THREE TIMES China has forced playwright, novelist and painter Gao Xingjian into exile and, despite winning the biggest literature prize in the world – the first Chinese to be so honoured – his work may not be read, seen, or even openly talked about in the country of his birth.
‘I suppose my independent thinking is something they can’t tolerate,’ he tells Asia Literary Review.
Gao, a slim man with a delicate, sallow face, who is dressed entirely in black and grey, holds out his hand in the dim corridor to his apartment on the Rue Sainte-Anne, between Opéra and the Comédie Française, and leads the way through an almost-empty, white-painted front room to a sitting room. He pours tea into two white, bone china tea cups – pale liquid that is barely stained green. ‘I drink tea very weak. I hope you don’t mind if I pour myself first,’ he says in a light voice, leaning forward on a white leather sofa.
Four hours away by high-speed train, war has been waged all week at the Frankfurt Book Fair, as the guest of honour, China, dodged dialogue with critics and tried to present a tightly controlled, party-approved version of its literature; and though Gao dipped his toe in by appearing in public there with exiled poet Yang Lian, to talk on ‘Living Between Worlds’, (some of Gao’s comments from that exchange are included here), he’s uninterested in the fracas. ‘What does any of it have to do with literature?’ he asks.
Gao’s lifelong search for freedom is central to both his person and his artistry, the thing without which he believes true art is impossible. It is this uncompromising stance, this insistence that only true, absolute freedom of the mind can produce great literature, and his raised international profile since being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, that sets him apart and makes him such a central figure in Chinese writing.
Three times Gao paid for his art with exile. Born in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province, in 1940, he knew early to wrap his stories in plastic and ‘exile’ them to a carefully dug hole in the ground, to avoid discovery. Publication was out of the question. It was the 1970s, and China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution. By then a university graduate and fluent French speaker, he had been both a peasant farmer and a Red Guard, and knew the danger he was putting himself in by the mere act of writing. Only with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 did his work begin to appear in public.
The second exile came in 1983 when he learned that his absurdist plays, such as Bus Stop (1983) and Absolute Signal (1982), inspired in part by his work as a translator of the likes of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, had been condemned as ‘spiritual pollution’ and he was to be sent to a labour camp. Gao fled Beijing, heading south along the Yangtze, travelling for ten months and seeing China as if for the first time. He headed for his hometown on the Gan River, a tributary to the Yangtze, and that journey inspired his masterpiece Soul Mountain (1989). He found in that novel a voice that, at age forty-three, would enable him to write his way out of the nightmare of China’s history, to tease out the meaning of ‘I’ in a collectivist world where there was only ‘we’.
‘You have to find your own language,’ he says.
His third, and final, exile came in 1987 after rehearsals of a new play, The Other Shore (1986), were banned. He left for France, which he now regards as home.
Gao contends that three decades after China began to open up to the outside world following Mao’s death, artistic freedom, that is, the freedom to create free of fear, is still absent. His stance is a reproach to the snail’s pace retreat from the political interference that has pervaded people’s lives since 1949. Many Chinese writers learn to accommodate this absence of creative freedom, censoring themselves in exchange for the chance to publish. There are others who resist and find themselves banned, and sometimes imprisoned. Dissident writers have an audience in the West, but that’s not the writing Gao cares much about. ‘Too much politics and not enough literature,’ he says. Only writers prepared to disregard politics, write entirely truthfully and ‘bear witness’ can hope to make literature. It takes courage, he says. ‘The writer stands alone and in full consciousness in the face of truth and describes it with all his might.’
Gao has more than a little of the hermit about him. He is remote, soft-spoken and absolutely devoted to his craft, seeing merit in the Buddhist rejection of ‘chen’, or the ‘dusty’ world. His concept of ‘meiyou zhuyi’, or ‘none-ism’, expresses his absolute rejection of any religious, political or ideological constraint, and favours unbridled independence. This is not nihilism, Gao says, which is in itself a form of constraining belief.
His is a dark view of the twentieth century, and he posits that the blame lies with the embrace of two thinkers of the nineteenth century – Nietzsche and Marx. Nietzsche is a ‘madman’ who killed God and opened the way for a form of individual despotism fuelled by a political ideology that ‘hasn’t the first understanding of human society’. For Gao, ‘God’ is an abstract that provoked real thinking by such religious figures as Sixth Zen Patriarch Huineng about whom he wrote a landmark play, Snow in August (2000). Religion, otherwise, is about idolatory, which impinges on the absolute freedom – ‘l’indépendence totale’ – of the mind.
Set against the virtues of conformity in both Confucian and Communist culture, Gao’s uncompromising, independent stance is electrifying. Yet he is no blind worshipper of western culture, no ‘crossover’ who spurns his own. Today, via his theory of omnipotent theatre – ‘quanneng xiju’ – Gao is probably doing more than any other artist to merge the subtlety and sophistication of traditional Chinese acting aesthetics with western traditions of innovation and individual expression.
