la vie (Canières-Morlanwelz: Lansman, 1993);
Shanhaijing zhuan (Hong Kong: Cosmos, 1993);
Gao Xingjian xiju liuzhong, 7 volumes (Taipei: Dijiao, 1995)–includes in volume 1, Bi’an, translated by Jo Riley as The Other Side, in “The Other Side: A Contemporary Drama Without Acts,” in An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, edited by Martha P. Y. Cheung and Jane C. C. Lai (Oxford & New York: Hong Kong University Press, 1997), pp. 149–183; also translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong as The Other Shore, in his The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999); in volume 2, Mingcheng; in volume 4, Taowang, translated by Gregory B. Lee as Fugitives, in Chinese Writing and Exile, edited by Lee (Chicago: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago, 1993), pp. 89–138; in volume 5, Sheng si jie, translated by Fong as Between Life and Death, in The Other Shore, pp. 45–79; in volume 5, Yeyou shen, translated by Fong as Nocturnal Wanderer, in The Other Shore, pp. 137–190; and in volume 6, Duihua yu fanjie, translated by Fong as Dialogue and Rebuttal, in The Other Shore, pp. 81–136;
Le Somnambule (Carnières-Morlanwelz: Lansman, 1995);
Ink Paintings by Gao Xingjian, text translated by D. J. Toman and Tom Smith (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 1995; Dumont, N.J.: Homa & Sekey, 2002);
Meiyou zhuyi (Hong Kong: Cosmos, 1996)–includes “Zi xu,” “Meiyou zhuyi,” “Wo zhuzhang yizhong leng de wenxue,” “Wenxue yu xuanxue: Guanyu Lingshan,” “Geren de shengyin,” “Guanyu Taowang,” “Geri huanghua,” and “Ling yizhong xiju,” all translated by Lee in The Case for Literature (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2006); and “Bali suibi,” translated by Fong as “Parisian Notes,” in Leng de wenxue: Gao Xingjian zhuzuo xuan / Cold Literature: Selected Works by Gao Xingjian, bilingual edition, translated by Fong and Lee (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005);
Zhoumo sichongzou (Hong Kong: New Century, 1996)–includes “Sheng sheng man bianzhou,” translated by Fong as “Variation on ‘A Slow Slow Tune,’” and “Wo shuo ciwei,” translated by Fong as “I
Say Porcupine,” in Leng de wenxue/Cold Literature; title work translated by Fong as Weekend Quartet, in The Other Shore, pp. 191–254; title work revised as Quatre quatuors pour un week-end (Carnières-Morlanwelz: Lansman, 1998);
Goût de l’encre (Paris: Voix Richard Meier, 1996);
Au plus près du réel: Dialogues sur l’écriture (1994–1997), by Gao and Denis Bourgeois (La Tour-d’Aigues: Aube, 1997);
L’Encre et la lumière de Gao Xingjian (Paris: Voix Richard Meier, 1998);
Yige ren de shengjing (Taipei: Lianjing, 1999); translated by Lee as One Man’s Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2002);
Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 2000);
Bayue xue (Taipei: Lianjing, 2000); translated by Fong as Snow in August (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003);
Mo yu guang: Gao Xingjian jinzuo zhan / Darkness & Light: An Exhibition of Recent Works by Gao Xingjian (Taipei: Xingzheng, 2001);
Wenxue de liyou (Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 2001)–includes “Xiandai hanyu yu wenxue xiezuo,” translated by Lee as “The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation,” in The Case for Literature;
Gao Xing jian juzuo xuan (Hong Kong: Ming Pao, 2001);
Ling yizhong meixue (Taipei: Lianjing, 2001); translated by Nadia Benabid as Return to Painting (New York: Perennial, 2002);
Muqin (Taipei: Lianhe, 2001);
Gao Xingjian: Ink Paintings 1983–1993, edited by Curtis L. Carter (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, 2003);
L’Errance de l’oiseau (Paris: Seuil, 2003);
Le Quêteur de la Mort (Paris: Seuil, 2003); Chinese translation by Gao published as Kouwen siwang (Taipei: Lianjing, 2004);
Pengyou (Taipei: Lianhe, 2004);
Gao Xingjian (Paris: Galerie Claude Bernard, 2004);
Gao Xingjian Experience (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2005).
PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Juedui xinhao, Beijing, Beijing People’s Art Theater, August 1982;
Chezhan, Beijing, Beijing People’s Art Theater, July 1983; University of Michigan, Arena Theater, 2001;
Yeren, Beijing, Beijing People’s Art Theater, 1985;
Duo yu, Stockholm, Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, 1987;
Mingcheng, Hong Kong, Hong Kong Dance Company, 1988;
Sheng sheng man bianzou, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1989;
Bi’an, Taipei, National Arts College, 1990; Gannon University, Schuster Theatre, 2001; Los Angeles, Sons of Beckett Theater Company, 2003;
Taowang, Stockholm, Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, 26 May 1991;
Duihua yu fanjie, Vienna, Theater des Augenblicks, 1992;
Sheng si jie, Paris, Renaud-Barrault Théâtre du Rond-Point, 1993; New York, Theater for the New City, 1997;
Yeyou shen, Avignon, Théâtre des Halles, 1999; Davis, Theatre and Dance Department of the University of California, 2003;
Bayue xue, Taipei, National Theater, December 2002;
Zhoumo sichongzou, New York, Play Company, 2003;
Kouwen siwang, Marseille, Théâtre du Gymnase, 2003.
