Diasporic Aesthetics of Gao Xingjians Exilic Discourse

by
SHUM, Sau Ching Janet

A Thesis Submitted to
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Division of Humanities
16 August 2010, Hong Kong

i
HKUST Library
Reproduction is prohibited without the authors prior written consent

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my advisor Professor Angelina Yee for her ceaseless spiritual and
intellectual support which is pertinent to the smooth completion of this thesis. The fact that I
have been able to proceed freely with the thesis writing in an explorative manner while
staying on track is conducive to the open-mindedness of Prof. Yee and her guidance which is
always precise and timely. My gratitude to Professor Chen Li-fen for reminding me of certain
salient points of which the inclusion has made the study more substantial and comprehensive,
and to Professor Chen Jianhua and Professor Agnes Ku for reading the thesis and providing
their oral feedbacks. I am most in debt to Professor Gilbert Fong for taking time to go through
the thesis meticulously and providing constructive comments which all the more demonstrate
his admirable expertise in the study of Gao Xingjians work.
I would also like to thank Professor Wang Xinyang who, as the PG Committee Chair, has
generously given me his heart-warming blessings which is non-obligatory and comes as an
energizing boost. I am grateful for Katrinas help in proofreading the thesis with efficiency
and Kitty and Ritas on-going administrative assistance. My family members, friends and
colleagues have all rendered me encouragement and cheered me up in the course of my
academic ventures and to them I also express my gratitude. Lastly, I wish to note that it is the
ingenuity of Gaos literary creativity which has ignited the vigor of this research and made the
deciphering of his work an exciting and challenging intellectual exercise most enjoyable and
unforgettable.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Authorization Page

ii

Signature Page

iii

Acknowledgements

iv

Table of Contents

Abstract

vii

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Introduction
1.1 Postulating the question
1.2 In dialogue with theory
1.3 Third space as agency
1.4 Cultural translation
Chinese Condition of Exile
2.1 Exile-a complex term
2.2 The Chinese case
2.3 Fatal flight of the modern exile
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
2.8

Chapter 3

Between vanguard and mental exile

Torn between two homes
The wanderer and the dispossessed
Estrangement and emancipation
A cultural and individualistic turn

Spiritual Exile and Spatial Displacement

3.1
Spatial intervention and genealogy
3.2 Thinking through space
3.3
Locating culture
3.4
3.5
3.6

Chapter 4

1
11
20
23

Becoming animal and taking flight

Between here and there--the parable
Semiotic dream-scape

Exiles Time
4.1
Double time--between present and past
v

34
37
42
48
57
60
66
72

86
93
99
113
120
133

143

Chapter 5

4.2

Retrospective machineryintervening the past

151

4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6

Chaotic time, chaotic life

Photograph and memory
Desiring machine and mnemonic time
Being in time

159
164
168
177

Homeliness and Unhomeliness

5.1 Another kind of theatre assemblage
5.2
Escape or no escape
5.3
Assemblage of self-estrangement
5.4 Assemblage of nightmare
5.5
Assemblage of sin and Zen
5.6
5.7

Unhoming postmodernism
A transcendental home? A Chinese home?
5.7.1 Spectre of the forefather
5.7.2 Philosophical syncretization
5.7.3 Zen intelligence

Chapter 6
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendices

184
196
202
210
222
246
253
257
260
271
277
283
298

vi

Diasporic Aesthetics of Gao Xingjians Exilic Discourse

by SHUM, Sau Ching Janet
Division of Humanities
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Abstract
This thesis examines the diasporic aesthetic of Gao Xingjians narrative and plays
and studies how the idea of time, space, homeliness and unhomeliness pivotal to exile
literature is constituted in his work. It postulates that the diasporic aesthetic of Gao as a
spiritual and political exile from the Mainland in late 1980s is starkly different from that of
the traditional Chinese exile in the twentieth century across the straits who are largely under
the spell of the Middle Kingdom syndrome. The new kind of dissident voice as exemplified
by Gao is of double alienation. It is one which alienates the nation by questioning its
ideological hegemony and one of self-alienation through speaking in split. The voice speaks
as a counter-discourse against national myth and also against the myth of self as the centered
subject. Distance is not what the exile mourns but embraces so as to remain at the margin
which would enable the diasporic intellectual to observe with a cold eye, attain
self-interrogation and self-reflection. The ethic of the new type of dissident Gao demonstrates
as a mental and literal exile is to incessantly question the existential condition of the self and
its poetics is a sublimity of imperceptibility and possibility.
In adopting an intertextual approach and positing the discussion of Gaos exilic
discourse in dialogical exchange with theories in cultural studies which attend to issues
including cultural identity, narrative as agency and cultural translation, this study foregrounds
the writers work in a transcultural context and shows that Gaos diasporic third space is
always already transformed and hybridized. Whether the writers cultural resources are
derivative from traditional Chinese aesthetics or modern western culture, what we see is
Gaos individuated translated version which is irreducible and personalized, and a
transcultural assemblage seeking to communicate with the world audience a history of trauma,
the aporia of self, the libidinal, and deadly experience. In the midst of a postmodern
condition where inter-cultural transaction is a rule rather than exception, Gaos aesthetic
provides an option to interpreting the cultural self as a potential self-conscious site of
on-going cultural contest and transmutation.
vii

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Postulating the question

Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 2000, is described by the

Swedish Academy as a Chinese French citizen, a writer of prose, translator, dramatist,
director, critic and artist. The problem that immediately arises is what approach should
be adopted in order to apprehend the self-identification and the aesthetic valorized in
Gaos work. Tam Kwok-kan, in Language as Subjectivity in One Mans Bible, used
the term cubism to describe the different narrative voices of the split subject in Gaos
novel One Mans Bible. The experimentation by cubist artists aims to break down the
three-dimensional space constructed from a fixed point of view.1 In cubist artworks,
objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form.

Instead of

depicting the object from one viewpoint, the cubist artist depicts the object from a
multitude of viewpoints to represent the object in a greater context.

How then, should

we approach the cubist figure of Gao represented to the readers in its multiplicity?

Henry Zhao, in Towards A Modern Zen Theatre, categorized Gaos work

according to a periodic development of the playwrights dramatic aesthetic in the
context of the history of contemporary Chinese thinking.
1

In other words, Zhao

Tam Kwok-kan ed., Soul of Chaos: Critical perspectives on Gao Xingjian (Hong Kong: Chinese UP,
2001), 297.

compares Gaos works in different periods, as he says, against this or that

historically-recognized category or trend. Being aware that Gao is obsessed with
originality, Zhao defends his approach by claiming that his criticism is not to reveal
the truth even if there were any and his interpretation of Gaos plays is just one of the
many possibilities. Zhao goes so far as to avow an antagonistic stance against the
authors strong opinions of his own works. He declares the need to put himself on the
alert not to take what Gao said as the intertextual connections. The reason for Zhao to
adopt such an approach is that Gao is a drama theorist and a critic, and Zhao being an
independent critic should not be under the spell of Gao who is stubbornly insistent in his
stance. What is in play in the challenge to critique Gaos works which causes Zhao to
allude to the metaphor of himself playing tennis on the other side of the net in full alert
so as to respond strategically? He again puts the responsibility on Gaos side. Zhao
points out that his strategy to read against the Gaoist grain is made necessary by Gao
himself, since he has consistently refused to produce works of a polished surface with
the exception of his very early plays.2 All his works are fragmented in structure,
incomplete in plot, with no convincing thematic elaboration or in-depth characterization.
Zhao laments his pain for having to rewrite his draft many times. He says that when
both old and new conventions are ruthlessly torn down by the author, criticism has no
choice but to turn itself into art.3 Instead of pointing to a void of meaning in Gaos
work, Zhao eventually interprets Gaos work as modern Zen theatre and elevates it to
2

Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism
(London School of Oriental and African Studies, U of London, 2000), 15-17, 69. Zhao considers Gaos
earliest play Alarm Signalas one which assigns a true story on which a straightforwardly didactic and
moral play is written, though it might be largely due to the requirement of state-run theatres in the
mainland. Gilbert Fong sums up Gaos plays into two broad types, namely, the psychological plays and
the epic. The latter includes The Story of The Classic of Mountains and Sea, Hades, Snow in August
which are plays structurally intact and conjures a collective memory for the Chinese through the portrayal
of the well-known legendary and historical figures. In Gao Xingjian & Gilbert Fong, Lun xiju
(Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2010), 3.
3
Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 18.

the status of world theatre. He considers that what Gao has been trying to reconstruct
is a theatre above the East-West antagonism in both aesthetics and cultural politics.
Gaos Zen aesthetic is nourished by Brechtian alienation technique and Chinese xieye
poetics and gongan tradition dwelling on the aesthetic of eureka (or enlightenment)
which pushes the authorial intention aside by reminding the audience of their own
interpretative powers above the performance, thus forcing them to bring to full play
their own spectating/speculating selves.4 Hence, the enhancement of the interpreting
subjectivity is promoted at the expense of the performance subjectivity. According to
Zhao, the goal of Zen theatre is to provide the audience with an opportunity to reach
enlightenment by reminding them of their ability to illuminate themselves.5 Starting
with an antagonism against the stubbornness of the subjective I of Gao, Zhao
concludes with a reliance on you, the reader/audience, to retrieve the communicative
aspect of Gaos work and a transposition of his works across cultural borders to that of a
world theatre.

In reading the multi-dimensional cubist novel One Mans Bible, Tam Kwok-kan
adopts a strategy which mimicks the flowing narrative structure of the novel. Tams
analogy is a language flow from modernism/cubism to psychoanalysis, from Zen
Buddhism to split subject narrative of Duras and Kristeva, from Gaos painting
movement to the dream and journey of Hongloumeng and Ingmar Bergmans film, from
montage to musical structure experimented by Chinese and Western writers, from
4

Zhao points out that xieye for Gao is to use plain language to achieve Zen aesthetic which is different
from the meaning of xieye discussed in China in the 80s largely referred to Chinese opera which is
formulaic and serves to compensate the lack of resemblance. Ibid., 171. Gao has criticized the traditional
Chinese style of cognition based on eureka without bothering to think analytically on cognitive issues.
See his discussion with Yang Lian on What exile brings to us in Meiyou zhuyi (No-ism or
Without-ism) (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu , 1996).
5
Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 202, 210-3.

switching between the social and personal level of the novel to elaborating on Gaos
narrative theories expressed inside and outside the novel.

At the end, Tam settles with

the comment that Gaos autobiographical novel is more multi-faceted (three-faced

subject of I, you and s/he) than the spiritual autobiographical work by Western writers
such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. Gao differs from his Western
counterparts in the sense that he has brought to the foreground the process of
objectification of the subject through the split subject in textual temporality. While
there is a me-ism in Gao who regards the subject as his own god and himself as the
disciple, consciousness for the subject is a stream of language where he resides.
Coincidentally, like Zhao, Tam ends his analysis by pointing to the power of Gaos text
to engage the reader, though what Tam refers to is the sense of ironic identification
conjured through the dyad function of the you character deployed by the writer which
can mean either/both the Is distanced shadow or/and the reader as addressee.6

Whether it is Zhaos antagonistic reading against Gaos will to escort him back
into the historical site or Tams reading assimilating the flowing structure of Gaos
modernist fiction, there seems to be a curious voice in Gaos discourse which is so
engaging that a critic either seeks to strike it out or sings with it. What is this dialogic
voice which speaks with such power that it is both inspiring and irritating, engaging and
disengaging?

Mabel Lee, the translator of Soul Mountain and also a critic, considers

that the broad and transcultural outlook of Gao has enabled him to engage comfortably
in a Bakhtinian dialogue with readers in both the Chinese and transcultural context.7
To a certain extent, Gao is Bakhtinian in the sense that he shares with Bakhtin in
6

Tam Kwok-kan, Language as Subjectivity in One Mans Bible in Soul of Chaos.

Mabel Lee Gao Xingjian on the Issue of Literary Creation for the Modern Writer in Soul of Chaos.
21-42.
7

emulating the aesthetic of polyphony as a narrative strategy to speak against the

monologism of traditional authorial discourse. In a Bakhtinian style, Gao uses
polyphony and also invokes multiple disciplines in his discursive reflection including
music, psychology, philosophy, linguistics and anthropology. Like his Western
predecessor, Gao has restlessly sought to advance his thinking and is keen to change
alongside his aesthetic experimentation, a point also noted by Zhao in his criticism of
Gao. Another similarity shared between the two is that despite embracing dialogism,
they both cling to the value of individual voice as a fundamental category.
Commentators of Bakhtin consider his dialogism opposed to deconstruction as
subjectivity is thoroughly problematised in the latter.

As for Gao, he has commented

that the delimiting of self according to some theoretical system or ism would only
strangle free thought. The greatest difference between the two of course lies in the fact
that Gao is more than a critic or a theorist. He is basically a cultural practitioner putting
his aesthetic into artistic practice. As pointed out by Mabel Lee, Gaos
self-identification as an artist is unambiguous.

He is an artist who strives to work

across media and employs his knowledge and critical observation to achieve in his work
a universality which transcends the apparent boundaries existing between human beings.
Gao values freedom of expression and rejects any compromise of the artistic self in
literature, such as refusing to change his play script upon request.

Criticizing Lu

Xuns choice to abandon creative writing in favour of political involvement, he

considers that an artist is not the conscience of society nor is literature the mirror of
society. The writer simply uses his own conscience and knowledge to write his own
works.9
8

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Texas: U of Texas P, 1981); Irena R. Makaryk ed.,
Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), 31,32.
9
In Soul of Chaos, 21-42.

The question which follows is, how should a discussion of the work of Gao who is
a cultural critic and at the same time an artist across disciplines be framed? From what
perspective should we approach this cubist figure? Or is it an impossibility as whatever
view we take or stance we make would end up in being partial. De Man in Allegories of
Reading argues that all literary texts are self-deconstructing, the deconstructor appears
to have little to do except to collude with the texts own processes. Tam Kwok-kans
reading of the One Mans Bible has demonstrated a similar strategy to collude with the
texts own processes, ie., mimicking the multiple strategy of the narrative which pays
heed to a fragmentary structure. What next? How should one negotiate between theory
and practice? Should one, like Zhao, in an anxiety to fulfill a historical imperative,
strenuously break between the fragments of the text and suture the writer into the
normality of socio-historical procedure, regardless of how hard the writer has fought in
the past to self-alienate from the norm? If Gaos narrative is a flow of language as
suggested in the term stream of words (Yuyanliao), in what way does this language
flow represent his self as momentary existence in the presence of language? How far
has Gao expanded the limit or subject himself to the limit of language? How far has he
taken flight?

Gao speaks about the problematic of Chinese exile literature several years after his
self-willed exile in 1987. Pointing out the issues of politics, moral responsibility and
consumerism confronting writers in diaspora, he declares the irrelevance of these issues
from his point of view. He expresses therefore he exists, or in other words, his identity
and personhood dwells in language.

If Gao is obsessed with originality, then he is also

obsessed with language which is the agency for self expression. He says that the
6

world to him is woven in language.

But he is also aware of its limit, hence what he

can do at the most is to dance in the prison of language. 10

Is this Gaospeak a

self-speaking or a dialogic voice? If Gaospeak is the currency of the writers cultural

capital, what is its value for cross-cultural exchange?

The aim of this study is to examine how Gao speaks and the strategies involved in
his struggle to establish an individual discourse within the limit of language.

postulate that the aesthetic mode which gives shape to Gaos artistic discourse is shaped
by his exilic imperative in metaphorical and literal terms.

Metaphorically speaking,

Gao is a spiritual exile as he is always engaged in self-quest and demonstrates an

uncompromising single-mindedness in his pursuit of artistic autonomy and creativity.
The desire to establish a distinctive artistic style of his own underpins his exilic turn
from the pedagogical to the performative of an individuated style. As a spiritual exile
and an exile writer in diaspora, the existential condition has made him veer towards a
transcendental type of exile pondering on the question of self identification and the
universal question of human existence. I shall proceed with the discussion in the
respective chapters as follows-

In chapter two, I will examine the complex term exile as a cultural and literary
term with reference to studies in the West and discussions on the issue by Chinese
scholars. I will appropriate moments and traces of a Chinese condition of exile within
the framework of exile literature so as to contextualize the discussion of Gaos exilic
discourse. Juxtaposing the question of Chinese literary exile in a transcultural context
would provide insight to map out the particularity of Chinese exile writing in the
10

Meiyou zhuyi, 108-115.

modern era. It is not my aim to come up with a particular definition or designated

condition of Chinese exile, but rather to map out the ambivalence of Chinese diasporic
intellectuals towards the subject which is always a self-reflective issue. As the term
exile is by its own nature a de-centering notion, there is an immanent need to include
Chinese writers across the straits in the discussion. My purpose is to extrapolate the
exile imperative of modern writers in a metaphoric and literary sense. This survey is by
no means comprehensive but attempts to include some of the major diasporic
intellectuals and writers in the discussion so as to spell out the complex idea of exile
which covers a broad range of notions such as pain and pleasure, nostalgia, melancholy,
loss, abandonment, alienation, flight and escape, shock, discovery, home, wandering,
and language.

In chapter three, I will examine Gaos exilic imperative as a spiritual exile through
the symbolic spatial exchange in Soul Mountain and the dramaturgy of the writers
pre-exile plays. I aim to show how the idea of traveling in space in Gaos work
intercepts the subjects incessant inquiry against history, culture, narrativity and the
ontology of self. Through the politic and poetic of space, rhetoric of spatial metaphor,
allegory, self-reflective narrative and dream language, the writer creates for himself a
cultural identity of alterity and an artistic third space as inscribed in his narrative and
dramatic discourse. This chapter shows how the writer as a spiritual exile strives to seek
new discovery, delimit artistic boundaries, and open up possibilities through the
enunciative present of the split self and theatrical space which is both a public and
private enterprise.

Chapter four will show how the writer makes use of his privileged position as an
8

exterior exile to speak back to history as well as seek self-redemption and

transformation through the agency of time in One Mans Bible. I will examine how the
narrative operates through juxtaposition of the external exile in the present and the
internal exile in the past, and the writers ambivalence in negotiating between the
creative act of the present and the re-telling of the objective past. The chapter will show
how the multiple levels of temporality operate in the novel. I propose that the narrative
is basically operating through mind/cognitive time which empowers the implied
narrator to breathe thoughts and feelings into the past he during his retrospection so
as to resuscitate the past self, and also to put the traumatic period of history under
personal investigation. Other than juxtaposing the public time of Maospeak to unveil the
myth of the nation-state and the private time of the past-he who seeks to escape from
time, I will also show that in parallel with the operation of the retrospective machine
which enables the journeying into the past through mnemonic time, there is also a
desiring machine in operation overarching the narrative metonymic of the libidinal
desire for writing.

In chapter 5, I will study how Gao the exile playwright establishes his theatre
assemblage and speaks to the local audience in the adopted country through exploring
the idea of homeliness and unhomeliness in his post-exile plays. While examining how
Gao establishes his own theatrical accent through the use of pronoun strategy, Zen
aesthetics, musical structure and iteration of metaphors and language flow, I attempt to
map out the trajectory of how the exile playwright seeks self-expression and
self-affirmation through the agency of theatre. While the playwrights discursive
assemblage has taken a psychic turn espousing dream-like language flow and
foregrounding the uncanny, claustrophobia, and death threat, the aesthetic process is
9

also a displacement and psychotherapeutic process for the exile who seeks to achieve
self-renewal through artistic self-distancing. The exile writers discourse manifests his
ethic to sustain his position of I express therefore I exist, however; the continual
babbling at times becomes pathological and turned into a self-parody and self-mockery.
Subsequent to reviewing how the exile writer translates himself to the world in his
commemoration speech entitled The Case for Literature positing his identity between
a Chinese exile and a universal being, I will examine how Gaos critics have sought to
bring home Gaos Chineseness and the problems involved in the light of cultural
translation and interpretation.

In the following, I seek to posit the discussion of Gaos diasporic aesthetic in

dialogical exchange with some concepts of postcolonial theory which give heed to
issues such as cultural identity, narrative as agency and cultural translation and assess
the relevancy of the terms in instigating the discussion of Gaos work. While
negotiating for insights applicable to this study, my approach in this study is basically
intertextual which seeks to cross read Gaos texts with multi-disciplinary theories,
narratology, and theatre studies. To a certain extent, this approach echoes Gaos
aesthetic which seeks to be dialogic, explorative, interrogative and creative.

1.2

In dialogue with theory

Homi Bhabha, in Interrogating identity: The Post Colonial Prerogative, points

out that the way for the postcolonial subject to create its identity is through continuous
10

interrogation and to see beyond the visual image of identity prefigured in the historical
real. Such an interrogation empowers the diasporic subject to recuperate the lost origin
of self and history, foreground the absence which eludes the eyes and see beyond the
object of gaze and the visual image given as real. Interrogation through discursive and
different disciplinary space enables the diasporic subject to invoke and erase stereotype
through iterative questioning of the contingent and double nature of the signifier.
Subjection and identification is problematised through repetitive questioning of the
contingency of the signifier motivated by the ambivalence of the desire of the Other
of the diasporic self. 11

This process involves the translation of self into a new

episteme through self-articulation.

It encompasses an understanding that identity is

after all self-created, never a finished product, and a forever problematic process of
access to an image of totality. The interrogation of identity is by nature a narcissistic
reflective process underpinned with the understanding that there is no totality of image
but self in splitting.12 Bhabha appraises postmodernism for its power to interrogate the
delusive third dimensionality that creates the depth of perspective cineastes call the
fourth wall and which literary theorists describe as the transparency of realist
metanarrative.

The diasporic self should interrogate the unifying third dimension and

recuperate the missing person lost due to the inscription of the colonial past. The subject
should see beyond the visible image and recuperate the invisible.13 Bhabha valorizes
11

Desire of the Other for the postcolonial subject means a desire for the whiteness. In Gaos case, this
desire of the Other can be interpreted as a desire of an alterity of cultural identity which the Chinese subject
seeks to acquire. Kirk Denton observes that there is a post-Mao obsession with new subjectivity crucial to
the issue of new cultural identity in China in the 80s. The Problem of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature
(Stanford: Standford UP, 1998).
12
While self-reflectiveness or self-referentiality is pertinent to postcolonial or new historicist aesthetics,
Currie seems to echo with Bhabhas observation in noting that Saids reading of Conrads novel gives an
impression of deep narcissism. What Currie refers to is Saids reading of Conrads sense of alienation
from Englishness as seen in his novel is in fact reflective of his self-conscious exilic position. Mark Currie,
Postmodern Narrative Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP., 2007), 149, 150.
13
Bhabha alludes to Richard Rorty who has pointed out that it is a part of the Wests obsession that the
subjects primary relation to objects is analogous to visual perception.

11

the postmodernist experience of disseminating self-image which goes beyond

representation as the analogical consciousness of resemblance. Each time the encounter
with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it
eludes the eyes, evacuates the self as the site of identity and autonomy and leaves a
resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance. At that point the diasporic self
is no longer confronted with an ontological problem of being but with the discursive
strategy of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for
identification becomes a response to other questions of signification and desire, culture
and politics.14 While recuperation of the lost origin or the so called root search is
not the main issue for Gao who construes that Chinese culture has always been rooted
in him, the idea of self-articulation as discursive strategy, the disseminating of
self-image and seeing beyond the visual image as mentioned by Bhabha is relevant to
the discussion of diasporic aesthetic and identity politics embedded in Gaos work.

Mabel Lees analogy of Gao with Lu Xun and Xu Wei in Gao Xingjians
Dialogue with Two Dead Poets from Shaoxing explains how Gao embarks on identity
politics through reading beyond the visual image of historical site and speaking in split
voice. Mabel Lee first describes the scenes in Soul Mountain where the protagonist
visits historical sites in Shaoxing which is the two dead poets native place and then
draws Gaos aesthetic in parallel with the two dead poets. Her description of the
narrators chain of thoughts provides an illustration echoing what Bhabha calls the
interrogation of identity through reading beyond the frame of image and leaving a
resistant trace, a moment in which the demand for identification becomes a response to

14

Homi Bhabha, Interrogating Identity: the Post Colonial Prerogative in Du Gay ed. Identity: A Reader
(London: Open U, 2000).

12

questions of signification and culture politics-

he is in Shaoxing where he notes that the local grain temple, which had for
one night provided shelter for Ah Q has been renovated and now bears a
sign with an inscription by a famous contemporary calligrapher. Gao Xingjian
cannot help thinking: When Ah Q was beheaded as a bandit he certainly
wouldnt have imagined that such an honour would be bestowed upon him
after his death. Gao Xingjian concludes that it is difficult even for minor
characters to escape being put to death in this small town. Then there is the
example of the revolutionary martyr Qiu JinBy association, Qiu Jins
patriotic fervour and self-sacrifice takes Gao Xingjians mind back to the
great writer Lu Xun whose life was spent in hiding and on the run.
Fortunately he moved into the foreign concessions otherwise he would have
been killed long before illness brought an end to his life.At the tomb of Yu
the Great in the vicinity of Shaoxing, he recounts the reference in the
Shanhaijing to the animal ancestry of Yu the GreatJust as the script on a
stone slab at the tomb of Yu the Great continues to defy deciphering by the
experts, so it seems to Gao Xingjian that all history is like this and is open to
any number of interpretations.15

The above analogy of Gaos monologue while visiting the historical sites shows
that the protagonists enunciation is not bound by the visual image of the temple or the
historical monument but always sees beyond to retrieve the other of history with his
imaginary minds eye. The split self exists in dialogic relation between the bodily Gao
as visitor and him as a spiritual being conversing with history.

This identity is

contingent as the moment of existence of the subject occurs at a point in time within the
temporality of the thinking process.

This thinking self flows along with the journey

and within the discursive space and is never ending as there is no finishing point in this
journey which remains open ended. Lu Xun, a fetished icon in history is invoked as an
15

Mabel Lee Gao Xingjians Dialogue with Two Dead Poets from Shaoxing in Soul of Chaos,
278-279.

13

image and a stereotype of a giant figure who is erased and humanized by Gao revealing
the dark side of him as a fugitive striving to escape death. Yu the Great who is hailed as
a saint in Chinese history is evoked only to be dehumanized into an animal figure.
Through recuperation of the invisible meaning of the historical figures, the protagonist
provides us with an alternative view of seeing history rearticulated by the personalized
viewpoint of the subject.

The protagonist plays the role of a new historicist who has

demonstrated to the reader that the relationship between individual identity and its
cultural milieu is mutually constitutive and hence dynamically unstable. Individual
identity is not necessarily a product of society and the subject can negotiate for a space
to rearticulate history through individual thinking. Through the textual space, Gao has
demonstrated the potentiality of narrative as an imaginative third space where the
subject as free agent can negotiate for a space to rethink history.

One might argue that postcolonial critics theory is culturally specific and doubt
that such theory can only be meaningfully applied to the specific situation of the
colonialized subject of the Third World who has been subjected to the process of
hybridization and creolisation.

It is true that there is a specific element in the cultural

theory of the postcolonial critics. What Bhabha proposes is an alternative strategy to

deal with the identity problem of the postcolonial subject.

Bhabha cites Frantz Fanon

in his work to point out the problem of the subject being overwhelmed by the visual
reality of the image, that Fanon is engulfed by the question of the black man as an
object of gaze. While the identity issue for Fanon and the postcolonial critics is a
racial problem of colour, and in Gaos case it is about ideological discourse, there is
commensurability as to how an agent can tackle his/her identity problems strategically
through self-rearticulation and re-narrativisation. In Gaos case, it is about the use of
14

pronominal strategy and exposure of the psycho-scape in narrative and dramaturgy.

Despite its abstraction, postcolonial theory has been extended by critics to study the
experience and literary production of peoples whose history is characterized by extreme
political, social and psychological oppression.

In the conversation between Stuart Hall and Chan Kuanshing on the formation of
diasporic intellectual, theory and imagery as the agency for the intellectual in diaspora is
highlighted. The key issue for the experimental intellectual in diaspora for Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak and Bhabha is to identify a position from where they can speak and
their role as cultural translators in transferring between knowledge and experience is of
paramount importance. 16

Hall defines diasporic experience as not by essence or

purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a

conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference.
Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing
themselves anew, through transformation and difference.17

Hall highlights the essence

of diasporic aesthetic as a syncretic dynamic which critically appropriates elements

from the master-codes of the dominant culture and creolizes them, disarticulating
given signs and re-articulating their symbolic meaning. The subversive force of this
hybridizing tendency is most apparent at the level of language18

16

In his defense

Stuart Hall, David Morley and Chen Kuan-hsing, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
(London: Routledge, 1996), 484 ,503.
17
Stuart Hall Cultural identity and diaspora in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Wheatsheaf, 1993), 392-403. Sophia
McClennen points out that at present the term diaspora is applied to cultural markers, like language and
social practices, that were at one time geographically concentrated and are now deterritorialized. Like exile
and refugee, the term is generally considered to be related to forced dislocation. See Sophia McClennen,
The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic Literatures (West Lafayette:
Purdue UP, 2004), 15.
18
Hall refers to Kobena Mercers essay Diaspora culture and the dialogic imagination in defining the
term diaspora aesthetics. Ibid, 402.

15

against critics like Dirlik who criticizes that the postcolonial theory of re-narrativisation
underpinned by poststructuralism and postmodernism is a world constituting the
self-image of the intellectual of First World academic and reinforcing the logic of late
capitalism and globalism, Hall points out that concepts such as hybridity and
syncretization are not theory but present and real. He explains that the critical
epistemic shift or the new term of post-coloniality is to represent a response to a
genuine need, the need to overcome a crisis of understanding produced by the inability
of old categories to account for the world. 19 Hall quotes Derrida to illustrate
post-colonial critics attempt to think at the limit. Derridas strategy to return to the
origin and decenter old thinking is not simply to erase but a double gesture which
allows what it obliterates to be read.20 While the term of diaspora has its specific
political and historical meaning, I consider it a cultural and figurative marker to emulate
the exilic position of the intellectual cum artist embarking on liminality and doubleness.
I allude to the double meaning inscribed in the term relating to the trauma of struggle
for

identity at

the

margin

and

the

potential

for

artistic

creativity and

self-transformation.21

In the conversation between Gao and Yang Lian on What exile brings to us, their
discussion valorizes the importance of language not unlike the postcolonial critics.
19

Stuart Hall, When was the Post-colonial? Thinking at the Limit Chambers, Iain, and Lidia Curti. The
Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons ( London: Routledge,1996) 255-57.
20
Ibid 255. Henry Zhao cautions against the use of terms such as Western cultural hegemony arising
from the so called post-colonial age which is conducive to the upsurge of cultural ethnicism and
anatagonism against the West. While the antagonism attached to the term is typically prevalent in the
mainland, there is certainly other aspects of post-colonialism which is less antagonistic and more
constructive and commensurable as this study attempts to illustrate. Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen
Theatre, 210.
21
The notion of diaspora is originated in the Greek historian Thucydides in Peloponnesian War. Later,
it is used in the Bible to describe the Jews expelled from Babylon in 586 BC. But this term, in its modern
meaning, is largely used to describe the African and other minority groups from the Third World
dispersed in the West.

16

They consider that diasporic intellectuals from the Mainland, being free from the
political and ideological constraints, should make use of the opportunity and freedom to
work incessantly on the transformation of Chinese language. As writers, to identify a
position from where they can speak means to work within language as a practical
discourse. From the point of view of ethnic Chinese, they touch upon the idea of
heterogeneity not in the sense of hybrid but a dissemination of the concept of Chinese
language into huayu (spoken Chinese) rather than adhering to concepts such as
zhongwen (Chinese language) or hanyu which emphasizes ethnicity, contending that the
term huayu means to syncretize all Chinese communities in the peripheral.

This

proposed epistemic change is more than a linguistic issue as it implies a new way of
seeing Chinese culture away from the center. 22

Through disarticulating a given

cultural sign and re-articulation, the symbolic meaning of Chineseness is renewed.

As

to how huayu can be expanded or transformed, Gao suggests that comparison can be
made between Chinese and other languages (such as French) so as to explore the
possibility of re-cognizing Chineseness.

For Gao, a culture or language can be better

apprehended through comparison with others.

and bring home new vision.

It is through exiting that one can return

If Chinese language is home to these diasporic

writers, they also pose against it a challenge to unhome the predominant mode which
prescribes it. While transformation, difference and re-articulation are notions shared
between the Chinese diasporic intellectual and the postcolonial critics, the trajectory
they embark on are different.

For the colonized subject, the sense of double

consciousness of ones cultural identity as a result of the aftermath of imperialism gives

rise to an unstable sense of self and a sense of psychological limbo of unhomeliness.
22

In Meiyou zhuyi, 116-156. While the exile writers raised this issue in 1993, a decade later Wang Dewei
and other Chinese writers in diaspora raise the same issue about replacing the notion of literature of
Chinese Overseas by literature of sinophone literature. Ming Pao Monthly, Vol 41 No 7, 2006.

17

As for the modern Chinese exiled writers, to unhome is both a conceptual and physical
gesture, and a conscious and deliberate effect to set free the national subject as a victim
of ideological interpellation. In this connection, Yang Lian queries the mainland
intellectuals indifference to George Orwells 1984 introduced through translation to the
community during the cultural fever in the 80s and questions the lack of
self-reflectivity of their existential condition.

Both exiled writers criticize the lack of

metaphysics in Chinese thinking and the stagnancy of Chinese philosophy remaining

basically unchanged for thousands of years.23 They embrace the need for a writer to
engage in the present and reflect the existential human condition through self
interrogation. To the Chinese diasporic intellectual, the West carries with it a
symbolic meaning as the other of the home culture, a door of exit to the other shore
which enables one to envisage home from a distance. The process is a transferring
process between exit and return.

In 2007, when Gao talks about the aesthetic of artists, he points to the limit and
limitlessness of art and says that an artist must understand the fundamental structural
limit of each genre and extrapolate the potentiality of its form.

It is the grasping of the

creative tools and retrieval of the depth embedded within the form itself which is
most pertinent to the creativity of the artist. What Gao means here is the need to grasp
the essence of the literary language at its purest without the intervention of ideology.
He stresses the importance of thinking beyond the limit and the intimate relationship

23

They might have referred to Feng Youlans contention that while Chinese Philosophy is most
prosperous in the pre-Qin, it basically remains stable in its development from the post-Qin to the Qing.
Feng Youlan , Zhongguo zhe xue shi (Xianggang: Taipingyang tushu gongsi, 1961).
Liu Ziefu mentions Feng Youlan in his conversation with Gao in Lun zhuanzhuo (Taibei: Linking,
2008), 301.

18

between thinking and practice.24 Gaos aesthetic views expressed in terms of literary
form gives one an impression that he is formalistic and apolitical. But this apparently
apolitical gesture also carries with it a political side as embedded in Gaos self-declared
no-ism (or without-ism), a defensive gesture the intellectual has undertaken as a
counter strategy to defend against political allegation and a tool to disentangle himself
from the impossibility of ideological debate.

It is a shield to fend off incessant

argument and a neology to give identity to the diasporic intellectual. 25 The

deconstructionist gesture to think at the limit appropriated by postcolonial critics
hence carries a cultural specificity in the case of Gao as a Chinese diasporic intellectual.
While the neology of no-ism carries with it an underlying vindictive tone for the exiled
writer against the hegemony of ideology, it has accumulated its meaning as a part of
Gaos transcultural currency in circulation beyond the authors control particularly after
he became a Nobel prize laureate whereby the media tend to associate him with politics
in their coverage. Ironically, the claim of autonomy has trapped Gao into becoming a
reified political and cultural sign. Terry Eagleton points out that ideology referred not
only to formulated doctrines but also to all those systems of representation such as
aesthetics which shape the individuals mental picture of lived experience. The meaning
and perceptions produced in the text are a reworking of ideologys own working of
reality.

In short, literature cannot distance itself from ideology, it is a complex

reworking of already existing ideological discourses, a special production of ideology

itself. Eagleton also points out in his criticism against postmodern aesthetic that the very
autonomy and brute self-identity of the artifact is the effect of its thorough integration

24

Gao Xingjian, Lun Zhuanzhuo, 78-97.

Henry Zhao refers to Gaos article written in 1987 and notes that Gao has already denied his relationship
with any ism when he was in the mainland. Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 13.
25

19

into an economic system where such autonomy is the order of the day. 26 While Gao
denies all attempts to categorise his works under any ism, the gesture should be seen
as his predilection to escape from any pre-fixed concept so as to allow the greatest space
for creative thinking and practice. As he once pointed out, it is the what- which is the
most important and not be or not to be.27 But as a cultural sign, he cannot escape
critics scrutiny against him as a cultural product in circulation. An overseas researcher
who studies the performance of identity in the theatre of Gao queries the identity of Gao
as a transcultural artist. While the researcher concludes in a positive tone that Gao has
endeavored to be a conscious artist working within and beyond the new global market
of culture, he cannot avoid the risk of being traded off as a commodity to the world as a
Nobel Laureate. 28 The researcher also points to the anxiety generated by Gaos
multicultural identity in circulation across cultures and disciplines, despite his unique
image and unequivocal stance espoused in his defense for ones voice.

1.3 Third space as agency

In discussing the resituating of the colonized subjects identity, Bhabha argues that
discursive gestures located at the in-between spaces, splits and liminality are pertinent
to producing numerous and shifting subject-positions where cultural differences are
articulated.

He sees this notion of the border area, the liminal space crucial to

postcolonial identity and the approach raises the possibility of a cultural hybridity. He
identifies the site of articulation of cultural difference as the third space of enunciation.

26

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory ( London: Verso, 1976).
In Meiyou zhuyi, 174.
28
Todd Coulter Wo, je, I,ni, tu, you: the performance of identity in the theatre of Gao Xingjian. Diss. U
of Colorado at Boulder, 2006.
27

20

This third space can resituate knowledge from the perspective of the minority. The
indeterminate third space ensures that cultural signs are not fixed but can be
appropriated, rehistoricised, translated, and reread.

This third space is a place of

agency and intervention because it is here that cultural meaning is constructed and
located. Bhabhas contention is that culture is not a historically constituted set of
authentic, self-evident traditions contributing to a definition and unification of a nation
or people, but a disciplinary practice of writing crossed by the temporal and spatial
effects of difference.29

Bearing in mind that Bhabha is addressing a post-colonial hybrid community and

he considers that this third space in a general condition cannot in itself be conscious, I
consider these theoretical concepts that locate culture as a discursive act effecting
temporal and spatial differences give inspiration to the discussion of Gaos work. As a
response I propose to study how temporality and spatiality in his work serve as agencies
for his exile narrative and self-re-creation, and how the writer consciously creates his
individuated third space by engaging split, liminality, ambivalence and other symbolic
metaphors. Some critics argue against the efficacy of the theoretical concepts such as
the idea of third space as a site of resistance as these terms are often too general and
without historical content.

I agree that postcolonial theory or any theory as such

should not be applied wholesale. Rather than dwelling on historically void categories
such as postcolonialism, one should study a case in its particular context.

The

plasticity of the conceptual terms serve as an agency to inspire discussion and provide
currency for academic transaction but the discussion should be focused on the particular
case to flesh out the potentiality of the theoretical proposition. I consider that a
29

Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004).

21

discussion of Gaos diasporic aesthetic through symbolic exchange between the text and
postcolonial and other contemporary theories would posit Gao in dialogue with
transcultural theorists and critics and aptly serve the purpose of an exile narrative which
veers towards transcending national boundaries and attaining cross-cultural dialogue.
Cross reading theories with Gaos work is in fact a translating process pertinent to the
issue under discussion. I suggest that there is an invisible exilic and translational desire
at play in the imaginary, liminal, and heterogeneous third space of Gao inseparable from
his role as a translator in its metaphorical and practical sense.

It is worth noting that

the biographical fact of Gao as a well-trained bilingual hybrid has given him cultural
currency to engage in the transaction of symbolic exchange which is immanent to the
valorization of his diasporic aesthetic. While hybridity and the psychic split engendered
by colonial rule on the postcolonial subject is externally forced and an unconscious
process as described in Fanons white mask/black skin ambivalence which is to be
overcome, the self-splitting is voluntary and a conscious process in the case of Gao as a
modern hybrid Chinese intellectual. Gaos writing in the late 70s and early 80s on
French literature and narrative technique can be seen as a product of his cultural
translation.

When Bakhtin uses the term linguistic hybrid, he refers to the nature of

language which is always already a hybrid and the novelistic discourse always a split
embedded with double voice.30

For Gao, the third space is a translational field which

occasions the transference between identity and language, cultures, and art forms. It is a
site where cultural translation and self-translation take place through the performance of
symbolic exchange. However, cultural production generated from this site also subjects
itself to be read as a sign and translated.

30

Robert Young, Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture, and race (London: Routledge, 1995),
20-28

22

1.4 Cultural Translation

Jessica Yeung, in her study of Gaos works as cultural translation, refers to the
intertextuality of Gaos repertoire and the European source of influence as a
translational one. To assess the degree of translatability of modernism into Chinese
literature in the 1980s and to identify Gaos translation strategies, Yeung resorts to
Even-Zohars polysystem theory.

In short, she provides a reading of how European

modernism, in terms of foreign literary modes, is assimilated into the target Chinese
cultural context and considers Gao as an agent in the transference process.

Yeung

argues that in the acculturation process, Gao complies with Chinese modernists
structure of feeling in the 80s, namely, an overwhelming impulse of anti-naturalism
and anti-realism among the generation of writers who have started writing after the
Cultural Revolution.

She considers that Gaos translation project, in terms of his

experimental plays, is in tune with the modernist paradigm and hence plays an
important role in modernisms successful transfer.

Referring to the theory of

polysystem, she claims that a successful transfer is achieved when the transferred entity
has become an integral part of the indigenous repertoire; which means that not only is
the transferred entity domesticated in the target culture, but also that the need for it is
generated. The parameter mapped out in appraising Gaos work is that it should be a
part of the whole and functional as it is a need in response to social demand. This
approach reminds us of Henry Zhaos self-declared antagonistic stance to read Gaos
work against his will, that is, despite Gaos struggle to speak his own voice, Zhao has
chosen to stitch him back into the social milieu out of a historical imperative. While
Zhao has overtly declared his subjective stance and concluded the discussion by
23

transposing Gaos work to the space of world theatre, Jessica Yeungs translation
framework based on acculturation of modernisation into the local context fails to
operate in the discussion of Gaos post-exile plays. Alluding to Jamesons theory on
multi-capitalism and embarking on her stance on the grounds that an exiled writer
should both experience and engage the new framework of his life by appreciating and
criticizing the new framework, Yeung discounts Gaos post exile work as nihilistic and
egotistic. Her textual reading of the plays leads her to conclude that there is nothing
within the text to justify or explain why the relationship among these people develops in
this particularly negative way. The text articulates a general lack of purpose and
meaning of the characters actions, which reads as almost contrived.

She further

claims that the plays lack of clarity and force in the representation of the present life
outside and after China can therefore be interpreted as either incapability or
unwillingness to provide a more insightful interpretation of life in the late capitalist
West.31 The Nobel prize awarded to Gao in 2000 and the self parody of Gao in an
interview saying that he has henceforth disappeared as a person and become a symbol
provides Yeung with good reason to make Gao collude with globalism and world
literature which is often a subject of attack by neo-Marxist cultural critics. Yeung ends
her chapter on Gaos post-exile plays in a drifty manner by a sleight of hand claiming
that a re-positing of the meaning of his plays is called for as the social context in China
has changed and information technology and communications have assumed paramount
importance in the new economy of postmodern China which has progressed rapidly and
31

Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjians writing as cultural translation (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong UP, 2008), 125-153. Yeungs criticism is ironic and her stance is a negative response to
Henry Zhaos questioning: is this self-illuminating insight, however, achievable for all members of the
audience? How many in the audience are of so called sharp aptitude and pure heart and capable of
universal compassion, instead of having a slow aptitude who love petty-benefit and cling to life?...It in
fact makes the deliverance far more difficult as people no longer have outside means to rely uponThe
best Zen Theatre can do is to remind the audiencethat they have been given an opportunity to escape
this fascination-disgust trap. Zhaos Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 205-206.