His biography may offer some clues.
Gao’s mother, who attended a Christian school in the Jiangxi capital of Nanchang, was a theatre-lover and member of the local YWCA troupe, who acted in many western plays. During the Sino-Japanese war of 1937–45 she joined a resistance theatre troupe. ‘It was not a Communist troupe, it was organised by her church school,’ Gao says after our interview. ‘My father loved Peking opera, and often took me along. So, traditional Chinese and modern theatre, I saw it all.’
Gao’s early plays, in particular, such as Bus Stop, have been criticised as too Beckettian, and his novels, notably Soul Mountain, as difficult and obscure. There is some truth to both criticisms – the play is an early, derivative work, and the novel is no light read. But that isn’t the point. As he races against time and ill health – Gao is sixty-nine and has had a triple heart bypass operation – his oeuvre grows in depth and range. He is now trying to forge a new method for Chinese opera actors that will enable them to express individuality without losing traditional skills. Though exiled by his country, he is still Chinese, but believes borders are irrelevant because ‘Chinese surpasses national limits’.
Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Additional translation by Bruce Humes
Gao Xingjian …
… on ‘yansu wenxue’.
Not all writers pursue literature. You can go and do your writing, but what I’m doing is the kind that addresses the truth, face on. You must also overcome your own weaknesses, because every writer is a human being. You have to surpass yourself in terms of self-knowledge, overcome your narcissism, in order to see the world clearly and with consciousness. This is what I call ‘yansu wenxue’ – serious literature – and it’s the same in the East as in the West. There’s always been this kind of writing, and it’s the only kind of writing that will be passed down. It surpasses national boundaries. It surpasses languages and can be translated. It surpasses eras. It can be read forever. It’s universal and eternal. And this is humanity’s treasure trove.
… on the limitations of language as medium of expression.
Language is inadequate to express feelings, and you have to expend a lot of effort to find a language that can do it. With each form of creativity, whether literature, painting, music or theatre, the artist’s creative power comes from having found a creative language that can express the inexpressible. He must find a form for that language, and that is creativity. In this way, he enriches the expressiveness in his artistic sphere. Everyone can use a language, be it Chinese or English. But to express the feelings that are in Soul Mountain you have to find your own language.
Take, for example, the form of the ordinary novel today. If you were to use that you would not be able to write Soul Mountain. You have to find another form for the novel to do that. So every author has to find his individual form in order to express his individual experiences. A ready-made language can only express ready-made feelings. But if the writer wants to express an entirely individual and fresh feeling, the writer must find an individual and fresh language, a special language. Of course, not every writer does this. Only a small number do. The ones who do have to be entirely conscious of what they are doing, and their experiences have to be really luminous and sharp. You can say an author has to have talent to do this, to have this very individual feeling, to find his own, original form and language.
… on the need for creative freedom.
Total mental freedom and independence of thought are necessary conditions for an author, for literature. But this freedom isn’t limitless, nor is this independence casual. It’s not about freedom for the sake of freedom. Or freedom for people to write any old rubbish. The author must face the truth. A work has value because it is about the human predicament, about eternal predicaments, about the complicated nature of the human heart. Literature demands this freedom to truly address these things and cannot be subject to interference, from politics, religion, ideology, human habits and customs, from all kinds of prejudices that can interfere with the truth. The writer stands alone and in full consciousness in the face of truth and describes it with all his might. He needs a lot of courage.
China has never given writers this freedom. It controls what can and what cannot be published. This is why I left. For me it wasn’t realistic, it wasn’t possible to write under such conditions. Everyone makes their own choices. This was mine.
I believe the first priority for a writer is inner freedom. ‘Freedom’ does not necessarily refer only to freedom in the outside world. There is also inner freedom. Only once this freedom has been obtained can one engage in ‘writing’.
… on Chinese writing today.
What is Chinese writing? A Chinese writer (zhongguo huaren zuojia) can write in Chinese, and cannot write in Chinese, can write about China and cannot write about China. I write in Chinese about Chinese subjects, but, like Taowang [The Fugitives (1989), banned in China because of its reference to Tiananmen Square protests], while it’s written in Chinese, it’s got nothing to do with China, it surpasses China. Writing surpasses national limits, surpasses physical limits. Today, in this world, national boundaries are of no interest. In terms of politics they matter very much. But in terms of writing and literature, national borders are not interesting and preaching nationalism is irrelevant.
But how to continue writing in Chinese in a western environment, when you don’t count on this sort of writing being published?
Naturally, after I came to France and won the right to express myself freely, I have particularly cherished this freedom, and in the twenty-one years that followed, I’ve never taken a holiday. I have no Sundays.