OTHER: “Pulieweier, Geci ji,” in Waiguo xiandai shi (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1984);
“Younaisiku, Tutou genii”, in Huangdanpai xiju (Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1985);
“Wenxue de jianzheng: Dui zhenshi de zuiqiu,” translated by Mabel Lee as “Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth,” in Witness Literature: Proceedings of the Nobel Centennial Symposium, edited by Horace Engdahl (Singapore: World Scientific, 2002), pp. 113–127;
“Meng bo,” translated by Lee as “Dream Waves,” in A Birthday Book for Brother Stone: For David Hawkes, at Eighty, edited by Rachel May and John Minford (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2003), pp. 305–308.
SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS–UNCOLLECTED: “Contemporary Technique and National Character in Fiction,” translated by Mau-sang Ng, Renditions, 19–20 (1983): 55–58;
“The Voice of the Individual,” translated by Lena Aspfors and Torbjörn Lodén, Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies, 6 (1995): 71–81;
“Without Isms,” translated by Winnie Lau, Deborah Sauviat, and Martin Williams, Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia, 27–28 (1995–1996): 105–114.
Playwright, novelist, and artist Gao Xingjian was a prominent leader of the avant-garde movement in fiction and drama that emerged in the wake of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China. In 2000 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama,” as the citation read. This decision by the Swedish Academy marked the first time the Nobel Prize had been awarded for a body of writings in the Chinese language. At the time of his award, his major works had also been published in French, Swedish, and English translation; and by the end of 2003, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, German, Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Slovenian editions had been published. Gao’s plays have not been publicly performed in China since 1986, but, from 1987, performances have been staged in theaters all over the world.
Gao was born on 4 January 1940 in war-torn Republican China (Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province) during the Japanese invasion and received his formal education in the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong’s New China, established in 1949. Gao, however, had grown up in a liberal family environment and had free access to a sizable family library of Chinese literature as well as many volumes on Western literature and art, and he provided a solid education for himself through reading. From childhood he had wanted to become an artist, and on completing high school he wanted to enroll in an art school. When he realized that it would mean painting propaganda posters, he subsequently chose to study French at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, a choice that was crucial in his development as a writer. As more and more Chinese books were banned from the 1950s onward, he was able to continue reading his way through the shelves of French books at the Institute library. Following his graduation with a major in French literature, he was assigned work as a translator and editor at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. He continued reading books in French until all books in foreign languages were banned during the course of the Cultural Revolution. Before long, in 1970, along with almost the entire staff of the press, Gao was sent to attend a May Seventh cadre school for “reeducation” through hard labor.
Mao Zedong’s guidelines for literature, established in Yan’an in 1942, were rigidly enforced during the Cultural Revolution. In Mao’s program for literature and the arts, both Chinese and Western traditions had no place. The value of the individual was negated, and it was decreed that literature and the arts should serve the masses, although it was clearly understood that all creative activity was to serve a hierarchy of political authorities, at the pinnacle of which was Mao Zedong. The implementation of Mao’s wishes meant that the author and the reader, as well as the characters in literary works, were divested of psychological, intellectual, and physical autonomy.
Gao had begun keeping a diary soon after learning to write, and by the time he was a young adult he had developed an obsessive desire for self-expression in writing. During the Cultural Revolution, when stringent measures were imposed on writers, many who had begun their careers as early as the 1920s were publicly denounced and punished for what they had written decades earlier. Gao was aware that what he wrote in secret did not conform to Mao’s guidelines, and at the height of the Cultural Revolution, he reluctantly burned many manuscripts–ten plays, and several short stories, poems, and essays–rather than risk having them found and used as evidence against him.
After a few months at the May Seventh cadre school, he came under investigation for having led a “rebel” Red Guard group against the “revolutionary pedigree” Red Guard group that was subjecting older colleagues of the Foreign Languages Press to brutal beatings and torture for their alleged antirevolutionary, anti-Party criminal pasts. An officer of the Military Control Commission arrived to incite the masses to denounce Gao at meetings so they could arrest him. Before that happened, Gao succeeded in fleeing to a remote mountain village, where he resigned himself to spending the rest of his life as a peasant.
After a period of working in the paddy fields, he was recruited to teach at the village school, where he again began to write in secret, but not before he had made elaborate preparations. He wrote on thin letter paper that could quickly be stuffed into the hollow bamboo handle of his broom if he were interrupted. Completed manuscripts were wrapped in plastic and put in a lime-laced pot that was placed into a hole dug into the dirt floor of his hut and covered with a heavy water barrel. Even in those bleak times he had a visceral craving to articulate his thoughts in writing. In those extreme times, the fear of punishment coerced people into articulating only what was “correct”; one’s political masters manipulated what one thought, spoke, or did. Because it was not possible to share his thoughts with another person, being able to express them on paper was important: the act of writing was an affirmation of his existence.
In 1975 Gao was able to return to Beijing, where he was restored to his position in the Foreign Languages Press. The Cultural Revolution ended with Mao’s death in 1976, increasing artistic freedom. From 1980 Gao’s short stories, novellas, prose essays, and criticism began to appear regularly for the first time in literary magazines; he was among the first to discuss the developments that had taken place in literary theory and practice in the West. In 1981 he was assigned work as a writer for the Beijing People’s Art Theater, and in his spare time he wrote introductory essays on writers including Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Eugène Ionesco, and the Polish playwrights Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Two of his translations from the French were published in anthologies in Beijing: Jacques Prèvert’s Paroles (1945, Words) was included in Waiguo xiandai shi (1984, Foreign Modernist Poetry), and Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve (1950, The Bald Soprano) was included in Huangdanpai xiju (1985, Absurdist Plays). In the light of his knowledge of world literature, he also wrote critical assessments of China’s rich literary heritage. During the politically volatile times of the early 1980s, Gao’s insistence on the importance of the individual in literary creation firmly established his credentials among writers, academics, and ordinary thinking people in China.