24

monolithic mode of politics and social life have become utterly impossible. Her chapter
on Gaos post-exile plays which occupies less than one third of the book compared to
the space given to describing Gaos work in the 80s ends on a metaphorical note that
these works are fists punching thin air.32 At the end of the book, she discounts Gaos
work written since the mid 90s as ideas spoken as abstract concepts and the dramatic
situation presented as transcendental and fundamental to the human condition.

She

emphasizes the essentiality for a particular condition to trigger a critique of a play and
describes the decontextualised alienation of Gaos work as ink dances in limbo as
they have been recuperated into the existentialist discourse of the French and European
polysystems considered as universal entity. Yeungs critical response reminds us of
the aesthetic power or modernist/postmodernist edge of Gaos work to evoke tension
and antagonism in readers. While Henry Zhao holds tight to his racket and vows to
play a game with Gao, Yeung volleys with an endnote of nihilism.

Retrospectively,

she even denies the earlier appreciation of Gao the modernists contribution in the 80s
to the polysemy system claiming that the lack of sophisticated ideological reflection in
Gaos early works means that the struggle for freedom they symbolize can only serve as
a reactionary phenomenon.

It also means that they have to be read in China in the

shadow of the oppressive Other to acquire meaning.33 There is of course a certain truth
in her comment about the outdated political meaning of the earlier formalist texts as
she calls them. In fact Gao has self-reflectively noted that no-ism is only meaningful
within a certain context.34

The issue of concern here is how a critic should look

beyond the writer or the text as thing in exchange of ideas such as modernism and
capitalism, to see what eludes the eyes which have been clouded by ideological
32
33
34

Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, 125-153.

Ibid, 145.
Meiyou zhuyi,116-119.

25

presumption. Modernism and modernity are important terms engaging critics in their
discussion of modern Chinese literature and these terms have become so dominating a
concept that it has almost become the only paradigm in the discussion by Chinese
literary critics. Charles A. Laughlin, in Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature,
has insightfully suggested that pursuant to the development of a particular literary
modernity in the Chinese context, it is time for critics to question the very coherence of
the fictional construct that grounds the sphere of inquiry, by asking: how is it made and
who made it.35 The goal of this study is not to explore the above issue but to attempt to
explore how one may read Gaos work as an exilic discourse of self-enquiry and
self-transference against which critics have contested to engage in their own translation
of Gao as a cultural sign.

In what way does the notion of cultural translation contribute to the understanding
of the writers diasporic aesthetic and self-translation into a transcultural being?
Michel Foucault raises questions about the definition of authorship such as whether
identification pertains only to text, or can it be extended to modes and systems of
discourse. The critical meaning which we attribute to the identity of the author has a
lot to do with regimes of literary property and with the terms which are used to evaluate
literature. Adhering to Foucaults idea of an author, feminist writers who work in the
translation field contend that before the Renaissance whence translation becomes an
essentially translinguistic activitiy, translation was considered a transtextual operation

35

Laughlin, Charles A., Contested Modernities in Chinese Literature ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), 1-13. In short, Langhlin argues that while acknowledging the immense importance of the May
Fourth legacy in the discussion of modern Chinese culture, the study of Chinese literature in the
twenty-first century has embarked on a new emerging landscape which emcompasses an intersection of
nation, gender and city, disapora and modernity, feminism and historiography, goes beyond the
delimitation of binary oppositions and re-defines Chinese literature as those cultural production outside
the geographical boundary of mainland China.

26

not bounded by identities delimited by authorship, language and text as we interpret

them today. The Greek hermeneuein means both to explain and translate. During the
middle ages, there were a variety of terms to describe the task of translating different
literary genres according to its specificity. The boundary between ones own words and
those of another was fragile, equivocal, often purposely ambiguous. Feminist translators
call attention to the translators intervention in the translation process. It is most
insightful when they allude to the French translator and philosopher Antoine Berman
and highlight his emphasis on the creative role of the translating subject, arguing against
the functionalist approach of the polysystem theorists who defer to the overarching
authority of the norm to explain the interaction of translation with writing practice.
For Berman, the subjectivity of the translator must be understood as part of a complex
overlay of mediating activities, which allow for active and critical intervention. He
considers that the ethical character of translation is defined by respect for the original
in terms of engagement of dialogue; the poetic of translation eludes definition of a fixed
aesthetic mold and in general the work should be open, amplify and not be reductive or
ethnocentric.36 Likewise, Paul Ricoeur, well-known for his philosophical attempt to
mediate between diversified theories, contends that humanity, as in language, exists in
plurality. For Ricoeur, translation as a model for communication exchange between
different cultures and identities turns into a paradigm showing how one should come in
contact with the cultural and linguistic Other with a sense of hospitality and ethical
concern for the translating agency.37

36

Simon, Sherry, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York:
Routledge, 1996), 36, 43-44. The introduction of the term traducere in 1420 put an end to translation as
multidimensional activities by defining all translation as a translinguistic activity.
37
Paul Ricoeur, On Translation (Oxon: Routledge, 2006). Angelo Bottone The ethical task of the
translator in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, in Paschalis Nikolaou, Translating Selves: experience and
identity between languages and literatures (London: Cromwell Press, 2008), 73-86.

27

The altered understanding of translation under cultural studies and postcolonial

studies is regarded as an empowered activity to destablise cultural identities and the
basis for new modes of creation.

In the case of understanding Gaos cultural identity,

it would be helpful to take into account the altered notion of cultural translation which
gives heed to the subjectivity of the translator and the need to balance between the
irreducibility of the original and re-creation. In the Third Space, Bhabha says that
by translation I first of all mean a process by which, in order to objectify cultural
meaning, there always has to be a process of alienation and of secondariness in relation
to itself.38 Spivak, as a postcolonial theorist and a feminist translator, also speaks
about the need to keep a maximum distance in the translating process.

In the Politics

of Translation, she says that the translator needs to undo previously taught habits of
translation in order to learn how to engage fully with the text. What the translator
must do is surrender to the text, earning the right to transgress from the trace of the
other. In the translating relationship there has to be more respect for the irreducibility
of otherness. The translator, the agent of language, faces the text as a director directs a
play, as an actor interprets a script.39 Alienation, distance and the idea of the irreducible
are familiar concepts that often occur in Gaos artistic theory and practice.

In Gaos

essay on my drama and my key, Gao talks about his key related to his philosophical
reconceptualisation of the self.

He mentions the freeing of the self in the course of

training actors through practicing taijiquan and basic gongfu exercises and strive to
reach a state of non-thinking.40 After their bodies are fully relaxed, they will do some

38

Ibid, 52.
Spivak the Politics of Translation in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge,
1993).
40
While Gaos training technique aims to overcome the problem of self-centeredness of Stanislavskis
acting method, it contains within it profound philosophical syncreticism as the gongfu of taijiquan
embodying the Chinese philosophical notion of dongjing is used as a tool to achieving introspective
self-objectification.
39

28

games of language consciousness switching among the perspectives of I, you, and he so

that they can observe themselves beyond the confines of the self, through the eyes
hidden behind themselves.41 This description reminds us of the concept of distance,
surrender, and the imagination to see what has eluded the eyes. Gaos self-analogy of
how he treats his post-exile plays in French and Chinese as completely different texts
and how he writes as a Frenchman for French audience and as a Chinese for a Chinese
audience is reflective of an understanding he has about the irreducibility of otherness
as mentioned by Spivak.42

The priority of postcolonial translators and feminists such as Spivak is to invent

strategy in technical terms to decontextualise imperialist text, while the priority of
theorists like Bhabha is to emphasize a conceptual framework of translation as a
transcreation of culture.

I am not considering Gao as a thing to be interpreted within

the abstract framework of postcolonial theory but ideas such as cultural translation both
as concept and technique provides insights to understanding the process of
self-understanding and self-recreation. In Gaos case, being a translator in the past and a
bilingual hybrid, he is most sensitive to the potential and limit of translation, in other
words, the potential and limit of language in transposing culture and translating the self
into language.43

He is predominantly a writer more than a translator in the practicable

41

Soul of Chaos, 300.

Emily Apter in The Translation Zone, juxtaposes Walter Benjamins translation theory with that of
Alain Badiou. The former avows that all languages are translatable and they are generated from the
pure language. Translation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language can be
considered a translation of all the others, whereas the latter considers translation as a disaster and from the
point of view of philosophy of idea, one should not base on shared philological word-histories but on the
limitless and irreducible bounds of poesis. As for Gao, he prefers to provide bilingual versions of his
work such as the post-exile plays. Its the pure language of a particular culture that Gao pursues.
Kundera, by contrast, declares that he writes in more comprehensible Czech so as to facilitate translation
of his work. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature ( Princeton: Princeton
UP, 2006),7-11.
43
I would like to note that Gaos method of speaking aloud to the recorder during his creative process
42

29

sense. Rather than acting as an agency of language, language is his agent for self
articulation and re-creation.

Cultural translation for Gao is to be understood as a

process of the transposing of a language, a cognitive system, a literature, and a history

in which the subject is involved. Gaos re-reading of the classical Chinese literary text,
genre, folk tales and history is a process of cultural translation. The challenge of such a
writer cum cultural translator is to rewrite or write against the metatext of a culture or
tradition as a self-creative process rather than part of a polysemy system.

The

diasporic third space for Gao is a translation zone where, as a writer, he has a freedom
to choose the cultural elements he wishes to transpose and have his identity inscribed.
Within this zone, he brings to the fore an individual identity through self-splitting and
estrangement, and he emulates existential human condition commensurable to audiences
of transcultural differences.

If a translator in technical terms begins with a text, Gao as

a writer begins with a self as a text to be transposed and re-conceptualised. This can
be seen in his theory and practice of self-splitting as writing and acting technique.
What is shared between a writer and translator is they both have to encounter constraints
imposed by history, myth, ideology, patronage and affiliation, which set bounds on the
process of cultural transposition and self translation.

Postcolonial critics have pointed out the use of paratextual commentary as a

technique adopted by postcolonial translators to overcome the limitation of the
irreducibility of cultures in the translating process.

By means of paratextual

is strikingly similar to the research method of thinking-aloud in translation studies. The latter is to
subject translators to the experiment of verbalizing freely on their thought processes while translating
(itself a split process) so as to delve into the black box (mental process) of translation, namely, the
psychological and linguistic mechanisms involved in the activity of translating. Research shows that
professional translators (Gao certainly is a case in point) are keen to identify language problems and
prone to solving them. See Mona Baker, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London:
Routledge, 1998), 265-269. Gaos speaking aloud will be discussed in chapter 3.

30

commentary in the form of introductions, footnotes, critical essays, glossaries, maps and
the like, the translator can embed the translated text in a shell which helps to
supplement necessary cultural and literary background for the receiving audience and
serve as a running commentary on the translated work.

In doing so, the translator can

manipulate more than one textual level simultaneously in order to encode and explain
the source text.44

This provides insight to understanding the entire process of Gaos

strategy, consciously or unconsciously, in transposing culture and translating himself.

While Gao is unequivocal in declaring that he expresses and therefore he exists, he
simultaneously understands the limit of language and avows that the best he can do is to
dance within the prison of language. But at the same time, he is always contesting to
expand his expressive space and articulate beyond and within its limits.

Gaos

provision of introduction, postscripts and authorized commentaries for his plays and
novels, not unlike the postcolonial translators, act as paratextual commentaries and a
carapace for his artistic creation. By manipulating more than one textual level, the
writer can speak in multiple voices and represent himself from multiple perspectives.
Gaos engagement in multi-disciplinary art forms and theoretical extrapolation of his
aesthetics provide a complexity of intertext. Critics attempting to understand the
Gaospeak would have to consider the paraphernalia attached to his work to supplement
the understanding of his self-translation and cultural transposition, albeit these
contingent and fragmentary paratext might make a unique understanding more
unattainable.45

44

Maria Tymoczko, post-colonial writing and literary translation in Susan Bassnett & Harish Trivedi
Post-colonial Translation: theory and practice ( London: Routledge, 1999).
45
One example is that he says that he alludes to theory in explaining his idea of theatre in his seminal
paper presented in 1991, whereas in another occasion, he denies that he is talking about theory but only to
offer a method in his dialogue with Gilbert Fong. Meiyou zhuyi 235, Lun xiju, 159. Henry Zhao also
points out the inconsistency in Gaos views on theatre language such as shifting from his claim in 1990
that what an author faces is no other reality but that of language to raising doubt on the nature of

31

While this study covers the two novels and a large part of Gaos plays, it has not
included the writers short stories which are regarded as explorative by the writer in
seeking to come up with a new form of writing.46 Due to the limited scope of this study,
I have also not been able to compare Gaos work with his contemporary such as Bei
Dao or Ha Jin who also write in a transcultural context. While this study will examine
Gaos strategic use of cognitive time, pronoun technique, femininity and other literary
techniques, much space is left for further study in each of these significant areas which
would have much to contribute to the development of narrative theory in a transcultural
context pursuant to the postmodern turn.47

languages capability in expressing the existence of human beings in 1993. In Towards a Modern Zen
Theatre, 17-18.
46
See epilogue of Gaos Gewo laoye maiyugan (Buying a fishing rod for my grandfather) (Taibei: Lianhe
wenxue, 1989), 260-261. For the study of the use of pronoun strategy in Gaos short stories, see Ngai
Ling-tuns Use of second-person pronoun in Gao Xingjians short stories International Symposium
jointly presented by French Centre for Research on Contemporary China and Hong Kong Drama
Programme of Sir Run Run Shaw Hall, CUHK, May 2008. Seminal papers documented in Hong Kong
Drama Review. Hong Kong: The Chinese UP & Xianggang xiju gongcheng, vol 8 2009,
325-351. In view of the need to maintain the discussion within a manageable framework, this study has not
been able to launch a full-scale study into Gaos theoretical proposition in literary writing and dramaturgy
which would considerably require a different framework of analysis, such as following the trajectory of the
development of his theoretical discourse which stretches across three decades or making cross-examination
between his theories and practices.
47
Gaos vigorous use of the second-person pronoun, amongst others, deserved to be further studied. Ngai
Ling-tun refers to Brian Richardsons recent research on the use of the second-person and the latters claim
that this ground-breaking narrative device since the use of stream of consciousness should be more
attended to by theorists so as to come up with an approach in encountering this relatively new technique.
Lynne Pearce devotes a chapter to discussing the use of pronouns in feminist discourse but the focus is
mainly on I and the split between I and she. Rarely does she mention the use of the second pronoun in the
wide range of feminist narrative covered. See chapter one in The Rhetorics of Feminism (London:
Routledge, 2004). Mark Currie neatly sums up that the deconstructionist turn of narratology is one which
turns from discovery (of inherent formal and structural properties) to invention, from coherence to
complexity, and from poetics to politics. Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory (New York : St.
Martin's Press, 1998), 2-3.

32

CHAPTER TWO

CHINESE CONDITION OF EXILE

Is there an alternative way to describe modern Chinese writers work from the
point of view of exilic discourse and has there ever been a Chinese mode of exile?
Gao Xingjian says that the batch of Chinese writers in exile overseas after the 1989
Tiananmen incident is unprecedented in Chinese literary history.1 Bei Dao echoes a
similar view that exile literature is a new phenomenon on the Chinese literary scene and
exiled writers face a new challenge as they have to overcome the crisis of being caught
between two cultures.2 If there really is an existence of Chinese exile literature, how is
it to be described and where shall we start? Critics have pointed out the difficulty of an
assumption that literature has to have an essence which is in fact indescribable. The task
of literary criticism is to continually re-apply the rules and procedures by which
literature is marked off from its outsides, as if it has an identity of its own even though it
remains unclear what that identity is. If there is an agreement on the principle that
literature has an identity, literary criticism remains unsettled by the fact of considerable
disagreement over what should stand in for it.3 Woman writers in exile argue that
despite a certain common likeness among them, it is questionable to confine womens
1

Gao Xingjian, The problem of Chinese exile literature in Meiyou zhuyi. Tian Banxiang, from a
mainland scholars point of view, considers it beneficial to conduct research on the exile history of the
modern Chinese literati. He refers to the traditional concept of dunxi of the literati and says that taowang
is a form of cultural politics in ancient as well as contemporary China. See Tian Banxiangs seminal
paper, Escape, recluse, Zen in Hong Kong Drama Review, vol 8 2009, 31-41.
2
In Martin Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth-century : an analysis and biographical dictionary
( New York : Greenwood Press, 1991), 118.
3
Nancy Lucy, Postmodern Literary Theory: an introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 141.

33

writing in exile within bounds as the center is always shifting, being redefined, replaced.
Yesterdays place of exile can be tomorrows center, and perhaps only in the today of
moving from one place to another can conclusions, momentarily, be drawn. 4 The
question of identifying exile literature in the Chinese context is doubly complex as there
are currently no formal rules and procedures to underpin a fully-fledged description.
The term exile is a complex term which is multifarious in meaning and has no fixed
identity.

Despite the terms potency to break geographical boundaries and its

multicultural currency, the exilic complex would have to be substantiated and

configured case by case based on individual experience.

In this chapter, I attempt to

trace the momentary exilic instances of Chinese writers across the straits at different
temporality. I adopt the literal and literary meaning of exile in its physical, metaphysical
and metaphoric sense and examine how the Chinese exile intellectual expresses the split
self through the agency of the imaginary and self-expressive third space.

2.1 Exile--a complex term

Martin Tucker, who compiled the anthology Literary Exile in the Twentieth
Century, attempts to distinguish between exile and migr by pointing out that migr
activity follows a flight by choice, a decision taken to avoid a feared harm or wrong
and/or an expulsion by decree of the sociopolitical unit, whether it be a group of people,
a religious community, or a local/national government. An migr in this scheme flees
to avoid harassment, torture, imprisonment, or worse apprehensions; the method of
operation is a matter of varying circumstance and opportunity. An exile, by contrast,

Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram ed. Women's Writing in Exile (Chapel Hill : U of North Carolina P,
1989), 2.

34

is more passive; choice is determined by a decree of banishment. An exile can also be

described as a refugee in its metaphorical sense when one has found a place after much
wandering and begins the equally tortuous routes of wandering through memory and
yearning. However, having provided such a definition, Tucker immediately notes the
murkiness of the distinction, as emotionally an migr and exile alike might feel the
same pangs of loss upon arrival in a foreign land.

It is indeed difficult to categorize

distinction among the types of exile as described above. In the case of Gao Xingjian,
he initially falls into the category between migr and refugee as he plans to stay in
France in 1987 to seek freedom of expression and out of the apprehension of a larger
and better opportunity.5

He is made an exile in its political sense after he wrote the

play Escape in response to the June Fourth incident and was admonished by the state
regime as a dissident and has his civic identity and property proscribed and confiscated.

Metaphysically, exile writing often echoes themes in religious lore, such as Moses
and Jesuss flight from Egypt, Muhammads journey to Mecca and Buddhas
pilgrimages to vision in the East. But what gives potency to the term is its legacy as a
political modern construct created side by side with the creation of national borders and
forced emigration caused by political, religious and communal harassment. From the
position of a diasporic intellectual, Edward Said considers that there is an immanency
for the intellectual to consider him/herself to be a part of the general condition affecting
the displaced national community and to be a source not of acculturation but volatility
and instability. He argues against the mistaken assumption that being exiled is to be
totally cut off, isolated and hopelessly separated from the place of origin. He points out

Although Gao visited France in 1987 upon invitation, he reveals in the novel in retrospection that
subconsciously he intends to stay in the host country and not to return.

35

the realistic fact that for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to
live away from home, but rather, given todays world, in living with the many
reminders that the home is not in fact so far away.

Said stresses that it is not the literal

sense of exile but its metaphorical sense which gives meaning to an intellectual in exile.
Social and political history of dislocation and migration provides a background to the
intellectuals exilic position but it is after all the intellectuals willingness to remain in a
state of never being fully adjusted and always feeling outside the chatty and the
familiar world inhabited by natives. Exile for the intellectual in its metaphysical sense is
restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled and unsettling others. An intellectual
in exile cannot go back to some earlier and more stable condition of being at home and
can never fully arrive, be at one with his new home or situation. Paradoxically, the exile
intellectual is one who tends to be happy with the idea of unhappiness. A kind of
curmudgeonly disagreeableness can become not only a style of thought but also a new
habitation.6 To Said, the advantage of an intellectual to be in literal exile is that his
experience can make him see things in double perspective and counterpoise with others,
therefore in a sometimes new and unpredictable light. A particular advantage is that the
double perspective enables one to surpass ethnocentrism and see things from a wider
angle avoiding casting simple judgment against an approved enemy.

Said, as an expatriate of Palestinian origin settled in the United States, speaks from
the position of an intellectual cum academic defying the truism of exile as a state of
isolation and detachment where the origin is irrecoverable and totally cut off. From the
literary perspective however, it is often the sense of psychic loss generated by physical
separation and the incontrovertible feeling which largely gives form and shape to the
6

Edward Said, The Edward Said Reader ( Oxford: Granta Books, 2000), 368-381.

36

mode underpinning exile literature. While exile is as old as the first home one has left in
the prime of consciousness, the psychic states attendant upon the awareness of the loss
it renders often act as a nurturing stimulus to creative literary expression. Psychic loss
generated either by forced or voluntary physical separation from home is considered the
basic content of exile despite its different literary manifestations. The exilic contagion
in nineteenth century Europe is phenomenal and a corollary of the Romantic movement
when reason was discovered to be less than visionary and a rational worldview
insufficient to meet the demands of a sensuous soul. The coinage of the German
weltschmerz carrying with it a sense of melancholy becomes a period piece in the
nineteenth century and a response to the exilic imperative of the modern time. The
major difference between forced and voluntary exile is that the latters sense of
wandering, nostalgia and yearning is self-willed while the literally exiled has no choice
and must wait for a new order in his land before return.7

How does the Chinese sense

of exile or exilic discourse intersect with its Western counterpart?

2.2 The Chinese Case

In the preface to Literature in Exile which documents exiled writers seminal

discussion on their exile condition, John Glad questions the possibility of a separate
migr tradition distinguishable from a national literary tradition and concludes that it
remains a theory. Citing Russian migr literature as a case in point, he points out that
five distinct groups have left Russia in the twentieth century, from the peasants at the
turn of the century to the Jews who take flight, the revolutionaries who leave and return,
the waves of wartime exodus and the migrs in the seventies. In terms of literary work
7

Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, ix.

37

by Russian migr letters, there is no maintenance of a separate, viable tradition which

can show itself to be distinctive. While Glad is critical of the possibility of a distinctive
migr tradition, he gives leeway to the possibility of a distinctive Jewish exile
literature and at the same time mentions that perhaps an even better model would be
Chinese migr culturea tradition which has existed for centuries, resisting
assimilation. Glad does not explain further why he makes such a strong pledge and
neither is the subject of Chinese migr literature raised in the seminal discussion as no
Chinese writer was included.8

Is it just Glads bias or another case of orientalising

the Chinese as an exotic ethnic group speaking no other languages other than their
native tongue which makes the Chinese migr incomprehensible?

Or is the outsiders

response a hint implying the Chinese exiled writers complacency of writing in Chinese
for Chinese without giving heed to the question of assimilation in the adopted country?
Brecht once wrote to a friend in 1942 that our literary history does not boast of us as
many exiled writers as, for example, the Chinese. We must excuse ourselves on grounds
that our literature is still very young and not yet cultivated enough. Chinese lyric poets
and philosophers, I hear, were used to going into exile as ours go into the Academy.9
Brecht is probably talking about the literary tradition of ancient Chinese poets and
literati in exile within the state borders. But if the Chinese exile tradition is so immense
as to win the admiration of Brecht, what kind of immensity is embedded in the Chinese
exilic concept and experience which makes it culturally specific?

Commenting on the Chinese condition of exile in a seminal conference in 1991,

Leo Lee considers that the word exile (fangzhu, liufang) in Chinese is often associated
8

John Glad ed., Literature in Exile (Durham: Duke UP, 1990), x, xi. The only oriental representative
in the seminal discussion is an exile writer from Korea.
9
James A Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980).

38

with negative passive meanings as a form of banishment and punishment by

government, seldom does it connote the meaning of self-exile or exile by voluntary
choice as an act of individual protest. Given the Middle Kingdom syndrome, it was all
but unimaginable to be exiled out of the country apart from banishment to faraway
lands at the peripheries of the nations power centre.

10

Wang Ching-hsien points out

in the discussion that the term exile is problematic as the authentic experience of an
individual is never unique and has to be determined by the particularity of time and
space. He argues that Bo Yi and Shu Qis self-exile to Shouyang Mountain followed
by suicide to protest the newly founded Zhou Dynasty should be a sample case of
dissidents existing in ancient period. Another example to show the creative force of
exile is the lisao poetry written by Qu Yuan inseparable from his wandering life in the
swampy regions where the folk poetry stimulated his poetic imagination. Su Dongpo,
who had been appointed to forty to fifty different positions in various provinces, is also
an exile par excellence as his best poems are written during his banishment.11 A
mainland scholar researching on the Chinese exile culture in ancient time appears to
concur with Wangs observation as he also finds Su Dongpo to be an active exile who
has taken pleasure in engaging the rural folks in the peripheries and enhancing their
literacy. Su Dongpo even takes pride in claiming his exilic career to Huang Zhou, Wei
Zhou and Zhan Zhou as his lifetime achievement. 12 While Leo Lee and Wang
Ching-hsien might see the Chinese exile culture differently, they both share the view of
the creative power of exile from their position as diasporic intellectuals and migrs in
the United States. Wang, who is also a contemporary poet, avows the importance of
10

Leo Lee In the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: some personal thoughts on the cultural meaning in
the periphery in Gregory Lee ed., Chinese Writing and Exile (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1993).
11
Wang Ching-hsien Exile and Poetic Creativity in Chinese Writing and Exile, 79-88.
12
Li Xingsheng , Liuren shi liuren wenhua yu luyou wenhua
(Harbin: Heilongjiang renmin chuban, 2008), 34.

39

artistic distance in poetic creativity and declares that it is probably even better to be
away from the big centre of all the activities.13 As for Leo Lee, his exilic complex
seems to be more complicated. Apparently, he seems to take pleasure in exile affiliating
the Saidian mode of exile as a style of thought to turn the negative of a bicultural
marginal person into a positive character strength and seeks to remain in an outsider
position of thinking. While Saids outsider position is one which seeks to remain
secularist on all theocratic tendencies and at a vantage point where he could address
issues such as the often flawed discussions of Islamic fundamentalism in the West,
Lees style of thought is more ambivalent. On the one hand, he confesses that it is only
on this marginal ground that I feel psychologically secure and even culturally privileged.
By virtue of my self-chosen marginality I can never fully identify myself with any
center. Thus, I do not feel any compelling need to search for my roots. On the other, he
describes the trajectory of his self-identity search and realizes that my sense of being
Chinese, though it has undergone several subtle ideological transformations, is so
deeply rooted that it practically rules out the possibility of total Westernization. The
description Lee uses to picture himself is what he calls Chinese cosmopolitanismthat
embraces both a fundamental intellectual commitment to Chinese culture and a
multicultural receptivity, which effectively cuts across all conventional national
boundaries.

It is, in other words, a purposefully marginal discourse intended to

recontextualise the margins. Lee seems to embark on a kind of rooted cosmopolitans

or cosmopatriots coined by contemporary and postcolonial critics as a cross-cultural
position for cultural criticism counteracting the complexity in the light of
multi-culturalism and globalism in the postmodern era.14 What is ambivalent in Lees
13

Ibid., 83.
Eugene Chen Eoyang coined the word glocalization in his study of comparative literature in the
global context. See his Two-way Mirrors: cross-cultural studies in glocalization (Lanham: Lexington
14

40

stance is that he has not specified what kind of Chineseness which is so deeply rooted
within him and this structure of feeling affiliated with a cultural centre seems to be at
odds with his claim of a peripheral position.15 When Lee claims that it is intellectual
engagement that saves me from feeling totally lost between two continents, his stance
and self-identity located within the establishment of intellectual productivity as
counter-exile to compensate for a loss is based on an institutionalized exchange rather
than a style of thought that Said has emulated. For Wang, he avows that poetry
writing for him is an act of counter exile and that I can close my eyes, and in one
second I can see that whole city of Taibei and if I write, I write for Taiwan. Wangs
clear Taiwan position stands in contrast with Lees ambivalence, though they are similar
in the way that they both seek a third space within which they can interrogate their
self-identity, a third space manifested in intellectual discourse and poetry which gives
meaning to their identity and existence.

Lee and Wang fall into the type Tucker calls emigrant who is in a happier state
than the literal exile as his departure from homeland aims to seek for better
opportunities and he can always return at whatever point he wishes. But the Chinese
condition of exile is seemingly far more complex and has apparently exceeded the
definition of those terms based on Western experiences. The origin of the word exile in
Chinese is imbued with suffering and pain rather than pleasure. Li Xingsheng, in his
research of the history of the Chinese exile, finds that the word liuren (man in drift) is
Books, 2007). Critics refer to the terms cosmopatriots to describe a postcolonial loyalty to the home
country and a longing for and belonging to the world. The rooted cosmopolitans seek to think and feel
simultaneously beyond and within the nation. See Jurriens & Kloet ed., Cosmopatriots: On Distant
Belongings and Close Encounters (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
15
Ien Ang similarly challenges Leo Lees idea of fundamental intellectual commitment to Chinese
culture and considers his stance one of an unquestioned certainty about his own ontological
Chineseness. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London:
Routledge, 2001), 46.

41

used since the Qin dynasty to describe exiles, particularly those forced to be banished to
the peripheries during transition of dynasties. These people in drift include prisoners,
laborers, and family members of the court officials banished by the imperial court.16
There is no lack of classical Chinese poems which reflect the hardship of exilic life. A
Chinese poem written by a literatus in exile lamenting the vanity of his lifelong
devotion to the court has become the first literary specimen under the subject the
Exiled in Their Own Country in the Oxford Book of Exile. While passing by a village
where the literatus sees the villagers living harmoniously in a peaceful life with their
household, the literatus laments lifes cruelty and his loss of family and friends due to
war and a life in drift.17
Qing.

The Chinese liuren exodus reaches its climax in the Ming and

Many are prisoners ordered to become hard laborers in the peripheries or

officials ordered to be stationed at the outpost near the borders.18

2.3 Fatal flight of the modern exile

Chinese exile abroad which involves the intelligentsia started at the turn of the
twentieth century. To answer the call of the nation for self-strengthening, students were
dispatched in groups to Europe, United States and Japan to learn new knowledge and
technology and to receive language training. From the very beginning, the modern
exilic experience of the students, among whom some turned out to be key figures in the
new cultural movement in the early twentieth century, were imbued with social
responsibility for nation building. What is particular about this modern Chinese exilic

16

Li Xingsheng, Liuren shi liuren wenhua yu luyou wenhua, 5-12. Li laments the lack of attention to a
holistic research of Chinese exile literature despite scattered studies on particular poets or regions.
17
John Simpson, The Oxford Book of Exile (Oxford: Oxford UP,1995), 173-174.
18
Li Xingsheng, Liuren shi liuren wenhua yu luyou wenhua, 43.

42

experience is that the exile is a collective act and the youngsters as cultural agents were
to depart from their homeland only temporarily. They were designated to return and
given the task of building the new nation. According to records, around 20 to 30
thousand students were sent to Japan in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Pursuant to the establishment of the China Republic in 1911, around two to three
thousand students still studied in Japan. Some were sent to Europe particularly France
among whom many turned out to be revolutionaries of the Communist party, not unlike
the case in Russia.19 The English word exile which comes from the Latin root to
jump carries with it the notion of flight, as one must jump from somewhere to take
flight.

The Greek Daedalus in James Joyces modern version flies by the nets that

constrain him from wandering and must jump to take flight. Daedalus on the Chinese
soil can hardly take flight.

At his best, he flies with the nets and can hardly

disentangle himself from the burden of the past and the impasse of the inescapable
present. He cannot jump or if he does take flight, he only ends up sinking or facing
death. At his best, he can only seek his self-identity in the drifting words.

Yu Dafu lived and studied in Tokyo from 1912 to 1922. In 1923, Yu wrote the
Reminiscences on Returning Home against the setting of a homebound journey which
leaves him nowhere except in a flow of disjointed thoughts. The train is moving but the
superfluous man is trapped in his eerie imaginative moments of which the
configuration is self-consciously brought to the attention of the readers. The narrative of
an intersection between self and writing is imbued with images of death and an
incompetent self of inaction. In a trance of cinematic thinking moments, the narrator I

19

See Tang Yijie ed., Luan chuangtong yu fanchuangtong (Taibei: Linking

chuban, 1989), 261-279.

43

tells the readers in a predictive voice about the future which is going to happen. I in
his journey back home shall meet in tears with his wife of a traditional marriage, and
then they shall devise how they should put an end to their lives. The traveler then calls
upon his imagination and conjures before his minds eye the young modern ladies he
has loved but now are lying hard and cold in front of him with their mouths closed.
The uncanny melodrama which appears to be comic is in fact an allegory of the liminal
self trapped between the impasse of the old and new. Yu, in the voice of the narrator-I,
says he wants to make a suicidal jump but finds himself too weak and lacking in will
power that he cannot exert enough strength even to kill himself. Failing to commit
suicide, the narrator-I regrets his lack of will power as he is unable like Dante, to sit at
the feet of the goddess Beatrice. 20 Dante is hailed in the West for his moral
decisiveness in leaving Florence and writes his masterpiece the Divine Comedy in exile.
In contrast, Yus comedy is at best a self-parody foregrounding his indecision and
incompetence as a heroic exile.

Paolo Bartoloni, in On Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing, contends that

exile and translation intersect as a language that travels from one language to another
and is transformed into a third. It is a transferring process resembling an exile of
self-search which is always a flight into the memory of oneself and a process of
self-translation. In the process, the self is irredeemably broken by the opposition
between a before and an after and rehabilitated in the space of indistinction. This
process takes place through suspension of experience, moment of inaction and shock.21
20

Lydia Liu Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature in Liu Kang
& Tang Xiaobing ed., Politics Ideology & Literary Discourse in Modern China ( Durham: Duke UP,
1993).
21
Paolo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing (West Lafayette: Purdue UP,
2008).

44

Yus exilic journey of self-translation through literary imagination between the future
and the past is also marked by continuous disruption. The use of verbal indicators such
as suddenly highlights moment of self- imagination and suspension of time.22 The
story made up of abrupt thoughts and incoherent text of psychological drama points to
inaction and void of substantial experience. No action has taken place in the narrative
except a trance of eerie thinking. Unlike the Plotinian kind of exile for self-search which
is metaphysical and elevating, the discursive flight into the memory of self and a
self-translation ends in self-parody.

Writing as self-translation which leads to a sense

of loss and an iterative of impasse and helplessness is seen in Yus memoir of his early
sojourner year in Japan written in his forties.

In 1936, two years before he fled to

Singapore, Yu wrote about his early years as a student in Tokyo in the form of
autobiographical fragments.

The young sojourner in the foreign land admires the

Japanese young ladies roaming in the amusement park whose intoxicating youth and
flowering beauty makes him dreamy. But soon he falls into despair and feels a mingled
wave of insult and indignation when receiving a humiliating response from the ladies to
a Chinaman.

The unbearable sexual frustration drives him to embark on a

Tokyo-bound train in the cold winter snow heading for a brothel.

He wakes up in the

morning and cannot control his tears thinking that this is such a wastemy ideals, my
aspirations, my love for my country, whats left of all that now?

If Im going to sink, I

might as well sink to the bottomHuman life has been a complicated mystery palace
all along.23

Yus reminiscence ends with a remark at the end that the memoir is his

rough translation of the confused thoughts going through the superfluous youth at that
22

Lydia Liu Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature in Liu,
Kang, and Tang Xiaobing, Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical
Interventions and Cultural Critique, 102-123.
23
Helmut Martin ed., Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992),
305-312.

45

moment of time, apparently hinting that this is a re-figuration of the past looking back
from a distance. The self-translation recounted as authentic to the original in the form
of an autobiography is a conjecture of a present self as an invisible translator. The I as
represented through the libidinal self exposure is not equivalent to the real I but an I of
the repressive other.

Lydia Liu considers that Yu comes closest to Freud, whose

psychoanalytical theory shocks the bourgeoisie in the West in much the same manner
that Yu scandalizes his urban Chinese readers, for they both show that idealism or the
humanist dream of fullness is itself a libidinal fantasy. 24

Time passes but the

superfluous man in the past remains helpless and drifting in the present.

Yu took flight

to Singapore to run for his life and continues his hectic errant life in refuge from one
place to another escaping the manhunt of the Japanese agent.

He is left penniless

while a return to China was unforeseeable. After much meandering, he finally takes
refuge in a small fishing village in Western Sumatra under the camouflage of a
pseudonym. He even managed to open a distillery producing rice wine and the Japanese
police became his major customers. In the midst of a celebration in August 1946 upon
the surrender of the Japanese at his village home, he was lured to meet with somebody
and disappeared.

News followed that he was killed by the secret agency of the

Japanese military police in Sumatra as the police needed to eliminate a potentially

articulate witness in the forthcoming trials of war criminals.

As a freelance interpreter

for the Japanese military police, Yu was known to have acted boldly through sieving
information during the translation process to protect many people caught by the police.
He was privy to much sensitive information which cost him his life.25 As a physical

24

Lydia Liu Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature in Politics
Ideology & Literary Discourse in Modern China,119.
25
Wong yoon wah, Post Colonial Chinese Literatures in Singapore and Malaysia (Singapore: National
U of Singapore, 2002), 83-100.

46

exile, Yu acts bravely and with resilience in his last struggle for survival before his
death. But literary speaking, Leo Lee considers that there is a discrepancy between the
real Yu and the literary Yu configured in his work and which makes him less great
than Lu Xun. Rather than reenacting on his curse of life as expressed in his work, Yu
creates his own legend through the catharsis of confessional writing and pursues a
perpetuation of a literary image, unlike Lu Xun who has made a superhuman effort to
reenact the curses of life.

Lee contends that the chasm between image and reality

reveals itself when in real life Yu relapses into complacency of an old-style

scholar-connoisseur in his middle age of which the regression is a source of his real
tragedy. What makes Lu Xun greater than Yu lies with the different ways they chose to
confront their inner afflictions. Lu Xun keeps his inner conflicts and tensions to himself,
to subject them to intense and agonizing self-scrutiny and to condenses them into
crystallizations of profound insight in his works. As for Yu, he chose to write in order to
exorcise, to drive out his inner demons by exposing them to his imaginary audience.
Confession was his catharsis, after laying bare all his weaknesses, he would feel better.
He had created his own legenda personality and life-style intended for mass
consumption and imitation by his reading public just as he had imitated the images
projected by the life story of his literary predecessors Huang Chongze and the 19th
century English poet Ernest Dowson.26 It remains arguable that the difference between
Lu Xun and Yu Dafu is not a difference in the kind of faade that the writer chooses to
represent himself. If Yus work conjures the image of superfluous youth for mass
consumption, that of Lu Xun is one of a cultural icon for the consumption of the young
generation desiring for a new nation and new life.27 In the midst of the modernist
26

Leo Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973),
122-123.
27
Wang Xiaoming , Wufa Zhimian de Rensheng:Lu Xun Zhuan :

47

outlook of Lu Xuns work, there lies a skepticism through the ambivalent use of images
and symbols while Yu juxtaposes the authenticity of libidinal desire against the
inauthenticity of idealism. The difference between the two hinges on what kind of
symbolic representation and exchange the actors chose to have themselves inscribed and
disseminated through discursive space. It is a process of self-translation and negotiation
between the authenticity of personhood and the inauthenticity of a self subject to
nationhood.

It is also a question of choice as to what type of intellectual the actor

chooses to have his self-identity registered on.

2.4 Between vanguard and mental exile

Liu Xiaofeng, in his reflection on the relation between exile discourse and ideology,
categorises the intellectual into three broad types. The first is those who feel an urge to
speak for the collective and have mistaken ones individual discourse as the collective;
the second type is those who recognize the impossibility of negotiating between the self
and the collective and withdraw to act as spokesman; the third is the true individual
mind who insists on speaking for himself, and in this connection, the kind closest to
ressembling a spiritual exile. According to Liu, most intellectuals belong to the first
type as there is an irresistible seduction in knowledge itself that makes the privileged
intellectual feel empowered to speak not just for himself but in the name of others.
Ideological discourse operating in the name of people has become a peculiar
invention of the twentieth century. It is an abstract term full of fecundity as people is
(Taibei: Yeqiang chuban, 1992). Wang avows his disillusion in finding out the Lu Xun who has given
hope to many young people including himself in the past is not a giant after all. Lus bondage to old
values and distrust of people has made him a procrastinator such as his indecision to break away from
blind marriage. Wang discloses that Lu Xun is highly conscious of his self-image as seen in his invitation
of a third person to join his secret honeymoon with Xu Guangping so as to avoid scandal. There is a
chasm between the real and the represented Lu Xun.

48

a concept of innumerable totality imbued with moral implication and hence an

extremely effective tool for social governance.

In the name of the people, the self is no

more an individual person but a thing in exchange for the collective. Similarly, ism
has artificially been used as a tool of ideological operation whereby the self is defined
under ism as part of the collective. Through a process of self-legitimization,
ideological discourse ascertains itself as the absolute truth in the name of rationality,
empirical science, history, and ethics.

The intellectual is in identity crisis when

confronted with the dilemma whereby parole of the individual is captured by the
over-determination of the langue.28 Those intellectuals who have no means of escape
or do not want to escape often become an internal or spiritual exile which is also a
prominent feature of the modern era. It requires super strength of the individual to
sustain their autonomous self. Those who strive to speak under the tension of the
coercive hegemonic collective discourse have to resort to a variety of discursive forms
to express the self. Liu considers that although exile discourse is inseparable from
politics, it is not necessarily a discourse of politics. Exile discourse is after all a parole
of the individual and it is by its nature not an effective instrument to deconstruct
established authority or ideological discourse in its totality. Exile discourse as a
discourse generated from the self by its nature is alienated from the collective and is
basically existentialist. Exile discourse as the other of collective discourse is a
discourse of homelessness while the latter is of home.29

Leo Lee in his study on the legacy of Lu Xun concludes that Lu Xun is a cultural
giant not in the sense that he is a revolutionary hero as depicted in the Mao era, but in
28

According to the linguist Saussure, langue refers to the whole system of a given language while
parole refers to the individual instance of utterance that takes place under the framework of the langue.
29
Liu Xiaofeng, Liuwang huayu yu yishixingtai, Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-first century) 1 (October 1990).