I don’t just write now in Chinese, I also write in French, and this is a new challenge. Is a writer capable of transcending his country and the limits of his mother tongue to undertake creative work in another language? I believe many writers answer this question via their literary works, thereby proving it is indeed feasible. And this is my experience too. Singing at Night is the fifth play I composed in French and it has just been translated into German. I believe a writer cannot only transcend national borders, but can also transcend his own language.
… on the limits of a writer's power and the recourse to exile.
The writer is a weak individual and cannot overcome political oppression; he can only flee, or he has to write for the government. The writer can’t change an era. The writer can’t change the world, or society, can’t overcome political disasters, religious restrictions, social habits and strange customs. But he can, as an individual, take up a pen, and, if he can face his loneliness, he truly can write down the truth of his times, and if he can truly write of people’s predicaments in an honest way, then he can write a work that is of value, and it will naturally overcome restrictions – the political, the religious, the social. This is the writer’s strength.
Cao Xueqin [eighteenth-century author of Dream of the Red Chamber] was writing in a closed and despotic society in the early Qing dynasty. His books could not be published. He wrote in secret. But today in China, he’s of the stature of Shakespeare, and we are still studying him! [Laughs] Look how many interpretations there are of Shakespeare; it’s the same for Cao Xueqin. China and the West are the same. These kinds of works can be written under conditions of autocracy. It’s a question of the writer’s strength.
But sometimes strength is not enough. During Mao’s time, during the Cultural Revolution, it was totally impossible to write. All you could do was flee. Dante fled Florence because he couldn’t write. Ibsen fled Norway; it wasn’t until Norway began to recognise him that he went back.
… on exile.
Exile is salvation. Exile is a writer’s salvation. The goal is not exile. The goal is to write. There have been so many writers who have been forced to flee in order to write. Sometimes the oppression isn’t even that extreme, but they still leave. Like James Joyce. It wasn’t political oppression. But Joyce and Beckett, they never went back. It was psychological oppression in Ireland; the Catholic Church made them exile themselves. No, a writer cannot defeat a society. But he can save himself, which has been the case from ancient times until today.
After Mao died [1976], after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese society had a relative period of liberalisation and I could travel and look at things. Lingshan was about seeking a starting point for consciousness, looking for an entry point on a spiritual level. It was mostly written in China and finished in France, but I had to wait until after Mao died and even then I couldn’t think of having it published. I began writing Lingshan in 1982.
… on being banned in China.
I cannot go back to China, though you’ll have to ask the authorities why because I have no idea. I don’t get involved with politics. I suppose my independent thinking is something they can’t tolerate. But I’m not interested anymore in going back. I’m busy here. My life is in Europe, and in America and Asia. But my health isn’t good, so I avoid a lot of events. If I took everything on I’d be running around all year long! [Laughs] I like Europe. It has permitted me to do everything important. My audience is here, my creative environment is here.
… on writing as a means of making a living.
Relying on writing to eat? I think it’s best to abandon such an idea. That’s my own experience. The reason I write as I do – ‘cold literature’, I call it – is because it isn’t linked to the market. It’s an inner need. Only when I feel compelled to write do I pick up my pen. Not in order to sell books. There is a market for books and we are not opposed to commercial promotion, because ‘cultural consumption’ does exist. But we shouldn’t confuse the two. A writer should be clear about the boundary between cultural consumption and serious literature. Is he writing for consumption by others, or writing for himself? In my view, serious literary writing is inherently written for oneself. It is precisely because one is writing for oneself that one can gain access to authenticity in life, and therefore has something valuable to convey to the reader. The same is true for words. When the reader reads them, he can experience them too. This ‘transcends’ the market.
Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am’. For the writer, that does not mean, ‘I express myself, therefore I am’, but rather, ‘I write, therefore I am’. By writing, he is no longer living in a blind and befuddled manner, but in a very clear state of mind. In itself, this experience of self-understanding and confirmation of the value of his written works – occurring while writing – is also an affirmation of the writer’s value in and of himself, and is sufficient reward.
… on the limitations of 'self-discipline'.
Everyone knows I encountered many difficulties getting published in China. Besides the limits on publication by the authorities, the writer also had to place limitations on himself and exercise ‘self-discipline’. But in China, even when I showed ‘self-discipline’, my works were still banned. So I rejected it as ludicrous. Soul Mountain is one work I thoroughly enjoyed writing precisely because I did not expect to see it published within my lifetime.
… on writers as philosophers of their time.