Although the Cultural Revolution had ended, the established guidelines for literary creation continued to prevail under the watchful eyes of the Chinese Writers’ Association and the Ministry of Propaganda. In 1980 Gao’s Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan (Preliminary Explorations into the Art of Modern Fiction) was serialized in Suibi Monthly in Guangzhou. Exercising self-censorship, Gao discussed how modern technology had impacted upon people’s appreciation of fiction and how attention to technique and language was important to breathe new life into fiction. The Cultural Revolution guidelines for fiction stipulated that characters should be either unambiguously “good” or unambiguously “bad.” The “good” characters were to serve as exemplars for the masses, and anyone behaving like the “bad” characters should be reported to the authorities. Rather than mounting a frontal attack on these guidelines, Gao gently proposed that fiction that preached was not effective, and that for fiction to be effective, freedom was important: for the author and reader as well as the characters. He substantiated his argument by drawing on examples mainly from the great Chinese and Russian novels. The work was published as a book in 1981, but when it was reprinted the following year, Gao came under the scrutiny of the authorities because the book had been applauded by older, established writers in literary publications.
In 1982 Gao also made his debut as a playwright with Fuedui xinhao (translated as Alarm, Signal, 1996), which was staged to packed audiences at the Beijing People’s Art Theater. The play challenged decades of entrenched socialist-realist practices in the theater, not to mention Mao’s dictum that literature and the arts should serve the people. Written again with considerable self-censorship, the story is simple and tells of an attempted train robbery that is thwarted when one of the villains has a change of heart. Gao’s innovative techniques–such as flashbacks, different perspectives, and his focus on the psychological dimensions of his characters–had enormous appeal for audiences, but for the authorities the play was problematical and deemed subversive because there was ambiguity in the “good” and “bad” characters. In other words, the members of the audience were encouraged to make up their own minds about the characters.
In 1983 his play Chezhan (translated as The Bus Stop, 1996, and as Bus Stop, 1998) was also performed to packed audiences but incurred the wrath of the authorities; it was stopped after several performances. The play depicts the actions of people waiting at a bus stop, as they watch buses pass without stopping, and as years pass by. Western critics found the play reminiscent of the Theater of the Absurd, but not quite the same. Chinese audiences simply found the play refreshing and totally different from the overtly didactic plays of past decades. Bureaucratic intrusion into the smallest details of people’s lives had made waiting a familiar daily event for more than a decade. What was subversive in the play was the freedom it gave audiences to identify with the characters. Only one character, The Silent Man, strides off after a short wait, while the others all choose to remain together. The individualism symbolized by the decisiveness of The Silent Man to act alone was unacceptable to the authorities.
After the banning of Chezhan, the actors were recalled by the authorities to put on special performances so that journalists could write criticisms of the play for all the major newspapers. During this period of intense anxiety, Gao was diagnosed with lung cancer, and he resigned himself to imminent death from the disease. Weeks later, another x-ray was taken to determine the extent to which the cancer had spread. When instead it confirmed without doubt that there had been a wrong diagnosis, Gao felt “reborn,” with a “fundamentalist” belief in his own human worth. He resolved never again to allow himself to be manipulated by others as he had during the Cultural Revolution. On hearing the rumor that the authorities planned to send him to one of the notorious prison farms of Qinghai Province because of his “pernicious” play, he did not wait to be sent. He took an advance royalty from an editor, who in the previous year had urged him to put his theories on fiction into practice, and immediately fled by train to the remote forests of Sichuan Province. From there he wandered to the source of the Yangtze River and leisurely followed it down to the eastern seaboard.
During his absence from Beijing, Gao was singled out and denounced for promoting the decadent modernism of capitalist Western literature. The Oppose Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983 had erupted; Gao and other writers were blacklisted and their works banned from publication. Shock waves reverberated through the literary world, as writers nervously faced the possibility of a return to the not-too-distant Cultural Revolution with its persecution campaigns against writers. Gao traveled more than fifteen thousand kilometers in the Chinese hinterland for five months, until the campaign had petered out and friends informed him that it was safe to return to Beijing. In the early part of his travels, he kept to the borders and margins of society to avoid detection by the authorities. There, with the curiosity of an anthropologist, ethnographer, and archeologist, he observed vestiges of early civilization and ancient folk practices that provided much material for his reflections on human existence, the political nature of how human history is documented, and the function of language, song, and storytelling. The solitude of his long journey also provided much space for him to reflect on his own life, both his present predicament and on the fragments of forgotten memories that had surfaced during his confrontation with death.
Gao had been working on a novel since 1982. Firm in his conviction that the Chinese written language in modern times had lost the vitality and sensuality of the spoken language, he wanted to write a long novel that would enable him to explore the limitations and potential of the written language. He consciously strove to invest his writing with the music and rhythm of the spoken language, and his physical and psychological experiences during his five-month journey filled the pages of this novel, which he completed eight years later in Paris. That novel is Lingshan (1990; translated as Soul Mountain, 2000).