49

the fact that he has a great sense of moral integrity and is a shrewd critic with an
astuteness in identifying the root problem of Chineseness in which he can see in himself
the residue of the tradition.30 It is the self consciousness of the vanity of action and
the commitment to act until the last moment, that is, the tragic sense of a split self that
makes him great. Lu Xun, the conscientious and self-reflexive intellectual, has taken on
a role assigned to him during the historical moment of transition of which he has
performed with vigilance and dexterity. In terms of the mode of intellectual mapped out
by Liu Xiaofeng, Lu Xun is a hybrid between the type of a spokesman and a mental
exile with an uncompromising single-mindedness. As described by Leo Lee, Lu Xuns
aesthetic demonstrates that he is both a traditionalist and a modernist, he has a taste for
decadence and existentialism. As a kind of spiritual exile of the modern era, Lu Xun has
exercised super strength to fight to sustain the integrity of his autonomous being against
the background of contesting ideological discourse on which he is forced to make
mediation from time to time. As Lee points out, Lu Xun once asks himself whether it is
possible for the interest of the intellectual to co-exist with those in political power and
the answer is negative. A free thinker cannot be tolerated in the society as his criticism
will diminish the power of the totalitarian regime. The wretched of the earth for Lu Xun
are different from that of Fanon as the latters white mask black skin is a legacy of
imperialism and the recuperation of the past of the colonized subject becomes a source
of hope. The Chinese intellectuals outcry in the airtight deadening iron house is a
painful cry as he sees the imminency to discard the old tradition but is aware of the
impossibility at the same time. Awaking the soul to a new consciousness would only
add to their pain of finding their hope unfulfilled.31 Rather than resembling a giant who
30

Leo Lee, Tiewu Zhong de Nanhan (Xianggang: Sanlian shudian, 1991).

This sense of awakening to a new consciousness which is unsettling and agonizing is repeatedly
mentioned in Gaos work.
31

50

shoulders the gate to save the children, Lu Xun is more like the ancient Roman deity
Janus, also a guardian of doors but with two faces. Negatively speaking, the two faces,
one of a vanguard and the other of an exile can neither look to the past nor future. It is at
the liminality of the in-between that the voice of the Janus Lu Xun is heard speaking in
ambivalence. It is a site of ambivalence as the actor is aware that he is entangled in a
split between the traditional and modernist self and posited at two cultural spaces at
once. In A Madmans Diary, the madman is portrayed as an exile of society speaking
only to himself in a lone voice and an alien of society. At the same time, the writer has
empowered the madman with a moral strength casting condemnation against the
pathology of the man eating society and made the madman an allegorical figure and a
spokesman of the people. It is the split between the self as vanguard and the other as an
exile of a lone voice of self-speaking which gives force to the articulation. The
writers self identity is one of desire to admonish the public of the truth and also of fear
of its futility which would make himself a ludicrous madman. In Regret for the Past, the
male protagonist has made use of reminiscence to exorcise the ghost of a failed
marriage and to redeem a regrettable past in which the couples separation to redeem
freedom has led to the wifes fatal death. Lydia Liu considers the narration a
self-redemption and a therapeutic device for the reconstitution of a coherent self of the
modernist. The narrative structure bespeaks a split self who attempts to resolve the
self-contradiction through a writing process but only ends up in futility, as the
protagonists visit to the old room reminds him life has remained stagnant and
unchanged.32 While the text can be read as an attempt for the I-protagonist to seek
self-identification, it can also be read as a manifestation of the conflicting split self of

32

Lydia Liu,Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature in Politics
Ideology & Literary Discourse in Modern China.

51

Lu Xun, who as a modernist writer is obliged to promote new values and yet cannot
withhold his skepticism toward purchasing modernist values wholesale. The protagonist
I has exploited the stereotype of Nora to talk his wife into breaking off from marriage,
yet the event ending in void suggests an irony of the modernists pursuit. There seems
to be an ethical sense of moral doubt that the modernist writer has cast upon the reified
modern image advocated by the new society of young men and girls seeking free love at
all costs. Wang Xiaoming has pointed out the procrastination of Lu Xun in his
modernist turn to pursue a marriage with Xu Guangping while abandoning the first
wife of the blind marriage. Taking into account the biographical factor, Regret for the
Past can be read as the writers self-interrogation against the pursuit of modern free
love and redemption of guilt. It also bespeaks the ambivalence of a split self during the
era of cultural transition and the modernist writers effort to reconcile within himself
through the discursive third space.

Liu Xiaofeng points out that exiled writers seek to write in their own style and give
particular attention to the reconstruction of a personal discourse which make them often
in corollary with concerns of modernism or postmodernism. What is so modern about
Lu Xun apart from the tragic sense which makes Leo Lee feel the greatness of Lu Xun
in his ethic to fight and act against himself despite the impossibility? 33 Is it not the
exilic imperative of Lu Xun which makes him see things, as Said says, in double
perspective which betokens his modernist spirit. Lu Xun does not need true exile in
literal terms to enable him to see things in double. Lu Xun as an exile in its

33

This tragic sense is phenomenal and embedded in the rudiment of modern Chinese cultural history.
Gu Xin considers Chen Duxiu an innovator in appropriating western ideology such as democracy into
social practice in the name of the people. Chen is considered a prototype of a tragic figure in the May
Fourth era. See Tang Yijie ed., Chuangtong yu Fanchuangtong, 303-332.

52

metaphorical and metaphysical sense shares the cold mind of a winter of the diasporic
intellectual literally in exile though it brings him more pain than pleasure. Lu Xun
bestows the quality of an intellectual in mental exile as he often regards himself
speaking a lone voice partly conducive to his often ironic, skeptical, parodic if not so
playful style. He is an exile in its metaphorical sense, someone constantly undergoing
self- interrogation and exposing the process of self quest which gives strength to his
work and enhances its critical edge. Said says that exile means that you are always
going to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up because
you cannot follow a prescribed path. In the famous preface to the Outcry, Lu Xun maps
out his path of becoming a writer and brings to the fore the trajectory of his struggle
between the possible and the impossible. He says he cannot stop writing after A
Madmans Diary and soon he no longer feels any great urge to express himself. Yet he
continues to write because he cannot forget the grief of his past loneliness and needs to
comfort those fighters galloping on in loneliness. He lays bare that his work is about
the lonely soul, and yet confesses that he does not want the young people to dream the
lonely dream he once had. He says that is no good waking up those unfortunate few
only to make them suffer in agony of irrevocable death but on the other hand, he cant
say that there is no hope either. He appears to be humble in saying that his short stories
fall short of being works of art but in fact is sarcastic of the directives of new literature
which are against pessimism and ambiguity. What is modern of Lu Xun is the exilic
imperative which he sees things always in split and looks at situations as contingent and
as a result of personal choices. In the light of this, Lu Xun serves to demonstrate a kind
of spiritual exile who finds it still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in
spite of barriers and confrontation of an inescapable historicity. The liminality of the
discursive third space provides an occasion to enable the modernist writer to move away
53

to the margins at a distance where he can see things that have not traveled beyond the
conventional and the comfortable.34

Referring to Heideggerians notion of language as drift and forever in exile, Liu

Xiaofeng elevates the level of exile to an ontological and theological sense whereby the
subject of exile is in fact ultimately an issue of language which is unhomed.35 Lius
analogy is true to the extent that, in Lu Xuns case, as in other cases of many exile
writers, there is an exilic moment whereby the self is immediately confronted with
existential questions. This is a moment of shock and suspension which occasions
self-reflection and interrogation. The exilic moment is, as Tucker points out, what
happens when the fabric is suddenly, violently or irremediably torn away. 36 An exile
immediately has two selves and this awareness of duality is pertinent to the exiles
self-quest. Lu Xuns moment of split and suspension of time is when he sees on the
screen the indifferent Chinese outsiders viewing an execution of a fellow Chinese.
The two selves in split at the exilic moment is a self-conscious intellectual viewing the
Chinese onlooker with scorn and a humiliated self being despised under the gaze of the
Japanese colleague in the viewing room. This moment of split self both as subject and
object of gaze is an awakening moment whereby ones existential state has become a
pressing question. For Lu Xun, this moment in which he questions the meaning of his
existence is intricately linked with his mission to wake up the existential unconscious
mass attributed to his escape from the medical profession to the literary, a moment of
strike not unlike the eureka in the philosophical and religious sense. This reminds us
of the enlightenment brought by the fallen stone split from heaven upon which Cao
34
35
36

Said Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals in The Edward Said Reader.
Liu Xiaofeng, Liuwang huayu yu yishixingtai in Ershiyi shiji.
Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, xxi.

54

Xueqing has written The Story of the Stone, a work written in Caos exiled life from the
past recaptured through the counterpoise of two worlds experienced by the protagonist
Bao Yu in split. While Caos splitting world is metaphysical and a self-reflective
process of ones existential being and leads to religious transcendence, the splitting
moment of the young Lu Xun has led him to an epiphany and a belief that writing is
capable of social and cultural transformation. If language manifests the drifting life and
the unhomeliness of the Chinese poets in ancient times, Lu Xuns work is a language in
drift and unhomed in an ironic sense. After the death of Lu Xun, the meaning of his
words has become thickened over time under the appropriation of the communist
leaders as political propaganda. It explains why contemporary critics particularly the
diasporic intellectual, pursuant to the end of the Cultural Revolution in the mainland,
have endeavored to recuperate and bring home the authentic Lu Xun in their
rereading.

According to Liu Xiaofeng, Russian and German intellectuals in exile in the first
half of the century have, in response to their traumatic experience, respectively
conducted vigorous examination against the operation of ideological discourse and its
interpellation process in relation to language, psychology, sociology, religion and
culture. What is of interest here is that many Russian exile intellectuals focus on a
re-reading of Dostoyevskys work aiming to retrieve from the great writers insights
which could help to re-establish the fundamental for an individual to live as a free being
in its ontological sense. In the Chinese context, Liu points out that contemporary
scholars of Neo-Confucianism outside China in the post-1949 period had endeavoured
to re-interpret classical Confucianism but the revised reading of classical Chinese
philosophy did not give heed to issues in relation to the political and existential
55

condition of the national culture, instead, such scholars appeared to remain in cultural
complacency revealing a parochial sense of ethnocentrism.37 While Liu has expressed
the lack of attention given to philosophical issues in relation to existential condition of
the people, it is worth noting that cultural reflection has been made by Chinese scholars
and literary critics on the traumatic past particularly in the early 90s pursuant to the
June Fourth incident which has stimulated critics re-thinking of the May Fourth
cultural movement and the intellectuals role. Articles and studies have been undertaken
to review the historical implication and meaning of the May Fourth movement, the role
of the intelligentsia and the impact of the cultural giant in the pre-Mao era.38 On the
literary side, critics rereading of Lu Xun is a case in point.

2.5 Torn between two homes

The Polish self-exile Leszek Kolakowski considers that a refugee differs from an
exile in the sense that the former engages in a heroic retreat from tyranny and keeps as
an option a later battle with his oppressors while an exile is forced to drift.39 While the
claim is occasioned by the Poles experience, it is subject to scrutiny as the Chinese
case shows that refugee and exile are indistinguishable and the former can take flight as
37

Lius criticism is directed to the exiled scholars in Hong Kong. He considers that modern scholars of
Neo-Confucianism have not addressed the living issue as to how Chinese philosophy should respond to
the living condition of the Chinese people other than a pedagogical stance. Liu proposes that Christianity
or theology is philosophically relevant in addressing the contemporary moral needs of the Chinese people.
See Hu Weixi , Zhongguo bentu wenhua shiye xia de xifang zhexue
(Beijing : Shoudu shifan daxue, 2002).
38
Some examples are Wang Xiaoming, Wufa zhimian de rensheng: Luxun Zhuan ; Tang Yijie ed.,
Chuangtong yu Fanchuangtong; Helmut Martin ed., Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals; Leo Lee,
The Crisis of Culturein China Briefing (Boulder: Westview P., 1990).
39
Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, xvi.

56

a result of forced action in the form of an entire regime. In The Anatomy of Exile, Paul
Tabori points out that in the twentieth century, Chinese history created immense exile
communities of which, of course, the Nationalist establishment on Taiwan is the largest,
most prosperous, and the most importantone of the few modern examples of a viable
exile Government establishing its authority for any length of time outside the original
heartland.40 While young students were collectively sent in the early decades for
overseas learning and return was a rule rather than exception, the collective exile of the
entire government in the 40s to a remote island is of no return as a comeback proved
impossible over time. The flux to Taiwan includes mainlanders in political exile, and
migr seeking new opportunities and a new home elsewhere. While some migrs have
assimilated into their new home set up in Taiwan, some consider the island a transit and
later emigrates to the United States when opportunities arise and stay overseas as
diaspora.

Jian Zhengzhen, in his study of the exile motif in modern Chinese literature in
Taiwan, points out the complexity of the exile condition of the Taiwan diasporic writers
which is both political and psychological. The sense of nostalgia, banishment and loss
of identity arises not from homelessness but a sense of double home. Different from the
African slaves in the past who might never know what their mother country looks like,
the diasporic intellectuals have two homelands, Taiwan and Mainland, and hence make
the direction of homelands obscure. Exile for Taiwan writers in diaspora is both literal
and literary and their imagination of the homelands is often double foci.41 Nostalgia is a
collective consciousness for the diasporic writers which hinges on an emotional tie to
40

Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile (London: George Harrap & Co., 1972),37.
Jian Zhengzhen, The Exile Motif in Modern Chinese Literature in Taiwan (diss. Texas: U of Texas,
1982), 10-20.
41

57

two homelands at the same time. In an article Bai Xianyong denotes the phenomenon of
a collective emotional bondage with the homelands, pointing out that Yu Lihau
earmarks the first generation of writers in diaspora and her work which expresses the
uncertainty and confusion of the rootless generation studying overseas in the 60s. The
attention of the exiled writers to the political and historical changes in Taiwan and
mainland China have shown that their hearts are in bondage with the future destiny of
the Chinese people and their culture. From the point of view of a Taiwan writer in
diaspora, Bai considers that the Chinese tradition of exile literature does not emerge
until the 60s and 70s and it arises mainly in the United States. Though each writer
chooses a different political stance and separate subject matter, their stories are still
about the Chinese, for all of them lived in a foreign land and longed for home. Bai
points out that Chen Ruoxis return to the mainland in 1966 in the midst of the
Cultural Revolution makes her a figure not unlike the May Fourth writer Ding Lings
enlisting at Yanan in response to the call of the proletariats.42 While Chen Ruoxis
home search turns out to be an exilic journey of painful memory, the experience of
return has become her inspiration for literary creation, although ironically the return to
home has distanced her further from her ideal home. As indicated by Jian Zhengzhen,
the diasporic writers consciousness of home is transformed into an ideological concept
dwelling in his/her mind, that of a unique home unbisected by the present political
reality.

This desire for an integral home unbisected in the writers imagination reflects

the liminal and exilic position of the Taiwan intellectual. The complexity of the issue
is that this double home dilemma or desire for an unbisected home Jian has
mentioned does not necessarily represent the entirety of the Taiwanese who seek to

42

Bai Xianyong, The Chinese student Movement Abroad: exiled writers in the new world in Helmut
Martin ed., Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals, 181-185.

58

establish their local identity vigorously in recent decades partly due to their
disappointment with the situation in the mainland and partly due to the internal social
and political change on the island. The Taiwan critic Liao Hsien-hao, points out that in
addition to the perennial marginal status that Taiwan has been allotted, marginalization
caused by mainland-centered ideologies has a particularly devastating effect on the
certainty of identity perception in Taiwan. The obsession with identity has become a
conspicuous theme underlying the history of modern Taiwanese literature since the
question of the Orphan of Asia has been brought up by Wu Zhuoliu in the late days of
the Japanese occupation in Taiwan and in the early stage of Nationalist rule. As mapped
out by Liao, the debate over cultural identity has lasted for decades in Taiwan. Initially,
the debate is a transplant of the May Fourth debate over literary issues centering around
the old and the new, the classical and the vernacular Chinese language. As the
debate develops over the 70s and 80s, it becomes an ideological cum literary issue
centering around the notion of Taiwanese literature or Chinese literature in Taiwan
and the notion of Taiwanese identity vis--vis Chinese identity.43
2.6 The wanderer and the dispossessed

The point of interest here is that exile as metaphor seems to straddle the varied
literary expressions of writers across time and space. Yu Lihua and Ni Hualing have
respectively described Chinese intellectuals exile journey in diaspora, their
disappointment upon return to the Taiwan home and their struggle for assimilation into
the adopted country.

The tone of their writing is sentimental and often pessimistic.

Ni Hualings Mulberry Green and Peach Red (Sanqing yutaohong) describes the

43

Liao Hsien-hao, From Central Kingdom to Orphan of Asia in Chang &Yeh ed.,Contemporary
Chinese Literature: Crossing the Boundaries (Texas: U of Texas, Austin, 1995).

59

identity confusion of the split selves of the female protagonist alongside her wandering
drift from the mainland to Taiwan and to the United States. As an exile at the margin of
American society, the female protagonist recalls her life as a self-exiled Chinese on the
peripheries encompassing the master narrative of modern Chinese history.

It is at the

liminal position of a newly acquired identity as an American Chinese which enables the
protagonist to reflect her former drifting journey and the split selves lived in
schizophrenia and spiritual dislocation.44 While written in diary and epistolary forms
denoting an intimate personal experience of the exiled writer, the above novel by Ni
Hualing is considered a powerful allegory of modern Chinas tragic fate. As for Yu
Lihuas exile writing, it is considered typical in reflecting the stages of development of
overseas Chinese literature over the decades.45 While Yus Again the Palm Trees,
Again the Palm Trees is representative of the early stage which adheres most closely to
the theme of rootlessness and drifting life of the Chinese migrs, her other stories such
as The Fu Family and Mothers and Daughters are reflective of the progressive
development from one of hopelessness and cultural confrontation to that of
introspective subtlety and harmonious coexistence. According to Kao Hsin-sheng,
critics almost unanimously agree that the work of Chinese overseas writers
demonstrates a soulful yearning for their homeland, and a conscientious choice to write
not only in the name of art, but also with a sense of mission which makes them
significant both literarily and historically.46 Bai Xianyong once describes the condition
of exile of the wandering Chinese as deprived of his cultural heritage, yearning for
the lost kingdom as Taiwan and the motherland is in split and incommensurable, the

44

Leo Lee, On the Margin of the Chinese Discourse in Chinese Writing and Exile, 8-11.
See Yu Shiao-lings The themes of exile and identity-crisis in Nie Hualings fiction in Kao
Hsin-shen ed., Nativism Overseas (New York: State U of New York P, 1993), 152.
46
Kao Hsin-sheng Development of a New Poetics in Nativism Overseas, 103.
45

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wandering son is like Ulysses, he sets out onan endless journey across the ocean,
dark and without hopeHe is sad because he is driven out of Eden, dispossessed,
disinherited, a spiritual orphan, with the burden of memory that carries the weight of
five thousand years.47 Bais use of cultural imagery alluding to both Western and
Chinese suggested that the wandering son is a hybrid lost in-between two different
cultures. He is pushed out of Western Eden and cannot reconnect with the lost Chinese
mother.

Instead of being a free man, the wandering son shoulders the burden of a

history of five thousand years.

Bais yearning of the homeland reminds us about the

yearning and sadness of the May Fourth intellectual studying abroad in the early
decades of the century but with a difference.

While the Taiwan diasporic intellectuals exile is voluntary, the May Fourth exiled
writers exilic journey is circumscribed under a historical and political necessity and
hence is half forced than self-willed. Wen Yiduo studied in the United States in the 20s
and his yearning for home drove him to antagonism and bitterness against the foreign
land.

Wen describes Chicago, an industrialized society of the United States as a

fierce and ferocious despot, a nest of money and wealth and machines...drunken
with the blood of the weak. His homesickness has made him predicated on
ethnocentrism and a glorification of Chinese culture as counter-exile. He laments that
the Chinese is a great race and our life is the life of the world, and he emphasizes
his pride of belonging to a country that has a history and culture of over five thousand
years. In what ways are we inferior to the Americans? The humiliating and painful
experience of the young students abroad in the early decades has led many to commit
suicide and Wen shows admiration for these students who have the determination to kill
47

in Gregory Lee ed., Chinese Writing and Exile, 7.

61

themselves and feels also that death is putting his skinny hands around my throat.48

The wandering sons image in modern Chinese literature has been used by writers
across different historical periods, and the meaning the image carries cannot be
separated from the rubrics of the socio-political milieu which give meaning to the
symbolic exchange.

The wandering son motif hinges on a Chinese exilic complex

represented in variegated forms underpinned by the cultural politics of a particular

historical moment.

In Ba Jins Family (Jia), the reformist young son takes flight

from the burden of the family for the revolutionary cause while the timid elder brother
felt obliged to sustain traditional values and stays at home. The exilic sons flight
from home is symptomatic of the historical moment when individualism is a key term
and a site of vigorous ideological and political contestation.

In The Discourse of

Individualism, Lydia Liu argues against Pruseks claim that subjectivism and
individualism in Modern Chinese Literature has its purely Chinese origins and that
European invasion only accelerated a process that would have achieved its goal
without any such external force. She points particularly to the process of transference
of the term individualism (gewei zhuyi) upon which a multiplicity of contradictory
meaning is produced to serve its purpose as an ideological tool. Most ironically, the
term originally foregrounding personhood is transferred to mean at the later stage an
equivalence of nationhood. Liu argues that the discourse of individualism has probably
accomplished something more than liberating the individual from familyIt
contributed to the process of inventing geren for the goals of liberation and national
revolution.49 It is against such a political context that Ba Jins Family is produced.
48

Wong Wang-chi I am a Prisoner in Exile in Chinese Writing and Exile.

Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: literature, national culture, and translated modernity-China
1900-1937 (Calif: Stanford UP, 1995). In Jiang Guangcis The Youthful Tramp (Shaonian piaobo zhe),
49

62

The sons flight from home for a revolutionary cause serves to underpin the assertion
that in order for the nation-state to claim the individual in some unmediated fashion,
the individual must be liberated in the first place from the family. In parallel to Ba
Jins young revolutionary taking flight from home, the image of wandering son is also
used by the proletariat to symbolize a dedication to a political cause of no return.

The wandering image of the modern diaspora as manifested in Bai Xianyongs

work appears in various forms and the literary expression of nostalgia differs in form if
not in kind from his predecessors in the pre-1949 period. To the wandering Chinese
New Yorkers, existence is a meaningless survival in a strange land except getting a fatal
academic degree, passing the time which rotates monotonously every day in a dead
corner or getting drunk to anesthetize the function of sense of consciousness.
ceaseless drifting and rootlessness are familiar images in such stories.

Solitude,
The strong

sense of loss of identity is manifested in Death in Chicago as the truncated legs

appeared as shadows passing through the window of the cellar where the wandering son
lies in dead solitude and alienation from the outside world.

If it is ethnocentrism that

Wen Yidou adheres to as counter exile in the 20s, narrative has become the third space
where the rootless Taiwan diasporic intellectual finds comfort for his self-reflective
existence. Different from the May Fourth writers like Yu Dafu who uses confessional
voice to expose the sinking feeling of the wandering son, Bai plays with the narrative
voices in the stories of Taibeiren and New Yorkers to bring out different perspectives in
the wandering youth away from home is a proletariat fighting for the goal of liberation and national
revolution. Liu notes that individualism is used as a modern term to fight against the old. It is used by
Chen Duxiu in the 20s as an evil term in connection with Daoism and hence should be condemned. As
an interesting contrast to the May-fourth socialists interpretation of individualism, Mabel Lee contends
that Gaos individualism should be understood in genealogy of Laozi and Zhuangzi which pertains to
mental independence and individuation against collectivity (starkly different from Nietzsches superman).
See Mabel Lees seminal paper The resonance of Zhuangzi in Gao Xingjians creation in Hong Kong
Drama Review, vol 8 2009, 123-134.

63

describing the exile. On some occasions he uses the I and you mode where the I often
speaks as the exile.

In other instances, he uses the I-you-he mode, where he who is

an exile is observed through the eyes of the subject I.50

In the Winters Night, the

wandering son image is echoed through the juxtaposition of two intellectuals wherein
one intends to take flight to United States while the other wishes to return to Taiwan.
The motif of exit and return motivated by a common desire to be homed cancels each
other out and the paradoxical juxtaposition of the exilic complex of the intellectual
foreground a sense of failure in seeking a permanent home.

Critics who attempt to work out a theory of minority discourse consider that
development of dominant discourse is based on a truncation of minority voices.

In the

case of minority forms, the sublimation of misery needs to be understood as primarily

a strategy for survival and a preservation in some form or other of cultural identity and
for political critique. In Afro-American culture, this sublimation and expression of
misery find their unique form in the blues matrix, a mediational site where familiar
antinomies are resolved.51 While Bai Xianyong is embraced as writer par excellence
and a cornerstone of modern Chinese literature, his work seen from the point of view of
a diasporic aesthetic has indeed elevated the sublimation of misery to a matrix
comparable with the blues of the Afro-American. But Bais work is more than just a
portrayal of the Chinese in diaspora. Exile in Bais work espouses an ideological
concept as the exiles consciousness of home is transformed into an ideological concept
of dwelling in his mind which yearns for a unique home unbisected by the political

50

For detailed description of Bais technique see Jian Zhengzhen, The Exile Motif in Modern Chinese
Literature in Taiwan),137-190.
51
Adudl R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse ( New
York:Oxford UP, 1990), 4,5.

64

reality. Yip Wai-lim once commented that Bais work is shockingly ideological.52 It
is ideological in the sense that the idea of homelessness residing in nostalgia implies an
indulgence of a nationalist descendants yearning of a macro spatiality and an
unbisected home prior to the split of the nationalist regime from the motherland. On
another level, the idea of a yearning for a dwelling is fulfilled by the writers ideological
creation of a home in language through the spatiality of the text. Paradoxically, the
spatial dwelling in language where Bai seeks to create his identity is a hybrid as the
sense of Chineseness created is predicated upon the text of a modernist style in
association with Western literary technique which earmarks Bais work as the apex of
Chinese modernist fiction in the 70s. In Wandering in a Garden, Waking from a Dream
(Youyuan jingmeng), Bai seeks home in a stream of words comprising fragmentary and
disruptive monologue expressed by the uncanny nostalgic female protagonist. The
Joycean ungrammatical and broken sentences of the characters are symbolic
representations of the anxiety of the fragmentary identity of the writer. The disjointed
and disruptive linguistic structure bespeaks the psychic power of the text foregrounding
a sense of alienation and isolation expressed through the female protagonists uncanny
obsession with her embedded secrecy incommunicable to others. The whirlpool of
vigorous psychic realism constructed through words lies in stark contrast with the past
represented by the uncanny apparition of the stale nationalist figures consigned to a
static temporality of a standstill just like the suspended old clock.53

52

Jian Zhengzhen, The Exile Motif in Modern Chinese Literature in Taiwan, 157.
Yvonne Chang considers Bai Xianyong an eminent example of seeking affinities in terms of aesthetic
outlook of the modernist western and the Chinese classical such as alluding to traditionalist view of
history and culture in Taipei ren and Honglou meng in the Crystal Boy. Yvonne Chang, Sung-sheng.
Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan. (Durham: Duke U
P, 1993), 11. The word uncanny in German (unheimlich) has its root heimlich indicating shelter and
secrecy. Uncanniness coincides with the idea of unhomeliness and a desire to expose and reveal a secret.
More details in Christopher Lupke, Modern Chinese Literature in the Postcolonial Diaspora, (diss.
Cornell U, 1993), 135-140.
53

65

2.7 Estrangement and emancipation

Terry Eagleton, in Exiles and Emigres, appraises exiled writers such as Conrad,
Joyce, and T. S Eliots contribution to modern English literature. He argues that the felt
experience of exile and the subtle and diffused variety of forms of exile aesthetic
provides a challenge to the parochial style of the individualistic writers of local breed.
The inscription of an operative distance and an expansion of vision embedded in exile
literature empowers it to pose itself as a stranger to a system. 54 While Eagleton
appraises the outsiders contribution to provide literary input to break the parochialism
of English literature, the inside and outside division in the Chinese case is less clear cut.
While it is without doubt that diasporic intellectuals exilic experience has provided
inspiration for their work and expanded the scope of literary expression, it is after all the
writers cultivation of literary technique that has given force to the dynamic of their
artistry. As Bai has once expressed, the most important thing is the way of expression.
Just like sculpture, a statue of the Virgin is not necessarily better than that of a prostitute.
Whether a statue is good or bad depends on its artistic form and technique, rather than
on its content.55 Bais technique and language such as the use of narrative perspectives
in describing exilic figures in Taibeiren and Jimo de shiqisui (The lonely age of
seventeen) are considered by critics as highly original and have surprised readers in the
70s.56 But in terms of surprise and shock brought to the Taiwan readers in the 70, it is
more a collective effort than that of a single writer. While strangers from other
54

Terry Eagleton, Exile and Emigres (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). Women exile writers criticize
that Eagleton has risked romanticizing and privileging the exiled subject as pertinent to the great strength
of modern writing in English. The critics position colludes himself with that civilization he seemingly
seeks to challenge. See Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, Women's Writing in Exile, 2-3.
55
Jian Zhengzhen, The Exile Motif in Modern Chinese Literature in Taiwan, 155, 156.
56
Helmut Martin ed. Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals, 181.

66

countries have enriched the English literary system, Bai together with other
non-expatriate modernist writers of local birth such as Wang Wenxing have estranged
and provided challenge to the local literary system in their own way through their
specific use of literary technique. The challenge can be seen as a collaborative effort of
the Taiwan modernist writers nurtured under the flagship of the literary periodical
Modern Literature in the Sixties promoting modern Chinese literature with a liberal
vision and catching up with literary modernism in the West. Other than Bai, the other
Chinese Joycean writer Wang Wenxing also shocks the readers with his fiction
Family Mutation (Jiabian) in the 70s. The work which is about the history of a
mainland migr family rebuilding their home in Taiwan has created a stormy debate
locally about Taiwans generation gap and other cultural issues. Most importantly, it has
elevated the discussion to the level of transformation of language usage which seeks to
give a distinctive cultural identity to the people of Taiwan.57

Despite Bai Xianyongs emphasis on the importance of artistic form over content,
the unsettling cultural effect and public attention given to Jiabian in the 70s has much
to do with its form as well as its content. From the perspective of the readers, the
regulative and over determined structure of the novel has estranged the reading habit of
the readers requiring them to read between two texts of reversed temporality notated
respectively in numbered sequence and lettered sections. The two texts in juxtaposition
are about the familys history told from a childs perspective in linear time and about
the fathers flight from home told in retrospect by the grown up son. Readers, under the
design of the insurgent architect, are forced to take flight from their usual reading
57

Ibid., 193-195. Chen Lifen has affirmed the modernist writers contribution to language reform in
Taiwan.Chen Lifen . Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang (Taibei : Shu
lin chuban, 2000), 58.

67

habits and posit themselves in-between the two texts adopting double foci. Yvonne
Chang alludes to the extensive use of autobiographical raw material in Taiwan
modernists texts which serves to provide the distance necessary for their relentless
self-analysis, but whats more, these texts serve to provide visions of an alternative
cultural model conceived with emancipatory ideals. In short, the modernists
emancipatory texts are considered effective agency to instigate a cultural shift and an
expansion of cultural outlook of a transforming society heading towards modernization
and technological advancement.

What is emancipatory in Jiabian is that the one

taking flight from home is the father rather than the son which is considered a great
departure and unprecedented in terms of the Chinese literary convention. The ironic
inversion of the wandering father in drift taking over the usual place of the wandering
son is symptomatic of a foreseeable cultural turn in Taiwan society. However, the
ambivalence expressed in Jiabian with its open ending withholding a sense of moral
decency has made critics cast doubt as to whether the modernist writers actually
believe that the younger generation can really free themselves from the shackles of
tradition and patriarchal dominance.58 Such ambivalence can be seen in the protagonist
sons moment of doubt as to whether the lost father has turned to seek sanctuary and
redemption in the monastery. But the thought is soon overridden by the uncertainty and
open-endedness on the whereabouts of the lost father. Despite the modernists avowal
of the autonomy of artistry, Yvonne Chang distinguishes them from the pre-1949
predecessors in their pessimistic recognition of the inconsequentiality of literature in
modern society. While the image of the exiled father in Wangs first novel is seen by
some as a subversive act against the patriarchal society and a desire for social

58

Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan
(Durham: Duke UP, 1993),12-17.

68

transformation, the writers self-exile in the second novel The Man with his Back to the
Sea (beihai deren) in the early 80s is seen by critics as self-imprisoning and
self-isolation. It is read by critics as a manifesto of the modernist writers stubborn
adherence to a belief in words and the construction of a virtual text seeking its
self-sufficiency in a prison house of language. The anonymous, dragged and
half-blind old mans self-exile to escape from the manhunt of the police force is
considered to be the writers self-parody of his self-exile into language which has
become the prison house of the insurgent architect. On one level, the old mans
monologue and piling up of garbage-like words apparently speaking nothing but
nonsense can be read as an anti-novel defying the meaning of words and their function.
Wangs text is read as a radical manifesto of the writer to demonstrate the
non-utilitarian function of literature through a meticulously worked out literal
performance of its uselessness by speaking nonsense jammed with implicit literary
allusion and embedded symbolic reference. 59 The text reminds us of Becketts
voluntary exile from language in his latest work which contains nothing but the
movement of a breath lasting for some seconds, making him an exemplary figure of
the isolate commentator. But Becketts nihilistic view towards language carries a
philosophical and existential dimension which is quite different from that of Wang
Wenxing. Rather than deserting language and nullifying its use, Wangs second novel is
seen as an attempt to come back to shock the readers in the 80s through a
self-deconstructive piling up of literary allusions, but such an attempt fails him partly
due to the incomprehensibility and opacity of his depth and partly due to the loss of

59

Chen Lifen, Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang, 55-76. While Chen queries the cultural
effectiveness of Wangs novel from the point of view of social receptiveness, Yvonne Chang seems to
be more appreciative of Wangs aestheticism as she considers the novel a masterpiece of Taiwans
Modernist literary movement. Ibid.,22.

69

cultural impact of such a strange literary piece in the local arena which has turned to
multi-media and undergone much socio-cultural changes in the 80s.60 In short, while
Wangs Jiabien has effectively served as an agency to incite cultural debate in the 70s,
the writers second and even more radical effort in terms of literary irony fails to incite
with similar effect. The irony turns against the writer himself as he virtually experiences
the self-exile of the old man taking flight to the peripheries and acts out the self-parody
of an outcast.

While it remains controversial as regards the literary value of Wangs

modernist text, the main concern here is to point out the potency of the exilic imperative
most pertinent to give shape to variegated forms of literary representation. Though
Wang is not an exile in the literal sense, his awesome stubbornness to adhere to his
literary principle and aesthetics reminds us of the kind of stubborn intellectual and
spiritual exile who is determined to speak his own mind and cling to his own style
without compromise, the kind of spiritual exile Said refers to who prefers to be marginal
and undomesticated as someone who is in real exile.

Deleuze and Guattari use the term assemblage (or agencement) to describe a
particular process of arranging, organizing, and fitting together. A home as an
assemblage is how we make a place our own, how we arrange artifacts, qualities and
affect to express ourselves. Assemblages such as home are less objects and qualities
than lines and speeds. According to the theorists, assemblage elements include
discourses, words, meanings and non-corporeal relations that link signifiers with effects,
in other words, a collective assemblage of enunciation.61 Linguistic oddity including
stutters and agrammatical structure such as those demonstrated by Wang Wenxing in

60
61

Chen Lifen, Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang, 72.

Charles J Stivale, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 78-79.

70

the second novel are among those means hailed by theorists to abandon dominant forms
of language use and setting meaning free from conventional understanding. The
question for Wang is that his freeing of words is imprisoned by an excessive implant
of literary allusion which he cannot really abandon and risk remaining opaque to the
readers. The dilemma is that he has chosen self-imprisonment and opted to stay in the
comfort of his isolated home of words which he has stressed should be built and visited
at a slow pace to appreciate its finesse.62

The slow pace as a mandate for his work

might have made him alienated from the development of the society which has begun to
accelerate in growing speed and become multicultural. While imprisonment and
freedom exist in dyad as metaphor of exile, Wangs text can be categorized as exilic as
his assemblage of language in his work pegs him in alliance with other exile writers to
whom the idea of language as dwelling is of paramount importance. What makes
Wangs dispossessed old man different from the literal exile, however, is that his
symbolic mimicry is based on a self-reflection of a society still within reach and
tangible no matter how garbage-like, repulsive and patriarchal that world is to the
detached intellectual. For a parody to take effect there is always a need for a presence of
the other to be imitated upon. While Wang prefers to stand firm on his ground and
anchor on an aesthetic through heaping literary garbage, the writers across the straits
in the 80s entrapped in a cultural fever seek to break new ground through taking a
cultural turn advocating an exilic discourse of the peripheries.

2.8 A cultural and individualistic turn

Gao Xingjian and Yanglian points out the limitation of the mainland writers in
62

Chen Lifen, Xiandai wenxue yu wenhua xiangxiang, 69-71.

71

their search for cultural space and self-expression in the 80s despite the relatively
open atmosphere of the Post-Mao period. At that time, one could only seek to speak
through the camouflage of artistic form.63 The misty poets sought to surpass an old
artistic mode for expression but nonetheless could not escape the criticism of the
authority. Pursuant to the June Fourth incidents, the artists concerned felt threatened by
the purge of the regime and resigned to abandoning their home to take flight in their
adopted countries. In the seminal discussion on Chinese writing and exile, Gregory
Lee expresses his concern that the imminent question remaining for the exiled writers is,
on the one hand, to resist being co-opted by the commodifying impulse of Western
society and on the other hand, to overcome the risk of being subsumed under what
might be seen as the totalizing, collectivizing, modernizing and patriotic project that
Chinese writers have been subscribed to for the last hundred years and seemed content
to continue to support.

Gregory Lee also reminds the exiled writers of the impending

question continuing to confront writers whether or not in exile, that is, the rebellious
and revelatory power of modernism being absorbed into the orthodoxy of commodity
culture leaving its previous shocking and challenging power to no avail.

In comparing

exiled writers such as Duo Duos work before and after the exile, Gregory Lee
considers that Duo Duos post-exilic poems seem to embark on a more philosophical
mediation on death and thus on life itself. When speaking about the poets pre-exile
works, much as other critics do, Lee seems to revel in a pleasurable reminiscence of
the

seeming

lack

of

freedom

paradoxically

empowered

(Duo

Duo)

to

writecontributing to the task of ideological critique, and the invigoration of (his)

being engaged in a reality which bred his modernist poetry. Exile metaphors in the
dissident poets pre-June Fourths poems would have the readers presumed that the
63

Gao Xingjian, The problem of Chinese exile literature in Meiyou zhuyi.

72

lyrics convey a political message, whether it is directed at the dominant

Confucian-Leninist ideology or a critique of modernity.

According to Lee, Duo Duos

post-exilic poems seem to embark on a more philosophical mediation on death and thus
on life itself.64 As for Bei Daos poems, Lo Kwai-cheung, in his study of the misty
poems, considers the poets pre-exile misty poems to have in fact a secret affinity with
the resurrection of a traditional thought of centrism.

Instead of rescuing the language

from being severely abused by the regime to tell lies to restore it to a proper language of
truth, he considers that the poet stops at maintaining the old belief that truth told by
language is constative rather than constitutive. According to Lo, the poetic discourse as
a discriminative agent is conceived as a receptacle, an inner place where the subject can
dwell. The old house of language is collapsing, but the poet still holds on to the
interiority language encompasses as the domain of autonomy against the external
arbitrary power.

Lo refers to Bei Daos post-exilic poem Native Accent (xiangyin) in

which the I speak Chinese to the mirror and hear my fright on the other end of a
phone line recalling the native land as a kind of local accent, and he considers it a
textual proof of a void of the poets pure self.65 Los criticism of the failure for the
misty poets to recreate a new identity through the artistic means is underscored by his
theoretical presumption that the misty poets ideological discourse is not only a revival
of the May Fourth idea of an autonomous subject dwelling on a capital letter I which
64

Gregory Lee Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Exile and the Potential of Modernism in Chinese
Writing and Exile, 55-77.
65
Lo Kwai-cheung, The Paths That Lead Nowhere: Chinese misty poetry and modernity (diss. Stanford
U,1996), 187-194. Leo Lee reads the same poem in a different light and an apparently more charitable
manner. He takes into account the historicity which underpins the representation of the symbolic meaning
of Bei Daos poems. He considers that the difficulty for the misty poets to break new ground in terms of
seeking a new language is attributive to their lack of cultural capital, as they have been either bound to the
Maoist idiom or limited to a reliance on western translation for artistic insight in the past. He considers
that the poet has surpassed himself in terms of the use of artistic idiom which no longer embarks on a
grand narrative but alludes to daily metaphors which give a personal touch occasioned by the exilic
experience on foreign land. Preface in Bei Dao , Wuye geshou : Beidao shixuan :
1972-1994 ( Taibei : Jiuge, 1995), 18-20.

73

advocates individualism, self-liberation and Western democracy, but a manifestation of

the Chinese intellectuals return of gaze to the West in showing her admiration of
Western democracy. He argues that what attracts the Western gaze to misty poetry is
not only due to its association of a cultural and political rupture of modern Chinese
history, but also the Chinese intellectuals restaging of enlightenment which is long
gone in the West. The cultural politics staged by the misty poets provides an occasion
for the West to seek its own lost origin in China who also attempts to look for a
narrative which can account for an identity of its culture and society through the
fascinated gaze of the West. According to Lo, the misty poets pure self is a void
because the desire of the self predicated on ideas of enlightenment which uphold reason,
liberation, and a new form of subjectivity is first and foremost a desire of the other. The
West rediscovers the significance of its values and finds China desirable because they
are desired by the Chinese. The cultural reflection of mainland China as manifested in
the cultural fever of the 80s is a double reflection by the way in which China sees the
West seeing her. Hence, the whole process of national identification is proceeded under
the virtual gaze of the other. In view of the real politick in China and the June Fourth
incident which proved the revival of the enlightenment project a fantasy rather than real,
Lo construes that the cultural fever is after all nothing but a virtuality relied on two
mutually fascinated gazes both in China and the West. 66 Los polemic aims to
deconstruct and de-mystify misty poetry which is considered an epitome of the Chinese
intellectuals struggle for freedom and democracy. However, his reduction of the West
and China as nothing but two static entities flirting with each other through the casting
and returning of gaze is problematic, as such argument for the sake of polemic forfeits
details such as the subtle differences between the idealism of misty poetry and those
66

Ibid, 17-20, 205-207.

74

writers promulgating root-searching (xungen) literature during the cultural fever. Lo

claims that the so called root-searching writers desire to seek for ones own lost
cultural-national roots is as elusive as the cultural politics promulgated by misty
poetry, as it is also a manifestation of a Chinese desire of the desire of the West.67

Han Shaogong who publishes the manifesto The Roots of Literature is

unequivocal on the influence of Western literature on the writers in the 80s. His
advocation of root-searching literature in fact bespeaks the desire of the generation of
writers in their thirties to make breakthrough in the philosophical and aesthetic realm.
The imminent questions the post-Maoist writers wish to address are namely, what to
write about and how to write.68 In the light of this, revisiting the issues involved in
the advocation of root-searching (xungen) literature would help to provide a background
as to how Gao as a spiritual exile has embarked on his own aesthetic discourse different
from his contemporary. In an interview, Han explains that each root writer has his/her
own particular emphasis, be it style, atmosphere, language, theme, or regional color.
Writers such as Jia Pingwa expresses an interest in writing about peoples cultural
psychology as manifested in his writing of the history, geography, human nature and
society in Shangzhou; whereas Achengs writing emulates a cultural mentality of Daoist
spirit.69 The concern of the root-searching writers in the 80s advocating a cultural turn
is exilic in the sense that the discourse apparently strives to seek an alternative culture
different from that sanctioned by the nation state. According to Leo Lee, the root writers,
by reinventing new centers on the peripheries, have relativized the significance of one
67

Ibid, 206.
Although Hans manifesto bears his signature, it is recognized that the promulgation of root-searching
literature is a result of a series of discussions at a writers conference held in Hangzhou at the end of 1984
which calls for a literary turn or a shift of cultural/literary paradigm. See Li Tuos 1985 in Jin Tian,
Vol 3 & 4, 1991.
69
Helmut Martin, Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayal, 148-155.
68

75

center and paved the way for cultural pluralism.70 In sum, what promulgated in Hans
manifesto is to resort to a Southern imagination so as to re-create an alterity of a
cultural identity in the post-Maoist period. It is an evocation of an exit from the center
to the local culture in the peripheries with which the writers have an ethnic tie or
familiarized during their rustication as a sent-down youth for education.

