"The Nobel Literature Prize has been used for ulterior political motives, and is not worth commenting on." (Chinese Foreign Ministry, October 13, 2000). The awarding, last week, of the Nobel prize for Literature 1989 to Gao Xingjian was instantly politicized, partly thanks to Beijing's hardliners, who responded to the announcement by denouncing the "political purposes" of the Prize and declaring that it had lost authority. The Western press also played its part. In the wave of panic that swept the British media last Thursday afternoon (who is he? what has he written? how is his name pronounced?), everyone reached for the first security blanket of modern Chinese studies: the playwright and novelist Gao Xingjian is an exiled dissident (he lives in France). But what significance, if any, does this political virtue have for his writing?
Born in 1940, Gao Xingjian spent the first forty-seven years of his life in China. Though he did not start writing as a professional playwright until 1981, he was active in a drama Prize group while at university in Beijing, where he studied French literature and was introduced to Brechtian theatre. After China re-opened her doors in 1979, the literary scene was quickly deluged with Western literature and theory. (It re Widespread debates ensued on how to reconcile new China's ambition to achieve cultural and social modernity with the spiritually polluting origins of these concepts in the bourgeois West.
Gao Xingjian contributed to these debates with a much-discussed booklet on techniques in time modern fiction and with Bus Stop, a play influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd. Seven characters spend ten years waiting for a bus that never comes, expressing their hopes, disappointments and anxieties in a public transport vacuum. Aesthetics and individual subjectivity, however, were distinctly political issues in a China emerging from an authoritarian phase of proletarian realism: ten years waiting for a bus? what kind of realism is that? what are the masses to make of it? Gao's play fell victim to the 1983 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. Rather than waiting to be sent for re-education, however, he took off on a five-month tour of China, a trip which yielded the novel Mountain of Souls, an exploration of the self in eighty-one chapters, a beleaguered concept both in China's past and present, but a mainstay of modern Gao Western philosophy. All reassuringly dissident and accessible to the West.
Gao is not that easily categorized. A highly innovative playwright, in the 1980s he started developing a concept of "Total Theatre" that incorporated singing, dancing and acrobatics from Chinese sources. Chinese tradition, however, is not used for its 1989 own exotic sake, but rather as a dynamic means to create a "modern Eastern theatre" to treat wider, cross-cultural themes, such as human alienation. Set in remote rural China, his 1986 play Wildman aimed ambitiously to address both local questions of ecological disaster and the predicament of modern man. Nor is the West an indispensable model: Gao has written that he reads contemporary Western literature simply to avoid duplicating what others have already done.
Gao's reasons for exile emphasized the artistic over the political: on leaving China, he remarked, "an artist who wishes to express freely would not want to stay in this country unless he goes against his conscience". In exile in France, he has not been unwilling to comment on politics: his play Fleeing was set during the e 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, but he refused y to identify with either the protesters or the Communist Party. In the 1990s, he declared that his existence as a writer hinges on expression, not it on representing a nation and its people. He is one of the least political of Chinese dissidents, and it is doubtless his assertion of aesthetic neutrality that appealed to the Nobel Committee.
In an ideal world, Gao Xingjian's prize would be feted as an award to an individual writer, who happened to be born in China, for his impressive achievements in both Chinese and French. In view of the heavily politicized course of modem Chinese literature, moreover, it's easy to sympathize with Gao Xingjian's detached stance. But recent Chinese history and the marginal position occupied by modem Chinese literature in the world literary economy inevitably make his a Prize a political issue. Through circumstances beyond his control, Gao, an exile practically unknown to readers in contemporary China and r a French citizen since 1998, will most likely be turned into a representative of China in the West. (It remains to be seen whether Gao Xingjian's new status in World Literature will convert to cultural capital in China, whether Beijing will reclaim him as a true son of China or continue to regard him as a turncoat Frenchman.) For China, winning a Nobel Prize for Literature for the first time has been a symbol of achieving global recognition as a modem culture. Although many Chinese intellectuals have long been aware that anxiety to secure the Prize risks a capitulation to Western literary values, the money and prestige that modem Chinese literature would stand to gain are a strong draw, especially as the chances a of Chinese literature breaking into the world market are influenced by the politics of international translation and publishing. (The Economist predicted in 1998 that the Chinese football team would qualify for the World Cup finals long before a Chinese novelist won the Nobel Prize.) The bitterness of the Chinese government is unsurprising, in view of this abrupt end to China's century-long quest for the Prize.
Yet leaving aside the official aspect to China's search for a Nobel Literature Prize, Gao Xingjian's laureateship does not solve the problem of Western unfamiliarity with most Chinese literature. China and its literature remain a blank in average Western perceptions, filled occasionally by the writings of exiled authors. While many Chinese are doubtless privately delighted at Gao's prize, there is a feeling among contemporary Chinese writers that the country has changed enormously since 1989, and that the Western exiles are not necessarily qualified spokesmen. There is also some suspicion about the "virtuous dissident" image attached to exiled writers, an image that is ably manipulated by publishers. The Chinese government's condemnation of the Nobel Prize simply reinforces this image.
The real challenge to World Literature still remains; to build a bridge to China's contemporary literature. When copies of Gao Xingjian' work reach bookshops in a few weeks time, it to be hoped that modern Chinese literature in general will benefit from the increase attention.
JULIA LOVEL
TLS OCTOBER 20 200