In the 563 pages of Lingshan, Gao indulged himself in a grand-scale experimentation with narrative form and language to create an unusual work of autobiographical fiction. Instead of named characters, the pronouns “you,” “she,” and “he” are used to scrutinize the narrator’s psychological self from various perspectives, while the pronoun “I” is used to recount the narrator’s physical journey through China. Most of Gao’s short stories had experimented with the use of pronouns as characters; however, in Lingshan, Gao demonstrates conclusively that this technique could be sustained in a novel of considerable length. During large sections of his journey the narrator, “I,” does not encounter anyone for days. Lonely and perceiving the need to talk with someone, the narrator, “I,” creates “you,” who is in fact a reflection of the narrator. Naturally, being a reflection of “I,” “you” also experiences loneliness and creates “she” for a companion. “You” flirts with “she,” who finally succumbs, and the two gratify their sexual lust. “You” and “she” travel together to Soul Mountain, and on the way “you” tells “she” many fascinating tales and legends; “she” is also persuaded to tell her stories. Eventually, “she” tires of the never-ending journey to Soul Mountain, and becomes depressed and morbid. “She” feels betrayed in her relationship with “you.” While sex has generated feelings of love in the woman, it has not in the man. In a fit of hysteria “she” attacks “you” with a knife, although “you” succeeds in repelling her. “She” becomes paranoid about “you” wanting to push her over a cliff; yet, it is with reluctance that she departs, leaving “you” to travel alone to Soul Mountain. “You” and “I” have been traveling for quite some time together and have become too close, so the narrator suggests that “you” should go his own way. As “you” walks off, the back of “you” becomes “he.” Shamans, grave robbers, bandit chiefs, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks and nuns, reclusive forest rangers, and local cadres and officials populate the novel as they do the regions traversed by the author in reality and in his imagination and memories.
Gao returned to Beijing at the end of 1983, and in the following year he was able to submit works for publication again. However, although a generally more liberal policy was being implemented, there could suddenly also be cycles of repression. Gao found the restrictions on literary expression increasingly intolerable. Even while he carefully exercised self-censorship, his writings continued to cause troubles for him. When his play Yeren (translated as Wild Man, 1990) was staged in 1985 at the Beijing People’s Art Theater, he found that his performers were being taken aside and individually warned not to take part in future productions of his plays. In 1986 his play Bi’an (translated as The Other Side, 1997, and as The Other Shore, 1999) was banned at rehearsal. Yeren was the last of Gao’s plays to be performed in China. Despite these far from ideal circumstances, Gao nevertheless succeeded in publishing a significant number of plays, short stories, and theoretical works on fiction and dramaturgy in various literary magazines and in book form. His other major works of this time are a novella, You zhi gezi jiao Hongchunr (1985, A Pigeon Called Red Beak), Gao Xingjian xiju ji (1985, Collected Plays by Gao Xingjian), and Dui yizhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu (1988, In Search of a Modern Form of Dramatic Representation). However, he was utterly frustrated by having to practice self-censorship and yet still failing to satisfy the censors. It was clear to him that he was the target of an unarticulated harassment campaign.
In late 1987 the opportunity arose for Gao to travel to Germany, and on leaving Beijing he had in mind the thought of seeking to remain in Europe. He wanted the freedom to write without the anxiety and frustration of political interference, and by the end of the year he took up residence in Paris. Prior to leaving China he had compiled a collection of seventeen short stories (written between 1982 and 1986) for publication, but learned in Paris that all the major publishers had rejected it. The collection was published in Taipei in 1989 with the title Gei wo laoye mai yugan, the title he later also gave to a six-story collection for translation into foreign languages (translated as Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, 2004). The latter collection includes five stories from the original seventeen-story collection, plus one he had written in Paris, “Shunjian” (1990; translated as “In an Instant,” 2004). The story “Shunjian” has since been published alongside the original seventeen stories in a collection with a new title, Gao Xingjian duanpian xiaoshuo ji (2001, Short Stories by Gao Xingjian).
In the preface he wrote in Beijing in 1987 for his seventeen-story collection (which is also included in the eighteen-story collection), Gao notes the need for changes in the concepts and techniques employed in fiction. He cautions that he is not announcing a new form of fiction and that his collection simply represents his own quest for a “more pure, more penetrating, and more adequate language” that will facilitate a better understanding of what it means to be human. He also alerts readers that his stories have no plot and that the suspense common in most fiction is absent. Gao sees fiction as a form of linguistic art, as the “actualization of language” rather than the imitation of reality: fiction is interesting because it is capable of evoking genuine feelings and sensations in the reader. The collection represents Gao’s experimentation with various techniques that evolved further in his novel Lingshan, which he was writing in the same period as the stories of the original collection. In Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan, Gao had identified many of the basic problems facing narrative fiction since the advent of cinema and television. His short stories and novels represent his ongoing quest to resolve these problems. In his drama and painting, he has adopted the same attitude of continual striving and experimentation to satisfy his artistic impulses.