Hans manifesto starts with a query of the disappearance of the many-splendored

culture of Chu in Hunan, however, as a critic points out, it expresses not so much a
concern of the loss of the mystery, romantic strangeness, freedom, lack of inhibition or
indignation of Chu culture but the intellectuals desire for a deeper level of a nations
culture, the substratum, the magma that lies under the earth shell. 71

The yearning for

an alternative national culture based on the local or the so called nativism reminds us
of the Taiwan diasporas longing for the nation and the moaning for a loss kingdom
with a history of five thousand years. The difference is that the diasporic intellectuals
idea of nation is a unique home unbisected by political reality, whereas the mainland
intellectuals yearning calls for the re-construction of a new cultural nation based on an
excavation of heterogeneous culture/heterodoxy to be found in the peripheries. While
the formers imaginary home is more of a nostalgia, the latters is grounded on native
soils such as the promulgation of a revival of Wu-Yue culture in the Qiantangjiang area
in Zhejiang province, Chu culture in the Xiangsi area, Qin-Han culture in Shangzhou
and Ba Shu culture in Sichuan. A key term found in Hans manifesto is that of minzhu
which is considered by critics as a hegemonic term glossing over all the different

70

Gregory Lee, Chinese Writing and Exile, 17.

Han Shaogong Shengzhan yu youxi (Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 1994), 62. Yi-tsi
Mei, Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant "Other" in Modern
Chinese Literature ( Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 202.
71

76

meanings of nation, nationality, and ethnic groups. Minzhu, a term emerged at the turn
of the 20th century to forge a Han-Chinese nationalism against the Manchu and the
foreign powers, is considered by critics to be suggestive of a linguistic conflation of
nation, nationality and ethnicity which bears political significance in the development of
nationalism in modern China. The idea of minzu essentially compresses ethnic identities
among culturally diverse peoples constituting different Sinitic linguistic communities in
different regions within China and congeals them into a huge nationality group under
the name of Han.72 While the above definition of minzu might be understood in line
with the orthodoxy of the nation state or the communist regime, Hans idea of minzu as
valorized in the manifesto by and large underscores a promulgation of cultural
consciousness giving heed to the heterodoxy of regional cultures such as that of
Guangdong in the South and Xinjiang in the North. If there is a pitfall in his use of the
term, the problem seemingly lies at the end when he uses the term in collusion with the
idea of Chineseness and national identity which makes him a culprit of a Chinese
national subject exhibiting, as a critic says, a concomitant of cultural anxiety and
cultural chauvinism.73 Hans chauvinistic tone is most prominent when he says on
behalf of we and avows to remind the readers of the particularity of Chinese culture in
the midst of the hype of Westernization that China is still China, especially in the
realm of literature and artswe have our national self-identity, our responsibility is
to release the energy from modern concepts, to recuperate and galvanize this form of
self-identity.74 In another article written a year after the manifesto, Han clarifies his
stance that the idea of root-searching is not to emulate a kind of ethnocentrism as an
72

Lai Ming-yan, Nativism and Modernity (New York: State U of New York Press, 2008), 114.
Ibid, 122. Lais criticism of Hans manifesto is more of an appropriation to make him an exemplary
case of nativism in complicity with nationalism and capitalism. Lais argument is largely reductive and
motivated by essentialist cultural politics.
74
Han Shaogong, Shengzhan yu youx, 62. Also see Lai, Nativism and Modernity, 122.
73

77

instrument opposing the West, but an effort to turn inward to seek an Oriental-style of
thinking and aesthetic potency which would particularize Chinese culture into a
self-identifying entity in the world stage. This inward turn is to emulate the intuitive and
dialectic thinking style of Zhuangzi and Zen philosophy, the subjective expressiveness
of Chu culture embracing an aesthetic of heart and mind and heterogeneous style.75 In
spite of Hans denial of ethnocentrism, his essay ends with a loftiness claiming that the
intellectuals task is to contribute to the Chinese nation and the world in re-constructing
a kind of Oriental style of thinking and aesthetics embracing new human dignity, new
state of mind and new spirit. It bespeaks the Chinese intellectuals anxiety to
promulgate a cultural inward turn as an immediate response to the flux of
Westernization in the 80s. While it is controversial as to whether Han evocation can
be considered as cultural chauvinism, the intellectuals ostensive desire to displace the
centre through the recovery of ancient philosophy and aesthetics is most prominent.
What makes Han vulnerable to critics attack is his promulgation of root-searching or
rural exile as fictive ethnicism which makes the rural or the peripheries an object of
desire and an object of gaze of the Han Chinese intellectual. Critics have pointed out
the gap between Hans root-searching theory and his narrative performance. His fiction
Bababa (Dad, dad, dad) which came out two months after the manifesto and considered
by some as a root-search story par excellence is more of a national allegory than an
emulation of Chu culture.76 Feuerwerker points out that while Han may claim to be
representing in his fiction a countryside with its customs and folkways that is distinctive
of the regional culture of Chu, paradoxically the powerful impact of his celebrated
root-searching story comes rather from its being read as a much broader, more
75

Han, Shengzhan yu youxi, 84-87.

Lai, Nativism and Modernity 127; Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the
Peasant "Other" in Modern Chinese Literature, 207.
76

78

generalized portrait of China as a whole. Not only that the boundaries of time and space
are blurred in Bababa, spatial metaphors such as the Cocks Head Village situated in
deep mountains in the midst of floating clouds, the figure of a personage of a new
style (xinpai renwu) crippled with poor eyesight, the misshapen and grotesque figure
of the little old dumb man Bingzai allusive to Lu Xuns Ah Q, all point to an
emblematic of a community stuck in time and underdeveloped. The stagnancy of the
community set in an exilic state and the self-effacing stance and superior position of the
omniscient narrator employing a matter-of-fact tone is most agitating and making critics
query as to whether the searchers for cultural roots know what it is that they are
doing.77 The local places in which the primal tradition is supposed to be located are
rendered outside of history, locked in an ahistorical past bearing little if any real links to
contemporary social relations.78 Despite Hans proclaimed effort to search for roots of
cultural regeneration in the surviving legacy of Chu culture, the roots that seem to take
hold in his fictional endeavors are not so much the marginalized ethnic culture as the
May Fourth legacy of nationalistic critique of the spiritual malaise plaguing the Chinese
people that Xia Zhiqing has named the obsession with China. 79 This exile of
alternatives to the imaginary realm is problematised by critics as revealing a deliberate
myth-making underlying the root-search nativists efforts to intervene or invest in the
discourse of modernity. While this discursive strategy of xungen serves the dual
purposes of decentering cultural traditions reclaimed in post/modernity and challenging
the legitimation of the state project of modernization on nationalistic grounds, it also
lays bare the immaterial nature of the nativist space of countermodernity inscribed

77

Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant "Other" in Modern Chinese
Literature, 202-207.
78
Lai, Nativism and Modernity, 157.
79
Ibid, 130.

79

therein.80

The story by Han which follows Bababa is Homecoming (Guiqulai) which

describes the narrator-I, an educated youth being mistaken as another educated youth
who was a sent-down to a mountain village during the Cultural Revolution. The
confusion of identity leads to the split in the self of the narrator-I who can no longer
ascertain who he once was and who he is now. The notion of a fractured self induces the
protagonist to cry out to Mama at the end that he will never be able to get out of that
gigantic I. While the story reveals the self as a product of a specific history against
which the self has no escape, the writers portrayal of the protagonist being haunted in
dreams undifferentiated with reality reminds readers of an allusion to Zhuangzis
butterflies in dream. The recuperation of Daoist spirit is regarded as a prominent feature
of root-searching literature. It is largely conducive to Achengs fiction The Chess King
published in the late 1984 which won him the acclaim as the pioneer reviving the Daoist
aesthetics. Critics such as Huang Ziping who is a contemporary of Acheng credits the
success of the fiction as one which emulates the Daoist spirit of seeking an alternative
cultural practice predicated on ordinary things and a secular way of living. The portrayal
of the self-engaging chess king in the midst of the rustication during the Cultural
Revolution is considered a reminiscence of a Daoist way of life embracing an immanent
aesthetic through the subjects indiscriminative response to the surroundings, work,
ordinary things and human life in general.81 What makes Acheng an exemplary of
root-searching literature different from Han is that the formers idea of narrative
discourse does not begin with a concept but a manifestation of a living condition.
80

Ibid, 158.
Huang Ziping Xingcun zhe de wenxue (Taibei : Yuan liu chu ban, 1991),
185-207.
81

80

Acheng considers that writing to him is to express the illogical through the logic of
language which is dialogic and plural.82 He considers that the Chinese literary tradition
which imposes an all-encompassing demand on composition and the moral requirement
imposed on writers is what makes Chinese literature different from the West. Chinese
literature shoulders the burden of the press, of education, of the law, and so forth and it
is weighted down with more burden than it ought to be responsible for. The principles
of truth as conveyed by literature should not be overwhelmingly social as art has its own
principles. Literature to him is a concrete rendering of ones aesthetic judgment. A
writers sense of duty and responsibility calls for him to make something from his sense
of the beautiful. Achengs idea of aesthetics is similar to Gao in the sense that he is also
affirmative that writing is nothing but an act of satisfying oneself. Literature has
become his own affair. One meets with conflict only if he is inside that system. Acheng
demonstrates an exilic spirit of remaining outside the circle and always be with himself.
The experience of isolation and exilic life in the rural during the Cultural Revolution is
conducive to his mode of writing and habit of self-talking which is essential to
developing a dialogic relation with oneself during the process of writing and re-writing.
He is accustomed to living for himself instead of other people. To him, all the
excitement brought forward with his writing to the literary circle in the 80s belongs to
the periphery. As all aesthetes, he demonstrates a sense of stubbornness in adhering to
the principle of seeing writing as his own business.83

Since 2001, Han Shaogong has opted to becoming an internal exile away from
the metropolitan and practiced his homecoming in residing in Hunan and alluding to
82

Shi Shuqing Wentan fansi yu qianzhan: Shi Shuqing yu dalu zuojia duihua :

(Xianggang: Ming chuang chu ban she, 1989), 195.

83

Helmut Martin, Modern Chinese Writers Self-portrayals, 107-117.

81

human and natural ecology which underscores his latest choice of home. Acheng has led
a life of an external exile subsequent to the June Fourth event and his literary output
since then was minimal.84 When Gao and Yang Lian discussed the moral responsibility
of the exile writers, they acknowledge that the immediate challenge posed to the post
June Fourth Chinese exile is to answer the question- what can be gained from the exile
experience? And what can exile writers do to continue their effort in contributing to
modern Chinese writing?

In short, as Gao has put it, the question is, how to speak?

The imminent question of the exiled writers need to transform themselves into a new
being by means of a self-translation into a new language is not exclusively one of the
problem of the Chinese exiled writers.

What kind of language the exiled writer

chooses to take refuge as their shelter seems to hinge on what type of an exile the
subject chooses to identify themselves with. Joseph Brodsky, a well-known Russian
exile banished by the Soviet Union in 1972, has turned towards bilingualism in 1983.
But in his early exile period, he has avowed exile as a linguistic event in relation to the
native language. He says that for one in our profession the condition we call exile is,
first of all, a linguistic event: he is thrust from, he retreats into his mother tongue. From
being his, so to speak, sword, it turns into his shield. A critic has compared Brodskys
later self-transformation to write in a new language as a baby thrusting out of the womb.
The irony of such an effort is that while translating himself into a newly acquired
language, the poet is being transformed by it at the same time. His self is being
metamorphosed together with his texts being re-born in a different language, which
leads to re-inventing of his self.85

84

Lai Ming-yan, Nativism and Modernism, 175. Acheng has apparently returned to the mainland recently.
See his brief biography in Qishi niandai (Hong Kong: Oxford UP, 2008), 136.
85
Magda Stroinska and Vittorina Cecchetto ed., Exile, Language, and Identity (New York: P. Lang,
2003), 111-123.

82

Tucker, in his analysis of exile literature in the twentieth century, points out that
the choice of language of the exiled writers can be taken as a measure of psychic exile
and indicates how the migr writer places himself in relation to the adopted country.
Tucker considers that an exile has become a transcendental type if the writer adopts the
home of a new language and has made a literary conversion to write in a new language
instead of the mother tongue, such as in the case of Conrad and Beckett who mainly
write in English and French despite the fact that their native language is Polish and Irish.
Tucker calls them transcendental exiles who have integrated the past into the present,
discovered the roots that have grown anew without severance of old vines. These
writers go beyond the past into a future that does not deny the validity of the past while
assigning it a less dominant territory. But there are other types like Thomas Mann and
James Joyce who, despite their choice of no return, adhere to writing only in the one
language tied to their homeland, as it is the distance which makes them able to come
home in its literary sense. In the Chinese case, most of the writers in diaspora, as Bai
Xianyong once declares, write for the Chinese readers and have their work published
targeting Chinese readers. If Bai has pointed out a general condition of Chinese exiled
writers, Gao Xingjians case is an exception rather than the rule. Gao, who obtained a
diploma in French at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages in 1962 and worked as
a translator at the Foreign Languages press until 1980, becomes a rare case of a Chinese
exiled writer in diaspora who writes in two languages. 86 Gao wrote five plays in French
within the period from 1992 to 2000 of which he also provides a Chinese version
86

Ha Jin has been in America since 1984 and writes in English only. While he vowed to speak for the
Chinese people in his early works, he later changed his stance as he realized that it should be the art work
itself which should be of prime concern for a writer and history has repeatedly revealed the fallacious
notion that a writer should speak for the people. See Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant (Chicago: U of
Chicago P., 2008), 3-30.

83

simultaneously for publishing and performances for audiences of the Chinese

communities. In the dialogue between Gao and Yang Liang, Gaos pledge seems to
respond to the reminders posed by Gregory Lee on the ethic of exiled writers. Gao
reiterates the importance of artistic autonomy and claims that as an exile writer he
writes not for the readers but himself, as the audience market is not his concern for an
exile writer cut off from the homeland and whose meaning of existence is gauged by
nothing but his language.
to anyone.

As a free person he disavows the need to bear accountability

Although as a playwright he has to encounter the audience in the theatre,

he considers it impossible to write plays catering to a target audience who is only an

abstract mass to him. As French has been Gaos second language for decades and it is
not a language newly acquired after exile, self transcendence and transformation for him
is different from that of Brodsky or others like him. Having his plays staged in the
language of the adopted country signifies the establishment of Gao as a transnational
and multicultural person in the world stage. In his well known article The Condition
We Call Exile, Brodsky portrays a rather gloomy picture of the condition of a
Russian in exile in the United States by claiming, among other things, that exile slows
down ones stylish evolution and makes one become more conservative as he is
suspicious of the irritants of the foreign and tends to always turn his head back.87 As for
Gaos condition of exile, it proves the opposite as he has become profuse in his
post-exile cultural production in terms of theory and practice. Rather than becoming
conservative or suspicious of the foreign, his work has indicated an establishment of a
personal style he claims that every serious writer should have aimed to achieve.

87

In Glad, Literature in Exile, 106.

84

85

CHAPTER THREE

SPIRITUAL EXILE AND SPATIAL

DISPLACEMENT

3.1 Spatial intervention and genealogy

Gilbert Fong, in his seminal paper on Gao Xingjian and exile, considers Gao a
perennial traveler and that his exilic imperative can be seen in his predilection for the
original and primordial such as focusing on the titular character in the play Wild Man,
returning to the ancient myth of Shanhaijing (The Classics of Mountains and Seas)and
embarking on the pilgrimage to the wilds of Southwest China in Soul Mountain. Gaos
literary and literal escape to the primeval territory provides a refuge from the
encroachment of politics and commercialism in the contaminated modern world and
occasions a delineation of the collective unconsciousness of the Chinese people in its
initial purity. 1 The question to ask is how the writer as a traveler configures an
alternative Chinese exilic existence through his other discourse. From the perspective
of cultural studies, Gaos journey of self-exile into the Southwest in 1983 is a spatial
practice which is experiential and helps to inscribe the emotive and cognitive self in the
cultural space pertinent to his literary creation. The traveler is a spatially located self.
The locatedness of the self will influence the kinds of questions asked, texts drawn on
and the forms of cultural knowledge that are available. The act of journeying out to the
1

See Gilbert Fongs seminal paper, Why Say No to Chineseness? Gao Xingjian and Exile in Hong
Kong Drama Review Vol 8 2009, 17-30.

86

peripheries and traveling as a pursuit for bodily experience is in part driven by the
desire to turn away from the tyranny of time, the temporal modes of structuring thought
and narrative that have been prevalently dominating.2

In the Saidian sense, Gao as an exilic intellectual seems to valorize the audacity of
daring rather than adhering to the logic of the conventional. His restless exile imperative
compels him to adhere to the provisional and risky rather than the status quo. An
example of his daring and risky act can be seen in his research and dramatic
presentation of the classical legend Shanhaijing. Gao makes it explicit in the postscript
of Shanhaijing zhuan that he intends to recuperate the innocence of the archaic legend
which has been distorted by the moral interpretation of classical Confucianism. Gao
calls Shanhaijing zhuan a tragic-comedy and many of the humanized gods in the play
are endowed with the qualities of buffoons and clowns. Monumental history as
interpreted in the legend is a parody of human politics and power struggle. The play
transposes the legendary classic to a child-like fable with a porous structure. Gaos
suggestion of staging the play in a carnival and festive manner echoes Foucaults
appropriation of the Nietzschean sense of history as parodic and farcical. Foucault
explains that the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots
of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipationIf genealogy in its own right
gives rise to questions concerning our native land, native language, or the laws that
govern us, its intention is to reveal the heterogeneous systems which, masked by the self,

Richard Johnson. The Practice of Culture Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2004),105-107. The idea
to escape from time is a distinctively modern notion and particularly meaningful in the Chinese cultural
context. Robert Hegel notes that traditional Chinese self is not given the freedom to ignore time while
asserting its individuality. See Hegel & Hessney ed. Expression of Self in Chinese Literature (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985), 9-18. Hegel also refers to James Lius interesting remark: In case of circular time
one would be at the circumference, if one were at the center, one would no longer be in time. Liu
apparently argues against self-centered identification in traditional literati.

87

inhibit the formation of any form of identityHistory is the sacrifice of the subject of
knowledgethe will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truthon the contrary,
it ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory
defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject3

The adaptation of the play from the classic apparently demonstrates Gaos will to
knowledge as agency to break down illusory defenses and dissolve the unity of the
subject as emulated by Foucault. Liu Zaifu points out that in writing the play and
personally researching in the Southwest, Gao aims to show that Chinese culture has
heterogeneous sources, that it does not originate from the Yellow River as the middle
kingdom has always claimed, but also from the Chu Culture of Yangtze river and Shang
Culture of the Eastern sea.4 The Taiwan critic Hu Yaoheng seemingly has grasped the
genealogical approach of Gao towards cultural history. He marvels at the immensity of
Gaos effort in rendering the 31 thousand word old classic into a play. Rather than a
connoisseur of archaeology, he considers that the effort of Gao should be read as an
intention to reveal the heterogeneous systems through which history should be defined.5

Gaos dissipation of cultural history and deconstruction of legendary myth in fact

3

Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in Paul Rabinow ed. The Foucault Reader
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
4
Gao, Shanhaijing Zhuan (Taibei: Dijiao, 1995), 4. Wan Hui of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences points out that since the 1970s, archaeologistss findings of Liangzhu Culture in the
lower Yangtze River, Dawenkou-Longshan Culture in the lower Yellow River and Hongshan Culture in
the Liao River outside of the Zhougyuan area have shaken the traditional version of ancient history. The
finding of Yu ji (Yus traces) in the Liao River, Yangtze River and other areas meant that China is not
from one origin and such findings deconstructed the Yellow River-centered version of ancient history.
Naoki Sakai and Yukiko Hanawa ed: Traces: Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation, (New
York: Cornell University P, 2001), 357-358.
5
Hu Yaoheng , Bai nian geng yun de feng shou (Taibei : Dijiao chuban
she,1995).

88

continue to operate as an on-going traveling process in Soul Mountain. In Chapter 68,

Gao uses the spatial metaphor of mountain climbing to describe the protagonists will to
knowledge which is seductive and a never-ending pursuit. The writer says, after some
time you get used to this loneliness and climbing peaks becomes an obsession. You
know you will find nothing but are driven by this blind thought and keep on climbing.
However, while doing this you need to have some distraction and as you fabricate
stories for yourself, images are born. The writer then immediately demonstrates his
fabrication of stories by creating a vision of a legendary figure coming to life and
speaking to the protagonist. This encountering of the imagined legendary figure echoes
the I-protagonists thought on the history of Yu the Great whom the protagonist
considers a historical figure who can become the first person to kill another in order to
realize his ambitions. In the minds eye of the protagonist, Yu the Great is the kind who
cannot tolerate his subordinate, the hapless giant Fang Fang who happens to come late
to his ceremony in a carefree manner, and orders his retainers to decapitate Fang Fang.
In Chapter 71, the writer also gives his views on his reading of history of the cultural
origin in association with the Yangtze River and his understanding of history as a
hermeneutic cultural alterity. His allusion to Sima Qians journeying for historical
investigation is also self-referential and a self-parody of his dangerous and risky act in
dissipating history-

Two thousand years ago, Sima Qian came here to carry out investigations and
wrote that great work the Historical Records. He offended the emperor and,
although he managed to keep his head, he was castrated.
According to the account in the Records of the State of Shu, Yu was born a
native of Guangrou County in Wenshan. I have just come down from that
area which is the present Qiang nationality district of Wenchuan as well as the

89

home of the giant panda. Yu was born from the womb of a bear and this can
be substantiated in an earlier work, the Classic of the Mountains and Seas. His
achievement of curbing the floods is generally thought to have been through
his dredging of the Yellow River but I have reservations about that. My
theory is that he set out from the upper reaches of the Min River (the main
source of the Yangtze in ancient times was the Min River and references can
found in the Classic of Mountains and Seas), followed the course of the
Yangtze and passed through the Three Gorges.
In Yus tomb there are now artifacts for reference but the experts still cannot
decipher the tadpole-like script on the stone epitaph opposite the main hall. I
look at it from various angles, ruminate for a long time, and suddenly it
occurs to me that it can be read in this way: history is a riddle,
It can also be read as: history is lies
And it can also be read as: history is nonsense
And yet it can read as: history is prediction
And then it can read as: history is sour fruit
Or: history is a state of mind
And furthermore: history is history
And: history is sad sighs
Oh history oh history oh history oh history
Actually history can be read any way and this is a major discovery!6

What is unusual in the above description is Gaos incorporation of geographical

concepts such as mapping and boundaries in his interrogation of historical truth. His
rhetorical intervention by means of spatial metaphors operates on the realm of cultural
politics aiming to clarify misconception sedimented over time. By alluding to the old
classic and speaking in the voice of a researcher, the protagonist avoids the problem of
romantic hermeneutics in understanding history discredited by theorists such as
Gadamer who considers that the readers own time should be included in his historical
reading as a reflexive process. By foregrounding his understanding as a sudden
6

I refer to Mabel Lees translation of Gaos Soul Mountain (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000), 449-450.

90

discovery and opening up the multiple interpretations of history, the protagonist also
disclaims his interpretation as the sole version and hints that ones entanglement and
reflexivity of cultural history in which self identity is located is very much a process of
subjectivity, fantasy and self-making.

If the Southwest and the Yangtze region described in Soul Mountain is in

association with folk legend and alternative history upon which the writer collects traces
such as songs and tales and conducts study with reference to classical text, the North
where lies the Yellow River in association with legitimated original sources of culture
described in One Mans Bible (Chapter 29 and 34) paradoxically reveals the
impossibility of historical truth. The setting in which the he-protagonist as the writers
past self visited the historical site of the Yellow River in the North echoes the
inquisitive act of the I-protagonist in Soul Mountain. The he-protagonist embarks on a
site survey to study history but this time its about human history, namely, the past of
ex-underground party members in the pre-1949 years. In Chapter 34, the he-protagonist
visits the dwelling of a former revolutionary heroine but he could not extract anything
from her story. The heroine who takes refuge in the village area appears to have saved
her former husband who was a party secret agent in the pre-1949 years but ended up
being caught herself and put in jail. In the face of prosecution this woman refuses to say
anything and only indicates her momentary pain when the he-protagonist mentions the
death of her new-born baby in jail. The truth and authenticity of the womans pain lies
in stark contrast with the falsity of the grand narrative of the nations revolutionary saga.
The visit to the ex-heroine ends in the he-protagonists sense of loss and melancholy.
He is described as cycling and bouncing up and down lashed up by the wind with all

91

swirling snow before him, everything was a vast expanse of gray...7 On his return
journey, the protagonist bypasses the Yellow River region and asks a village woman the
whereabouts of the Yellow River. The village woman answers that she doesnt know
anything about the Yellow River and simply ignores him. The lack of knowledge of the
village woman on the historical site is followed by the protagonists reflection of his
lack of knowledge of the Yellow River despite its seeming familiarity.

Different from

the protagonists visit to the Yangtze River in Soul Mountain, the momentary break
from the political turmoil of the cultural revolution to visit the Yellow River which has
long been eulogized seeks to expose the gap of an unreal sense of history. The
he-protagonist virtually examines the slushy mud of the river and finds that contrary to
the revolutionary poet who once sang I drink the water of the Yellow River, the
muddy soup was not for humans, and even fish and shrimp would find it hard to survive
in it. It would seem that dire poverty and disaster can be eulogized. The great muddy
river, which was virtually dead, shocked him and filled him with desolation. In finding
the mud soup is not palatable, the writer appeals to the virtual experience of the
he-protagonist which verifies the false claim of history. The he-protagonists moment
of shock in finding out the truth stands in stark contrast with the distanced cool
voice of the implied-I in retrospection. The exiled writer in his omnipresent voice says,
some years later, an important member of the Party Center said he wanted to erect a
great statue to honor the spirit of the nation in the upper reaches of the Yellow River,
and probably it has already been erected, disseminating an impression that the falsity
of history still lingers.8 The juxtaposition of the protagonists historical research at
the respective geographical sites in the North and Southwest in the two novels at

7
8

Ibid., 272.
I refer to Mabel Lees translation of One Mans Bible (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 234.

92

different temporality delves into history in its genealogy. The geographical metaphors
provide the object and an expansive space against which the protagonist can negotiate
his thoughts and feelings. Hermeneutic otherness arising from the spatial encounter
conjures a sense of surprise and shock elevating oneself to a new realm of recognition
and knowledge of self.

3.2 Thinking through space

Michael Seidel, in Exile and the Narrative Imagination, explains that narrative
forges two kinds of scenes, the first a counter or allegorical space where the I am of
the character projects a being that sustains an inscriptive sovereignty, and the second a
mimetic space that limits the absolute otherness of the I am by supposing a
recognizable world to which it is answerable.

He cites the example of Kafkas The

Castle in which K the subject is mysteriously called over to an alien land to await his
duties in the village. Ks job becomes a quest to make things signify but no sooner has
he found that he cannot comprehend and recognize the environs, K is committed to the
allegorical lot as an exilic one.9

In Gaos Soul Mountain, the imaginative space of the

exile narrative operates in quite a different manner. In the virtuality of the narrative the
I-protagonists travelogue provides occasion to set free rather than limit the absolute
otherness of the writer in his self-quest.

The solitary search for lingshan (the soul

mountain) is a self-initiation rather than obligatory.

It is the desire to pursue the

unknown and mythic place which energizes the entire narrative of self-exile dominated
by the I-travelers subjective vision. The writer who speaks in the I-protagonists
position sets up his own spatial boundary and is in full control of the movement of the
9

Michael Siedel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (London: Yale UP, 1986).

93

itinerary. Some exile writers comment that the difference between spiritual exile and
external exile is that the former sets up his own boundary to secure his spiritual integrity
and private space which others may not cross while the latter is restricted by borders
which the external exile may not cross.10 In Soul Mountain which is largely written in
Gaos pre-exile years, we see an intense desire of the spiritual exile to create a private
narrative place with vigorous variation of narrative style operated through deictic shifts
and eclecticism. Psychological space is expanded through the creation of multiple
voices spoken by the pronominal characters I, You and She presumably representing the
writers ego, his shadow and projection.

Chapter One of Soul Mountain starts with the description of the you- protagonists
arrival in the mountain county town in the South.

As a travelogue often does, it

portrays the environs of the town focusing on the sights and sounds and the activity of
the people around him. No sooner the you-protagonist starts recalling why he is
attracted to this place, he recalls someone he met in the train carriage who was on his
way to Lingshan. When the recounting of the encounter proceeds, it suggests that this
someone is in fact the protagonists replicate, and the so called Lingshan is a
self-imagination and exists more as an agency of the protagonists soul searching. The
dyad of the self and the imaginative other is animated through the clattering of two cups.
The mirroring effect conjures an estrangement and uncanniness of the soul-searching
journey right at the start-

You cant explain why youre here. It happened that you were on a train and
this person mentioned a place called Lingshan. He was sitting opposite and

10

Glad, Literature in Exile.

94

your cup was next to his. As the train moved, the lids on the cups clattered
against one another. If the lids kept on clattering or clattered and then
stopped, that would have been the end of it. However, whenever you and he
were about to separate the cups, the clattering would stop, and as soon as you
and he looked away the clattering would start again11

The traveler whom the you-protagonist met in the mimetic setting talked about the
location of Lingshan situated near the You River near Wuyizhen of which the names
were unknown to the protagonist. Feeling suspicious of the authenticity of the
information, the protagonist surprisingly finds out on the train schedule that there really
is a place called Wuyizhen which appears as the last stop of one of the train routes.
There is an edge of magical realism at this point as the unreal place the protagonist
fancied appears before him as if it is really there. On another occasion, the protagonist
fancies meeting a girl who he has come across and the girl suddenly appears around the
corner. Psychic materiality is a modern technique and a familiar strategy of the French
dramatist Artaud. But what makes Gaos narrative unique is its syncretic style which is
personalized and enlivened through the bodily senses of the protagonist be it from the
perspective of I or You. There is another scene (Chapter 43) where the solitary traveler
is described as seeing someone more or less like himself sitting opposite him in the
open with a similar outlook. They sit opposite each other and smoke at the same time,
causing the protagonist to engage in uncanny thoughts about the mischievous motif of
his other. The mirroring reminds readers of traces of the Story of the Stone
(Hongloumeng) in which the real and unreal Baoyu encounter each other in mimicry.
The incessant mentioning of the soul-rock, soul-cliff in the metonymic chain of the soul
mountain also suggests traces of the fallen stone in Hongloumeng. If the mirroring of

11

Mabel Lee, 2.

95

the authentic and inauthentic Baoyu suggests a rare momentary discovery of an

existential self of the traditional literati, the avant-garde writers long distanced echo is
also a parody.12

Plato observes that place is a veritable matrix of energies, and the nurturing
container of experience. Place is an active receptacle of shapes, powers, feelings, and
meanings giving experience its definition and substance.13 While being a spiritual exile
and often engaged in solitary monologue, the protagonist is vigorously engaging in the
symbolic exchange of meaning with people, objects and things contained in place. In
Chapter 8, the I-protagonist is staying in a forest camp and speaks with an old botanist
who talks about his knowledge on plantation, views on ecology conservation, traumatic
events during the anti-Japanese war and the Cultural Revolution. The truncated life
story of the old ecologist immediately leads to the protagonists reflection of his own
life and the purpose of this journey coming to the mountain.

The protagonists

self-reflexivity prevalent in the entire narrative provides the occasion for the
questioning of ones existential condition. Paradoxically it is to the idea of thinking
itself that the protagonist poses his question: If Im trying to be a recluse why do I need
to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too
much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so
why does there have to be logic to explain what it means?14 The chaotic multitude of
ones life such as that told by the old ecologist which precedes the reflexive questioning
of the protagonist aptly illustrates the futility and absurdity to make logical sense out of
12

Gao deliberately writes one more chapter so that Soul Mountain will be different from the 80-chapter
Hongloumeng He mentions his exploration of a new form of novel writing seeking inspiration from the
eclectic style of classical chinese novel. See Meiyou zhuyi, 177-178.
13
Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity ( New Haven: Yale UP,
1993), 24
14
Soul Mountain, 50.

96

ones life.

The incessant symbolic exchange in the course of traveling whereby the writer
conducts his self-search and self-reflection amounts to becoming an obsessive
occupation. The people and things the protagonist encountered become the object of the
subjects springboard for self-revelation. In Chapter 24, the I-protagonist sees from the
carved wooden mask of an animal head with a human face a self who cannot cast off his
mask which is a projection of his inauthentic self which cannot be obliterated. The
process of the revelation is always startling, amazing and agonistic.15 The protagonist
comments that this process of self-reflection is an ongoing process taking place in
everyday life, whether you are lying on the grass, on the bed or going to toilet. Like
water stain in the lavatory the self is like a mark that changes every day and one is left
in bewilderment about the self which surpasses ones grasp. The protagonists self
examination continues in Chapter 26 and his revelation on the impossibility to escape
from the existential situation of self pitches at a philosophical level.

In reproaching the

narcissistic act of self-reflexivity, the self-conscious protagonist is also aware of the

impossibility to solve the problem which is at once existential, philosophical and
political-

Whenever I observed other people I found this detestable omniscient self of

mine interfering, and to this day there is not one face it hasnt interfered with.
This a serious problem, for when I am scrutinizing someone else, I am at the
same time scrutinizing myself.when I am observing others I always treat
the other person as a mirror for looking inwardly at myselfWomen I like
are inevitably illusions I have created to delude myself, and this is my tragedy.
The problem is the awakened self in the inner mind, there is the monster
15

Ibid, 141.

97

which torments me no end. People love the self yet mutilate the selfThe self
is in fact the source of mankinds misery. So, does this unhappy conclusion
mean that the awakened self should therefore be killed?16

Subsequent to the spatial turn which emerged in narrative theory in the latter half
of the last century, theorists have found in the modern writers narrative a displacement
of time into spatial metaphor foregrounding the idea of space as a theoretical trope
related to real life experience. The humanly embodied space is a lived space of the
phenomenological realm which indicates a conception of space always embodying a
subject who is affected by space and who experiences and reacts to space in a bodily
way, a subject who feels space through existential living conditions, mood and
atmosphere. Gaos thinking through the lived space of everyday life intercepted with
his existential questioning is a case in point manifesting the entrapment of the self in
real life experience. While the protagonists self-questioning in the above scenarios
seems to address a universal issue of self-identity and the problem of self-cognition, as a
Chinese intellectual, the revelation vigorously suggests the protagonists implicit
cultural dialogue with his predecessors on the issue of self-awaking. Lu Xun conjures
the image of the unconscious collective sleeping in the iron house and raises the
question of whether they should be awakened as the awakening might engender more
pain and end in fatality. The protagonist as an awakened self seems to echo his
predecessor about the pain of awakening but at the same time remains skeptical against
the deterrence of the right of an autonomous life for an awakened self.

The anecdote

of the carefree Fang Fangs tardy appearance in the court ceremony of Yu the Great
attributed to his being killed serves to express the writers criticism against autocratic
repression. The political threat cast on him for writing plays sanctioned by the
16

Ibid, 151-152.

98

autocratic regime which triggers his self-exile explains his accusation against the
prohibition for one to live an autonomous life. The writers negotiation or the
reconfiguration of a private spatial realm within the literary and the contiguous
subspaces created in the novel where the protagonist travels freely from one space to the
next is a gesture to counter a historicity of a world in which the subject is entrapped.
Such a narrative space relies on gapping and the readers' commitment to follow the
spatial and mental movement to accomplish its task. It also invites readers to transpose
to the scene of action and picture the setting imaginatively adopting the position of a
hypothetical observer.17
3.3

Locating culture
If the travelers roaming in the Southern region is a solitary journey which makes

possible the protagonists self-reflection, it is also one of cultural pursuit whereby the
modern writer seemingly follows the path of his predecessors such as Shen Chongwen
and Wen Yiduo in collecting regional lore and folk songs during their visits to the South.
Jeffrey Kinkley, in comparing Gaos venture to the South with that of the ancient poet
Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen in the 30s, finds that the three outsiders to the South
frontier all allude to Shamanism in their works. Kinkley notes that the traveler in Gaos
novel resembles the protagonist in Shens Fengzi which is a narrative mixing alternative
senses of place, philosophical and religious musings, ancient rites of the non-Han,
childhood memories, imaginary and indirect romantic encounters with women and first
and third person dissections of a self divided into separate aspects. The two being both
Han-Chinese also share between them a curiosity in pursuing popular ethnography such

17

David Hermann, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (London: Routledge, 2005), 552-3.

99

as the suspended coffins and walking corpses in West Hunan.18 But what makes Gao
novel distinctive, as pointed out by Kinkley, is his Chu modernism which arguably
makes Gao a descendant of the ancient poet whose work is prototypical in its emulation
of Chu aesthetics. The ancient poet being slandered by political enemy and dismissed
from court undertakes a poetic and mystical journey through the sky in search of a
virtuous lord represented allegorically as a beauty (meiren). It includes adaptations of
popular verses from shamanistic ritual, describes songs and dance of a shaman in
ecstatic trance. It also poses long series of questions on early Chinese history and
mythology and is reflexive on the riddles of temple mural paintings in the ancestral
temples. In Yuan You and Yu Fu (Far Journey and The Fisherman), the response of the
ancient poet to adversity is recorded through mysticism and dialogue with a
fisherman. 19 In Soul Mountain, we see that the solitary traveler, in his course of
self-quest for his soul mountain, not only performs the multiple role of an amateur
historian, anthropologist, song collector, and photographer, but most importantly acts as
a raconteur of the stories and songs he heard and a reflective commentator on the places
and people he came across. The novel is a story of a traveler but at the same time a noteform literature in which the travelers cultural observation is jotted down and traces of
the cultural life recorded.

Kinkley traces the trajectory of the protagonist in Soul Mountain starting from
Qinghai, the place where the writer feared that he would be banished for re-education as
one who has offended the nations status quo in literary creation. The protagonist then
18

Jeffrey Kinkley Gao Xingjian in the Chinese perspective of Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen in Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol 14, No 2 Fall, 2002, 144-145. Kinkley points out that while Shen
Congwen is a native of Hunan, he was raised as a Han.
19
William Nienhauser, Jr, ed., The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Bloomington,
Ind: Indiana UP., 1985), 347, 348.

100

travels to Western Sichuan, Western and Eastern Guizhou, West Hunan, Southern
Zhejiang, the Sichuan-Hubei borders, Jiangxi, Fujian and ends in Shanghai but the
trajectory is fictive than real as it is highly truncated and irregular.20 The issue at stake
here is how space in terms of the locale, people and things in the peripheries and regions
of minority culture are re-configured in contiguity with the thoughts of the traveler.21
Ritual in terms of shamanism indeed is pertinent to the manifestation of the ethnic
tradition of the cultural minority but it is first and foremost the intervention of the
conscious cultural observer which is at stake. The notion of the South, as epitomized in
Qu Yuans poetics of shamanism, has always been regarded in literary or cultural
history as a frontier in concomitant of multi-ethnic and southern escape tradition. In
addition, the South is also the birth place of Daoism which is considered heterodoxy
from the point of view of Confucianism. How can this complicit notion of the South
which is a spatial metaphor of hermitage, mysticism, marginality, primitivism be
contained within a note-form narrative. Is Gaos idea of Southernism a fantasy of the
otherness of the Han Chinese intellectual? An instrument to be used to affirm a Han
Chinese intellectuals self-identity, such as that promulgated in the root-searching
manifesto by Han Shaogong that one should turn to the peripheries to recuperate an
Oriental way of thinking and aesthetic potency which would define Chineseness amidst
the global culture?22 Jian Ming points out that Soul Mountain is imbued with a sense of
20

Jeffrey Kinkley Gao Xingjian in the Chinese perspective of Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen in Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture, 144-145.
21
When Henry Zhao argues that Gaos play Wild Man written at the end of 1984 and the novel Soul
Mountain are reflective of the root seeking trend in Chinese art and literature, he refers to the ritual
elements of the play and the intention to re-discover and re-evaluate an authentic Chinese culture in the
novel which makes the work bear the traits of the root-searching trend. Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern
Zen Theatre, 14, 17, 106.
22
Wild Man came out four months after Achengs The Chess King and earlier than Han Shaogongs
manifesto on root-searching literature. As Gao was born in 1940, by age he does not fall within the
generation who is mesmerized by the unnamable lost culture of which they seek to re-cultivate. But Gaos
evocation of a modern Oriental theatre and high regard of Zen philosophy somehow makes him
associative if not in collusion with some of the characteristic of the so called root-seeking trend.

101

tension manifested in the protagonist inability to reconcile between existential angst and
Zen tranquility. He criticizes that the writer, as a Han-Chinese intellectual in search of
consolation in the South and casting sympathy upon the ethnic minority, has
unmistakably controlled by a gaze of a dominant Han Chinese intellectual who
demonstrates intentionally or unintentionally throughout the novel the latent superiority
complex of an intellectual towards common people.23 Interestedly, another critic, who
is a native of Hunan where he has resided for thirty-six years and whose father is a folk
song-collector, credits Gaos portrayal of the Southwest as the most genuine one he has
ever read. The critic avows that legendary figures in the novel such as the great hunter
Grandpa Stone mentioned in Chapter 2 whose dead body never got rotten is a
well-known legacy of the village and he virtually has first hand knowledge of the
personae described in the novel.24 How is the reader to negotiate this interpretive gap of
the cultural stance of the writer? In criticizing nativism and boundary-making of the
root-searchers in distinguishing natives of the particular regions from the dominant
construct of Han Chineseness, Lai Ming-yan points out that the trope of roots is
naturalized by the Han-Chinese intellectual with its implication of natural origins,
biological connection and contiguous growth. Referring to Lu Xuns moving rendition
of the almost unbridgeable gap between intellectuals and the rural subaltern, Lai
criticizes xungen nativism for overlooking the gap between intellectual representation
and experiences of marginalized others and ensuing the problem of intellectual

23

Jin Ming, Fission and Fusion: Dynamic Tension of Chineseness in Gao Xingjians Literary Writing in
Hong Kong Drama Review, vol 8, 2009, 61-78.
24
Yin Xiaodong is a poet and native of Szechuan province. He was active in promoting poetry writing in
the 80s. See his A study of Gao Xingjians work,http://tw001.net/novels/mingjwx/gxjzpwx/gxj29.html.
Sookyung Oh considers that in Soul Mountain, Gao deconstructs Sinicization; Yangtze River/ethnic
cultures/anti-rational/feminine/ stands in contrast to Yellow River/Han centeredness/patriarchy/pedagogy.
See her An introduction to the Modern Oriental Theatre of Gao Xingjian, in Hong Kong Drama Review,
vol 8, 2009, 213-220.

102

appropriation of marginality to consolidate their representational authority.25 In this

connection, the question to address is whether the writer of Soul Mountain as a spiritual
exile is aware of such a gap, and if so, what strategy is employed by the writer to
overcome cultural essentialism or opposition.