My understanding is that clarity refers to clarity of thought. If the thought is not clear, neither will be the writing. The writer must first of all reflect carefully upon the object about which he is writing, and what he wishes to convey. In this sense, there are two kinds of ‘thinkers’. One employs a philosophical mode to contemplate human existence and serves up answers to many questions. There is also a kind of thinking that revolves around images. The writer and the artist are, in the final analysis, thinkers. They must have thoughts that are deep and clear in order to be able to compose good works. So behind clarity of language lies profound thinking. The works left behind by the finest writers of every era could only be written because they responded to the conditions of the era in which they lived, and the writers were thoroughly familiar with the complexity of man’s nature, his self-contradictions and confusion. In this sense, I believe that Shakespeare was undoubtedly a great thinker. Many of his contemporary philosophers could probably not match his intellect, status or level of sophistication. The writer is not simply a stylist; a pre-requisite is that he must possess penetrating, profound thinking.
… on Nietzsche, Communism and contemporary writers in China.
For the past hundred years the impact of politics on Chinese writing was too large. The whole left-wing writing movement was just too much politics and not enough literature. You can see that at the Frankfurt Book Fair. For too long politics has been overwhelming literature in China. There are a lot of writers who themselves think they are very strong. But that’s an illusion, a kind of self-inflation, ego, a narcissism.
It’s linked to Nietzsche. And Marxism.
Last century, the major streams of thought in China came from Europe: Marxism, Communism, Idealism, the belief that we could change society. It was an illusion. Marxism hasn’t the first understanding of human society. Marxists used politics to change literature, they judged it by political standards, they used literature as a tool to condemn capitalism. That was what happened in the twentieth century and it’s a strong current still. A lot of western intellectuals joined in and supported the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution. We have to walk out of the shadows of the twentieth century.
Then Nietzsche killed God, and this inflated people’s sense of their own importance. Nietzsche was a madman. Most of his life he had to be taken care of by his sister and his mother. He couldn’t even manage his own life. He wrote some interesting things, but I don’t think you can use him as a guide for life in the twentieth century. How can you think that every person is God and that that is a legitimate position from which to judge life? Intellectuals, especially left-wing ones, used the position of being God to judge the world, to condemn it. They judged people, and forgot that the judge was also a weak person full of contradictions, full of weakness and perplexity. They wanted to play God. How else can we explain why so many intellectuals ran madly after revolution, madly advocated violence?
We can only see problems from the perspective of people’s limitations. And we can’t solve many problems. [Laughs] And the problems that there are to be solved might be ones you haven’t even thought of! [Laughs]
… on political correctness and authenticity.
Boundless freedom does not exist in real life. But freedom of thought does exist in any era even under authoritarian rule, political oppression, or social constraints, including religious ones. In a democratic society, does one have full freedom? No. The market does not give you freedom. The market exerts massive pressure. Political correctness is like a straitjacket that inhibits one’s thinking. In past eras, public morality was the judge and there were ‘morality trials’. In our era, political correctness has taken the place of morality trials. Within the writer’s society, politically incorrect ideas are considered heretical and are banned. Today, in our comparatively democratic and free western societies, we have prohibitions. Political correctness is omnipresent. Politically incorrect thinking is criticised and inhibited. But the writer is a unique being: his existence is conditional upon absolute freedom of thought.
Absolute freedom of thought does not mean one does not have a confirmed set of moral values. Behind absolute freedom of thought lies a set of values. For the writer, I believe, the most wide-ranging value is that of ‘authenticity’. Sincerity is the writer’s ethic, and authenticity the writer’s moral compass. He transcends political correctness, ethical judgments and society. These are the values the writer must maintain. This thinking is not constructed upon unbridled imagination, but rather upon a freedom based on authentic, confirmed values, and the premise that the writer has a sincere attitude.
… on the influence of Buddhism.
Huineng [638–713] was an important figure in Buddhism. People always see him as a religious man and leader, but I see him as first and foremost a thinker. He had very deep understanding of the lives of ordinary people and in this way he was a source of liberation and not of repression. He didn’t worship idols – in religion, people always worship idols or images – and in this way he was a liberator. He smashed people’s obsessions. I wanted to bring that out in Snow in August, which is much more than a play about an historical Buddhist figure and I think everyone understood it, both in the East and the West. Many people thought it would not be possible to use western opera in a play like this, but it worked. This year it was played in Düsseldorf, translated into German, and it was very warmly received. The French conductor Marc Trautman really hopes it will go around the world. But it needs 250 people, including the workmen, to mount. It’s a big thing, very expensive, a big cast and set. But it cannot be staged in China. My works are all banned there.
… on the writer as a witness.
Where are we going in the twenty-first century? We should be going to a place where we can observe reality with clarity. We need to see the problems of people’s lives, and the complicatedness of people and their weakness. We are all mere witnesses, and the best thing we can do is see things as they are. You are not the creator, you can’t overcome the world, but you can bear witness. And when it comes to art, to talk about a country is meaningless. A writer is a witness to humankind, a witness to humanity.