Gao has a wide knowledge of both Chinese and Western drama and theater. Concerned that theater has seemingly lost its appeal, he calls for a return to what he considers to be the essence of theater: its “theatricality,” which is precisely what distinguishes drama from other literary forms. In his view theatricality is largely absent in contemporary plays. Through his analysis of the conventions and techniques of traditional Peking Opera, Gao formulated his notion of the “tripartite actor”: the actor as a person, the neutral actor, and the character. To achieve neutrality there must be a sloughing off of the everyday self to enable the actor to observe his or her own acting from a distance. The actor would thus modify his or her acting accordingly. In other words, the actor is to effect a psychological identification with the audience, which will allow the actor to communicate better with the audience. Gao observed in his fiction that additional critical perspectives could be generated when a character addressed himself (or herself) in the second or third person, so he also extended this technique into his plays. The inner mind is what interests Gao, and his exploration of innovative techniques is aimed at providing a fuller articulation of the psychological processes that determine human behavior.
Gao’s first three plays had been directed by Lin Zhaohua under highly stressful political conditions in Beijing. In 1988, Lin traveled to Germany to direct a production of Yeren at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. Since then, various eminent directors have produced Gao’s plays on five continents. Gao has also taken a keen interest in directing his own plays. His productions include Duihua yu fanjie (performed in 1992, published in 1995; translated as Dialogue and Rebuttal, 1999) at the Theatre Augenblicks in Vienna in 1992 and at the Theatre Moliére in Paris in 1995; Bi’an at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1995; Sheng si jie (performed in 1993, published in 1995; translated as Between Life and Death, 1999) at the Theater for the New City in New York in 1997; and Bayue xue (published in 2000, performed in 2002; translated as Snow in August, 2003) at the National Theater in Taipei in 2002. For the production of Bayue xue he mobilized a group of fifty Peking Opera performers and acrobats, a chorus of fifty singers, and a symphony orchestra with close to one hundred musicians. Through Bayue xue, a work based on the life of the illiterate woodcutter Huineng, Sixth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism (commonly known in the Western world as Zen), Gao was able to realize his longtime goal of creating modern operatic theatre on a grand scale. The work is in the style of traditional Peking Opera, with singing, dialogue, action, and martial arts, but Gao’s production may be said to have totally changed the genre. He employed international experts for musical composition and stage lighting, and he was able to inspire the actors to understand and apply the principles for performance that he had developed from both Eastern and Western theater.
Gao’s uncompromising stance in his creative endeavors is demonstrated by the events surrounding his writing of the play Taowang (Fleeing, published in 1990, performed in 1991; translated as Fugitives, 1993). Eighteen months after he had settled in Paris, the military crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, occurred in the early hours of 4 June 1989. Aghast at the brutal actions of the Chinese authorities, Gao tore up his Chinese passport and applied for political asylum in France; in interviews for French television, the Italian daily newspaper La Stampa, and Le Sud magazine, he angrily denounced the massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. Soon after, he was commissioned by an undisclosed theater company in America to write a play about the events, and he wrote the two-act play Taowang. The company arranged for a translation and consequently suggested changes because there were no student heroes. Gao declined to make any changes, withdrew his manuscript, and paid the translation fee himself. In a speech in Stockholm on 26 May 1991, Gao declared: “In China the Communist Party couldn’t make me to revise my works, so there was no question about an American theater group making me do so.”
The setting for Taowang is just after tanks have rolled into an unnamed square in an unnamed city, and the play begins with a young male student and a woman radio broadcaster who have escaped into an unused warehouse. For those who had for so many weeks watched television news of the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, the setting is unmistakably the early hours of 4 June 1989. When the traumatized woman tears off her blood-spattered skirt and the man draws her into his arms to comfort her, feelings of lust arise. The couple is disturbed by the arrival of a middle-aged man, who is the persona of the author. The three characters present different perspectives on the events that have just taken place in the square. The impulsive young student is fired with heroic fervor and had been actively involved in the demonstrations; the radio broadcaster had been urging the citizens of Beijing to support the students; and the middle-aged man had gone into the square in response to the woman’s passionate broadcasts. Adopting a heroic stance, the student proclaims that despite this setback, the struggle for democracy would continue, and that victory would finally belong to the students. The middle-aged man is cynical and dismissive: the students had been whipped up by emotional crowd frenzy and were deluded into thinking that they were heroes who, by their collective action of protest, would bring democracy to the nation. It was folly, he says, for the student protesters not to have worked out a fallback strategy.
The student finally decides to leave the building and urges the other two to follow immediately, because at the crack of dawn the army would be combing the city to arrest anyone who had been in the square. As soon as he goes out the door there is a burst of gunfire, and it is assumed that he has been killed. The middle aged man and the woman sublimate their terror of imminent death and succumb to the comfort of one another’s bodies. The play examines human instincts and behavior arising from the fear of death as well as tribal instincts and mass hysteria induced by frenzied dancing, ghetto-blasters, and the worship of totems (even those as noble as nation, freedom, and democracy).
Taowang was first published in 1990 in the Chinese-language literary magazine Jintian, established by Chinese writers stranded in various countries abroad after the events of 4 June 1989. Some of these writers had been associated with the well-known Beijing literary magazine publishing under the same name from 1978 until the authorities closed it down in 1981; strong support also came from prominent members of the international academic and literary world for the resurrection of Jintian magazine in Stockholm. In the following year, unexpectedly, Taowang was published in China. Endorsed by the Chinese authorities, the first print-run of twenty-five thousand copies of a collection titled Wangming “jingying”: Qi ren qi shi (The Diaspora “Elite”: Who They Are and What They Are Doing) went on the market in May and was reprinted within a couple of months. The aim of the book was to provide incriminating evidence of “reactionary” writings by “unpatriotic,” “anti-Party” Chinese living abroad. The book was read eagerly, but apparently not with the intended effect. In the book the full text of Taowang was reproduced after a three-page diatribe attacking the play for wrongly alleging that thousands of students had been killed in Tiananmen Square. The moral depravity of the three characters of the play is also condemned, especially the sexual promiscuity of the woman. About the same time, Gao learned from friends that his Beijing apartment had been confiscated and that he had been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party. In response to these developments Gao wrote “Guanyu Taowang” (1991, translated as “About Fleeing, 2006), first published in Lianhebao Supplement (17 June 1991) and later collected in Meiyou zhuyi. In it he makes the wry comment that he had already publicly severed his association with the party in 1989, when the student protesters were brutally suppressed.