First of all, the protagonist, who mimics the traditional practice of Chinese literati
as a folk lore and song collector, states right at the beginning his doubt on the notion of
a definite kind of truthful writing sanctioned by orthodoxy and reminds readers of the
tradition of Chinese fiction derivative from a mixture of history and legend. As a writer
haunted by political attack, he poses right at the beginning a defensive mechanism to
fend off argument on whether what he portrays is real or not real, as reality cant be
verified and doesnt need to be, that can be left for the reality-of life experts to
debate. 26 When the traveler in the voice of the protagonist-I is engaged in dialogues
with the local people be they Han or non-Han, a sense of distance is always created
either through the stance of the narrator as an observer or a conscious self who is also
simultaneously engaged in internal monologue. Being a traveler instead of a native of
the region, the protagonist has no claim of natural origin or biological connection. The
only time that root is mentioned is related to a talisman carved on wood called the
old root used by the native of Qiang to accompany the newborn from birth to death.
The protagonist is told that such a talisman is for the native hunter and would not be of
use to him.27 In describing traditional ethnic culture, the narrator is conscious not to
render a portrayal merely from his subjective viewpoint confining to his own thoughts
and feelings, but frequently alludes to information provided by experts such as
25
26
27

Lai Ming-yang, Nativism and Modernism, 115, 159.

Soul Mountain, Ch 2, 15.
Ibid., 13.

103

anthropologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, ecologists, historians etc. Is it then a proof

of the narrators elitist stance? Chapter 20 which describes the gradual changes of the
native culture serves as a good example to illustrate the stance of the author. The gap
between the Han-Chinese narrator and the Yi culture is exposed through the language
barrier mentioned in the chapter which requires translation. It is only through the
priests sinicized sons translation that the traveler is able to understand the words of
the Yi dirge. The travelers cultural enquiry as represented in this chapter is conducted
through a dialogue between him and an official who is a native Yi. The native cadre
informs the traveler that the ancestors of the Yi culture who are traceable to the Aba
region of north-west Sichuan are closely connected with the ancient Qiang people.
Mesmerized by the mysticism of the Yi customs such as the slave-owned aristocracy
system, prohibition against same clan marriage and cruel punishments, the narrator-I
seek clarification from the Yi cadre in the form of question and answer. The dialogue
ends with a consensus between the interlocutors that repressive customs and cruel
punishments are also found in Han culture. The dialogue which starts off from treating
the other as an object of gaze ends up with the protagonist turning inward to reflect on
his own culture. This is a process of de-mystification as the Han tribe can be as cruel
and savage. As pointed out by the native who somehow is a surrogate of the writer, we
had all these, but of course in the past. They arent much different from what happened
during the Cultural Revolution. The irony is that the savageness of the Yi native is one
of legacy while that of the Han-Chinese is a prevalent modern phenomenon. In a
subsequent conversation between the protagonist and a friend who studied archeology,
he was informed on the origin of the habitat in the Southwest with reference to some
ancient Yi text. The issue on ethnic origin becomes complicated as it seems to prove

104

that historically the region had been a co-habitation of multiple ethnic groups.28 While
the narrator maintains a distance and an objective stance and makes no comment on his
friends ethnographical reading, the dialogue between the two bespeaks the difficulty in
seeking to understand issues such as ethnic origin. This scenario also reminds readers of
the earlier remarks of the protagonist-I on the difficulty to define history: history is
bewildering: it is only the singing of the bimo which is loud and clear, and reality
exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience.29

If shamanism (wu) bespeaks the essence of ancient Chu culture as emulated in Qu

Yuans poems two thousand years ago, how is a modern Chinese writer in the 1980s to
recapitulate or rearticulate this ancient culture? Is recuperation possible? Yin Xiaodong
considers Gaos rendering of Shamanism in Soul Mountain a truthful representation of a
culture which is important to the local as god is to the West. This is a culture of the soul
beyond description. Yin recalls how his family members secretly resort to shamanism
during the Cultural Revolution to relieve his mothers illness. He credits Gaos recount
of the wu culture as the greatest contribution of hanyu to the ethnic culture. The
narrative manifests the writers ethic but what is lacking is that he has not drilled deep
enough. Yins criticism might be explained by the fact that for the traveler the portrayal
of Shamanism is after all not for the sake of nativism. If Shamanism for the ancient
poet Qu Yuan is a rhetoric for redressing grievances, it is for the protagonist a sign of a
containment of culture due to disappear attributive to authoritarianism and the advance
of capitalism. In Chapter 20, the authentic Yi funeral dirge sung by a priest in ancient
Yi language is portrayed in contrast with the vulgarized funeral practices in the

28
29

Soul Mountain, Ch 20, 123-125.

Ibid., Ch 2, 15.

105

modernized cities of the vast delta of the Yangtze. No more songs are sung by the
descendants of the deceased whose attention are drawn to playing poker during the
funeral than singing songs. Among other chapters which portray Shamanism, two are
rendered in the form of folk tales. The mythic power of the ancient practice is posed in
contrast with its waning (Chapter 29 & 41). In Chapter 41, the last surviving old
master of sacrifice residing among the hundred Miao stockades in the region struggles
to sing the swan song on new years eve with his weak body and old voice like a
broken bamboo pipe. The memory of the good old days when he could slaughter three
oxen or even nine at his peak performance was gone. The ritual of paying tribute to the
ancestor is barely traceable in the region nowadays where the young generation are
found in their city look wearing evil black glasses and carrying a screaming electric
box. Also the river is very dirty and no more big trees suitable for the sacrifices could
be found along the river bank. The Han Chinese are everywhere nowadays and many
have come to poach fish and make money whenever it is possible. The melancholic tone
of the narrative describing the priests last struggle to sing the dirge in his weak voice
recalling the glamorous past is posed in ironic contrast to the modernized
contemporary city culture. In Chapter 29, the spirit of Shamanism as a supernatural
force is manifested through the figure of the malevolent Goddess Tianluo who can
control peoples fates. A carpenter, in taking up the job to carve the goddesss head
which he has never done before, found that the goddess has attached herself to his body
and is just waiting to take his life. To give life to his craft and incite his artistic desire,
the carpenter recalls the image of a mute girl whom he had taken advantage of as an
itinerant craftsman. In giving life to his craft, the carpenter cannot avoid the retributive
fate the goddess casts on him on behalf of the mute girl. In imagining the image of the
goddess, the carpenter gives himself to the goddess and succumbs himself to fates
106

avenge. While apparently the legend seems to be a story about retribution, it serves the
function to represent Shamanism obliquely from the point of view of the common folk
whose life is religiously infused with the mythic power of the supernatural.

When Kinkley describes Gaos Soul Mountain as Chu modernism, he argues that
the Chu culture emulated by Gao develops the popular Chu mystique of the southern
places which evocates exotic, non-core traditions without foreignizing them by
making them the original property of non-Han peoples. He suggests that Gao, in
alliance with other root-search writers, has taken upon the primeval non-Han customs
and rituals as original Chinese culture and as roots that were sloughed off by the Han
in their long history.30 Kinkleys observation is true to the extent that Gaos narrative
apparently has avoided foreignizing the native culture as exoticism which is to be
marketed as tourism. The traveler in the novel does not hesitate to point out that nothing
remained to be seen in the historical sites in association with the Chu kingdom or Qu
Yuans life such as the Wu Mountain or the Miluo River.31 What is problematic of
Kinkleys claim is his comment on the stance of the writer who has presumably taken
the primeval non-Han customs and rituals as original Chinese culture. While
Kinkleys view seems to echo with other critics observation that root-searching writers
often turn to non-mainstream culture to shame the senility of mainstream culture, the
question at stake is whether Gao takes the stance to sincisize the South as the original
property of original Chinese culture from a Han Chinese point of view.32

30

In Chapter

Jeffrey Kinkley Gao Xingjian in the Chinese perspective of Qu Yuan and Shen Congwen in Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture, 141.
31
Soul Mountain, Ch 51,53.
32
The excavation by archeologists in the 70s which deconstructs the Yellow River-centered version of
ancient history has an enormous impact on the intellectual in seeking to re-construct an alternative
interpretation of Chinese cultural origin endorsing a Southern spirit. Daoist philosophy originated in the
South in the ancient period such as that of Zhuangzi is regarded as subversive as it is skeptical towards

107

59, the narrator-I shows his excitement in his discovery from a song collector the
prelude of the Record of Darkness which is a filial song once circulated among the
people and sung at the mountain funeral before the interment of the coffin. The
narrator-I was told that an old master-singer once had a brass chest full of songs
amongst which was a complete set of the Record of Darkness. During the Cultural
Revolution, the Record of Darkness had been targeted in the search for reactionary and
superstitious works. The old man was forced to hand over the whole set he had kept
hiding and not long after the confiscation the old singer died. The prelude of the song
recounts its own origin-

To know the things born within us,

Is to know the principles of Earth and Heaven
With Yin there is language,
With Yang there is sound,
With sound there is song
The songs grew many, and song books came into being.
These books were rejected by Confucius,
And dumped in the wilderness

The excitement of the traveler in discovering the folk song is due to the fact that this is
a folk song which hasnt been vandalized by the literati! It is song gushing straight out
of the soulit isnt at all constrained by the five-word and seven-word prosody of the
so called folk song genre. In a mood of ecstasy due to the drinking of too much rice
wine as the protagonist-I is self-consciously aware of, he cries out emotionally, Its
not unique to the smaller nationalities, the Han nationality also has a genuine folk
Confucian doctrine as recorded in the classic Lun Yu. Zhuangzi is well-known for his refusal to accede to
the request of the emperor to provide service to the imperial court. See Feng Youlan , Zhongguo zhe
xue jianshi ( Xianggang: Sanlian shudian, 2005), 16. Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen
Theatre, 106.

108

culture which hasnt been contaminated by Confucian ethical teachings. The loss of the
song book incites the rage of the protagonist condemning the lost of the soul where
else can reverence of the soul be found? Where else can we find these songs which one
should listen to while seated in quiet reverence.A race of people who have lost their
souls! 33 In cursing the oppression against folk culture, be it in the name of
Confucianism or political coercion, the stance of the writer is unequivocal that instead
of root-searching, his mission to the South as a song and folklore collector is to
capture traces of a lost culture, be it the legendary folk tale of the local people or that of
the Han folk arts. The narrator has pointed out through reference to recent research on
the Yi people in Chapter 20 that the first ancestor of the Han people, Fuxi, is in fact
derivative from the tiger totem of Yi people. Han relic also shows that the Queen
Mother of the West is a tigress with a human face, hence presumably the Han culture is
derivative from the primal culture embedded in the South. Rather than sinicizing the
South, the travelogue serves otherwise to de-mystify the predominance of Han culture
which has cast its supremacy over other culture and continued to erode other culture
through capitalism. If the major concern of root-searching literature is to recuperate a
lost culture so as to re-construct for the Han intellectual a new cultural identity amidst
the agenda of modernism, the travelogue betokens its divergence as a narrative act to
preserve a culture of alterity under oppression and contaminated by modernization. It
enacts as a cultural critique against damages caused to a fading culture be it of Han or
non-Han origin.

Huang Ziping points out that Achengs fiction the Chess King is an exemplary case
of root-searching literature in the 80s attributive to its secular attitude in portraying the
33

Soul Mountain, Ch 59, 358-361.

109

living condition of the ordinary people. Achengs fiction espouses an essence of dao
embedded in ones intense self-engagement in ordinary things and practices such as
playing chess and eating.34 The pragmatism of the chess king towards eating becomes a
paradox when he notes that there is no need to moan and groan about being sent down
for rustication as one got something to eat over there.35

In Gaos travelogue, there is

no lack of the portrayal of the local people whose way of life is bestowed with a kind of
dao. If dao for the Han people is seen embedded in their ordinary practices such as
chess game and eating, for the Southerner it is seen in a local peasant who chopped off
his hand after it had been bitten by a Qichun snake which was lethal and took it for
granted. According to the peasant, it is a natural instinct for human being to escape
danger and seek survival. The peasant explains that even a praying mantis will shed a
claw to save itself, foxes have bitten off a leg to get out of a trap, surely humans cant
be less intelligent than foxes.36 The daoist escapist spirit and survival instinct is seen
embodied in the native folk in its particularity. In another case, a secular kind of daoist
practice is manifested in the art practiced by the folk daoist described in Chapter 49 who
makes a living as a vendor selling calligraphy but well versed with the textbook Daily
Lessons for Daoists which contains the procedures for all the daoist rituals. The folk
daoist brings home the traveler and performs before him the martial arts and daoist
dance for expelling illness and calamity. The folk daoist makes a string of incantations
to invoke the spirits of Heaven and Earth. His words become incomprehensible and his
movements wilder as he circles the table and demonstrates a whole range of martial arts
sword techniques. Following the pitch of his singing and movements of his dance the
six sons beat the gongs and drums with increasing gusto and produce endless
34
35
36

Huang Ziping, Xingcunzhe de wenxue, 198-201.

Ibid., 200.
Soul Mountain, Chapter 30, 168-169.

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variations. If there is a Chu culture emblematic in daoism, it is that which witnessed by

the narrator-I embodied in the daoist practice in the folk village. The foregrounding of
this place and time of the travelogue is what makes Gaos narrative of the Southern
region different from most of the root-searching writers. If the later is obsessed with
that time and place, it is the experiential presence of this time and place which is of
meaning to the traveler. Wang Anyi, who is considered a root-searching writer, once
claimed that she wished to tell a story but this story is not from me. That is, this story
is not spoken through my perspective or anybodys perspective, but it just happens.37
Contrary to the desire of the root-searching writer to represent a cultural prototype or
cultural sedimentation in the form of a legend in the past, Gaos narrative emulates a
sense of presence through the experiential journey of the traveler and his vigorous
engagement as a cultural observer/commentator. In Soul Mountain, reminiscence of the
personal past such as memory of the Cultural Revolution is often reduced to the
background. During the performance of the folk daoist, the past penetrates as a
momentary flashback, described by the narrator as the sparks and dark red embers
vanished, like a song, a song of loud and pure grief flickering in a flame the size of a
bean seed on a candle in the shadows of a room. The robust demonstration of the
martial arts dance of the folk daoist before the traveler lies in stark contrast with the
private sensation of that experience in the distance past when the protagonist was a
sent-down intellectual in the peripheries. The loss of family members during the
Cultural Revolution and the memory of them is intertwined with the travelers thoughts
in his solitary walk among the historical relics which remind him of the past in flashes.

37

Huang Ziping, Xingcunzhe de wenxue, 205. Huang points out that the deixis that is what makes the
root-searching literature different from the experimental or postmodernist fictions. In the former, the
presence of the author is always implied than foregrounded. The unitary narrative style manifests the
desire of the root-searching writers to show the narrative as that storyin the past.

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The lament on what lost is not confined to the cultural realm, but a family history which
has disappeared just like the site of the old home. The travelogue as an experiential
journey of the protagonist interweaves cultural pursuit with memory of childhood,
which, as the narrator says, does not need to have a definite location. It is a mood, a
sense of nostalgia which incites the traveler to feel a sense of home in the daily life of
the local people, in the blue chimney smoke, translucent rice-coloured little insects
and the campfires and the mud-sealed wood-pail beehives.38

Mabel Lee construes that the sense of daoism embraced by Gao echoing the
philosophy of Zhuagzi is manifested in his Chinese sense of individualism which
valorizes individual thinking and an idea of a subject not subordinated to collectivism or
ideology.39 If Mabel Lees observation is accurate, Gaos sense of individualism is also
seen in his provision of his own definition of the meaning of root-searching. In
denying that his novel is a root-searching work, he explains that the roots of Mainland
Chinese writers areright under our feet. The question is only which tradition we
prefer to embrace, and whether our understanding of it is sufficient.40 Gaos idea
implies that the so called cultural search is a matter of choice, an issue of cognition and
knowledge. Gaos travelogue indicates that the culture he embraces is not marked by
ethnic boundaries but to think beyond them. Rather than a naturalization of the other to
affirm ones unique identity, it is to acknowledge the difference between the self and the
other and seek for understanding. As for daoism, Gao is no less skeptical of its
institutionalization. In Chapter 63, the narrator-I describes his visit to the famous Daoist

38

Soul Mountain, Chapter 54.

Mabel Lee, Resonance of Zhuangzi in the work of Gao Xingjian in Hong Kong Drama Review, vol 8,
2009.
40
Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen theatre, 106.
39

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site Palace of Supreme Purity in the Dragon Tiger Mountain. The narrator-I is told by
the head Daoist that for Daoists, purity is the principle, non-action the essence and
spontaneity the application; it is a life of truth and a life requiring absence of self. To
put it simply, this is the general meaning of Daoism. Immediately referring to the
young disciples huddled together listening to the teaching, the writer queries if such
realm of purity, and an absence of self is attainable. At the end of the chapter, the writer
seems to suggest through his revelation that Dao is that which is emulated in the noisy
surging of the river under the stone bridge and the soughing of the nigh wind which
flow from his heart. It is a sense of subjective and emotive feeling, an experience of the
real valorized in nature and experienced by the self. Dao is not the forgetting or absence
of self but a sense of the selfs presence in his interaction and exchange of thoughts and
feelings with the things, places and human life surrounding him. It is also an experience
of the spiritual and imaginative realm instigated by the folk tales, songs, practices of
Shamanism and the landscape of the ethnic culture.

3.4. Becoming animal and taking flight

George Santayana, In the Philosophy of Travel, compares life to a form of

motion and a journey through a foreign world. Intelligence is a daring venture and an
attempt to be in two places at once, that of here and there. It is the possibility of travel
that lends a meaning to the images of the eye and the mind, which otherwise would be
mere feelings and a dull state of oneself. Santayana criticizes that mere reliance on
sensibility to things at a distance is useless and unmeaning until there are organs ready
to pursue these things. He considers that a peripatetic philosophy should be the best.
Thinking while you walk keeps you alert, your thoughts review real things in their real
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order; you are keen for discovery, ready for novelties and surprises. He contends that
locomotion is the key to intelligence as symbolised in the privilege of animals to which
vegetables posed a contrast. Vegetables endure in time and expand vaguely in space,
without distinguishing or focusing the influences to which they are subject, having no
occasion to notice anything beyond their own bodies, but identifying the universe, like
the innocent egoists they are with their own being. In contrast, in animals we see the
power of locomotion which changes all the pale experience into a life of passion.

41

To

Deleuze and Guattari, the becoming-insect of the protagonist in Kafkas the

Metamorphosis, like the many other animal-becomings in Kafkas stories, is not
symbolic or metaphoric but metamorphic, a simple process of undoing codes and
deterritorializing coordinates in order to open a line of flight.42

While Santayanas predilection for thinking while you walk expresses his
philosophy of travel and it remains arguable as to how far travel or not travel would
make a difference in terms of production of literary creation, the exilic imperative
configured in the idea of traveling and becoming animal which serves as a kind of
energy and narrative intelligence shaping Gaos work is quite obvious. But there is a
process to go through before the protagonist can take flight. The figures as projected in
Gaos early plays, in Santayanas terms, tend to be more vegetative than animalistic,
though the exilic imperative of these figures is traceable. The requirement of
self-censorship confronted by the mainland playwright would make a subversive flight
difficult to attain as theatre is largely a public institution in the mainland in the 80s.
In Gaos first play Alarm Signal staged in the mainland in the early 80s, the female

41
42

See Marc Robinson ed. Altogether Elsewhere-writers on Exile (Boston:Faber and Faber 1994), 41-48.
Charles J Stivale, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 115.

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character called Bee is dramatically sought after by the two young men Trumpet
and Heizi, the latter being in alliance with a gang of burglars aiming to loot the train
which makes up the apparent plot of the play. Bee is the innocent figure working in the
bee farm who dreams of an exilic life together with her true love Heizi who is portrayed
as a vagabond living at the margin of the society. Bee and Heizi make a pair as they
seemingly pursue an off-centre lifestyle. Bee working in the bee team for the
unemployed calls the flying bees her sisters. Heizi who lives by roaming around is
considered a dissident dissatisfied with society and is tempted to transgress in a negative
manner. Trumpet, despite his will for an artistic accomplishment in music, remains in a
vegetative state as he is bound by his responsibility to his parents to seek a
prospective future while working in the railway carriage as a trainee. When the train
carriage which sets the stage is transformed into a dancing floor at the end of the play,
Trumpet is the one who stands aside and blows his horn for a prosperous future. Quah
Sy Ren, like many other Gao critics, considers the earlier plays of Gao constitutive of
social messages and at times didactic. Quah considers that theatre for Gao is a place of
experimentation of theatre technique, what he calls suppositionality which denotes the
Chinese theatrical artistry of Gao endorsing the traditional xieye aesthetic.43 There is
no question that Gao is always experimenting with new theatre technique and is
unequivocal about his idea of new theatrical concept but as far as the space of the
theatre is concerned, it is more than a venue for a showcase of new theatrical form to
subvert social realism.

Theatre space is itself always a public space and the tension

between representation and private self-expression is most subtle. One might argue that
there is an ironic tone in the play and three young people are mental exiles in their own

43

Quah, Sy Ren, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater ( Honolulu: U of Hawai'i Press, 2004),
93-129.

115

ways. Bee as a dreamer is exiled from life, Heizi as a marginal man lives an off-centre
life and Trumpet is an exile from the authentic self. The end note where the artist blows
his trumpet to salute the happy progressive mood of the noisy train might suggest the
playwrights self-parody.

In the Bus Stop, the condition of the people waiting at the bus stop despite the
flight of time is most vegetative. They are virtually presented on the stage as being
stuck and attached to the ground hesitating to move forward. These people endure in
time and expand vaguely in space, though there are moments when some of the figures
like the Girl would lament that to live on like this, not really alive and not dead either
is so boring, there is no interaction between this conscious mental space of hers with
the dramatic space of inaction and stagnancy to which she seemingly succumbs.
Similarly, the student Glass says that he knows he should start walking but he is
defeated by his procrastination and predilection for continual philosophizing. The
student reminds us of the I-protagonist in the Soul Mountain who reflects on the
impossibility to escape from the hermeneutic of self and of being trapped in his problem
of philosophizing and too much analytical thinking. Luckily, the protagonist in Soul
Mountain has taken flight and happily walked his thoughts out in the Southwest. But it
is also ironic that despite the foresight of the Silent Man in The Bus Stop to depart early
and walk his own way in silence, in real life the writer seems to be determined to be on
the road and walk his own way only when his play was banned and cursed as radically
revolutionary. The writers self-exile to the Southwest seems to be a belated response
to the whistling music of the Silent Man sung from a distance to the vegetative mass to
which the writer as a social subject is a part. The split self of the writer trapped in the
liminality of being animal and vegetable remained Gaos problem as an internal
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exile and the source of his inner conflict.

The animalistic energy to take flight to the remote region has apparently
empowered the creative imagination of Gao the spiritual exile. The new vision and
discovery in the traveling experience gives rise to an expansion of his imaginative and
internal landscape. In Wild Man written in 1985, we see a drastic change in Gaos use of
theatre space compared to his two earlier plays. We see a restless shift of the conjured
boundaries on the stage between the city and the rural, public and private, actors and
audience, action and sound. The desire to map out a vigorous spatial shift on the stage is
prominent. In the first part of the play, the short scenes move between the city, the
private dwelling of the protagonist cum ecologist, the office of the cardre in charge of
deforestation, the rural area under housing project, and the dancing ritual. What is most
interesting is the recurrent image of animals in the play not found in Gaos earlier plays.
The city is described from the birds eye view, a hen is killed during the singing ritual,
the ecologist whistling to the birds, an innocent village girl compared to a deer, the
ecologist teaching the child on the variety of cranes in extinction, not to mention the
beastly wild man which forms the central focus of the play juxtaposing the idea of forest
conservation. Santayana mentions that for an exile to be happy, he must be born again
and change his moral climate and the inner landscape of his mind. While the ending of
Wild Man is celebrative and gesturing an epiphany of a utopian dream of the liberation
of the half animal by the child, the happy ending ironically strikes a false note as it
remains a fantasy.

Although the particular political moment in which the play Wild Man was written
was comparatively relaxed as the more liberal regime apparently was still in control,
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there was a certain threshold which the playwright could not surpass as long as the play
script was to go through official censorship. Theatre as a public space is a social
engagement against which the autocratic regime imposes constraints on playwrights
who in turn have submitted themselves to self-censorship so as to guarantee that the
play would gain the approval stamp of the authorities. Gao deploys in the Wild Man
Brechtian techniques to break the third wall of realism drama by positioning actors in
the auditorium acting out as audiences who are subsequently invited to speak out as
witnesses of the wild man saga. The verbal report by the actors playing country folks
provides comic relief and the implicit violence of people shooting the wild man with
big breasts and eating the wild mans meat is shielded under laughter. When similar
episodes on the wild man saga are mentioned in Chapter 59 of Soul Mountain, the
writer highlights that evidence and documentation given by the folks on the wild man
has all been stamped suggesting the authenticity of the wild man saga but only to
subvert it immediately. As the narrative proceeds, the officials portrayal of the wild
man becomes more and more confused and the documentation of evidence fails to
underpin a substantial version of the wild man. In a detached tone, the I-protagonist
concludes that you can believe or not believe all this, the people of the investigation
team are also divided about it.44 The private writing act enables the writer to query the
authenticity of the official document and foreground the difficulty to arrive at a true
portrayal of the real.

Not only is the writer de-mythicizing the wild man saga but also the modern myth
of the national symbol. In Chapter 6 of Soul Mountain, the protagonist is described
staying at the 2500 meter giant panda observation compound. The narrator inserts a
44

Soul Mountain, 365.

118

lighthearted incident about the visit of a baby panda Beibei to the camp. Beibei who
was saved by the conservatory people makes noise outside the door asking for food and
excites the people of the compound who keep awake all night talking about Beibei as if
its everyones sweetheart. But the purpose of inserting this story is far from glorifying
the protected animal which is considered the nations treasure and a collective symbol
of the nation state.

In telling the anecdote, the narrator tends to de-mythicize the

animal by highlighting its animalistic instinct. A journalist who naively thinks that the
giant panda is as cute as a pet cat and puts his arms around the bear while a photo was
taken has his genital torn off and has to be rushed to the hospital fighting for his life.
The animal is also vulnerable subjected to abusive killing by hunters who would rip off
its skin and leave it to decay in midst of the forest. In the conjured dialogue between the
I-protagonist and the ecologist, the act of saving the giant panda is criticized as a
deceptive act.

The writer criticizes that while effort and resources are given to

preserving an animal species which no longer has the capacity for survival, natural
environments such as the Min River and the Yangtze for the survival of the human
species are subject to ruthless destruction.45

The protagonists travel to the wild mountain occasions a narrative of cultural

reflection which transcends time, as traveling could be regarded as a moment of
suspension in time. The materiality of things encountered in space such as images of
animals enables the protagonist to take flight in his thoughts freed from temporal
consecutiveness.

In Chapter 8 the protagonist tells a folk story about the suicide of a

young girl at a river crossing juncture called Yu Crossing in juxtaposition with the
portrayal of a bird called blue bird. The protagonist introduces this blue bird
45

Ibid, 39, 48,51.

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according to its various descriptions by villagers, specialists and in the poetry of the
Tang Dynasty.

Then he relates it to the mythological blue bird as described in

Shanhaijing zhuan which bestows the bird with an aura of magic in association with
feminine intelligence and sensuality.

At the end the narrator remarks that traditionally

women are considered as sexual pleasure for man and housewives for husband and
none of these are for love. Is he suggesting that civilization is a regression in terms of
the development of patriarchal stance towards woman seeing them as functional as
compared to the high tribute to women in the legend? The narrator does not provide an
answer in a straight-forward manner but embarks on a labyrinth of twists and turns
through the image of the blue bird intersecting the mythic and the literary. 46 In
juxtaposing the image of the bird with the myth of the girls suicide, the narrator
expands the narrative space and sets free the imagination of the readers to wander with
the protagonist and become a mental exile as much as the subject under interrogation.

3.5 Between here and therethe parable

In the West, the alienated feeling of modernist writers of the early twentieth
century dissatisfied with the commercialization of culture traveled abroad to Europe
driven by a sense of difference and isolation. The cultural production of these modernist
writers demonstrates the selfs alienation from national culture, the rise of the city and
from the increasing entrenchment of modern society.47 In Soul Mountain, the writer is

46

Birds are regarded as an important archaic image of the legendary myth in ancient China embodying
the life-charging energy of the sun. See Bernice Chans notes on the creative process of Shanhaijing
zhuan in Hong Kong Drama Review, vol 8 2009, 291. Bird is also symbolic of the Chu culture and the
Chu people are regarded as the descendants of Bird which stands in contrast to the descendants of dragon
eulogized in the culture of the Yellow River. See Shi Shuqing, Wentan fansi yu qianzhan, 130.
47
Sophia Mc Clennen, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in Hispanic
Literatures, 39.

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apparently aware of the social changes underway which transform the landscape of the
city and the rural areas due to construction projects and development of tourism. But the
sense of isolation which is most intensively felt by the protagonist is not that derived
from the outer but one of inside. While there are many occasions that the protagonist
describes himself as a traveler, this traveler is only a shield under which there lies a
strong sense of fear and loss. On the one hand, we see a cultural traveler who does not
hesitate to give his interpretation and criticism against the cultural history and affirm his
cultural identity of an alterity. On the other, we also visualize a floating self in drift who
is haunted by fear and intensively driven by a sense of loss most acutely described in
the surreal and dream-like scenes. As Jeffrey Kinkley has pointed out, the route of the
traveler is not linear but moving back and forth which appears illusory rather than real,
while the entire journey of the protagonist seems to embark on a floating landscape
without a fixed trajectory.48 The floating itinerary can be said to be bracketed by two
scenes located near the beginning and end of the novel describing the ascending and
descending of the protagonist in the mountain.

In Chapter 10 the you-protagonist

follows a guide to climb the mountain of the conservatory forest and soon finds he has
lost touch with the guide. He is engulfed by the mist at the high elevated mountain and
could not find his way out. He finds himself at the edge of the forest and below is a
path straight to death. The protagonist immediately exercises his instinct to struggle for
survival but finds that he can do nothing other than wait at a fixed point for rescue. He
describes himself as a fish which has fallen into terrors nestfutile to struggle while
impaled upon the fish spear. He ponders that it will take a miracle to change my fate.
But havent I been waiting for this or that sort of miracle all my life? This
self-questioning reminds us of the city folks in The Bus Stop waiting for the bypassing
48

Jeffrey Kinkley , Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol 14, No 2 Fall, 2002, 144-145.

121

buses to stop. The Silent Man has left the passenger queue to pursue his own path and
embarked on a journey but the trajectory is never a smooth one. Like a pilgrim the
protagonist is tested and confronted with threat of death prior to rebirth. The chapter
ends with the opening question without an answer until nearer the end of the novel
where the protagonist has seemingly provided an answer but only to deny it.

At the beginning of Chapter 65, the protagonist laments that he is tired of the
struggles of the human world. This trouble refers to the lack of artistic freedom and his
being subjected to criticism and being a target of attack and power politics. While
people around him struggle to speak for him like his parents and represent the country
for him, he overtly questions that he does not know what is country or whether or not I
have a country.49 The protagonist subsequently encounters a Daoist of the Pure Unity
Sect who is the embodiment of evil resembling the ancient tree which looms up with
its decaying black branches willfully outstretched like a malevolent demon. Driven
away by the hostile daoist the protagonist hastily descends from the Huanggang
Mountain of the Wuyi Range and finds that he has reached the dark side of the
mountain as if running into death. The writer uses deadly images to describe this
descent, the barren stones as rows of skulls on top of the posts, the lurid grey-white
stone posts are like skeletons, the trunk is like a cows eye observing him. The
protagonist confesses to himself that this is the inner fear and his soul in darkness which
is spying on him and the multitude of eyes is simply him scrutinizing himself. His
feeling of being spied upon which makes him feel uneasy is in fact his own fear of
himself. Does it mean that all those troubles he has are in fact self-generated? What
does the political reality matter if one can conquer ones own fear? In Chapter 66, the
49

Soul Mountain, 410.

122

protagonist continues to pose questions against himself to choose between returning to

the endless forest or going to the bottom of the valley.

The image of a fish skewered

to death on a spear again resurges but this time the protagonist seems to be clear that
instead of wasting energy scouring memories, he needs to discard this last thread to the
familiar human world. It appears that the protagonist has come to an enlightenment
through the deadly journey downhill that the only way to survive is to forget. But this
seemingly happy resolution which propels the protagonist running and yelling downhill
comes with a weird discovery that while he runs he cant hear his own voice. The
solitary being in a soundless and smell-ness state of mind (wusheng wuchou )
is traditionally regarded as a state of poetic transcendence attaining dao, but this
traditional aesthetic is transformed in the novel to manifest the inner fear and a state of
nightmare.50 This estranged scenario where the protagonist found himself unheard
reminds us of the abandoned mute child the protagonist met on his way downhill in
Chapter 74. The you-protagonist initially picks up the child and carries him downhill
but soon realizes that he is too much of a burden and decides to leave the child who is
asleep at where he is found. The writer at this point suggests an affinity between the
protagonist-you and the child, as you look at him, you start to think he looks like you.
This self-referential image of the mute child found lost bespeaks the state of being of
the writer himself who is not able to speak his own voice under censorship and found
himself at a loss. As to carry the child along would mean shouldering this burden of
muteness, the decision of the protagonist to leave the child and seek self-salvation
keeping on his own run like a fugitive criminal predicts his escape which is embedded
50

I refer to the couplet from the Book of Classics ,. Lao Siguan

Xin bian Zhongguo zhe xue shi (Taibei: Sanming, 1981), vol 3, part 1, 353. But soundless
sound is also metaphorical of a dreamy self-transcendence as described in Chapter 80 a totality of purity
and freshnessalmost soundless soundno physical burden and no rashness in your emotions. Soul
Mountain, 503.

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with an implicit guilt.51 In Chapter 66, the you-protagonists thought of forgetting

about the past in exchange for survival has immediately led himself into a state of
muteness. As the protagonist is shown not yet ready to succumb to muteness, his
illusive experience in the river of forgetfulness and death cannot contain within it any
real meaning but a dream.

Michael Seidel construes that, in exile literature, underworld descent is considered

the most profound narrative model for exilic experiences in literature. Descent myth
from the early fragments of the Greek classic such as nekuia relays secrets from the
world of the dead for the benefit of lifes vital format. Descent is that ending which is
also a telling, and that exile which conjures up imaginable territory. The spatial and
temporal magic of the descent is a powerful emblem of narrative imagination at work.
Only those with special visionary powers, either power possessed or power granted can
negotiate these depths.52

In Soul Mountain, the writer has described many instances

where he continuously ascends and descends the mountains exploring the virgin forest
and seeking new discovery.

The discovery in Chapter 66 where the protagonist

experiences an illusory descent into the river of dead and forgetfulness however is no
end point for the protagonist. The protagonist confesses that he is too conscious a
person and loves himself too much to give up himself or succumb to total forgetfulness.
At the end of this chapter, the writer conjures images of a squirming mass of maggots
dispersing under the thick moss from where the singing came from. He playfully
remarks that the worms from the dead corpse are too disgusting a scene and he
apparently does not want to be engaged in this not a particularly wonderful prospect.

51
52

Soul Mountain, 469- 470.

Michael Siedel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination, 13.

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If there is any secret from the world of the dead which benefits the protagonist, it would
be the illumination that he is not yet willing to succumb or bow to death. The
protagonist avows his incessant desire to move on and be explorative despite knowing
that the trajectory is an unending journey of ascent and descent. The allegory of the soul
search journey can be seen as the protagonists spiritual search for the meaning of his
existence and of life, but it also signifies the writers struggle to sustain his creative
force and not to give in or give up. In fact, life and creative literary exploration are
inseparable idioms for the writer-

You go on climbing mountains. As you near the peak and are feeling
exhausted you always thinks it is the last time but when the exhilaration of
reaching the peak subsides you feel the urge again. This feeling grows as your
weariness vanishes and looking at the rising and falling lines of the peaks in
the hazy distance your desire to climb mountains resurges. But once you
climb a mountain you lose interest in it and invariably think the mountain
beyond will have things you havent encountered. When you eventually get to
that peak the wonders you hoped for arent there, and once again there is just
the lonely mountain wind.53

This valorization of an endless search predicts the parable in Chapter 76 where the
protagonist meets an old man wearing a long gown and carrying a staff telling him that
Lingshan is on that side of the river where the protagonist comes from, implying that
the protagonist should go back to where he departed for the journey. In disbelief the
protagonist tries to reason that he just came from that side of the river to this side and
asks whether the old man is talking metaphysics, and the old man answers, arent you
asking the way? While critics, particularly Chinese critics, would immediately allude
the dialogue to the Zen paradox which repudiates reason as a means to understanding,
53

Soul Mountain, 435.

125

the foregrounding of the parable also serves to address the expectation of the reader who
has traveled so far with the protagonist and is probably also as shocked that after the
labyrinth of crossing the river of dead, the protagonist he is told that the soul
mountain is located on the other side of the river over which the protagonist has just
crossed. So is it a Zen joke or a literary trick that the author is playing? In the
Storyteller, Walter Benjamin tells us that the first true storyteller is the teller of fairy
tales. Whenever good counsel was at the premium, the fairy tale had itThe fairy tale
tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare
which the myth had placed upon its chest. In the figure of the fool it shows us how
mankind acts dumb toward the mythin the figure of the wiseacre it shows us that the
questions posed by the myth are simple-minded54 The protagonist who is trapped in
his fear takes flight to escape but only becomes somewhat like a fool who is deceived
by the myth that there is a causality to things and a destination or solution ought to be
found. The Daoist figure acts out the role of the wiseacre telling us that the questions
posed by the myth are simple-minded. So is this the lesson to be learnt from the soul
search of the writer?

Has the writer been a fool for having set off this journey in the

first place? The writer breaks the pattern of the narrative progressing alternatively
between the I and the You and uses he in this chapter to distance both himself and the
reader from the interlocutory act. The writer uses the so called free indirect speech
characterized by a suspension between direct and indirect speech which bespeaks the
ambiguity of the speaking position and ideological implications of the parable. With the
intrusion of the implied author through the quoting of a proverb at the end of the parable,
it is suggestive that the figures of the interlocution, that of the Daoist and the
protagonist, are in fact a dramatic split of the writer who is at the same time playing the
54

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations ( London: Johnathan Cape, 1970), 102.

126

wiseacre and the fool--

He stays alone on this side of the river, the other side of the river from
Wuyizhen. The problem now is on which side of the river is Wuyizhen? He
really cant make up his mind and can only think of an old proverb dating
back a thousand years:
Existence is returning, non-existence is returning, so dont stay by the river
getting blown about by the cold wind.55

Benjamin considers that proverb best exemplified the relationship of the storyteller
to his life material from where the stories are gathered and told. A proverb is like a ruin
which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening
like ivy around a wall. In telling a proverb, the storyteller joins the ranks of the
teachers and sages.56 The Chinese proverb in the form of an old folk song highlighted
at the end of the parable has already been sung for a thousand years, in its light-hearted
manner it serves to de-myth the assumption that there is a teleological point where
one can reach the ultimate. And if there is a moral, it is based more on a practical view
of life than abstract philosophy. So is Gao the storyteller a Zen master or a storyteller
who possesses the finesse in playing tricks with the readers? We may recall that the
absurdity of the journey of self-search is already hinted at the beginning where we are
told that the protagonist learnt about Lingshan through hearsay without knowing
whether such a place really exists. The failure to locate Lingshan at this shore is less a
disenchantment than a predicament as the writer has foretold the vanity of endless
mountain climbing in Chapter 68. It is rather a manifestation of the exilic desire of the
writer to explore the unknown and the incessant will to know which is at work here.

55
56

Soul Mountain, 76-77.

Benjamin, Illuminations, 108.

127

The I-protagonist virtually acts out paradoxically the role of a wiseacre and a sage
in Chapter 79. He is described as engaging in a somewhat Zen like dialogue with three
persons approaching him to seek advice. The first is one troubled by a sutra indicating
some huge amount of cultural relics belonging to the ancestor which are hidden under a
piece of land behind two buildings; the second is a cadre seeking help to get a place for
his daughter in a prestigious school; the third is a writer seeking to have his work
published.

57

The I-protagonist appears to be helpless and simply talks them away

suggesting that they solve their own problems or leave things as they are. Benjamin says
that myth in the shape of animals comes to the aid of the child in the fairy tale. In the
Soul Mountain, god appears in this Chapter as an imaginary frog telling the protagonist
that there is no miracle. Things or life simply cannot be understood. But if this
metaphysical and philosophical endnote strikes the last key of Soul Mountain, it is only
contingent and a temporary pause. In Gaos post-exile plays written in Paris, the idea of
liminality and border crossing continues to constitute meaning for his plays.

When Gao embarked on his self-willed exile in 1987, he was in the process of
completing Soul Mountain of which the writing plan started in 1982. In 1986, Gao
completed the play The Other Shore which is the last play of his pre-exile years.
Cross reading this play with the novel from the perspective of Gaos predilection for
boundary crossing is interesting as it will throw new light on the interpretation of the
play. In The Other Shore, the Silent Man who embarks on his lonely journey in The Bus
Stop no longer remains silent but appears as the Man in the play overtly expressing his
57

There is a strong sense of self-referentiality in the first and third zen myth. The first points obliquely to
the novel Soul Mountain which is richly overlaid with cultural allusion to be discovered by readers and
the third is an echo of the problem of having the writers work published in the mainland.

128

desire to cross the boundary to the other shore. Many drama critics highlight the
experimental aspect of this play and regard it as another experimental turn of Gaos
explorative theatre. As in other Gaos earlier plays, there is no fixed setting in this play.
The movement and patterning of the physical bodies of the actors are the key element of
the mise en scene in The Other Shore. Henry Zhao considers that Gao is more positive
and shames people by taking initiative in life in The Bus Stop and forewarns people
about environmental destruction through the ecologist in Wild Man. In this play, Gao is
more sombre and renders the philosophical message that human beings are bound to be
followers only, or lost souls, never being able to reach the other shore.58 To justify his
argument, Zhao refers to a scene where Man the protagonist says he does not know
where to go and asks the members of the group in turn what they are searching for. Not
unlike The Bus Stop, each of the actors playing the collective on the stage has his/her
own search but while they are searching they vegetatively search in a fixed position
and refuse to move to the other side. Man the protagonist is the only one who cries out
loud and clear that I am not looking here anymore. I---want ---to ---go there.59

In

the card-playing scene, Man states that he finds the game a trick because there is no
trump card in the stack which is in fact hidden in the card players hand. He considers it
silly and vows to go.

Near the end Man even bears the shame to cross under

peoples legs so as to crawl to the other side and picks up a key he has lost. Man and his
shadow, a transposed version of the pronoun characters I and You in the Soul Mountain,
act in a dyad on the other side theatrically delineated on the stage.

Commenting on the play, Henry Zhao points out that the protagonist cannot escape

58
59

Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 131.

I refer to Gilbert Fongs translated version of The Other Shore (Hong Kong: The Chinese UP, 1999).

129

social language and is subsumed by it in the play.60 At the end Man is seemingly
exhausted and is dragged away from the stage suggesting that his effort to escape is
fatal. What needs to be noted here is that counteracting the langue spoken by the
collective, parole in terms of poetic language is uttered by the Shadow despite
sounding like a weak voice juxtaposing the langue. Recurrent images in the Soul
Mountain such as forest, tree branches, snow, dim blue light are uttered by the Shadow
near the end of the play. The play ends with the group of actors citing the play as a fable
and uttering scattered sentences providing a dramatic relief which appears to unfix any
determined meaning the play has emulated. Like Soul Mountain, the crossing to the
other side renders no salvation to the protagonist. Shadow, as the Mans split self, utters
that Mans effort is like leaving footprints in the snow. While Shadow seems to
admonish Man for being so vain and unwilling to end like this, such a comment is
ironic as it is exactly this spirit of non-compromise which energizes the exile imperative
of Man, the playwrights surrogate, to take action to cross the border. The image of
footprints on the snow bears the signature of the playwright as this phrase alludes to
the first prose written by the writer as a child prodigy described in The One Man Bible.
Though The Other Shore did not have a chance to be staged on the mainland soil, it
remains as a footprint and a literary text to be read. As an agency of the playwright
and a cultural production, the play has again ventured for Gao the playwright a new
artistic space which marked his individual thinking and creativity.

Agency is a problematic term in contemporary theory as it raises the question as to

how far an agent or the subject can initiate action in engaging or resisting cohesive and
imperial power.
60

For the colonial discourse theory of Bhabha and Hall, the creation of

Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 131.

130

a third space whether through narrative, theatre or otherwise is pivotal to the

reconfiguration of cultural identity. Conversely, structural Marxist critics tend to belittle
the freedom of the individual, reducing social agents to mere bearers of a structure, who
passively follow rules that they have internalized during socialization.61 Critics of The
Other Shore such as Riley and Gissenwehrer consider this abstract play as named by
Gao is perhaps the most extreme example of Gaos interest in examining man and his
role in society, and his role in relation to other men for it goes beyond the framework of
the fixed space of a railway carriage, or bus stop, and operates in a make-believe
environment whereby a river or a temple are created by the actors imagination only.62
The meaning of the play as a transformative agency for the self and the public might lie
in its overt attempt to challenge the theatre institution. As Riley and Gissenwehrer have
pointed out, Perhaps it is too much ahead of itself for the Chinese actors let alone the
audienceChinese actors are not trained to risk exposure of the inner self

63

This

comment betoken the problem of the Chinese actors in the 80s who have been
subjected to the regulated acting style of social realism. Hence crossing from here to
there is also the crossing of restrictive aesthetic and ideological boundary against which
Man is determined to cross over. In this regard, the prologue of the play in which actors
are shown how they could simply make use of a rope to demonstrate unlimited
relational possibilities and delimit theatrical spatial boundary serves as a meta-drama
signifying the poetics and politics of The Other Shore which is more than simply
experimental. The play, as pointed out by the critics, can be interpreted at multiple
levels due to its porous structure. It can be a theatrical experimentation of new form, a
social play about the tension between the individual and the collective, a religious play
61
62
63

Edgar, and Sedgwick. Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts ( London: Routledge, 2002), 17.
Riley and Gissenwehrer the Myth of Gao Xingjian in Tam Kwok-kan ed, Soul of Chaos, 126.
Ibid., 129.

131

of Buddhist philosophy as manifested in its title and the idea of stepping beyond oneself
to reach a state of nothingness, or a play about language as one event of the play is
about the actors relearning of a new language. 64 The prologue which apparently
illustrates how the game with a rope can be played at different levels serves as a
metadrama reflective of the multiple structure of the play itself. The actor taking the
center position who speaks like a director and the surrogate of the playwright illustrates
the multiple possibilities of the rope-game. The different level of play is illustrated
symbolically having the rope served as an agent demonstrating interpersonal
relationship, spatial tension, idea of subjectivity, self-delusion, and philosophy. The
game with the lead actor serving as the focal point holding one end of the ropes of all
the others gathered at the opposite end symbolically manifests the multiple
interpretative possibilities in connection to the dramatic text. The actor indicates, this
way youll be able to establish all kinds of relationship with me, some tense, some lax,
some distant, and some close, and soon your individual attitudes will have a strong
impact on me. Society is complex and ever-changing; were constantly pulling and
being pulled The actors pronouncement is in fact an accurate predication of the
situation the playwright is involved. Whether the playful challenge or the tug of war
posed by the playwright can continue to take place on the stage hinges on the public
response in particular the sanction of the authority. The playwright wished to take lead
to pull but in reality he was being pushed back as the play was banned after a rehearsal.
Gilbert Fong points out that this marked a turning point in Gao Xingjians
thinkinghe gradually came to the realization that the authorities would no longer
allow his plays to be performed in China.65 The playwright, with his foresightedness,

64
65

Ibid., 125-130.
The Other Shore, xxvi.

132

may have already predicted his destiny when he writes the play. Hence, the mans death
in the play can be taken religiously as unattainable enlightenment or politically as a
symbol of self-predicament.

3.6 Semiotic dream-scape

In terms of narrative theory, spatial terms such as here, there, now, then as well as
all the pronouns fall under the category of deixis. The referential scope of deictic is
variable, as in here can be used to point to a spot on the speakers body, the setting of
talk, the region, country, or broader space of reference.66 Likewise, the use of pronouns
as characters as demonstrated in Gaos Soul Mountain can situate the subject in a
porous and plastic framework which is not bound by pre-existing social categories but
contingently situated in time and space.

While Gao had written on the use of pronouns

as literary technique in his preliminary discussion of the art of modern fiction written
in 1981 from the point of view of narrative grammar, his discussion on the use of
pronouns in the novel is ingeniously transposed to one related to Chinese culture, and
even more, one related to the origin of personhood. In Chapter 51, the writer traces the
origin of I and You to Fuxi and Nuwa during his inspection on some archaic relics and
earthenware in association with the inscription of yin-yang fish design of the daoist taiji
chart. He notes the mythical union of the legendary figures as the first birth of I and
you.67

The writer considers that he as the third person is only a separate social

existence alienated from oneself whose self-consciousness has faded. While

66

David Hermann, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 551-556.

There is a self-referentiality here as the writers name Xingjian () is virturally associative with the
aphorism (, ) in Yijing (the Book of Changes). I and You may mean the author
and the addressees, but the deictic indices may also refer to the writers split self.
67

133

foregrounding he the everyman as an interpellated subject, the narrator then avows

that he can only search for a self of an I who is small and insignificant like a grain of
sand and write a book on the human self without worrying whether it will be
published. The implication is that a novel in search for a self of an I is to recuperate
the authentic self and self-consciousness lost in the inauthentic he who is no more
than a social subject and alienated from himself. The book on the human self would
require a completely new form of narrative.

This search for a new narrative space for the enunciation of personhood reminds us
of Postcolonial theorists emulation of the third space as a new form of identification
and extended cultural space. Bhabha explains that specifying the enunciative present in
the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which the objectified others may be
turned into subjects of their history and experience. It is the ambivalence enacted in the
enunciative present--disjunctive and multiaccentual--that produces the objective of
political desire which is a culture space for opening up new forms of identification
that may confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, confound the ordering of
cultural symbols, traumatize traditions.68 As if providing a distanced response to the
postcolonial theorists, Gao dramatizes the struggle against the pedagogical forces in his
contention of a new narrative space which opts for the disjunctive and multiaccentual.
In Chapter 72 of Soul Mountain, the writer displays a dramatized theoretical discussion
between two voices. The pedagogical voice insists that a story or a novel must have a
complete story, connected episodes, logic of causality with climax and conclusion, clear
images, main characters etc and declares that a novel which comprises pronouns
without clear images, slapping together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings,
68

Bhabha, The Postcolonial and the Postmodern:question of the agency in The Location of Culture.

134

jotted irrational discussions, unfabled-like fables, folk songs, legend-like nonsense

cannot be a fiction. The he, in an interrogative manner, argues that fiction can be
written without conforming to the method which is common knowledge. He argues for
a narrative form parts told from beginning to end and parts from end to beginning;
parts with a beginning and an end and others with only a conclusion or are fragments
which arent followed up, parts which are developed but arent completed, parts which
are left out or dont need to be told any further, or about which theres nothing more to
say can all be considered stories.69 Foregrounding the contention of the authentic
writer he, Gao legitimizes his struggle to expand the discursive space as seen in the
disjunctive and multi-accentual structure of Soul Mountain. The disjunctive narrative
text which are incomplete, unfinished, fragmentary, non-conclusive and multi-accentual
embodied the narrative desire of he to write a book of the human self which
apparently would confuse the continuity of historical temporalities and traumatize
traditions. At this juncture, the willful struggle of the mental exile in experimenting a
new narrative mode manifested in his use of multiple pronouns as a strategy to delimit
human self as an interpellated subject provides a contrast to the modern writers decades
ago who are skeptical of the use of the pronoun I as a modern technique to emulate a
subject position. As Lydia Liu has construed, modern writers such as Lu Xuns
ambivalence in the use of pronoun I is embedded in his skepticism of the effectiveness
of the innovative agency to speak for the Other, namely the lower class and his
criticism of modernist egotism. 70 While Lu Xuns ambivalence posits him at the
liminality between speaking for the self and Other, the question of Gao the avant-garde
writer is one of a struggle to liberate the small-other of the self through the strategy of

69
70

Soul Mountain, 452.

Lydia Liu, The Politics of First-person Narrative in Modern Chinese Fiction (diss. Harvard U, 1990).

135

self-splitting and multiple pronoun.

In her article Pronouns as Protagonists, Mabel Lee considers the use of pronoun
characters the most striking feature of Soul Mountain and Gaos most radical
experiment in artistic expression in a novel, which abounds in a plethora of
experimentation creating an artistic reality with maximum creative space for both the
author and reader. The pronouns I, you, she, speaking in soliloquies or dialogue, telling
stories, dreaming, or reminiscing, succeed in providing many points of view even within
the space of a paragraph as well as examining various facets of the author.71 Another
critic, Nicoletta Pesaro points to the strangeness of the narrative through the use of
shifting personae and highlights the belief of Gao the existence of irrationality, as an
unfailing part of human life and as the free expression of subjective pleas.72 The
mental exiles desire to expand narrative space to emulate the free expression of the
human self is best demonstrated in the writers use of violent deictic shift. In Chapter 78
of Soul Mountain, Gao uses all three pronouns (I/you/she) in the dream narrative. While
I and you are used to indicate the male voice throughout the novel, the gender
references of the two pronouns are made indistinguishable due to the vigorous deictic
shift. The different voices are more like floating signifiers in nowhere and no time. The
dream narrative which starts with the subject I who visualize you and her on the snow
undergoes a deictic shift eventually ending up with I and you on the snow leaning
against each other-

I can see, you and her, in the snow, on a grey hazy night. I cant see clearly
71

Soul of Chaos, 236.

Nicoletta Pesaro From a preliminary discussion of the art of modern fiction to Soul Mountain and
One Mans Bible: Gao Xingjians use of narrative patterns to rethink China in Hong Kong Drama
Review, vol 8, 2009.
72

136

but I can still see, you are in the snow, barefoot.

Arent you cold?
I dont feel the cold
You are holding her hand tightly, leading the way.
Is it far away?
Far, far away, arent you afraid?
Theres something odd about this night, its inky-blue but bright. But Im not
really afraid with you by my side.
Do you feel secure?
Yes. Are you in my arms? Yes, I am leaning against you and you are holding
me gently73

In the above deictic shift, pronoun- I who first visualize you and she in a distance
is presumably the male-subject speaking, but at the end, it is unclear as regards the
gender identity of the I-pronoun who leans against you. Several scenarios might
arise--first, it might be that the subject-I have undergone a gender shift to becoming a
female who is leaning against the you who is presumably the male Is shadow; second,
it might be that the you have undergone a gender shift to becoming the female
holding the man (me) gently. But the speaking position is after all not the key issue, it is
the enunciation of thoughts and feeling in the process of the internal monologue or
dialogue that the writing self wishes to emulate. Rather than treating the sign I as
representation of the subject, it is the writing itself or the signifying process which
becomes the writers subject. To use Bhabhas term, it is the liminality between the split
subject in which the self is individuated. Gaos split subject through the use of the
multiple pronouns is more than autobiographical and echoes what Derrida calls
situating of the subject which is embodied in a swift flow of different point of view
transcending the limitation of s/he as social categories such as race, gender, and class.

73

Soul Mountain. 487-488.

137

Gao questions the (im)possibility of writing such kind of narrative in Chapter 58 when
he disseminates his thinking on an alternative narrative mode using a so called pure
language which can transcend limitations of phrases and sentences, does not
distinguish between subject and object, transcends pronouns, discards logic, simply
sprawls and is not bound by images, metaphors, associations or symbols. 74 He
compares this struggle against language as silk thread wrapping him up and the writer
can only rely on a faint glimmer of light and fragment of desire to express himself.
The fact that Gao lays bare his experimental intent in writing the novel and his telling
of the new form of fiction while showing it demonstrates that this journey of soul
search is also a literary journey; a journey of self-exile from the pedagogical and
coercive literary norm. It is a self-search for an ideal narrative framework to constitute
his exilic discourse, one which is completely liberating and free to espouse ones
thoughts and feelings. Other than using pronominal strategy to expand narrative space,
the textual struggle against the pedagogical is also one of a performative act of
speaking aloud.

In the Pleasure of the Text, Barthes construes a kind of writing aloud which
attempts to enumerate the stereophony of languages within earshot: music, conversation,
chairs, glasses, Arabic, French. Barthes writes that this speech at once very cultural
and very savage, was above all lexical, sporadic, it set up in me, through its apparent
flowall linguistics that gives an exorbitant dignity to predicative syntax fell
awaythe hierarchy and the subordinations of the sentence are replaced by the
definitive discontinuity of the textA text of pulsional incidents, the language lined
with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throata whole carnal stereophony:
74

Ibid., 350, 351.

138

the articulation of the tongue, not the meaning of language.75

Bhabha calls this

narrative of semiotic daydream supplementary to acting in the real world. The structure
of fantasy narrates the subject of daydream as the articulation of incommensurable
temporalities, disavowed wishes and discontinuous scenarios. The performative
structure of the text reveals a temporality of discourse that opens up a narrative strategy
for the emergence and negotiation of those agencies of the marginal, minority, subaltern,
and diasporic.76

In Chapter 80, Gao demonstrates his version of semiotic daydream which he opts
to call language flow. Gaos narrative of semiotic daydream espouses technique of
symbolism whereby emotions and ideas are suggested rather than represented directly.
The dream semiotics of Gao hovers between sound and sense reclaiming the poetic of
music which renders a suggestive indefiniteness of ambiguity and poetic imagination.
Gao lays it bare at the end of the description that he aims to describe the fear of death
of the living body is concrete like this, the physical body you failed to abandon recovers
its sensitivity. In doing so, Gao is fleshing out the corporeality of death and
breathing life and senuality into it. The following extract from the chapter is sufficient
to illustrate such dream flow of language which often escapes the critical idioms of his
readers who may fall short of terms to describe or choose to call it irrational or
strange-

a never before experienced limpidity, a totality of purity and freshness. You

perceive a barely discernible subtle, almost soundless sound, it turns
transparentyou are falling and while falling you float up, so gently, and
75
76

Bhabha, The Loction of Culture, 180.

Ibid.

139

there is no wind, no physical burdens and no rashness in your emotions.

The extremity of the crack fuses with the darkness, loses its form, expands,
transforms into faint, minute points of light, then boundless countless
particles,
enveloping you in this cloud blanket of distinct particles..
You close your eyes to cut the glare but cant. Trembling fear and hope rise
from the depths of your heart, at the edge of the darkness you hear music, this
solidified sound gradually expands, spreads and sparkling crystals of sound
penetrate your body..
But the force of the pulsating sounds becomes stronger and stronger, lifts you
up, pushes you towards a high tide, a high tide of pure spirituality. Before
your eyes, in your heart, in your body oblivious to time and spaceis a blast
exploding exploding exploding exploding explo- explo- explo- explo-ding ding ding ding- then again absolute silence. You fall into an even
deeper darkness and again feel your heart pulsating, discern physical pain.77

The discursive pattern of Gaos dream semiotic which is structured through

constellation of figures is neither the expressive function of language as authorial
attention or generic determination but performed through the sensuousness and emotive
figures through a corporeal exteriorization of discourse. It is the art of guiding ones
body into a discourse of figures. Its noise is made vocal and visible, across the flow of
the sentences communicative code and the struggle to insert into the agency--wound
and bow, death and life.78 To achieve this art of guiding ones body into discourse or
language flow, Gao seems to have appropriated the technique of psychic automatism
which has been a creative process of surrealist artists valorizing the art of automatic
writing and painting. Writers of the surrealist movement draw images from the
unconscious and disconnected images of dreams which are revealed without concern for
logical, moral or aesthetic order. Empowered by the superior manifestation of the
human psyche, Gao, as much as the surrealist writers, seeks to abandon the established
77
78

Soul Mountain, 503-504.

Bhabha, The Location of culture, 104.

140

rules in pursuit of a new method through which the creative images attain independent
meaning and life.79 In Henry Zhaos analogy of Gaos use of plain language and
method to overcome the hurdle of language, he has referred to Gaos remark on the lack
of sensuousness and musicality in modern Chinese literature which short-circuits the
process of perception. In the above example, we are given the opportunity to visualize
how the writer is being experimental in reinvigorating perception through the
sonorousness of words which alludes to sound images such as soundless sound,
solidified sound, pulsating sounds, blast exploding silence in juxtaposition
with feelings of darkness, pain, fear and hope etc. This example also serves to illustrate
what Gao means by stretching the limit of language within its scope of acceptability and
without artificially creating new words.

80

At the end of this chapter where the novel is

near its close, Gao foregrounds his use of the agent for his speaking aloud in the
course of his creative process. He writes that in the darkness, in the corner of the room,
the line of bright red lights on your tape recorder is flashing. His idiosyncratic way of
speaking to the recorder with music at the background and listening back his own voice
in the creative process shows that his obsession with voice is not simply a pronominal
technique but an aesthetic process to take flight from the predictive syntax and
hierarchy and the subordinations of the sentence as Barthes has valorized. Gao
transforms Barthes in his double process of speaking aloud and writing aloud. The
semiotic daydream of Gao is an agency to open up a narrative strategy for symbolic
representation of a human self which is more than strange and uncanny but strives to
release literature and the arts from moral, aesthetic and ideological strictures and to
create an evocation freed from time and space. Gaos aesthetic and personal third space
79

Helene Henderson and Jay P. Pederson. Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Dictionary ( Mich:
Omnigraphics, 2000), 713-714.
80
Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 194.

141

seeks to confuse the continuity of historical temporalities, traumatize tradition, liberate

the imagination and free language from the stagnation of the pedagogical past.

142

CHAPTER FOUR

EXILES TIME

4.1 Double time--between present and past

Tam Kwok-kan points out that Gaos innovation in One Mans Bible is concretized
in the use of contrapuntal plots, which structurally and semantically serve as dialogue
between the past-he and the present-you within the monologue of the absent but implied
I.

He points out that the novel can be read as a spiritual autobiography of a wandering

Chinese, who by turning outward into He and You, goes more inward in his quest for
the true meaning of self.1

But the issue in relation to the novel is more than a spiritual

quest. It serves as an agent to interrogate self as a historical subject, provide witness to

the traumatic political events and redeem the self from the past by returning and exiting
through temporality.

The question to ask here is how the condition of the writer as an

external exile provides a privileged site for the interrogation of the past self through the
agency of time. How does the symbolic exchange between the present and past operate
and enact to elevate the protagonist into a transcendental exile? How does the narrative
of time operate as an agency to transform the self into a new being through journeying
into the past?

Pronouns are used as cognitive agents in both Soul Mountain and One Mans Bible
1

Tam Kwok-kan ed., Soul of Chaos, 303-309.

143

to structure the journey of self re-cognition, but the spatial and temporal background
against which the protagonists are situated is not the same. Thematically, it can be said
that both novels are about escape, the former is basically a journey of an internal exiles
escape to the margin of the territory and the temporality in operation is mainly in the
present, whereas the latter is the external exiles reminiscence of the past selfs
continuous flight during the Cultural Revolution. The one mans bible which claims to
be the authors own truth of history is intricately entangled with that of the collective. In
his study on the cultures of exile, Bartoloni points out that in poetic exile, the solitude of
the self in mental flight is determined to gain or regain an originality and purity
predicated upon the exclusion of others. The mental flight is an imaginative domain or
state in which the senses roam at ease in a world devoid of others. As for the enforced
exile, the solitude is physical as well as mental. In the second instance, all the senses
and the language employed to articulate them, appear to be nothing other than a
continuous struggle to reclaim and be subsumed again by the language and the senses of
the individuals lost community.2 The critics analogy points out the solitary mindset of
the spiritual exile in the Soul Mountain, and the struggle of the exiled writer in One
Mans Bible to recapture the past through senses and language. But the difference
between Bartolonis enforced exile and Gao as an exiled writer is that the latter is
conscious of not being subsumed by language in the reconnection with the past and
strives to keep a distant voice and a pair of detached eyes.

In Dissemination-time, narrative and margins of the modern nation, Bhabha

construes nation as a narrative of double time, a split temporality between the pre-given
time of national pedagogy and the present time of a process of signification. It is at the
2

Bartoloni, On the Culture of Exile, Translation, and Writing, 82.

144

liminality of nation as a narrative temporality of splitting and ambivalence whereby the

tension between the signifying of the people as a pedagogical object of historical
presence and performative subject of narrative can be articulated. Such a narrative
demands that the subject has to split itself into object and subject in the process of
identifying its field of knowledge.3 In One Mans Bible, the retrospection of the
ex-national subject in exile is posited through an ostensive temporal split and a narrative
of double time. It is a performative act to stage the subjects retrospective resistance to
the pre-given dominant discourse and master narrative imposed on the past-he
subjugated to the inescapable historical and political forces. Through the narrative of
self-interrogation using pronouns and time as agency and through the process of
incessant exits and returns between temporality, the human subject re-creates itself
between the liminality of past and present. While the politic and poetic of postcolonial
theorist is to address the residue of historical memory, the imminent issue of cultural
identity and national reconstruction of minority groups and diasporic community, Gaos
narrative of one mans story aims to expunge politics which had contaminated and
traumatized the past-self. In other words, it is to redeem and set free the self from the
past. As the narrator says-

What you seek is a pure form of narration. You are striving to describe in
simple language the terrible contamination of life by politics, but it is very
difficult. You want to expunge the pervasive politics that penetrated every

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 150. Mark Currie, in referring to Bhabhas article herewith
mentioned and criticizing its volume of intellectual noise for an expression of a weak political
argument, appraises Bhabhas success in illustrating the false dichotomy of the ideal and the material in
academic approaches to culture such as that exemplified in cultural materialism. Bhabhas theory
concerns the displacement of historicism and homogeneity of nation with the temporal aporias of
narrative time, and a certain mix between historical writing and a psychoanalysis of exclusion in the
construction of identity as a self-conscious textuality in which material processes are transposed into
stories and metaphors. Dissent becomes a writing strategy which opens narrative out from its singular
linear character. Postmodern Narrative Theory, 93, 94.

145

pore, clung to daily life, became fused in speech and action, and from
which no one at the time could escape. You want to tell about an individual
who was contaminated by politics, without having to discuss the sordid
politics itself. Nevertheless, you must return to his state of mind at that time,
and to describe this accurately is even more difficultit is not your
intention
to write stories of suffering. You seek only to narrate your
impressions and
psychological state of that time, and to do this, you must
carefully excise the
insights that you possess at this instant and in this place,
as well as put aside
your present thoughts.4
Gaos ostensibly ambivalent view of writing the authentic past through the
perspective of the present self at a distance hints at a con-fusion of the objective past
and the subjective present. Quite different from Soul Mountain which gives a sense of
on-going traveling of the thinking and emotive self between the I and you, the
foregrounding of a split in temporality in One Mans Bible requires the use of the
pronoun-he as the deictic centre of the narrative in the past which also suggests a sense
of omniscient truth and that the pronoun-he described is also an Everyman. The third
person pronoun as protagonist also facilitates authorial intrusion at the diegetic level.5
The narrative operates on a discourse level of double time between past and present
rather than a plot and is constituted upon a cognitive order of temporality rather than
chronology. A narrative which operates according to the mind time becomes warped,
discontinuous, and a four-dimensional time-space. This mind time resembles what
Monika Fludernik calls natural narratology whereby the traditional concept of
narrative is replaced by a conception of representation of and by means of
consciousness. In Soul Mountain, the consciousness of the I-protagonist controls the

One Mans Bible, 181-182.

Gerald Genette uses the term narrative discourse to substitute story. The former refers to both the story
(intradiegetic level) and level above it (extradiegetic) The level of narrative discourse refers to the level of
telling and indirect presentation rather than direct scenic representation or showing. Herman, Jahn and
Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 107.
5

146

narrative while in One Mans Bible, its the writer or the implied I who is in control.
This narrative model referred to by Fludernik is based on experiential reality and the
point of the story is not merely what happened but what the experience meant to the
narrator and what he wants to convey with it.6

The narrative structure operates like a

thought report which is the most flexible and versatile form accommodating a variety of
narration such as psycho narration, narratised speech, internal and narratorial analysis,
omniscient description, summaries, elaboration of mental instants of particular
significance and combinations of descriptions of thought processes with surface
descriptions.7

In Soul Mountain the cognitive process largely operates in a symbolic exchange of

physical materiality encroached on landscape and people and things contained in places,
whereas the operation of cognitive process in One Mans Bible is through mnemonic
time whereby the existential state of the past-he posited in historical time is interrogated.
In Soul Mountain the act of viewing oneself from a distance and the re-cognition of self
as an ordinary being is achieved through the circumspection of a real telescope. In
Chapter 18, the I-protagonist arrives at the Wu River of Caohai and visits the new
ranger station of the reserve.

The scene depicts a powerful telescope installed at the

window and the water several kilometers away is a dazzling white expanse through the
lens. No sooner is the protagonist described as next to the edge of the lake, he is
attempting to take a boat onto the lake. While thinking that he might sink deep into the
mud right up to his calf, the protagonist then sinks into a pensive mood viewing himself
from the perspective of the telescope described earlier-

6
7

Ibid., 610.
Ibid., 604.

147

Maybe theyll see me in the upstairs telescope of the little ranger station, just
like I had seen people on the boat. But I would just be a face. Even if they
adjusted the lens, they wouldnt be able to see my face. Even if they adjusted
the lens, theyd only think I was some peasant taking the boat out to get a bit
of extra income.8

In One Mans Bible, the telescoping of the distanced self is operated through the
creation of the present-you and the past-he in different temporality. The present-you
leads an exilic life shifting in global time roaming between places like Hong Kong,
Europe and the United States while also serving as the agent of the implied authors
intra-subjective monologue. The past-he is posited in historical time as the experiential
subject in the midst of the Cultural Revolution intercepted with childhood memories.
The implied narrator lays bare the authorial voice in the recounting process and his
effort to distance the past self so as to interrogate the subject under objective gaze from
a distance.

In Chapter 22, the writer or the implied I address the tension involved in

the narrative process and the impossibility to achieve pure objectivity in an inner
monologue with a voice resembling narratorial analysis-

You must find a detached voice, scrape off the thick residue of resentment and
anger deep in your heart, then unhurriedly and calmly proceed to articulate
your various impressions, your flood of confused memories, and your tangled
thoughts. But you find this is very difficultHis experiences have silted up in
the creases of your memory. How can they be stripped off in layers,
coherently arranged and scanned, so that a pair of detached eyes can observe
what he had experienced?.... You do not play the role of judge, and you
should not regard him as a victim. In this way, the fervor and the suffering
that are destructive to art make way for observation and examination. Of

Soul Mountain, 108-112.

148

interest is not your judgment or his righteous indignation, your sorrow or his
suffering, but rather, the process of this inquiry.9

The use of the third-person or omniscient narrator has always been the literary
convention in historical fiction. This third-person narrator is understood to represent not
himself but an objective point of view. But the third person protagonist in One Mans
Bible is more of an agent for the omnipresent narrator to espouse his thoughts towards
the past anachronistically. The point of view is pre-dominated by the omnipresent
storyteller. The writer lays bare the aesthetic veil of the mnemonic discourse and
contradicts himself of his impossible desire to create a distanced examination of the past
self. As the implied I proclaims, that eye with its neutrality is driven by all sorts of
desiresseparate from reality by a layer of language. It is cloaking naked reality with a
gauze curtain, ordering language and weaving into it feelings and aesthetics that you are
able to derive pleasure from looking back at it, and are interested in continuing to
write.10 In Chapter 24, the writer devotes the entire chapter to narratorial analysis and
his inner dialogue and rebuttal on the need to write the novel, denying that he is writing
for pure literature which is a shield, a limitation and a cage demarcated by others and
yourself. At the end, he declares that the novel is a book of fleeing. Fleeing here can
mean the escape of the past-he as fugitive, the liberating pleasure of disentangling the
self from the past by returning, and the impossibility of language to render a pure form
of narration of precise description of the real. How does the exile writer speak to the
past from present? How does this mental flight through passage of mnemonic time take
place? What knowledge of self and truth is discovered through the aesthetic
telescope of language?
9
10

One Mans Bible, 182-183.

Ibid., 197.

149

Temporality of the exile writer as the present-you is described as a world traveler

roaming about the city as a traveler whose itinerary is interpolated with drifting
thoughts. In Chapter 16, the present-you is described as an artist visiting Hong Kong
engaged in theatre production and a daydreamer roaming around the city with thoughts
about his relationship with women, the need to write about his past experiences
interpolated with the flaneurs description of the cityscape and street scene, and
thoughts about the future of the city due to be handed over to China. The free roaming
flaneur cum exile writer in the global cities as an oblique shadow of the implied I is
partly to fulfill a function as the implied Is writing self and partly to foreground a free
temporality in contrast to the past-he who is to struggle against time in the historical
past. Time for the flaneur is free, unrestrictive; the writer cum director is free to indulge
in his thoughts, pop into the cinema for a while, or talk with other exile writers. The
narrative through the mind time of the second person pronoun obliquely resembles one
of the micro-narratives in the Benjaminesque style rendering thoughts and comments
of a particular cultural moment in space. Benjamins work adopts the consciousness of a
city flaneur who wanders not only through the contemporary streets of Paris, but also
through its past, the poetry and other literature by which it is inscribed. While Benjamin
tours the city as a pair of eyes somehow leaving his own bodily presence out of the
picture, Gao the exile writer foregrounds his bodily movement in the city interpolating
with description of the city, cultural observation and inner monologue without any
attempt to integrate these fragments. The exile writer takes pleasure of an existence as a
liminal being and as Said describes, as an observer of a winters mind. Like many
well known exile writers in the West who opted to carry the country in their pockets,
Gao makes an unprecedented move in terms of the convention of Chinese intellectual in
150

exile to announce that he prefers to carry Chinese culture with him and unfix the notion
of China as a country bounded by geographical concept11-

You will not go back. Not even in the future? Someone asks. No, it is not your
country. It exists in your memory only, as a hidden spring gushing forth
feelings that are hard to articulate. This China is possessed by you alone, and
has nothing to do with the country.
Your heart is at peace, and you are no longer a rebel. You are now an observer,
.For you, looking back has been a time of quiet reflection, so that you can
get on with your life12.

But to reach transcendence and be a true exile with a peace of mind is no easy task for
the Chinese exile writer. Gao the writer has to go through a traumatic experience to
write about the past and an ambivalent struggle to mediate between personal confession
and aesthetic revelation, between the grotesque of reality and the beauty of life, and
between remembering and forgetting. When Brodsky speaks on the condition of exile
writers, he points out that there is a retrospective machinery in the exile that plays an
excessive role in his existence, overshadowing his reality and dimming the future into
something thicker than its usual pea soup.13 So how does this retrospective machinery
operate in terms of temporality in One Mans Bible?

4.2 Retrospective machineryintervening the past

In the novel, the past-he can be seen as one struggling between two temporalities.

11

Other than Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish exile whom Gao refers to, Joyce says Ireland is in his
imagination; Thomas Mann says German culture is where I am; Appiah says take your roots with
you. Declaration as such can mean either way, ie.,alien-nation vis--vis long-distance nationalism.
12
One Mans Bible, 443-444.
13
Glad, Literature in Exile, 104-106.

151

One of public time which is dictated by politics and the autocratic regime through
incessant political campaigns, the other is of private time which is dangerous and
sanctioned. The protagonist is described as an actor and a performer imprisoned by
public time struggling to escape so as to survive. The escape on the personal level is
also an escape from the false-self as victim of ideological interpellation, a process of
becoming an internal exile learning to observe with cold eyes. By staging the naked
self, by flagging and interrogation, the writer is seeking redemption for the past-he,
that child, that youth, that immature man, that daydreaming survivor, that arrogant
fellow and that scoundrel who gradually became crafty.14

There are several instances where the he-protagonist is described as a being

subjected to interpellation of the hegemonic discourse of ideology. The moments are
those under patriarchal influence. In Chapter 5, the past-he as a child is mesmerized by
the heroic stories told by his uncle who was once an underground party member
participating in the guerilla war. Hence from the Mother Goose stories of Andersons
childrens books, he turns to admire the revolutionary myths. The child lived quite
happily under the new nation led by Mao. He was selected by the school to take part in
the city celebrations in which he presented flowers to the exemplary workers of city,
hoping one day he would be able to go on stage to perform at the Youth Palace. 15 The
past-he is subjected to public time strictly regulated under the Mao regime. He who
works under the party institution has to comply with the learning schedule after work
reciting Maospeak. The interpellated subject has to comply with a temporality
systemized and hegemonized. The institution where one works is like a big beehive,

14
15

One Mans Bible, 182.

Ibid., 38-39.

152

allocating city residence permit, monthly grain coupons and oil coupons etc. One has no
other options but to become a bee whose refuge is this hive.16 The political time clock
during the Mao regime is dictated by Maospeak. In Chapter 33, the writer describes the
moment of time during the Cultural Revolution when the university rebel groups used
initially to purge the old revolutionary warriors are replaced by the workers. Mao is
described as saying to university student representatives, You, little generals, its time
you commit errors. And the political tide swiftly turns out to be one dominated by
workers underpinned by the military army against the students. The clock time is one of
restlessness and noise. In Chapter 35, the writer describes the political moment whereby
people have to assemble, form rank and begin marching on the streets usually until
midnight. Like a soldier, one stood to attention before the portrait of the
Commander-in-Chief that hung in the middle of the main wall of every office and
shouted longlive three times. After the implementation of army control, all this was
compulsory daily ritual at the start and finish of work. It was called seeking
instructions in the morning and reporting at night.

In Desire in Language, Kristeva coins the word semanalysis as a method to

describe the signifying phenomenon while analyzing, criticizing and dissolving
phenomenon meaning and signifier. The method attends to the moments of an
analytical process and the underlying speaking subject, in particular the splitting of
subjectivity of the unconscious, the so called semiotics which co-exist with the
symbolic that is the establishment of a sign system. 17

Somewhat resembling the

semanalysis process, the writer conducts an analysis of the political terms used during

16
17

Ibid., 265.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia UP.,1980), 18.

153

the Mao regime in Chapter 18. The writer highlights the symbolic meaning of terms like
party which stands for oppression and even the nation ranks below it, not to mention
the individual who is subjugated under the machinery of the work unit which
determines ones personal freedom and mobility. A person has no private self and his
fate is determined by the record of his personal file monitored by the institution.
According to the writer, the word private is interpreted as psychological evil that
has to be eradicated. The Party only permits one kind of thinking, that is, the thinking of
the supreme leader. Spelling out the hegemony of the symbolic force which subjugates
the psychology of the private individual and prohibits one to speak differently is
considered by the author a prerequisite in ones looking back at the past. In the same
chapter, the writer conducts a psychoanalysis of himself, the reason he went crazy at
that time was probably because the illusions he believed in had been shattered, and the
imaginary world of books had become taboo. Also, he was young, had had nowhere to
dissipate his energy, and couldnt find a woman for his body and soul. Sexually
frustrated, he simply stirred the water in mud puddles.18 The parole of the One Mans
Bible becomes a means, a discourse to strike back, to revenge against time, to liberate
the self from the prison of the past particularly the hegemony of ideology and the
subjugation of the self to the langue of the collective. The novel as a hyper-narrative not
only writes over the past but hypes up, making visible the system and hierarchy by
which meaning is produced. In this connection, the author has preferred direct analysis
than dramatization, analogy than narrativity in his striking back against the hegemony
of ideology culled in political idiom. The personal history, the one mans bible, is also
an implicit strike back against the grand History which is under control of the autocratic
regime. In Chapter 18, the writer also comments on the changes in the official
18

One Mans Bible, 152.

154

documentation of the history of the Cultural Revolution and that investigation against
such changes is prohibited. He points out the impossibility of a grand narrative of the
national history, as the peoples history is inevitably complicit and comprises multiple
view points. But most important of all is that people avoided talking about rebelling, or
simply forgot that part of historyforgotten that before disaster fell upon their own
heads, they too, were to some extent also the assailants.19

Hence the writers narrative of a personal history is both poetic and political in the
sense that it is somehow an interpretation of history while eludicating an aesthetic
representation of the thinking and feeling of an individuated subject under ideological
interpellation in the momentary past. In the political sense, remembering becomes a
struggle against history and a refusal to reification. To Adorno, every reification is
forgetting and the central issue of reification is mnemonic disturbance, thus to trace the
history of any commodity is to remember. History is perpetually suspicious of
memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it. To historical discourse,
remembering is regarded as inherently subversive and disruptive. It is only by mastery
and suppression of that deviation represented by memory that historical continuity can
be established and maintained.20 Gao the exile writer, in activating the retrospective
machinery, embarks on a recollection which is also an interpretive act despite his desire
to remain an objective observer, and within which there is a selection between
remembering and forgetting.

Similar to Soul Mountain, the protagonist in One Mans Bible has encountered
19

Ibid., 150-151.
Lu, Jie. Time, Space and Language in Contemporary Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction( diss. Stanford U,
1996), 35-36.
20

155

moments of discovery whereby the subject has come to a re-cognition. While the
I-protagonist in Soul Mountain learns that there is no end to a soul search journey, the
he-protagonist in One Mans Bible undergoes an awakening process and learns that
there is no new myth and one has no role to play in the political turmoil other than as
a fugitive who keeps running for his life. The writer describes a moment of discovery of
the he-protagonist while he is studying in the university where the confession system
required everyone to confess their thoughts to the Party-

He was tricked and frivolously asked if one could be a hero without having to

many

throw oneself on a bag of explosives and getting blown upThis instantly

sent his fellow students into an uproarhe had been taught a lesson: a person
had to lie. If one wanted only to tell the truth, then there was no point living.
It was fundamentally impossible for a person to be pure, but it was only
years later that he was able to comprehend thisonly after having

personally

verified the experiences of others and suffering as a consequence.21

In recalling this moment of discovery, the narrator uses free indirect thought or authorial
intrusion to supplement the thought of the past-he retrospectively.22 The past-he as an
unconscious political being cannot transcend time and see himself clearly in the
moment of history, but only in deferred moments when the writer is able to look back
and put himself under scrutiny. Another moment of the past-hes discovery of the new
myth takes place after the protagonist has commented on some public affairs in
response to Chairman Maos call-- all of you must concern yourselves with the
important affairs of the nation. The result of the protagonists response to the leaders
call is that he has committed a political error and such an error has to be registered on
21

One Mans Bible, 142

Free indirect thought narrated monologue, represented speech and thought, dual voice, substitutionary
speech, narrated speech and thought, immediate speech, and simple indirect thought. This is similar to
what Bakhtin called double-voiced discourse. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 605.
22

156

his file.

This experience rudely awakened him and he could see his precarious

situation: a political storm was raging everywhere and if he were to preserve himself he
had to lose himself among the common people. He had to say what everyone else said
and be able to show that he was the same as everyone else 23 This so called
awakening is by no means a salvation but an awaking of ones survival instinct which
calls for one to wear a mask and become a performer. This situation of the social self
succumbing to a political ideological and hegemonic discourse described by the exile
writer through the experience of the past-he who is also an everyman illustrates an
exemplary prototype of the intimate relationship between discourse and institutional
power as extrapolated by Foucault. History has shown that in a dictatorial regime real
power is exercised through discourse, and that this discursive power has real effects.
Rules and procedures, or in the case of the Cultural Revolution, disciplinary techniques
govern the minute details of everyday life producing the individual as subject in/to the
disciplinary mechanisms of the state. Discipline and confession, as Foucault postulates,
become the two major phenomena resulting from the processes of ordering and
restrictive procedures to which the self is subjected. While discipline produces
conforming people or docile bodies by subjecting the self to procedures of
normalization, confession subjectifies human beings, seemingly allowing them to freely
talk about themselves and promoting the illusion that liberation are possible but in
reality is just another way of reinforcing and submitting the self to power or the
authority of the confessor. 24 What is most insightful of Foucaults argument and
implicitly foregrounded by the exile writer is that rather than being something that one
group possesses or uses over individuals, power is a network of relations that

23
24

One Mans Bible, 55.

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

157

encompasses the rulers as well as those they rule in a vast web of discrete, and local
conflicts. Hence, there is no outside of power, no disengaged point from which power is
exercised or even studied without implicating that the subject in the very forces could
escape. It is at this juncture that the writers comment on the selfs entanglement with
history and the need to reflect echoes Foucaults analogy. Hence the remembering
process is for the exile writer a self-flagging without which one would have no
redemption.

It is also at this juncture that we may recall postcolonial critics theory

which construes that there is always an insidious and intricate alliance between the
colonizers and colonized which makes the question more complex than a study of
antagonistic forces. The exile writers confession is that the past-he was lured to also
wearing a mask as one of the collective. In a dramatic manner, the writer describes the
past-he somewhat between a tragic hero and a performer in the midst of the political
turmoil playing out his role as a revolutionary leader governed by the impulse for
justice sprang from a sense of tragedyhe thought he had seen an opening and there
was something of gambling with life in being a hero.25 But whether he is a tragic hero
or simply a clown, he, as well as all other people became puppets, and could not
escape the big hand behind, which controlled them.26 Seeing the he-protagonist also as
an everyman, the writers remark foregrounds a revelation towards the tragic hero
role played out by the Chinese intellectual at different stages in the past century. This
big hand can be that of the autocratic leader or that of a nations fate. In Chapter 59,
the writer describes his artistic creation as a performance of grotesque beauty of a
national flag (fate) through theatre images, the plastic leg bearing your signature
WHAT in the old picture frame slowly rises on the stage. In the midst of singing, an old

25
26

One Mans Bible, 155.

Ibid., 151.

158

man with a sunken mouth is hoisting it up on a rope, solemnly, just like raising a
flag.27

4.3 Chaotic time, chaotic life

While time is dictated in the political sense through top-down directives whereby
the actions of the collective are strictly regulated, the particular historical moment on a
macro level under portrayal is also one of chaos and irrationality. The temporal
re-configuration of the historical is one of irregularities, confusion and chaos.

As

pointed out by a critic, the novel shares the traits of the so called new historical fiction
which demonstrates an arbitrary reshuffling of the temporal sequence of narrative
events and disrupts the sequence of causality of events by subjecting them to a
random order. The restructuring of temporality in the new historical fictionalerts the
reader to different possibilities of time and history.28 In counterpoise with public time
whereby the protagonist is described as a social subject entangled in history, the
narrative operating on a mnemonic structure enables the writer to dwell into
psychological time of the past-he against the temporality of the history proper. Memory
is not subject to the order of time; it runs wildly like a horse and provides a free
expressive universe.29 In Chapter 5, the writer describes in a poetic manner the chaotic
structure of mnemonic representation and the impossibility of portraying the network of
human life -

27

Ibid., 426.
Nicoletta Pesaros seminal paper, From a Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction to
Soul Mountain and One Mans Bible: Gao Xingjians use of narrative patterns to rethink China in Hong
Kong Drama Review, vol 8, 2009, 401-411.
29
Ibid., 8.
28

159

that

Remote childhood is hazy, but some bright spots float up in memories. When
you pick up the end of a thread, memories that have been submerged by time
gradually appear and, like a net emerging from the water, they are
interconnected and infinite Its impossible to sort them to put them into
some sort of order. Human life is a net, you want to undo it a knot at a time,
but only succeed in creating a tangled mess. Life is a muddled account
you cant work out.30

Mnemonic time in the novel centering on the past-hes personal story intertwined with
stories/events of the people around him operates disjunctively in ellipses. Chaotic time
is illustrated through vigorous alternation of narrative speed. In Chapter 9, the narrative
starts with the past-hes burning of personal documents including manuscripts, diary
and photos. Then there is a flashback to recounting an earlier time whence the
protagonist witnessed an old woman being struck to death by the teenage red guards on
the street. Switching back to the burning fire through montage, the protagonist recalls a
photo at his fathers place which might possibly cause trouble. Then a piece of
manuscript reminds him of an old writer warning him some time ago to be cautious
about publishing literary articles which might drag him into misfortune. Subsequently
the narration shifts backward and forward to different moments in time before the
Cultural Revolution and ten years after when the protagonist met with the same old
writer on three occasions exchanging dialogue.