In “Guanyu Taowang,” Gao expresses abhorrence for writers who distort the truth in order to “hitch literature to the war chariot of a political group.” While sympathizing with the students’ cause, he was keenly aware that Taowang would anger the Chinese democracy movement, but truth in literature is his only criterion, and he refused to compromise. In those times of high emotions, he knew that a play that failed to portray the students as heroes, or offered the hint of any criticism of their actions, would be construed as a betrayal of the democracy movement. In the stage instructions for Taowang, Gao had explained that from ancient times human existence has been the same unending tragedy, and that Taowang seeks to portray the dilemma of modern mankind as a classical tragedy. He stipulates that: “The performance should embody both the declamatory tone of classical Greek tragedy and the ritualistic solemnity of Eastern classical drama. . . . This play is political, philosophical and psychological, and should not be construed as a socialist-realist play that simply reflects a single contemporary political event.”
His strategy of presenting Taowang as classical tragedy is to induce in the reader/audience a psychological distancing from the emotional trauma of the specific events of 4 June. This distancing would allow for critical thinking and reflection on those events, as well as reinforce the fact that the specific incident under scrutiny is not unique in human history. This strategy also allows Gao as the playwright to retain adequate distance for writing truthfully about the harrowing reality of the specific event that, at the surface level, is ostensibly the theme of the play.
In the process of writing this play, Gao’s reflections on literature, politics, and the self began to coalesce. In “Guanyu Taowang,” Gao makes reference to an observation in Eloge de la fuite (1976, In Praise of Flight) by the French physician and philosopher Henri Laborit: once protest becomes organized, the protester is reduced to being a follower of the organizer, and the only escape is to flee. Gao broadens the scope of Laborit’s thesis to posit that life is continual fleeing– from political oppression, others, and also from the self: “When the self is awakened, it is this self that cannot be escaped, and this is the tragedy of modern human beings.” He argues that there are external pressures such as political pressures, social customs, fashions, and the will of others, but that mankind’s misfortunes also derive from the self. The self is not God; it cannot be suppressed, but there is no need to worship it. One cannot escape one’s self, and that is humankind’s fate. This truth, he maintains, is central to classical Greek tragedy, and for this reason he had written Taowang as “pure tragedy.”
The allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche is unmistakable. Gao had in fact read in Chinese translation all of Nietzsche’s major works during the twelve months preceding his departure from China. The Tiananmen events of June 1989 prompted Gao to complete the final revisions to his novel Lingshan, which he had begun in Beijing in 1982. His submitting the manuscript to publishers in September 1989 symbolized his break with China, the country of his birth, where he had spent the first fifty years of his life. He went on to write Taowang during October 1989, and over the next few years he wrote a series of essays triggered by the events of Tiananmen and his writing of Taowang. Mention of Nietzsche’s name, or brief reference to Nietzsche’s superman, began to recur consistently in these essays. Collected and published as Meiyou zhuyi (1996, Without Isms), these essays display Gao’s penetrating analyses of the inroads of politics, patriotism, and nationalism on China’s modern literature. In these pieces he also establishes the foundation of what he later referred to as “another kind of aesthetics.”
China’s modern literature had emerged at the height of a Nietzsche craze during the 1910s and 1920s. Nietzsche’s superman and his pronouncement “God is dead!” had fueled an intellectual movement that later came to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Although China had contributed to the war effort of the Allies against Germany during World War I, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 it was disclosed that the Allies had secretly agreed to hand over to Japan the German concession of Qingdao in North China. This “sell-out” by the Western democracies outraged all thinking Chinese who for decades had been painfully aware of China’s impotence in the modern world. These events united China’s youth, and fired by emotional fervor, they demanded radical, thoroughgoing change. They condemned the traditional culture of their predecessors, indicting it as the cause of China’s problems. Armed with a smattering of Nietzsche, Chinese youth wrested the mantle of authority from their elders and set about smashing all that was old in order to create from its ashes a new culture that would enable the Chinese people to deal with the problems of modern life.
China’s modern literature emerged in these emotion-charged times of patriotic fervor. The classical language was to be abandoned and replaced with a written language based on the vernacular language, and China’s new literature was to concern itself with the problems of modern society. A cohort of young writers with a solid grounding in classical Chinese literature, and who had widely read and also translated European, Russian, and Japanese literature, laid the foundations of China’s modern literature. During the early years of the 1920s, writers imagined that their works would contribute to the spiritual regeneration of the nation. China would then no longer be forced to suffer humiliation and loss of territorial sovereignty at the hands of the capitalist West and Japan. The individual was extolled, but as the nation was threatened further by Japanese territorial encroachments, political unity was seen to be of vital importance. The heroic fervor of empowered Chinese youth was easily manipulated for patriotic goals. Although Nietzsche’s name was familiar to Chinese youth of those times, few had read more than a few essays about Nietzsche plus the prologue and a few essays from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathusta (1883–1885; translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1896). Nevertheless, the notion of Nietzsche’s superman intoxicated them with the romantic view that they were the heroes who would deliver China from the abyss of national failure.