The interleaving of the narrative illustrates remarkably how life of the individual
and the personal his/her-story are woven with politics at the particular historical
moment from where no one can escape. The omnipresent writer skillfully describes the
chaotic scenes during the political campaigns from the narrators birds eye view
30

One Mans Bible, 41.This network of threads of human life reminds us of the rope Gao uses in the
prologue of The Other Shore.

160

through the portrayal of he-protagonists experience as witness to the macro historical

event.

In Chapter 19, Baozi the past-hes former next door neighbour escapes to the

capital running away from the purges of red guards against teachers who have deviated
from the approved teaching method by telling little stories to liven up the teaching. In
describing how the he-protagonist leads Baozi to the offices of Zhongnanhai to lodge
his grievances and the offices of the Ministry of Education to gather news, the
omniscient narrator posits personal experience against a monumental time engulfing
everyone at the historical moment. The past-he and Baozis little adventure is
described against the macro historical moment whereby frantic students are gathered in
the capital awaiting the patrol of the political leaders at Tiananmen Square-

The two of them were pushed away before they got anywhere near the desks,
and were pushed, helpless, all the way into the corridor
downstairsThey
made their way by foot to the Ministry of Education. The
whole of the
building had been converted into a hostel for students from out
of town. From
the main hall downstairs to the corridors of every floor, all the
offices had
been vacated, and everywhere there were wheat stalks, grass mats,
gray
blankets, plastic sheeting, and disorderly rows of bedding. Enamel
basins,
bowls, chopsticks, and spoons were strewn all over the floors and
there was
an all-pervasive stench of sweat, preserved radishes, shoes, and
unwashed
socks.There were around two million at each review, and
youngsters started
Square and then
along Changan
hot tears
shouting
was
workplaces31.

31

assembling in the middle of the night, first filling Tiananmen

both sides of the square for ten-kilometers from east to west
Avenue. These youngsters, waving the precious little red book,
streaming down their faces, screamed themselves hoarse, wildly
long live to wish a long life to Chairman Mao. Then, fired with
revolutionary zeal, they all went home to smash up everything that
old---wrecking schools, destroying temples, and attacking

One Mans Bible, 161-163.

161

The monumental time in which the students hailing of Chairman Mao in hilarious zeal
is described like movie shots focusing on the senses of sights and sounds. Rather than
detailing the monumental event, the narrator foregrounds the sense of history conjured
through depiction of objects and images. The speedy and swift scene juxtaposed the
turbulent political movement sweeping across the country. The self is engulfed in such a
collective time and anything private and personal is suppressed, just as the two
childhood friends are so overwhelmed by the collective moment that, as noted by the
omniscient writer, there is no space for personal chit-chat.

The interleaving technique which conjures a disruptive temporality is deployed

within a chapter as well as between chapters. In Chapter 13 the past-he who voluntarily
seeks to receive re-education in the May Seventh Cadre Schools to avoid political attack
in the Beijing party office is described as under danger of being prosecuted. As the
cardre school seems no place for escaping purges, the refuge instinct drives the
protagonist to plan for another escape to the commune in a rural area. While the escape
plan proceeds like an adventure story, it is abruptly suspended and reconnected again
only in Chapter 40 after which the tempo of the narrative begins to slow down. In the
last one-third of the chapters, the protagonist is described as settling into a new life in
the commune whereby the protagonist has fortunately been assigned a teaching job and
even got married with a girl he met on the road who later turns out to be schizophrenic
and emotionally unstable. Structurally the latter chapters are less disruptive and the
story of the new life proceeds in a relatively steady manner with occasional
interleaving of events under split temporality between the past-you and the present-he.
In between Chapters 13 and 40 prior to the reconnection of the protagonists escape
story in the commune, the intervening chapters contain multifarious events and little
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anecdotes describing the protagonist who is on the run and has taken time out from
public time. The past-he roams around the territory and the spatial stretch covers
Beijing and other regions such as the Yangtze River and Yellow River.32 The narrative
of split temporality is interwoven with the roaming thoughts of the present-you
following his spatial trajectory around the world, such as shifting from Hong Kong to
Sweden in Chapter 37 where the exile writer is described as participating in a
conference jointly with other Chinese writers. Within the ellipse of time between the
chapters, the writer provides multiple stories of his childhood and adolescent growth,
sexual encounters, stories of family members and ex-revolutionary party members,
conducts narratorial analysis, and comments on the pain and pleasure of writing while
giving omniscient description on the process of purging and street scenes during the
political turmoil.

In The Rhetorics of Feminism, Lynne Pearce considers that postmodernist aesthetic

of fragmentary narrative, and a rhetoric to contain narrative and argument is innovative
and effective as an agency for feminist writers to expose the subject matter such as the
female experience in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. What is pertinent in the
return visit to the past by means of little stories and a memoir floating in a
dream-like-space is that it provides a viewpoint or perspective from which the little
stories can be gathered together to make sense of a past which is a confusion of chaos
and decadence. By finding the viewpoint of a moment-in-future from which to view the
recent past enables one to look back and discover patterns and meanings where
before there were none. Making use of the time lag and the gap between the adolescent

32

The past-hes time out to the Yellow River region and research into human history is discussed in
chapter three of this study.

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past and the mature present, the retrospective self feels a surge of gratitude toward what
one has gone through.33 While Pearces analogy has spelt out the shared postmodernist
narrative strategy between feminist writers and the Chinese exile writer in recounting
the traumatic and chaotic past, what is particular to Gaos time narrative is that the
rhetoric is one involving multiple temporality stretching the entire life time of the author
since childhood and also that this looking back and discovery straddle multiple
spaces through juxtaposition between double time of the split self in the present and
past.

4.4 Photograph and memory

In describing the intertextuality of the photos essays of Said in After the Last Sky,
a critic considers that Said reveals a displaced mentality through its style of delightful
specificity, out-time progression, and elusive narrative. Through it all runs the
self-questioning of Said and the exile. Montage, and text and photo-essays illustrate one
another. The photo-essays speak volumes and shoot their way through the oppressors
omnipresence. W.J.T Mitchell remarks that the book of photo-essays is a nation-making
text which brings the Palestinians into existence for themselves as much as for others.

34

While Gaos narrative in One Mans Bible also elucidates a sense of displacement and
self-questioning, it is less a nation-making text but more an avenue for the writer to
extrapolate criticism on the political system while sowing sympathy on the collective
subjected to the inescapable political force. At the same time, it serves to emulate
redemptive effect on the personal level. While Said pictures through tangible real

33
34

Lynne Pearce , The Rhetorics of Feminism,177-179.

Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limit (Albany: State U of New York P, 2004), 116.

164

photos the far-fetched nation which has long been cut off, Gao explicates his attempt to
view painful history from the long-shot of aesthetic distance, as he says, to make poetics
out of garbage. The greatest difference between Said and Gao is that the former
endeavours to reconstruct a discursive place to re-place the native from placeless-ness,
while the latter seeks to displace oneself through writing from the entanglement of a
reality of a pig-prison. In On Mans Bible, the writer compares writing with
photographing which is a healing process through artistic re-creation-

You say what you want is a transparent reality, like a heap of garbage
captured through the lens of a camera. The garbage is still garbage, but
through the lens it has the imprint of your grief. What is real is your grief. As
you are photographing, you will pity yourself, and you must find a state of
mind that will allow you to endure the painthat is beyond this pigs pen of a
realityBy locating present reality in myth, pleasure can be derived from
writing, so that it is possible to achieve existential and psychological
balance.35

While Gao alludes to photographing in the metaphorical sense as a writing technique of

framing the garbage of history, photographs which contain memories of the
protagonists past and family history serve literally as one of the entry points whereby
time once lost is retrieved. Ricoeur points out that forgetting is not the opposite of
memory. There is a forgetting of survival which is a survival of images juxtaposing
definitive forgetting which wipes out all traces. The former is that which happens
involuntarily and requires us to tell or recount.36 In Gaos case, photographs mentioned
on various occasions serve to supplement the re-creation of the past entangled with the
larger history. The family photograph with 13 household members mentioned in
35
36

One Mans Bible, 341.

Mustapha Marrouchi, Edward Said at the Limits, 126-7.

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Chapter 1 embodied a past which has rendered the decimation of the family. The family
members either died of illness, drowned, committed suicide, went insane or passed
away in the prison farms.

When the he-protagonist burnt the family photos due to his

survival instinct to avoid purges, this act of willful forgetting out of fear causing him
to wipe out his memories and be cut off from the past is in a sense an exile from time.
To a certain extent, the Chinese subject under the particular historical moment is not
unlike an migr who has embarked on willful forgetting in order to make oneself fit in
the new cultural setting. What makes a difference is that the forced willful forgetting
of the Chinese subject during the political turmoil is one of life and death and a
choice-less choice. Hence, photography leads to two levels of forgetfulness in the novel,
one hinges on politics which forced one to exile from time, the second of poetic which
serves as survived images bridging the past and present. In One Mans Bible, the
iteration of two survived images from the photographs become a personal relic (that of
bird and pen) of the exile writer which are symbolic of the protagonists becoming.

A family photo mentioned in Chapter 1 contains the image of a child wearing slit
trousers squashed between the grandparents showing his little dick (xiaoji, literally
meaning little bird/chicken.) The image of bird and its correlative--chicken are recurrent
images in the novel illuminating explicitly and implicitly the identity and existence of
the self. In the second family photograph mentioned in Chapter 9, the writer as a skinny
child whose eyes were round with bewilderment is seen as if he thought a bird would
fly out of the box camera. But before the bird could really fly freely on the foreign land,
it has to go through a process of transformation.37 The bird is metamorphosized into a
black hen captured under the writers artistic lens in the rural commune and described as
37

Bird image appears in Ch 5, 9, 17 54, 57, 60 in One Mans Bible.

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containing endless meanings in its stare. The gaze of the black hen juxtaposing the
observing eyes of the writer is one of self-examination and narcissism. If the black hen
emulates an uplifting spirit, the dead hen to celebrate the newly wed couple in the
rural commune ironically signifies a marriage no less lifeless than the dead creature.
The wifes hysterical outburst accusing the protagonist as counter-revolutionary and
enemy drags the marriage into chaos and the protagonist into double trauma in the
midst of the political turmoil whereby writing in secret and self-dialogue becomes the
only consolation.38 At this juncture, the gold Parker fountain pen as the second
surviving photo image recounted by the exile writer bears its significance. The fountain
pen which signifies the protagonists becoming a writer is a gift from an uncle Fang, a
colleague of the protagonists father. The child who wouldnt let go of the fountain pen
was given it as a birthday gift which he holds as if it was a treasure. While recounting
this survived image, the writer traces his poetic desire to write as one originated under
maternal influence. While the uncle provides the tool, what really ignites the
protagonists poetic desire is in association with femininity. The writer mentions in
Chapter 1 that because he was frail and sick all the time, it was his mother who taught
him to read and write. The child later writes a diary with a brush and the writer
remembers that his mother always talked about the first diary piece he wrote
remembered roughly as snow falling on the ground turns it pure white, people treading
on it leave dirty footprints. The snow with footprints image is a recurrent image that
emerges throughout Gaos work. The writer recounts that from that time he could not
stop himself writing about his dreams and self-love, sowing the seeds of future
disaster.

38

One Mans Bible, Ch 43, 333.

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4.5 Desiring machine and mnemonic time

Within the operation of retrospective machinery in One Mans Bible, there is an

ongoing desiring machine in operation which provides libidinal energy for the writing
act of double time.39 The desiring machine starts to operate at the moments of sexual
awakening of the growing child pegging an inseparable link between writing and
femininity. The writer recounts the boyish memory of a pencil box and fragrant card
given to him by a girl which conjures in him a sense of warmth, fragrance and
femininity. He also recounts that after reading Merimees novel The Venus of Ille,
the teenage boy experiences a dream in which he sleeps hugging a carved marble of a
naked female body and which makes him feel agitated when awakened. The
simultaneous and double operation of the retrospective machine and the desiring
machine is ostensibly exposed in Chapter 37 when the exile writer addresses the issue
of memory and fantasy after recounting a dream he just had. In his dream, a woman
comes to see him and arouses his desire to make love to her but he fails to do so as they
cannot find a place to settle down despite going through a labyrinth of twists and turns
in the hotel. In recounting the dream, the writer juxtaposes the relationship between
mnemonic representation and fantasy, and that of writing and libidinal desire which
strikes a key note of the exile writers rhetoric.

Writing of the past is like roaming

from one dream to another dream, and from one desire to another fleshing out in the
breast image and elusive senses conjured by the author--

You keep trying to recall that dream, to recall the tactile sensation of fondling
39

Deleuze and Guattari describe desire as a machine which is an endless flow and unstoppable flight.
The subject does not produce desire but the flow of desire plays a role in the constitution of the subject. I
have appropriated this term to describe Gaos writing act as libidinal force. Julian Wolfreys, Key concepts
in literary theory, 2002.

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her smooth firm breasts and to recall that indistinct but familiar face. Instead
you recall another dream you have hadYou recall that when you were
four or five years old, during the chaos of war, you and your parents were
refugees and had lived in such a big courtyard. But you are searching for a big
girl with full breasts, and your memories and dreams are all confused.

How is it possible to retrieve past happenings that have become submerged in

what has been forgotten?... Its hard to confirm what gradually appears, and
its hard to decide in the end whether it is memory or something you have
imagined.Can memories be retold? You doubt it, and you also doubt the
capacity of language to do this. One retells memories or dreams, because
some wonderful things give you warmth, fragrance, longing and impulses
flash up.40

Some critics who are intrigued by the excessive corporeal description of the female
body in the novel seek to explain it by alluding to the political oppression against ones
sexual freedom in the time of the autocratic regime. 41 No doubt the writer has
embarked on this subject on several occasions. He recounts that women working in the
army medical college have to undergo a health check to ensure that they are virgins
before marriage which is not allowed until the woman reaches age 26. Transgressive
sexual acts between individuals during the Cultural Revolution would be a cause for
purging and subjected the persons to penalties by the state authority. The incessant
sexual encounters of the he-protagonist with various women, that of the married woman
from a revolutionary family background with a husband working in the military, the

40

One Mans Bible, 294-295. Can this portrayal of the visit of a sexual image in a dream inducing one to
make love be read as a postmodern version of Tang Xianjus Youyuan jingmeng? Readers are invited to
fill in the gap.
41
See Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, 133-135. The radical corporeality reminds us of Jingpingmei
as Gao is said to be highly appreciative of the novel for its authentic portrayal of human desire according
to Lui Zaifu. In the novel, the writer hints at the reading of this novel banned by the girl under Mao-style
overcoat who makes love with the past-he in his room. Gaos autoerotic love affairs with the literary
texts rendered in juxtaposition with sexual encounters is most prominently demonstrated in this little
sexual incident.

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unknown girl on the road who is to become the protagonists wife and the college girl
who comes to visit the protagonist at night in the midst of the student campaign, all
point to manifesting an irrepressible and transgressive libidinal desire of the social
subject refusing to be contained by political and social oppression.42 The sexual act
carried out in secrecy lies in juxtaposition with the secret writing act of the past-he in
the rural commune. But to appreciate the exile rhetoric and its relation to the libidinal,
one might have to go beyond the level of real politick and read Gaos estranged
relationship of the corporeal sexual discourse in the light of the convention of
lover/sexual discourse so as to appreciate the intricacy involved.

In Roland Barthess Lovers Discourse, he suggests that there is a lovers discourse

upon which we construct ourselves as amorous subjects, thus no love is original. In
repeated allusions to exemplars of romantic passion such as Goethes Werther, the lover
in Barthes work ceaselessly identifies himself with other lovers and becomes part of
the amorous system. Interestingly, there seems to be an amorous system in Western
exile literature that originated with the Roman exile poet Ovid whose elegies treat love
as a discursive artefact.43 Ovids pleas to the emperor to request for a return home is
considered the archetype of the amorous discourse containing the identity of the exile
writer who is absent from home. For the modern exile writers, Victor Shklovsky, best
known in the West as the theorist of estrangement and who once was an exile in Berlin,
composes an ironic epistolary romance, Letters Not about Love, based on his
correspondence with his unrequited lover. The epistolary romance mirrors Shklovskys
relations with Berlin in which he shows jealousy of his lovers flirtation with foreign

42
43

One Mans Bible, 28 & 45.

Duncan Kennedy, The Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 64-82.

170

things while he longs to go home. The last letter of the epistolary romance is addressed
to the Central Committee of the Communist Party begging to be allowed to return to
Russia. In this regard, estrangement to Shklovsky as an exile appears to be of limited
practice and more as a defense mechanism for mediation between art and life.
Shklovskys biography as a nations exile is of a traditional kind mourning about the
loss of his soul.44 What is particular to Gao which makes him different from the
Western predecessors seems to be that he has switched the discourse from one centering
on love to sexual desire, and from loyalty to promiscuity. If Barthes Lovers Discourse
is the collusion of readerly act and romance, Gaos sexual discourse is one of writerly
act and libidinal energy. For Gao, there is no epistolary begging to go home but only the
ethic and eros of writing. If it is the feminist rhetoric to think through the body and the
use of body as the ultimate container metaphor so as to seek vocabulary which
literally breathes life into things,45 Gao has radically written through the female body as
his container metaphor to flesh out the libidinal act of writing. The collusion between
the corporeal with the psychic reality of discursive desire grossly challenges readers
expectations.

Marguerite, the Jewish woman, introduced at the beginning of the novel who is
described to have met with the writer on the mainland before his exile serves as an
agency to ignite the mnemonic power of the present-you. Instead of reading the Jewish
woman as a real character at the mimetic level, it would be aesthetically suggestive to
read Marguerite as a fluid agency to serve both as the present-yous alterity and an
agent of desire to ignite the writers retrospective machine. It is through Marguerites
44

Svetlana Boym Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky in Susan Rubin Suleiman ed.
Exile and Creativity (Durham: Duke UP., 1998).
45
Lynne Pearce, The Rhetorics of Feminism,124-6.

171

questioning at the beginning of the novel that provokes the present-yous desire to
recount his sexual encounter with women in the past. While essentialist feminists might
challenge the use of a female body in the service of a male project toward alterity, the
figure of the Jew is recognized from the European-American perspective as an
unavoidable emblematic figure of displacement embodying restlessness and
uprootedness of whom the universal stranger of the Jew in Kafkas works is the
prototype. 46 In this connection, Marguerites service as the bodily bridge of
remembrance for the Chinese exile writer also makes her in collusion with Kafkas
bridge figure. In one of Kafkas short stories, the bodily bridge above the cliff suffers
from the painful poking of the travelers walking stick and the feets stamping on his
body. As for Gaos mnemonic bridge which is inspired by Marguerite who urges him to
write, it is an art of bridging two temporalities by a bodily text metonymic of his sexual
act with the Jewish woman which is one of sado-masochism and jouissance. Marguerite
serves as a parallel to the exile writer in the sense that she is also an exile without a
nation and has had a traumatic past.

Marguerite is symptomatic of the masochistic self

who bears the pain of the past and is unwilling to forget. Through the rhetoric of literal
sexual intercourse between the two exiles, the writer is able to penetrate into the past
ignited by libidinal energy. The Jewish female figure who cannot forget becomes the
source of empowerment enabling the writer to venture into the sado-masochistic
narrative act of self-torture putting himself on the center stage subject to public gaze.
The sexual discourse of the two exiles in the hotel room, the posture of naked bodies,
the gesture of flagging, ejaculation, female gushing and sucking mimic the libidinal
energy required of the narrative act which is also a discursive exposure of the naked self
under public gaze and voyeurism.
46

In a meta-theatrical language, the narrator describes

Susan Rubin Suleiman ed. Exile and Creativity (Durham: Duke UP., 1998), 4-5.

172

how the performing act of You is like a clown acting on stage and this You in fact is
interchangeable with He as they are the same one in split-

You need a stark, white stage with bright lights, so that he and a woman, both
naked, can roll about as everyone looks on.
You want to weep and wail in front of everyone, but dont make a
soundand get the honorable members of the audience to look on
helplesslyyou strut about with an elegant gait, and then, then slip and fall
and cant get up Its just a theater to show suffering, joy, grief and
lustAnd then, you quietly slip off with a young womanand you make
love standing up in the lavatorythen you noisily flush the toilet. You want
to flush yourself like this, to cleanse yourself, so that the world will
weepand you, by the window, mourn his loss of his self47

The exposure of the bodily self in its materiality through the language of sexual
intercourse under public gaze is in Barthes term savage. The language resembles
what Barthes describes as the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the
grain of throata whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the tongue (flesh), not
the meaning of language.48 The excessiveness of the language of the flesh under
torture to a certain extent makes Gaos writing also resemble that of Artauds of which
the main theme is one of writing and suffering. Artaud, one of the dramatists Gao
admires, attaches his utopianism of consciousness to a psychological materialism. To
him, the absolute mind is also absolutely carnal. Each statement Artaud makes about his
consciousness is also a statement about his body. He embraces the aesthetics of shock

47

One Mans Bible, 249-251.

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 182. The term savage narrative is counted as one of the
characteristics of postmodern narrative which refuses to submit to the discipline of structuralist narrative
theory. Lucy Herman & Bart Vervaeck, Handbook of Narrative Analysis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska,
2005),111. Lyotards idea of savage narrative stands in opposition to cosmopolitan or grand narrative.
Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory, 110-111.
48

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and believes the work of art has not only a directly moral function but a cognitive one.49
What makes Gao differ from Artaud is that pain and melancholy for him are only a
passage to freedom. Self-torture and flushing oneself into the toilet is also a process
of purification after which freedom could be obtained, as the narrator notes in Chapter
39, even while immersed in suffering and grief, one can still observe, so there can also
be freedom in suffering and griefingIt is this freedom that brings you happiness and
peace.50

Metaphorically, the writer alludes himself in many instances to a free-flying bird

and the womans womb becomes the place for him to wander. In Chapter 5, the
present-you compares himself to an infertile sperm roaming about in the maternal
womb after release from lust.51 Why a womans womb? Other than that the womb is
the first place of exile for man, the maternal womb as a place of moist and warmth is
life-giving and so are its correlative the female breasts, whether they are the big breasts
of nanny and of Marguerite or the small breasts of the skinny Chinese lover which
provide comfort. This is the place of chora, which Plato describes as a receptacle
nourishing and maternal, a place deprived of unity, identity, or diety, different from that
of the symbolic law, and effectuates discontinuities by temporarily articulating them
and then starting over again and again. According to Kristeva, the chora is the place of
drives involving pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and discharging energy that orient the
body to the mother.52 The writer, through the past-he, points out that the source of his
writing comes from his mother as it is her who teaches him to write.

49
50
51
52

The maternal or

Susan Sontag ed., Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings ( Berkeley: U of California P., 1988).
One Mans Bible, 303.
Ibid., 57.
Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language ( New York: Columbia, 1984), 25-30.

174

the feminine as the displacement of discursivity provides an important image

overarching the double temporality of the novel. The image of writing as discourse of
love and sex, pain and pleasure, desire and comfort is in symbolic exchange and
intermingled with the maternal and feminine. The writer lays bare the intricacy of his
complex desire and passion towards the maternal, female body, femininity, and writing-

and,

wet

Youre light, and float up as if youre weightless. You wander from country to
country, city to city, woman to woman, but dont thinking of finding a home.
You drift along, engrossed in savoring the tastes of the written language,
like ejaculating, leave behind some traces of your lifeyoure just a
melancholic piece of jazz, greedy and insatiable in that moist dark cavern
between a womans thighs. So, why is this pitiful little bird of yours
complainingYou want to cry, to throw yourself onto her firm breasts
with perspiration and smeared with semen, and to cry uncontrollably, like a
child needing the warmth of his motherYour mother was the first woman
you saw naked, through the half-closed door of her lighted roomcontented
and sleepy, you were her obedient child. She gently stroked you, and you
placidly allowed her to examine you all over with the palm of her hand. That
shriveled thing between your legs, she called it her little bird. Her eyes were
gentle as she stroked your head, and deeply moved, you wanted to nestle
against her, nestle against this woman who had given you life, happiness, and
comfort. You equated this with love, equated this with sex, equated this with
sadness, equated this with unsettling lust, and equated this with language.53

Kristeva suggests that the liberated person is able to move freely between the
feminine and the masculine, chaos and order, revolution and the status quo. In a style of
disjunctive time, fragmentary narrative and iterative mode of utterance, it is apparent
that Gao who defies the name of father and the order of the status quo, foregrounds an
exchange of symbolic identity with the feminine in his diasporic aesthetic mode of

53

One Mans Bible, 426-428.

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writing. The chain of women appearing in One Mans Bible and the image of the traces
of footprints on the snow written by the child seem to echo from a long distance the
chain of female figures and the ending snow scene in Hongloumeng. To Kristeva,
feminine writings of men have more revolutionary potential than those of women.
Culture is more upset when a man speaks like a woman than when a woman speaks like
a man. 54 Gaos writing certainly provides a challenge to critics with his radical
overlapping of two texts, that of the phenotext of the symbolic and genotext of the
semiosis. In the terms of Krisetva, the former is that part of the text which says what it
says, while the latter is that aspect governing the manner in which it communicates
indirectly or in which it is fissured by gap.55 The ambiguity and the embodiment of
subjectivity and self-expression through the womens bodies might lead critics to think
either that his work is literary misogyny or paradoxically overvaluing women which
makes him slanting towards self-orientalization.56 Taking into account the Chinese
traditional use of femininity as the literatis self-representation which reaches its apex in
Hongloumeng, it is suggestive that Gaos chain of feminine signifiers in the novel is an
ingenious rejuvenation of the Chinese literary tradition. As the overlap between sexual
and language desire in Gaos narrative is also symptomatic of feminist writing which is
underpinned by the psychoanalytical assumption of the relation between language and
the libidinal, Gaos exilic discourse could arguably be seen as a hybridization of the
aesthetics of the East and the West but bearing a signature distinctively belonging to the

54

Rosemarie Putnam Tong, Feminist Thought (Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), 205.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia UP., 1980), 6-7.
56
Carlos Rojass analogy in Without (femin)ism: Femininity as Axis of Alterity and Desire in Gao
Xingjians One Mans Bible is the case in point. In Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Vol 14, No.2
Fall, 2002. Traditional literati resort to the rhetoric of the mask in the form of meiren xiangcao (beauty
and flowers) as agency to express ones multiple-self, Gaos exposition of the multiple-self through the
use of multiple pronouns and his strategy to speak through the female body is arguably an ingenious
re-creation and a modern translation of the literary convention of the traditional literati. See Martin Huang,
Literati and Self-Re/Presentation (Standord: Stanford UP, 1995).
55

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writer.

4.6 Being in time

The problem of Kafkas bodily bridge often referred to in exile literature is that the
bridge symbolizes a failed exile who turns around its head and immediatley falls
together with the traveler down into the deep valley. Kafkas bridge serves as a parable
to remind the migr of the problem of exile and that he must creatively embrace the
past while moving forward into the present world full of possibilities.57 In Gaos One
Mans Bible, the implied I manages to speak to the ghost of Chairman Mao face to face
and virtually walk out of the specter of the nation. Having spoken to Maos corpse in
retrospect that he should not make every single person speak his words, the exile writer
physically got across to the other side and shall not return.58 The exile writers attitude
towards the present is close to what Said says, at home wherever one happens to be.
The present-you nearer the end of the novel roams around as a world traveler and lives
momentarily at the instant of time. In the last chapter, the writer dwells on the notion of
a process, a sense of becoming and a temporality that is forever on the move. For him,
eternity or transcendence is not the question and it is only in writing as a process that he
experiences the instant of time. To him, writing is a spiritual journey in which he can
obtain joy and fulfillment in the process. The exile writer embraces an anticipatory
voice and avows to continuously search for a virgin land aesthetic-wise and alludes to
the minimalist music of Schnittke which leaves many spaces and every phrase
conveys genuine feeling.
57

Hana Pichova, The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov & Milan Kundera ( Carbondale:
Southern Illinois U P, 2002), 1-6.
58
One Mans Bible, 405.

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Using this instant of time as the starting point, for you, writing is a spiritual
journey, either in deep reflection, or talking to yourself, and you obtain joy
and fulfillment in the process. Nothing frightens you anymore, for freedom
eradicates fear.59

The exile writer lives in the instant of momentary time as a piece of jazz, a saxophone,
and minimal music. Life to the momentary self is the savoring of illuminated shadow in
an instant, the momentary time in Perpignan in between France and Spain and the
observing of life, things and nature in the surrounding world. While the exile writer also
sees the trembling of the fragility of life in the trembling leaves, he shows his gratitude
and expresses his pleasure of exile in poetic language at the end of the novel. According
to Mark Curries analogy in About Time, the idea of presence as an authentic
temporality is deeply bound up with individuation and with self-ownership. The
characteristics of authentic being are linked to the future partly through death, because
nobody can do my dying for me, as Heidegger says, being-towards-death reminds
oneself that no one can do the living for one either. Being in the present is a moment of
vision and a present envisaging a future of a being-in death. While celebrating life, the
present-you is also aware of death as anticipation towards the future.60 In Chapter 59,
the present-you is engaged in philosophizing the meaning of life and death and
self-existence while engaging in a writer-signature book exhibition in Toulon on the
Mediterranean coast. Different from the protagonist in Soul Mountain, the present-you
no longer cares about the issue of self-identification, nor attempts to seek salvation
through religion. Even transcendence is not an issue. One simply lives in the moment of
time and embraces the frail life 59
60

Ibid., 445.
Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time, 56-57.

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Humans are frail, but what is so bad about being frail? And yours is a frail life.
The Superman aspires to replace God, and is fiercely arrogant in his ignorance,
so you may as well as be a frail, ordinary person. You dont plan anything, do
not rack your brains thinking about futile things, but simply live in the present,
not knowing how it will be from this instant to the next. Nobody can escape
death, and death provides an endDeath is an end that cant be resisted, but
the wonder of being human lies before that end, so squirm as you
transformIs this self that you are striving to create so very unique? Or, in
other words, do you have a self? You squirm in limitless karma but where is
all this karma? Karma, is just like frustration, is your creationYou may as
well return to the source of life: this instant that is full of life. What is eternal
is this instant.61

Other than saying that Gao the exile writer has transcended from the past to the present,
it would be more appropriate to say that the ending of the novel is an iteration of the
self-reflective mode of the narrative, and an exposition of the writers continuous
walking thoughts which is always on the road. Subsequent to the examination of the
past self, the present-you as an exilic being is examined from a philosophical
perspective through time. In Heideggerian terms, human beings existence is partly
defined by thinking about being, and being is always partly at a distance from itself. In
the act of reflecting upon itself, it will be reflecting upon the fact that it is, in its nature,
self reflecting. The keeping of spatial distance from the self goes alongside with the
turning back upon the self. It is a wrenching away from self in order to return to it. As
the writer says in Chapter 60, at that instant, he stops, turns back to look at you, and,
just like that, you and he go your separate ways. The cut off from the past self is to
return to a self to begin at this moment in time. The idea of becoming, the seeking of a
potential self of potentiality is to emulate the latent ability, a second-order capacity of a
61

One Mans Bible, 437-8.

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person to acquire, develop or regain another capacity in philosophical terms.62 The

temporal distance creates a split of self between the reflective consciousness and the
consciousness reflected on. The schism and the distance between the two modes of self
is a structure immanent to the self-reflective process.63 In this instant, the Chinese exile
becomes a self-reflexive and metaphysical being transforming his literal and physical
existence.

In philosophical terms, the thinking about being or self-questioning posits a

selfhood as being in time. The definition of selfhood focuses on the selfs potentiality
within a temporal progress, on the possibility of its coming into being. The embodied
subject in space and time is related to all other instants of ones existence. Other than
ones own time and conscious time, there is also social time and cosmic time. But
among the trimodality of the three temporalities, it is in conscious time that one chooses
to evaluate the past and plan for the future. It is in conscious time that one experiences
ones own unattenuated individuality. The notion of potential self is admittedly
dependent on whether one accepts the experience of time and bodiliness as relevant to
the determination of selfhood.64

At this juncture, the exile writer, having resolved with

his past through senses and language, is also having his self determined. As a world
traveler and an exile, the writer is not unaware of the social time. He notes that there is
no absolute democracy and freedom. Pointing out that Perpignan is a city-nation with a
constitution that enshrined magnanimity, peace and freedom and a city that receives
refugees, the exile writer is also aware that a local editorial remarks that eight hundred

62

Honderrich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 708.

Mark Currie, About Time, 57.
64
Linda Marie Brooks, Alternative Identities: The Self in Literature, History, Theory (New York:
Garland Pub, 1995).
63

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years of democracy and freedom, today under threat.65

The writer is conscious of the

nature surrounding him, the leaves and sunlight and the illuminated shadow which
exists in cosmic time. But it is after all life consciousness which turns sufferance into
celebration. If there is a soul mountain, to the Chinese exile writer, it is his
consciousness and self-awareness, the guarding dim light and tinkling bells
appearing repeatedly in his work which enlightens him and is his god, as he says at the
end, it is this consciousness of your self, this awareness of your own existence, that is
to be thanked, for it was through this that you were able to save yourself from your
predicament and suffering.66

65
66

One Mans Bible, 445.

Ibid., 446.

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CHAPTER FIVE

HOMELINESS AND UNHOMELINESS

A Czech exile writer points out that in the metaphysical sense, exile is the
prerogative of all men. The real choice is not between ones native land and exile,
neither is it between life and death as the dyad coexists and it is not up to one to choose.
The question for man is whether he can accept a life or death that is not his own and
imposed on him by every possible means. Either he decides to lead his own life or else
he accepts an alien life. To live ones own life means to protect a home within oneself.
Only in our own lives are we at home. The Czech exile writer claims that every artist
and thinker has had the duty and privilege of delineating contemporary man, of
throwing away those masks which he has accumulated knowingly and of revealing his
unique authentic face. For a writer, his job is first and foremost literature which acts as
an agent, as a revealer of life, of the meaning of being, both in general and particular.

This description sounds most familiar and can aptly apply to Gaos idea of exile as it is
his prime concern to live an authentic life which allows creative freedom without
political interference and prohibition, enables the unmasking of self and history, and the
questioning of self as an existential being. For Gao, to protect his integrity as a writer is
to protect a home within him. In other words, writing becomes the exiles home in a
metaphorical sense. In One Mans Bible, we visualize how the writer redeems his past
by unmasking the historical self who had been subjected to ideological interpellation
1

John Glad ed., Literature in Exile, 15-17. Jan Vladislav raises these points in the conference of exile
writers as documented in Glads book.

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and the struggle of the conscious being against the collective unconscious. At the end of
the novel, we envisage an exile writer feeling at home with himself as a world traveler.
But what is to happen next? The exile writer ends the novel with a return flight to
France. The question to address is how does the writer live a life and establish his
home as an exile playwright in the adopted country. What is the agency at work
which sustains his existence as an exile playwright? How shall the exile narrative
continue for an exile writer who stubbornly adheres to the ethic of I express therefore I
exist? What is the symbolic negotiation between homeliness and unhomeliness in
terms of the theatre assemblage of the exile writer?2 Said says that exile is compelling
to think about but terrible to experience. The irony of exile is that together with the
pain exile also brings along pleasure, a particular sense of achievement one derives
from acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be.3 The irony lies with
the idea of making real what is considered to be an unreal state of existence of exile,
and of finding a place for oneself out of the displacement, a sense of homeliness out of
unhomeliness. In the case of Gao as an external exile, theatre becomes an agency for the
exile playwrights self-expression, to make the unreal existence real and a home for the
displaced self.

In Gaos pre-exile plays as mentioned earlier, we see that the theatrical spaces are
largely set in the open, be it the social space of the train carriage, the bus stop, the city
and the rural setting, or the open stage setting in the theatre. The playwrights exile
2

I ask these questions in the broad sense as to how Gao represents his exile identity through dramatic
representation in his post-exile years starting from 1987 onwards. For assemblage, I refer to Deleuze and
Guattaris term mentioned in chapter 2. A home as an assemblage is how we make a place our own, how we
arrange artifacts, qualities and affect to express ourselves. Assemblages such as home are less objects and
qualities than lines and speeds. According to the theorists, assemblage elements include discourses, words,
meanings and non-corporeal relations that link signifiers with effects, in other words, a collective
assemblage of enunciation.
3
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Exile and Creativity, 1-2.

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imperative is seen in the embedded desire to move on and cross borders. Conversely,
Gaos post-exilic plays are largely set in an imaginary space of a home or an enclosed
place conjuring a sense of imprisonment and enclosure. Escape (1990) is about the
protagonists seeking fatal escape inside a warehouse; Between Life and Death (1991)
Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992) and Weekend Quartet (1995) are set in a domestic sphere
while The Man Who Questions Death (2000) is about a man locked in a museum. The
Nocturnal Wanderer (1993) apparently has an open setting but the theatre space is
encroached with the make-shift home of the tramp. How are these homes or places of
confinement represented on the foreign stage a signification of the existential state of
being of the exile writer? In what sense is the theatre a supplement of the writers
cognitive narrative and how does the writer seek to make theatre in the adopted country
his home across cultural borders?

5.1. Another kind of theatre assemblage

To answer these questions, it would be helpful to map out in brief the scenario of
the contemporary theatre in France and how Gao posits himself in the midst of the local
theatre arena. In gist, Gaos double role as a playwright and drama theorist/director has
made his liaison with the local theatre a dialogical one as he does not only produce play
scripts but is also unequivocal in putting forward his idea of theatre. In his seminal
paper My drama and my key delivered in 1991 at a conference on Asian modern
literature and drama held at the University of Paris VII, he precisely sums up the
problem of the French contemporary theatre, that is, the local theatre in the 80s has
become one which is at the service of the experimentation of directors who have taken
the center stage since their uprise in the last century and continued to act predominantly
184

in the local arena. Brecht and Artaud, with their respective theories in performance
technique, have greatly impacted the European theatre. While attention is being drawn
to performance, language as an agent of the new theatre is much neglected.4 Although
Gao also theorizes his idea of performing technique and puts forward concepts such
as the neutral actor and the tripartite method, as a playwright/writer, his utmost
concern is still on language. In Another kind of theatre he pleads that more attention
should be given to play-writing and reminds that the rise of the avant-garde theatre of
the West in the 50s is conducive to plays produced by Beckett and Ionesco, but by the
60 and 70s, following the rise of the director-oriented plays, the status of drama on
stage gradually declined. Despite the revival of interest on the scripts in the 80s, the
attention is not so much on the production of new scripts, such as that written by the
local writer Bernard-Marie Koltes (1945-1989) had not received the attention he
deserved, but a reversion to scripts that had been discarded and a rush to present new
interpretations of classical plays, such as that of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy.5

Gaos observation of the development of the contemporary theatre is precise and

his promulgation of the importance of new scripts is more to pinpoint the problem than
an adherence to self-promotion. In the 50s, Brechts Berliner Ensemble visited France
and brought with it technique for engaging the audiences enthusiasm while also
4

Gao, Meiyou zhuyi, 230-231.

Gao, The Case forLiterature (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007),159; Meiyou zhuyi, 189. Koltes was the most
successful young French dramatist of the 80s with four new plays all directed by Patrice Chereau, a
well-know director who also directed the first French performance of Heiner Mullers Quartett in 1983.
David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 257, 270. The
revival of past works and their appropriation as a hype in the contemporary theatre is conducive to an
expansion of the idea of translation from its traditional omitted sense to including the rewriting of all forms
or the recontextualization of the work of art. This new idea of translation is conducive to Derridas notion of
iterability which unsettles the stability of the original text and casts it into an open exchange with its
translation. Such an idea demolishes the importance of playscript or the playwrights role as the author and
readers are no longer in a hierarchical relation whereby the author imparts meaning to the reader. Mark
Fortier, Theory/Theatre An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 89.
5

185

positioning them to consider a case from a distanced, objective perspective, ie., the
alienation effect.6 In concomitant, Eastern theatre including the Peking Opera was also
introduced to France audiences in the same period altogether with Anglo-American
theatres and playwrights.7 Foreign influence together with the continuous development
of Artauds theatre of cruelty which called to do away with the script enhanced the
importance of acting styles and effected a shift away from the notion of individual star
performance towards ensemble production. The single-author script was no longer the
sole mover of the drama on stage. Body language, mime and mask, or the equally potent
language of objects, were held to communicate more complex meanings, more
effectively than the word alone. Eastern theatrical traditions offered whole languages of
gesture and movement which attached different meanings to the different kinds of
movement of different parts of the body, reaching the same complexity and subtlety as
the West had brought to the elaboration of its verbal codes. Performance hence became
a collaboration between actors, playwright and director in which the latter increasingly
took the major part, inventing and disseminating new acting techniques.8 But what
needs to supplement here is that the changes in the contemporary theatre which gives
heed to performance than drama text is also to change the audience habit of theatre
participation, namely, to advocate for an open, eager and active participation of the
audience in their acceptance and decoding of the signs presented to them. Alongside the
introduction of the Brechtian theatre to France in the 50s, the French theorists such as
Barthes also had a role to play in contributing to the transformation of the local theatre

According to Brecht, the alienation effect is a technique of taking the human social incidents to be
portrayed and labeling them as something striking that calls for explanation, something not to be taken for
granted and allow the spectator to criticize constructively for a social point of view. Eric Bentley, The
Theory of the Modern Stage (London: Penguin, 1990), 91.
7
Jennifer Birkett and James Kearns, A Guide to French Literature: From Early Modern to Postmodern
( New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 265.
8
Ibid., 258-259.

186

through their re-reading of theatre as a process of signification. In Barthes re-reading,

Brecht idea of theatre as social sign or gestus becomes one of an external material
expression of the social conflicts. In reading the Brechtian theatres costume as a type
of social sign, Barthes construes that the costume is nothing more than the second term
of a relation which must constantly link the works meaning to its externalityin this
way theatre involves a politics of the signEach theatrical gestus should aim for
clarity of argument.it is a roletheatrical action is explicitly representation rather
than presence, and the actor has a double role on stage as both character and
actor/demonstrator. However, Barthes also unfixes the signification of Brechts gestus
by pointing out that, Brechts theatre contributes to the art of livingcontains no final
meaningeach of which possesses a sufficient demonstrative power.9 While Barthes
interpretation is to point out the impossible signification in theatre which is an example
of control in the face of infinite dispersal of significance, he also implies the need for
the active participation of the audience so as to give effect to the signification process.
Coincidentally, such impossibility is also a trait of Gaos post-exile plays which give
heeds to the importance of language and yet the theatre assemblage of language is to be
questioned and dismantled at the end. While Gaos Brechtian edge is seen in his idea of
a theatre language, which should be structured within it a theatricality such as the
chorus of Greek tragedy or the philosophical soliloquy spoken by the characters of
Shakespeare, he also transforms Brechts politics of signs into a poetics of signs which
seeks to express a psychological field considered by him as a kind of theatricality.10
If the costume of Brechtian theatre is a social sign which is to become one of an
external material expression of the social conflicts, the props and costumes used in

9
10

Mark Fortier, Theatre/Theory, 24-25.