For Gao, however, Nietzsche’s superman is anathema. He sees the writer as a frail individual whose writings cannot change the world. By adopting this stance, he is challenging China’s modern literary traditions, down to their Nietzschean foundations. He is critical of the literary and intellectual giant Lu Xun, who had called upon compatriots to cease being bystanders and to become actively involved with solving the problems of China. Gao sees Lu Xun’s decision to sacrifice his creative life for politics as a tragedy for Chinese literature. In the essays of Meiyou zhuyi, he argues that the writer is merely a bystander who observes, and he maintains that literature has always been so, be it in the East or in the West. Politics, religion, fashion, and crass commercialism have led writers away from the essence of literary creation, and Gao is at pains to restate this point in his proposal that literature is “without isms.” These views are reiterated in his Nobel lecture.
In Ling yizhong meixue (2001; translated as Return to Painting, 2002) Gao systematically outlines “another kind of aesthetics” for literature and art, while attacking the pernicious impact of both Nietzsche and modernity on aesthetics. However, Gao most soundly takes Nietzsche to task in his creative writings. In his novel Yige ren de shengjing (1999; translated as One Man’s Bible, 2002) Gao depicts the insidious distortion of human behavior as having been made possible by individuals seeing themselves as supermen. Mao Zedong is the superman who has allowed his bloated ego to run amok and thinks and acts as if he has replaced God. Also possessing bloated egos, a multitude of lesser supermen believing they are Mao’s heroes willingly assist the Great Leader in his project of creating “perfect people” in his own image. Yige ren de shengjing is a penetrating examination of how the superman’s perception of his own heroism can lead to tyrannical behavior or to the individual’s being manipulated by others. Yige ren de shengjing is Gao’s indictment of Nietzsche’s superman for the collective insanity of the nation during the Cultural Revolution. The narrator “you” remarks on his present reality: “And you are not a superman. Since Nietzsche, there has been a glut of both supermen and common herds in the world. You are, in fact, very ordinary, the very epitome of ordinariness.”
Like others who had lived through those times, Gao had tried to obliterate from memory the painful events he had witnessed during the Cultural Revolution. Not until after he had become a French citizen in 1997, twenty years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was he prepared to undergo the excruciating experience of recalling those times in Yige ren de shengjing, which is an autobiographical novel. The Cultural Revolution had deprived him of a substantial part of his creative life; having to write in secret and often not being able to do so had caused him protracted anguish. But worst of all was his awareness that he was being manipulated, being forced to articulate thoughts that were not his own and having to act as dictated by his political masters. As an author, however, Gao was also mindful that if he inadvertently allowed himself to adopt a victim mentality in his writing, he would instinctively distort the truth to exonerate himself from complicity in the gross excesses of human cruelty that had taken place.
Yige ren de shengjing explores the psychological dimensions of how “he” came to be manipulated by various groups and ended up hopelessly enmeshed in politics. His ego became bloated by his sense of heroism, and he was inexorably overcome by what “he” perceived to be a sacred mission to defend senior colleagues at his workplace who were being persecuted by Red Guards. He found himself joining a “rebel” Red Guard group, and was soon acknowledged as their leader. However, when the Military Control Commission disbanded the Red Guards, his “rebel” Red Guard activities came under investigation. Rather than face certain detention and punishment, he fled to a remote mountain village in southwest China, volunteering to work as a peasant for the rest of his life.
Yige ren de shengjing also tells the stories of people “he” encounters, in the city and in the countryside. Most poignant are the stories of young women “he” meets: they are the most tragic casualties of the novel. Observed from the present, the narrator “you” indicts “he” for being cowardly and weak. Because “he” feels his own self-interests are at stake, he fails to offer sympathy to these women who in desperation had appealed to him for comfort by offering their bodies to him. By ruthlessly analyzing the behavior of “he” the narrator is by extension proposing how a whole population was manipulated in those extreme times. While autobiographical, the novel is at the same time a deep exploration of the dynamics of power at various levels that is of relevance to all human relationships.
Gao’s play Kouwen siwang (first published as Le Quêteur de la Mort, 2003; Interrogating Death) was presented in Marseille as one of the events for “Gao Xingjian Year,” declared by La Ville de Marseille in 2003. In this work he launches into a powerful and sustained attack on Nietzsche and modernity. Spoken words, simple but with much compressed meaning, are reinforced by stark visual representations onstage. The play critiques contemporary art as well as presenting Gao’s reflections on life and on death. Two actors dressed in black are presenting a soliloquy from two perspectives, in effect doubling the impact of the ideas expressed. Actor A (a neurotic old man) and Actor B (a somber, older man) comment on the words and actions of one another. They observe one another, but their eyes do not meet. Actor B is actually the inner voice of Actor A’s character. Both actors refer to themselves as “you,” inviting the audience to identify with them. Actor A has missed his train and has to wait more than an hour for the next one, so he enters a museum of contemporary art and finds that he has been locked inside. Surveying the exhibits of such items as urinals, cigarette butts, and used toilet paper, he thinks that if all this rubbish is displayed, undoubtedly with a catalogue offering critiques using the newest jargon, then he too deserves to be one of the exhibits. Amazed at his own genius for thinking of putting himself on display as a live person, he notes that he will be world news–he would be like a soccer star. He admits to being narcissistic just like anyone else, and considers how he will be listed in art histories, become the subject of analysis, be subjected to repeated deconstruction, and win more acclaim than any of the other “artworks” on display. And he would become the topic of endless discussions by art critics.
Through the lips of this neurotic old man, Gao disparages modernity as having created a continuing dynamic to be a trendsetter, just to be sensational, even if it is to do something futile such as masturbating in front of a camera. He regards this trend of continually subverting one’s predecessors and debunking all old things as akin to a father teaching the son to shoot and then the son killing the father so that he can be head of the family. Having pronounced the death of God, afraid of being left behind, everyone charges forward wanting to be God. The old man begins to voice his reflections on life and his desire not to be controlled, even by old age, even by death; and eventually he commits suicide.
When the Swedish Academy announced that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, Gao’s life as a reclusive writer was suddenly interrupted by crowds of journalists and television crews that arrived at the door of his modest apartment on the outskirts of Paris. The awarding of the prize to Gao caused a controversy of unprecedented proportions. In the hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize, it had never been awarded to a Chinese writer, so that year a large number of Chinese writers had been nominated. By that time, however, Gao was a French citizen, so the prize in fact had been awarded to a writer for a body of writings in the Chinese language but not to a citizen of China. Gao’s writings have been blacklisted in China since 1991 and can neither be published nor marketed, although pirated editions are in circulation. In China there was a media blackout on the 2000 Nobel ceremonies.
Being crowned a Nobel laureate did not distract Gao from his literary and artistic endeavors. For him, the fact that he had been awarded this singular honor did not at all signify that he was the best writer in the world, and in his Nobel lecture, “Wenxue de liyou” (translated as “The Case for Literature,” 2000), he acknowledges that many of the great writers of the world had died in obscurity. The Nobel award ceremony seemed to him “like a fairytale” in which he was playing a leading role.
The Nobel Prize money allowed Gao to relocate to an apartment in the center of Paris: it was the first time that his writings had brought him any financial rewards. Prior to that, he had supported himself in Paris by selling his paintings. He had once wanted to create works like the European masters, but on seeing the original paintings when he traveled to Europe in 1978 and 1980 as a translator and then a writer with two delegations, he decided to return to Chinese ink painting. As with his writing, his art is not bound to traditions or conventions; informed by his reading and observations on light and perspective in European painting, he began to explore the aesthetic potential of Chinese ink on rice paper. His first solo exhibition at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in 1985 has been followed by others in France, Germany, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Sweden, the United States, Poland, Belgium, and Spain. Public collections of Gao’s paintings are held in Germany by Morat Institut für Kunst und Kuntwissenschaft (Frieburg) and Leibniz Gesellschaft für Kulturellen Austausch (Berlin); in Sweden by Ostasiatiska Museet, the Nobel Foundation (Stockholm), and Krapperrus Konsthall (Malmo); in Taiwan by the Fine Arts Museum and the National History Museum (Taipei); and in France by Maison de la Culture (Bourges), Arotheque (Nantes), Thèâtre Moliére (Paris), and La Ville de Marseille.
In addition to the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, Gao has received many honors for his literary achievements. The most significant include the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1992), the Premio Letterario Feronia (2000), the Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Légion d’Honneur (2000), and the American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (Dublin, 2002). Gao’s health forced him to return to a relatively reclusive life. He collapsed and was hospitalized while in Taipei directing rehearsals for his modernized Peking Opera Bayue xue in late 2002, but he recovered sufficiently to direct the premiere performance in December before returning to Paris, where he underwent two bypass operations in February and March 2003. In June of that year, while directing rehearsals for his play Kouwen siwang, he collapsed again but was able to direct the play with the assistance of Romain Bonnin at the premiere in Marseille in September.
During most of 2004, prompted by his fragile health and the urging of his doctor, Gao resolved to take stock of his physical well-being, canceling all social commitments and following a strict vegetarian diet rather than face a further major operation. If he tried to read anything serious, his blood pressure immediately rose, but he was able to write poetry and to paint on a daily basis. By early 2005 he began to get stronger and was able to direct a production of Bayue xue at Opéra Marseille and to attend the Gao Xingjian Symposium held at Aix-en-Provence University, at which he received an honorary doctorate from Taiwan National University.
Gao has held several solo exhibitions of his new paintings, including those at Claude Bernard Galerie (Paris, 2004), Centra de Cultura Contemporainia (Barcelona, 2004), Frank Pages Art Galerie (Baden, 2005), and Singapore Art Museum (2005). Several of his artworks were also hung at Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain (Paris, 2003 and 2004, and Brussels, 2006) and Art Paris (2005).
In 2006, having completed the production of his “cinematic poem” La Silhouette si non l’ombre, which was entered as an artistic movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Gao has been preparing a series of four video lectures for the Faculty of the Humanities at Taiwan National University. In these lectures he addresses the topics “Zuojia de weizhi” (The Place of the Writer), “Xiaoshuo de yishu” (The Art of Fiction), “Xiju de keneng” (The Possibilities in Drama), and “Yishujia de meishu” (The Aesthetics of the Artist). His health has improved significantly, and he continues to derive pleasure from writing poetry and painting.
Interview
Gregory Lee and Noel Dutrait, “Conversation with Gao Xingjian: The First ‘Chinese’ Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” China Quarterly, 167 (2001): 738–748.
References
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