Meiyou zhuyi, 246.

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Gaos theatre is a sign or an external material expression of the inner conflict or the
psycho-scape of the actors. In Another Kind of Theatre, he says that the stage prop
to him is a lived object, of which the performance of an actor is to bestow it with life, so
that it becomes a character with whom the other characters can interact. In Between Life
and Death, the leg and hand hanging in midair is materialized as projections of the
female protagonists self; while the cardboard house evokes a string of childhood
memories. The wood fish stroke by the daoist figure in Dialogue and Rebuttal is to
represent the human head.11 If Brechts gestus is to engage the audience to think and
participate in social criticism, Gaos theatrical use of props is to provide an externality
to make an artistic statement across to the audiences with an effect to alienate the
audiences so that a self-distancing effect is also activated in them.12 If an actor in the
Brechtian theatre plays a double role on stage as both character and actor/demonstrator,
that of Gaos theatre is to play a tripartite role comprising the conscious I of the actor
as a subject, the actor/demonstrator as you and the character as he. Gao also
highlights the demonstrative act of the actor, but this is not the kind of social
demonstration that Brecht advocates. As Barthes points out, Brechts demonstrative
theatrical action is explicitly a representation rather than a presence. For Brecht, the
demonstrator, such as a witness of a street scene, is to find a point of view that allows
him to recount the car incident, to imitate the drivers excited voice, in short , a social
attitude to cast his judgment while acting.13 The demonstrative act referred to by Gao
is one of the theatrical announcements of a Peking opera artist who declares his/her role
or name prior to his/her acting. It is a performative act and an actualization of the
declarative function of language. In linguistic term, a declarative sentence is a speech
11
12
13

Meiyou zhuyi 188, 248.

Gao Xingjian & Gilbert Fong, Lun xiju, 5.
Eric Bentley, The Theory of the Modern Stage, 90.

188

act that has the performative function of changing the state of affairs in the world.14 For
Gao, the speech act performed on stage is always a demonstrative presence. Different
from the rhetorical use of I in narrative of which the point of reference does not
necessary belong to the here and now, an actor/actress making declaration on the stage
is always performing in the present.

An actor, in his deictic act of pointing to

something, is able to bring the audiences back to a definite time and space such as
ancient China, and to a dream by saying, this man has just had a dream of seeing
himself in blood.15 Gaos theory hence is different from Brecht who prefers the
representative, a speech act which describes states or events in the world or the
condition conducive to a happening through a reporter or witness. Gao transforms his
predecessor by referring to a linguistic concept than a social theory in underscoring his
idea of demonstration. For Gaos actors, in frequently switching his/her speaking
positions to address himself/herself as the second/third person, the demonstrative effect
is one of the psychological and cognitive realm.

While Gao has seemingly picked up the epic elements of the Brechtian theatre
by espousing a strong sense of self-consciousness, self-alienation, distancing and
heeding to the effect of the strange and surprises, 16 it is not Brechts concrete
dramaturgy but the absurdity of the New Theatre epitomized in the work of Ionesco and
Beckett which he embraces. An article on the French theatre written by Gao in late 70s

14

Jack Richards etc, Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics (London: Longman,1992),
343.
15
Meiyou zhuyi, 247.
16
Bradby, Modern French Drama, 98-100. According to Bradby, the Brechtian hype in France in the
60s is conducive to the anti-Aristotelian edge of his dramaturgy which defies an over-emphatic acting
style prevalent to the French theatre in the forties and fifties. The French is also attracted to the use of
masks, folk tales in Brechts dramaturgy and his modern repertoire imbued with the ease of Ancient
Greek and Elizabethan theatres, other than the Marxist notion of decentralizing theatres to the regions for
communication with a popular audience.

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is reflective of his predilection for the theatre of the absurd or the so called avant-garde
theatre. In the article, Gao illustrates how Ionesco emulates the Artaudian use of
psychological materialism to express the absurdity of the bourgeoisie and inscribes in
his script a dramaturgy which mixes singing, puppetry, circus and masks. What is most
attractive to Gao is Ionescos use of language comprising word plays, displacement and
meaningless repetition which draws attention to its irrationality and leads to languages
own negation of itself. Despite the tragic tone of Becketts plays and their abstraction,
Gao explains that the acclaim given to his plays is conducive to its open text which
allows free decoding. What is more, the philosophical edge of Becketts play gives it a
sense of unity which is elevating and vividly metaphorical.17

In arguing for the importance of play writing, Gao the exile writer is at the same
time postulating a kind of theatre language which embraces a theatricality comprising
lived objects, tension of a psychological field built between the actors and audiences,
between acting and seeing and a language which seeks to break its limit through word
plays and subversive sentence structure. He construes that provided that a sentence
complies with a basic grammatical structure familiar to the listener, the sound itself
would appeal to the audiences who can make sense out of the nonsensical or illogical
words.

18

For Gao, theatricality also means spatial communication between actors and

audiences which would turn the idea of absence prevalent in contemporary theatre to
becoming an attainment or fulfillment.19 Though being a new comer to the French

17

Gao Xingjian, visiting theatres in Paris- an anecdote, Shiyue (October)No.3, 1979. 262-263. This
article was written pursuant to Gaos visit to France in 1978 serving as the interpreter of the cultural
exchange programme led by Ba Jin.
18
Meiyou zhuyi, 245-246. The idea of a language sense which is natural to the native speaker is
derivative from linguistic theories such as Chomskys idea of competence.
19
Poststructuralists argue that theatre is one of absence as full presence (of meaning) is unobtainable.
Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993), 510. Gao seems to suggest that the

190

theatre, Gaos observation of the lack of attention given to playwrights is acute. A

survey on the state of play writing and publishing in France in 1987 confirmed the
change in the status of the playwrights who were considered a specialist and in decline.
While the importance of plays was marginalized in a sort of specialist ghetto, large
theatres employed dramaturges who work on adapting foreign plays or non-dramatic
writings which served their interests tilted to staging shows of high visual impact and
lavish production highlighting the importance of director-designer teams.20 Despite a
minority voice, Gaos promulgation of the importance of scripts is not a lone voice as
echo is found in his contemporaries.

Despite the rarity of published plays in the 80s,

two playwrights were also unequivocal about the importance of dramatic texts. Michel
Vinaver emphasized the double nature of the dramatic text which is considered by him
produced both for representation and for private reading. As for Koltes, he pledged for
more new plays to be staged and fewer rewrites of the classical repertory. While
rejoices in the capacity of theatre to refuse the weight of the so called real, the other
realities Koltes pursued are to do with the enslaved black who is always lurking at the
edge of his dramas. Koltes considers the theatre a showing of the how and he also
plays with the logic of language and explores languages ability to model the constraints
of time and space.21 As for Gao, though he seemingly embraces the aesthetics of the

absence itself is the beginning and end. Getting the idea of absence across is a fulfillment in terms of
Gaos Zen aesthetics which non-abiding or formlessness is the gist. This issue will be discussed later in
this chapter.
20
Bradby, Modern French Theatre, 258-261. Cixouss association with the Theatre de Soleil founded in
1964 is a case in point. The theatre promotes production built up through collective improvisation and
addressing social, historical and political issues. In Portrait de Dora (1976), Cixous displays shifting
subject positions through the split subject of Dora who was the analysant of Freud. The performance is of
multiple stage levels, voice-over, film projections and lighting effects aiming to displace Freud from the
spotlight, and releasing Dora from the object-status in which it scientifically imprisoned her. Cixous says
that writing for the theatre enables her to move away from writing from the self to writing of others,
there was the stagewhere the ego remains imperceptible. Susan Sellers, Helene Cixous (Oxford:
Polity Press, 1996), 76-77.
21
Bradby, Modern French Theatre, 271,272. Koltes reinvents the classical theatre of speech and
presence such as that of Molieres comedy. He applies the idea of three unities in different ways through

191

absurd, Izabella Labedzka, a Polish critic, points out that his concrete idea of theatre
coded in his works which is equally rooted in Eastern and Western cultural traditions
has made his plays rarely sought after by theatres of the world. While Gao is insistence
of a non-compromising stance and refusing to sell antique, his dramatic compositions
are notoriously difficult to decode due to its complex contextual, aural and visual layers
and to translate them into language of the stage. His Escape and Between Life and
Death staged in Poland, with the actors wild gesticulations and overexcited utterances
had unfortunately discouraged the audiences from appreciating the plays in view of the
excessively expressive gestures and words, spiced with cheap exoticism or naturalism
which had made all his theory on theatricality to come to no avail. In case of an
unsuccessful performance, the critics are able to discover hardly anything more than an
elusive verbal message with its agonizing artificiality and unnaturalness.22 Labedzka
has in fact implicitly pinpointed a problem of Gao, that as an exile writer emulating a
lone voice and an individuality which refuses to adhere to any groups, there remained a
gap between his theatre theory and practice which is still awaiting to be tested and
explored.

Lin Kehuan of the National Theatre Company of China relentlessly points out that
the so called neutral actor and tripartite model of Gao is more of an ideological
postulation to underpin his play-writing technique than an acting method. Referring to
the poor reception of Diderots proposal in the 18th century of the need to raise the
exploration of time and space. As for Vinaver, his plays are to interweave private experience with
political and economic discourse, and address issues such as the legal system to mobilize the anxieties
caught in the sticky, quivering webs of contemporary life. His actors change costume and scenery in full
view of the audiences. Different settings and characters are staged in juxtaposition to build up a picture of
the complex machinery of the patriarchal state of the prison house in which the characters are trapped by
the powerful machinery of law and the media.
22
Izabella Labedzka. Gao Xingjians Idea of Theatre-from the word to the image ( Leiden: Koninklijke
Brill, 2008), 6,7.

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consciousness of actors who should embody a split between the acting self and the
character,23 he criticizes Gaos proposal for being idealistic and impractical by referring
to negative reviews of the Snow in August staged in Taiwan in 2002. Repeatedly
referring to the Western sources of Gaos inspiration of the idea of split, Lin contends
that the idea is not original of Gaos and he calls for evidence to prove the sustainability
of his acting method and theatre aesthetics.24 While Lins criticism is to reinforce an
observation of a gap between Gaos theory and practice, it at the same time brings out
two issues which are pertinent to the playwrights exile condition. First, unlike directors
such as Jerzy Grotowski who could develop his poor theatre concepts and techniques
through a theatre establishment, there is a practical problem for Gao to materialize his
acting methodology in a sustainable manner. Considering that it took Grotowski more
than a year to work with an individual and committed disciple to develop the details of
the actors physical score prior to the combination of the central element of the
performance with the context of torture and martyrdom intrinsic to Grotowskis play,
Gaos actualization of his acting methodology which centered on self transformation
and the development of a conscious self through cold distance and quiet meditation
would require no less experimentation prior to its formulation as a feasible and
sustainable technique. In fact, Gao himself has pointed out the difficulty in the process
of his experimentation which presumably involves a complex negotiation between the
psychological and physical.25 Second, Gaos strategy of pronominal shift, whether in
23

According to Marvin Carlson, the double consciousness of the actor, a central concern of acting theory
ever since Diderot may be interpreted as one among many manifestations of the peculiar dialectic that
fuels the theatre event through this ambiguous and uncanny figure of the actor who is the center of a play
forces. Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 514
24
Lin Kehuans seminal paper Tripartite: an aesthetic? Or a technique? in Hong Kong Drama Review,
vol 8 2009, 235-246. Examples of source influences quoted include French new novels, films, and
technique used by Russian Director Marco Zaharoff.
25
Meiyou zhuyi, 250. Gao expresses difficulty in his experimentation of the tripartite techniques in which
he tried to work out the process of change in the I/you/he versus self/actor/character. The difficulty lies
with the process which is psychological and not purely physical. He has tried Taiji quan and meditative

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terms of narratology or a dramatic tripartite model, bespeaks the writers exilic

imperative and desire to break new ground, to seek a third space beyond the dichotomy
of the West and the East so as to posit a creativeness of an independent individual. Such
a desire is seen in his affirmative stance of a possibility of another kind of theatre, as he
says, Western opera, dance drama, and mime, and Eastern storytelling, singing.and
stalls selling dog-skin plaster can all count as theatre. My various experiments in theatre
are efforts to completely destroy the barriers between all of these and to modify and
adapt each of them for my own use.26 The problem is that theatre as a genre different
from narrative is a social institution which is beyond the encompassment of an
individual and necessitates the collaboration of a collective, no matter how small that
unit is. Gao has ingeniously defined drama from a structuralist perspective and reduced
it to elements including action, process, changes, discovery, surprise, and contrast,27
but other than these intrinsic qualities, theatre is also by nature a social space of
representation which involves complex recoding and decoding of a collective including
production teams, performers, audiences and critics.

Deleuze and Guattari allude to Artuads idea of the unconscious as a body without
an organ (BwO) which is always undergoing the drama between coding and decoding.
For the theorists, desire is an immanent locus of decoding which exceeds and subverts
any and all socially imposed representations, but it is also a locus of coding where
social representations capture desire and assign it determinate aims and goals. The
theorists argue that BwO stages a struggle between a schizophrenic desire to split and a
posture to help actors to loosen up and achieve self-observation. He considers that the key of this
self-distancing is after all a language consciousness which is beyond psychoanalysis. It is neither
Buddhist meditation nor the metaphysics of daoist jingguan.
26
The Case for Literature, 155.
27
Meiyou zhuyi, 187, 243.

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paranoic ascription of fixed meaning under conditions. While desire always seeks to
disorganize and free itself from instincts and habits so as to experiment with new modes
of perception and action and new mode of existence, it is always in battle against the
stratification on the plane of organ-ization.28 Lin Kehuans demand for substantial
evidence to prove the feasibility of Gaos acting method aptly serves to illustrate critics
demand of determinacy and fixation for social representations. As Gaos acting theory
is a decoding of the tradition of Chinese opera, the artistic convention as an
organ-zation and a system of sign-function by sedimented habit, codification and
representation, demands the succumbing of the decoded to a codification process. Lin
emphasizes that the opera artists consciousness is always present and there is no linear
development in operatic acting from the you to the he. Referring to Gaos own
words that his tripartite model is feasible for theatre in the East and West, Lin claims
that his idea is more ontological than practical. He escorts Gaos methodology from, in
the theorists terms, a plane of reference of science/knowledge to a plane of immanence
of philosophy.29 In this regard, Lin is not entirely wrong. Gaos aesthetics is seemingly
an artistic exchange of his philosophy of life of which he seeks to construe a theory to
objectify and distance the self which by its nature is chaotic, unknowable and
imperceptible. 30 The pragmatic difficulty of Gaos work apparently lies with its
embodiment of both performance and theatricality. The writer himself is pre-occupied
with his double role in the scripting stage as an actor virtually rehearsing a speech act
through talking to the recording machine and a playwright geared to orchestrating a
mis-en-scene in highly formulated codification. According to a theorist, the distinction
between theatre and performance is that the former is a narrative, representational
28
29
30

Charles J., Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 58-61.

Ibid.,60.
Meiyou zhuyi, 250.

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structure that inscribes the subject in the symbolic and theatrical codes, while the latter
undoes these codes and competencies, allowing the subjects flow of desire to speak.
The first builds structures that the second deconstructs. In performance, the actor is a
source of production and displacement, the point of passage for energy flows (the
gestural, vocal, libidinal) that traverse him without ever standing still in a fixed meaning
or representation, whereas theatricality is the bonding of this dynamic of performance
with theatre in endless play. 31 In Gaos writing act, the double process of
construction and deconstruction has already been built in and become an intrinsic whole
of the play. Gaos theatricality of codified signs built upon a deconstructive endless play
of speech flow makes his theatre home an unhomely one, posing challenges and
difficulties for readers intending to decipher the signification process.

5.2 Escape or no escape

In Gaos two auto-fictions, the idea of home for the protagonist in its physical
sense appears to be more unhomely than homely. Home in the past is always makeshift
and always on the move. The home in the writers childhood memory, whether it is the
British style house of the grandfather, the old house with a well of the maternal
grandmother, the old courtyard compound at the back of the bank where the
protagonists father worked had all been demolished. What has disappeared is also the
entire household. The protagonists mother died in her thirties while receiving her
re-education in the labor camp. His father attempted an unsuccessful suicide and despite
his survival in the Cultural Revolution, he could not save himself from terminal illness.

31

Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre, 511.

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The shabby home with water seeping in the rural commune during the Cultural
Revolution in which the he-protagonist started a new life was as precarious as the
marriage which turned out to be a nightmare when the schizophrenic wife sought to
confess against the husband. The writers single bedroom apartment in Beijing was
under surveillance both during and after the Cultural Revolution. Home for the writer is
a correlative of restless drift, haunting threat and claustrophobic fear like the panoptic
cow eye inscribed in the tree trunks in the dreamscape in Soul Mountain. On the other
hand, the idea of home also conjures a sense of loss configured in images reminiscent of
a past within the mnemonic landscape. The idea of home which houses personal
memory of a traumatic past inscribed with politics continues to circulate in the writers
post-exile dramaturgy of which the theatre assemblage is apparently imbued with an
ambivalence of self-expression and self-alienation.

A sense of confinement and no escape seems to prevail in the dramaturgy of the

writers post-exile plays in the form of theme and variation. Gilbert Fong, the
commentator and also translator of Gaos plays, notes that spiritual claustrophobia is a
recurring theme in Gaos work and a haunting presence in his life and art. The tension
between the desire to escape and the dread of inability to escape creates anxiety. The
Gaoian neurosis is derived from the endless struggle for deliverance and horror of being
stifled and dying of asphyxiation.32 Mabel Lee also notes the biographical resonance of
the post-exile plays which provide another arena other than the novels to articulate the
writers personal trauma and thoughts.33 How far is the theatrical assemblage on the
foreign stage an avenue for the exiles psychotherapy? Is the exile writer capitalizing on
32

Gao Xingjian, Gilbert Fong Trans. Escape and The Man Who Questions Death (Hong Kong: Chinese
U P. 2007), 109-110.
33
Ibid., xi, xii.

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a long-gone history as symbolic resources for self-stigmatization as a victim? In

psychoanalytical terms, there is a defense mechanism including selective perception,
memory, denial, avoidance, displacement and projection by which we keep the
repressed bottled in to avoid knowing what we feel and cant handle knowing. Of all the
defense mechanisms, regression is a return or reliving of a painful or pleasant
experience and is a complex mechanism as it provides defense against facing present
difficulties as well as opportunities to heal a wound. The return of what has been e
repressed brings anxiety as it reveals issues in play such as the painful, frightening and
guilty experiences which are the sources of anxiety. 34 The breaking down of the
defenses and the returning of the repressed through language is a painful and yet
necessary process if one is to effect a basic change in life.

The fact that the exile writer engages himself in the retrospective act of writing
One Mans Bible a decade after his exile bespeaks the strenuous struggle it requires to
walk out of the shadow and expel the ghosts of the past. In the novel, the present-you
speaks to his alterity, the conjured image of the Jewish woman, about the traumatic past
and manifests the sadomasochistic act to write about the garbage of the past in the
virtuality of sadomasochistic sexual act under the voyeuristic gaze of the readers to
whom the writer implicitly laments that you who would not understand his pain. The
protagonists monologue on the ethic and eros of recounting on the past deeply reflects
the neurosis of the inner conflict of the writer-

You say Margarethethe story of the new people is terrifyingthe pristine

kingdom of that brand-new society was nothing but a huge fraudYou

34

Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today (New York: Garland Pub, 1999), 17-19.

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should articulate your experiences in writing, leaving traces of your life, just
like the semen you ejaculate. Surely blaspheming the world will bring you joy!
It has oppressed you, and you have the right to seek revenge like thisYou
should regain your equilibriumthe world is like this and continue to be like
this.You have already fallen in love with this sadomasochistic prostitute
and cant help thinking of her, her moistness and smell, which arouse your
lustSince it is impossible to extricate yourself from it, simply sink into
itThat you are no match for the world and can only take refuge in written
word for a little solace and joy is like Margarethes telling you about her
suffering in order to exorcise it, even though doing this is unbearable.35

If exile is harder to experience than think, exorcising the past is harder to do than say. In
the post-exile plays, the imaginary door of confinement and escape continues to resurge
and carries strong symbolic impact. The image of door or border-crossing symbolizing
the liminality of life and death remains part and parcel of the writers theatrical
assemblage in the adopted country. The Man in The Other Shore crossing the imaginary
door ends up in fatality. In the first post-exile play Escape, three people, namely the girl,
young man and the middle-aged intellectual take refuge in a warehouse but the heavy
pounding on the door at the end suggests that the warehouse provides no shelter to fend
off inescapable death. Momentary escape indoors provides an arena for the
protagonists philosophizing of politics, idea of escape, subjectivism and life and death.
Under a totalitarian state of irrational killing, home provides no sanctuary for the
innocent. The middle-aged intellectual recounts that an old man wanted to save his
flowerpots from the burning smoke gunfire but turned out not being able to save his
own life from the misfiring bullets. Even the life of an animal cannot be spared. The
only event of death which obliquely takes place is the shooting of a dog off stage by
gunfire. The student who deliberately drives off the dog outside the door to test his
35

One Mans Bible, 137-140.

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safety is indirectly accountable for the dogs death. This incident reminds us of the dog
abandoned by the male protagonist in Lu Xuns fiction Regret for the Past who
abandons the dog prior to ending his marriage with his wife. The dogs abandonment
serves as a prediction of the latters fatal ending. Individualism in the name of
modernist kitsch or ideological pursuit seemed to be a subject of criticism of the
conscious Chinese intellectual despite the passage of time. While Lu Xuns skepticism
is implicit, Gao lays bare his criticism against the students heroic self-image in the
explicit dialogical exchange between the middle aged man and the student. While the
student admonishes the intellectual for being individualistic, cynical, escaping
responsibility to the nation, leaving the nation to perish and doing nothing except
philosophizing, the intellectual retorts that student protest is only a political card, he is
only a bystander on the road and responsible only to himself and not to the collective,
he has no-ism and queries how far the nation has been responsible to the people. If this
nation is designated to perish, let it be.36

When confronted with the imminence of a death threat, the male and female
protagonists turn inward to emulate their desire and fantasy. The seemingly irrelevant
sexual act could be explained by the Freudian theory of eros as the polar opposite of
death drive and a displacement of ones fear against imminent death.37 The female
students body becomes an agent of temporary sensual fulfillment to counteract the

36

Luo Qing criticizes the writers blaming of the students instead of the intellectual who had in fact played
an important role in the June Fourth movement. This is a complicated political issue beyond the coverage of
this thesis. But Gaos self-criticism of the nave self to play a heroic role in the Cultural Revolution despite
good intentions partly serves to explain his stance in this play. It is presumably the writers own painful
political experience in the past that induces him to take such a stance. For Luo Qings discussion, see his
seminal paper Ritual and Political Allegory in Gao Xingjians Escape in Hong Kong Drama Review, vol
8 2009, 243-258.
37
Freud puts death instinct as the polar opposite of eros in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Graham
Richards, Psychology: the key concepts (New York: Routledge, 2009).

200

liminality of life and death. At this juncture, the body of the female protagonist who
playfully acts as the goddess of liberty in the midst of the death threat simultaneously
symbolizes an embodiment of a life-giving hope and an imminent death-drive.
Apparently conscious of her body being used by the male as an object of desire and a
sacrifice to enable a symbolic exchange of the males heroic self-image or sanctuary for
escape, the girl condemns the male protagonist in an outburst at the end of the play as
selfish, egotistic and hypocritical. The condemnatory edge of the play switches from
one against autocracy to the male subject from the female perspective. As the female
character is created to voice as the male writers alterity, her criticism could be seen as
the writers self-reflexive struggle against his male-centered guilt.

Admonishment

from the point of view of the female as the subjects alterity is prevalent in Gaos
post-exile plays-

Youre all depressed. When youve dumped your troubles onto women,
everyone of you is a heroyou cant face yourselves, and the only thing you
can do is prove that youre a man, a real man in front of women, but you
wont allow a woman to prove herself..you only allow yourselves to have
your so-called freedom, spirit and will, and you wont allow other people to
have them. You just pass on your pain to others---Every one of you is selfish,
ugly, and wretched and dying to show off your ego38

Gao remarks that Escape is not a social realist play and other than running away from
political persecution, one has to run away from ones self, which awakened is precisely
what one can never run away fromthis is the tragedy of man. This comment has
appeared in Soul Mountain obliquely referring to Lu Xuns predicament about waking
the people asleep in the iron house indicates that the aporia of self is the ultimate prison
38

I refer to Gilbert Fongs translation of Escape in Gao Xingjian, Escape & The Man Who Questions
Death , 64.

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which engulfs every conscious being. It also reflects the obsessive self-reflexive
instinct of the writer as a diasporic intellectual. This first post-exile play also indicates
the diasporic aesthetic of Gao which encroaches on self-questioning rather than
nostalgia for home in the traditional sense.39 Juxtaposing his narrative writing, Gaos
aesthetic as seen in his theatre assemblage is also one which embarks on a narrative of
thought, monologue and symbolic representation through the female voice. Gaos
diasporic aesthetic suggests that he is engaging in a dissident voice which makes him
a new type of intellectual in the terms of Kristeva.

5.3 Assemblage of self-estrangement

Kristeva proposes in A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident a new form of

political engagement among intellectuals which would escape the old master-slave
dialectics outlined by Hegel. In her description of the new politics of marginality, she
indicates how a move away from the purely verbal level of politics to that of colour,
sound and gesture as alternatives would mobilize the forces necessary to break up the
symbolic order and its law. For Kristeva, the kind of intellectual who attacks political
power directly is one who relies on an insuperable opposition between the masses and
the individual governed by the master-slave dialectic which generates pity and guilt.
Whether euro-communist or not, the future of Western society will greatly depend on a
re-evaluation of the relationship of the masses to the individual or intellectual, and on
the intellectuals ability to break out of the dialectical trap between these oppositions
and to recast the whole relationship. She notes that there is something ignored by the

39

This first post-exile play was commissioned by an Amercian organization but the project was
immaterialized as Gao refused to make amendments to the script.

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machinery of politics which has been caught up in a large history that excludes the
specific histories of speech, dream, and jouissance. She alludes to the experimental
writer who experiments with the limits of identity and a playful language giving rise to
a law that is over-turned, violated and pluralized. Kristeva points to the language of
exile and contends that it is only by becoming a stranger to ones own country,
language, sex and identity that one can avoid sinking into the mire of common sense.
Writing is impossible without some kind of exile which is in turn already in itself a
form of dissidence. If meaning exists in the state of exile, it finds no incarnation and is
ceaselessly produced and destroyed in geographical or discursive transformations. She
considers what for true dissidence is thought which is tenable only as an analytic
position in the face of conceptual, subjective, sexual and linguistic identity. The real
cutting edge of dissidence is to bring about multiple sublations of the unnamable, the
unrepresentable, the void through the efforts of thought in language.40

How does Gao express his dissident voice on the cutting edge to becoming a
stranger to language, sex and identity and experimenting with the unnamable, the
unrepresentable, the void through the efforts of thought in language? In Between Life
and Death, the playwright continues his quest of self-questioning but lets the female
voice take the centre stage. The play, through the womans tormenting and deadly
experience of self revelation, exhibits the absurd and estranged existence of an interior
exile distanced from him/herself and from a world of life. Given the nature of womens

40

Juxtaposing the experimental writers, she alludes to the position of female entrapped within the frontiers
of her body and exiled by the general clichs that make up a common consensus and by the very powers of
generalization intrinsic to language. The identification of female identity with fragmentation, the drive, the
unnamable and particularly that of maternity points to the subversive potential for a woman to find a way
that is both natural and culturalto spread it over the social body to alleviate the strain.and form that
relationship with the symbolic and ethicJulia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader (Surrey: Basil Blackwell,
1986), 292-300.

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close association with the nether world, and the fact that, according to Kristeva, she is
the least afraid of death or the law, there embodied a certain aesthetic power in
speaking through the womans body.41 The exile writer speaks his voice through a
womans voice but is constantly reminding the readers of traces of the authors presence
through iterative of images and symbols in circulation among his works. As Gilbert
Fong has pointed out, the structure of the play in which the actress speaks in the third
person about her posited on the subjectivizing and neutralizing of the self. The
narrating I refer to her own story in the third person, distancing herself not only from
past experience but also from the actions and emotions of the present. Although the
I-narrator plays the role of a cold and detached observer, she cannot be without the
impassioned past and the worldliness of She.42 But apart from Gaos idiosyncratic use
of pronominal strategy, its the use of feminine voice as the site of enunciation in place
of the playwright which makes the speaking position of the play intricate. The iteration
of images and words often reminds the reader of the presence of the implied playwright,
and yet the impassioned experiencing self uttered in a womans voice is genuinely
feminine.

The dramatic setting of Between Life and Death takes place within the confinement
of the womans home. The fact that the key to the door is lost and the woman cannot
escape her home as the door is locked serves as an ironic reversal to a similar scenario
described in Soul Mountain (Chapter 62). The you-protagonist in the novel is first
engulfed by a sense of paranoia when he realizes that his door keys are lost but then is
overwhelmed by the pleasure of recognizing that he has nothing to lose in leaving the

41
42

Ibid., 296.
In The Other Shore, xxxii

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unlocked home as long as he is with himself. Abandoning home in turn enlightened the
self with a sense of freedom and distancing which enables him to walk the streets with a
renewed vision as a flaneur. In contrast, the key lost in the play serves to heighten the
fear of the female protagonist who finds no escape from her desperate situation of
having killed her husband and is forced to confront the reality of her existence. Her
illusive existence is dramatically manifested through the material dismembering of the
womans body, namely, with artificial arm and leg detaching from the body. Her
helpless and desperate situation is manifested by a rat crawling across the stage, an
animalistic image which often appears in One Mans Bible describing the past-he as a
fugitive running for his life during the political turmoil. The playwright, as if taking
heed of Kristevas proposal, posits the female protagonist in an analytic position
examining the authenticity of her fear at the threshold of life and death-

She wants to know if her fear is real. Maybe she only thinks shes afraid but
actually shes not? She must experience death once to find out what death is
and to feel its pain, in other words, a living experience of death, then, and
only then can she prove that she is still alive, and then shell know if life is
worth living, if its really necessary.43

In encountering her fear, death and her self-examination, the woman tells a chain of
half- illusive and dream-like stories about self and others, her relationship with her
mother and other women, perverse and estranged homo/heterosexual relationships.
The woman recounts her alienated and complex relationship with her mother; how she
punctured her own fingers with a knife trying to get her mothers attention but to no
avail; how she was raped by her mothers lover with the formers approval, used as a

43

Ibid., 56-57.

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plaything to spice up the sex life of her female lover, made herself a reified object of
femininity etc. The two strange scenarios of the girl puncturing her fingers and a nun
cutting open her abdomen and purifying the gut is mimed on the stage by other actresses
to highlight the female existential pain and self-purifying process. These episodes which
also appear in Soul Mountain (Chapter 38 & 48) serve different functions.

In the

novel, the raconteur lays bare the origin of the strange story about the nun extracted
from biji tale of the Jin Dynasty. The narrator remarks that what interests him is not the
political, historical, moral or religious interpretations of the story but its superb purity
and how the story can be retold. The story about the girl puncturing her fingers is told as
an imaginary act in the novel to manifest the psychology of She as the selfs shadow.
The imaginary blood-bathing imaginary act is told to express the imaginary womans
masochistic love-death attachment to the man who loves only for sex. In transposing the
episodes to the play, the enunciation is one which expresses the love attachment of the
girl to the mother. The gender shift of the embedded libidinal desire in the act means
more than an exhibition of the translation skill of the writer but bespeaks some
authenticity of human nature which is transsexual.

The gender specificity in the play is foreground through the gendering of the eye
which casts its gaze on the woman. In Soul Mountain, the panoptic eye described as a
huge eye inscribed in a tree trunk is asexual and explained by the I-protagonist as his
hallucination induced by inner fear and a scrutinizing force inside the soul. In the play,
the material representation on the stage of a mans eye staring behind and high above
the woman stands for the male gaze which makes the woman succumb to live like a
reified object. As the woman laments, she is always agitated, she can never have
peace, she suffers from all kinds of torments, they all stem from the mans eye in the
206

darkHis staring has been the cause of all her sufferings44 Subsequently, in a kind
of transference process, a mimetic and headless ghostly female figure appears on the
stage with a feminine eye painted on the palm, a symbol of the inner eye of the woman
trapped in her thoughts and feelings.

What follows this encountering of the womans

own inner eye is the womans monologue describing a graphic portrayal of a female
body floating and drifting in the dark sea like a corpse, a deadly experience which is
both ominous and yet liberating. The woman says in her monologue-

She saw herself just now, very clearly, naked, lying down and floating in the

nether world: she gradually moved up, and then she slowly went downby
surge after surge of black waves she couldnt touch or feelfrom an
unfathomable depthher body moved up againand then plunged into
deeper valley of darkness45

The woman, having apparently observed in her minds eye the experiencing Shes death
with her body drifting in the nether world, says at the end of the play about the loss of
thoughts, of words and feelings and that only a glimmer of secret light still exists. In a
metaphysical tone, the woman babbles on about the multiplicity of the meanings of the
world, the play, and the self pertaining to unfix any definite meaning. The woman then
shifts her voice to becoming the neutral actress concluding that the play is about no
more than the so-called self looking at her, looking at me. The play ends in irony with
the actress saying that it says nothing other than self represented through words, but
these words remain empty and hollow. The disclaimer at the end to negate meaning is
an idiosyncratic gesture of the playwright to demolish the assemblage suggesting that
what it signifies is nothingness save an experiential process of enunciation. The
44
45

Between Life and Death, 73.

Ibid., 75.

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self-referentiality of the play is hinted with a mimetic male figure appearing on the stage
at the end. The old man with a walking stick gesturing to catch the falling snowflake
reminds us of the Daoist figure in Soul Mountain telling the I-protagonist the riddle that
the soul mountain is there and not here. Somewhat similar to Soul Mountain, the
actresss narratorial voice concludes that, it resembles a riddle, but it has no answer. Is
it an illusion, no more than the ramblings in an idiots dream?46 The subtle difference
is that the playwright lays bare the illusiveness in the search for meaning in the play.
Theatre as an artistic medium which is by nature contingent and transient is an ideal
agency to impart the message about lifes illusiveness. Theatre time cannot be withheld;
each performance slips away, so does each life and each persons knowledge and
experience. In the phenomenological sense, it is less the signification of words but the
linguistic event and sensuous reality of the lived life delivered through theatre agency
which is to appeal to the perception of the audience for self-reflection.47

While the play can be read as one acted by a woman and about woman, it is after
all written by a male writer who strives to address multiple levels of meanings
switching between language, identity, sexuality and existence. The descent into hell
experienced by the spiritual exile in Soul Mountain is transposed to one experienced by
the woman in the play. The panoptic eye of an oppressive regime cast on the subject is
translated to the male gaze threatening the existence of the woman. The use of the
gendered body as the playwrights surrogate is dramatically effective as it opens up the
potential of the play to addressing gender issues which presumably transcend cultural
barrier and enable the playwright to communicate with his audiences. It should be noted

46
47

Ibid.,78.
Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre An Introduction, 30-31.

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that the Rond-Point theatre in Paris where this first French play of Gao staged in 1993 is
also the theatre which presented the first play by Marguerite Dura a decade ago. David
Bradby traces the publics interest in Duras works in relation to the developments in
psychoanalytic and feminist theory such as the writings of Kristeva. Duras work is seen
to be challenging the myths and structures of patriarchal society and seeking to create a
space for female desire. Her work displays the problem of finding a voice and a
preoccupation of shaping the various fragments of discourse that babble ceaselessly in
ones head together with an unstable nagging of memories. Duras play is closer to
monologue than dialogue, and in this regard Gaos one woman play shares a similar
trait with that of Duras. 48 When Gaos play was performed in Paris, newspaper
reviewers wrote that the play had created a prototype woman.49 According to Gao,
some female audiences told him after the performance that they thought the play was
written by a female playwright. He cites this to prove that he has no communication
problem with a Western audience.50 What makes Gaos play distinctive, other than the
theatricality of the lived objects on stage such as the figures miming gestures, is the
intricacy involved in the gender transaction. The actress speaking as a neutral character
as well as a womans character is simultaneously voicing from a male and female
perspective. Hence the actresss voice is both female and not female. A double
estrangement is embedded in the play as it is not only about the womans
self-estrangement addressing herself in a detached voice but also the playwrights
48

David Brady, Modern French Drama 1940-1990, 264. Monolgue is characteristic of Duras plays and
that of other new writings in the 80s grouped under the heading theatre du quotidian.
49
Gao Xingjian, Mabel Lee trans., The Case for Literature, 162. The play was first performed in 1993 at
Le Rond-point, Theatre Renaud-Barrault in Paris and subsequently in Sydney, Veroli (Italy), Gdynia
(Poland), New York, and, pursuant to Gaos Nobel Prize award, in 8 other countries/places (including
Hong Kong). Lun xiju, 200-207.
50
Gao Xingjian, Lun chuangzuo, 207.

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self-estrangement in seeking self-expression in the voice of a woman. The double

estrangement involves a double split in terms of the speaking position of the I and she in
temporality and the crossover of gender identity in spatiality.

5.4 Assemblage of nightmare

When speaking about a literature of recognition of unhomely lives, Homi Bhabha

construes that if there is to be a kind of world literature as proposed by Goethe more
than a century ago, it could be an emergent and prefigurative category that is concerned
with a form of cultural dissensus and alterity, where non-consensual terms of
affiliation may be established on the grounds of historical trauma. The centre of such a
study would neither be the sovereignty of national cultures nor the universalism of
human culture but a focus on those freak social and cultural displacements
represented in the unhomely fiction of writers such as Toni Morrisons Beloved, which
describes an untold history of a child murdered by her own mother relating to a larger
history of the huge numbers of deaths of black children in the late nineteenth century in
South Africa. Alluding to Morrison, Bhabha notes that to live in the unhomely world,
to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering
and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social
solidarity51 In the light of Bhabhas construed aesthetic of unhomeliness, how far
are the socially and culturally displaced freaks represented in Gaos plays which would
enlist him in a kind of unhomely world literature of social solidarity grounded on the
history of trauma?
51

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9-18. Tam Kwok kan, in his reference to the same passage from
Bhabha, points to the lack of a sense of homeness of the cultural condition in post-Mao China and the
post-war Japanese society. See Soul of Chaos, 211.

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Gaos Nocturnal Wanderer starts with a prelude staging a scene in the train coach.
The play begins with the train inspector checking tickets of the passengers in the coach.
All but one passenger, the traveler, escaped penalties from the inspector by absurd
excuses despite their inability to show their tickets. The traveler presumably alien to the
system shows his ticket but is asked to top up the fee of the second-class ticket if he
wants to stay in the first-class coach. The absurdity of the scenario hinges on the fact
that the one willingly abiding by the system got himself entangled in it. The idea of a
person absurdly trapped in an incomprehensible set up echoes throughout the play
centered on the experience of the Sleepwalker. The Sleepwalker, acted out by the same
actor playing the traveler, wishes to take a stroll freely at night but cannot escape having
his freedom disturbed by evil forces. He encounters a rascal who threatens his life, a
gangster who wants to control him and traps him into criminality, and a prostitute who
seduces him and tempts his soul. Evil is thrust upon the protagonist by a world
infested with crime and violence. Consequently Sleepwalker is lured into becoming a
murderer abandoning his sensibility, conscience and sense of morality. He even rejects
his head, which symbolizes thinking and reason, as he tramples upon it and breaks it
into pieces. At the end of the play, the sleepwalking protagonist is fascinated by evil and
even feels happy for himself in his newfound pleasures in violence.52 Rather than a
play about mans transformation from good to evil, the play in fact embarks on a higher
realm of consciousness. Sleepwalkers position of enunciation speaking in the second
person always addressing the you allows the actor to serve as an agent in the double
role of both performer and observer, simultaneously performing the mimetic act while
philosophizing on the meaning of the action.
52

Gilbert Fongs translated version of the play in The Other Shore, xxxvi-xxxviii.

211

Gilbert Fong notes that the play which ends with the book formerly read by the
traveler left open on the floor of the empty train coach suggests that the play is nothing
but the dream of the traveler. Does this open book mean that the nightmarish dream of
violence and criminality is after all an illusion of verbal act? Does it suggest that
interpretation of the play is one of the readers or audiences business? Is this open book
left on the floor the same as that which Marlow found abandoned in the jungle in Heart
of Darkness and unable to decipher? Marlow finds out later that the book he is unable to
decode is written in Russian. How is the audience to decode Gaos open text? Gao in his
own analogy of the play, says that it is about good and evil, about man, Satan, and God
and about mans self-consciousness. He further adds that his post-exile plays reveal the
nightmare in the inner world of man. What he strives to capture is the reality of the
feelings in the psyche and the true nature of human beings. What is this feeling in the
psyche and human beings true nature that he wants to communicate to the world
audience as an exile playwright? To begin with, the Sleepwalkers stroll reminds us of
the daydreaming walk of you-protagonist in Soul Mountain. The protagonist who lost
his door keys sought pleasure in strolling around the city feeling that in abandoning
home he has after all nothing to lose in exchange for a sense of freedom. The
you-protagonist starts to slow down his pace and experiment with a new style of
walking among the crowd feeling himself in a state of somnambulism. In the
description, the sleepwalkers free sense of autonomy is gradually transposed to a sense
of being washed down uncontrollably -

At this point he starts feeling happynormally its hard for him to slow his
pace but this time he manageshe begins to stroll, his entire sole coming in

212

contact with the ground and his whole body and mind relaxingHe also
discovers that its only he who is walking like a bear with the whole of his
foot.as he goes along this busy street he feels more and more lonely and
begins to sway as if he were sleepwalkinghe wants to slow his pace
butbeing knocked and jostled by the people behindjust like a discarded
cork swirling helplessly as it floats down the gutter after the rain53

While the experimentation of the dream walker and the subsequent situation that the self
is being helplessly set adrift in the novel reminds us of the pre-exile condition of the
writer under oppression, the stroll of the Sleepwalker in the play is deliberately set to
reflect the condition of a modern man as suggested by the reading voice bridging the
prelude in the train coach to the sleepwalking scene. To begin with, the Sleepwalker is
described as a modern man seeking escape from the hustle and bustle of life. While the
you-protagonist in the novel walks into the city to take a stroll, the Sleepwalker in the
post-exile play seeks a walk away from the city to disentangle himself from anxiety and
mental disturbance. The reading voice says-

Now you can take a stroll any way you like and without any purpose in
the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city, you have not been able to live
your life fullyJust like the phrase How are you? which you have to say
countless times in a single dayPeople suffer from so many nameless
anxieties all the time: they turn them over and over in their mindsand they
torment themselves mentally and physically, but how could they possibly
find a way out?54

Rather than celebrating the lightness of being in the exilic state of sleepwalking, the
writer poses a philosophical question right at the beginning of the play about modern

53

Soul Mountain, 393-4.

54

The Other Shore, 142.

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mans entanglement with their anxiety and troubles from which one can hardly seek
escape. When Sleepwalker first appears on the stage, he is presented as a nave being
happily engaged in his stroll and wants to tell the world that he is the only person
without any problems in this world. While Sleepwalker acts out different postures
congratulating himself that he is still alive and acting like a human being and still
thinking, he accidentally turns towards a black doorway and is dragged by a hand into
its shadow. Sleepwalker is interrogated by a gangster hiding in the doorway and is
absurdly lulled into some criminal conspiracy. But as the play develops, it reveals that
what really trapped the Sleepwalker is his desire to know the unknowable, the
temptation to think the unthinkable. The juxtaposition of the Sleepwalker with the
prostitute appearing on the stage selling her body indicates the state of being of a weak
self.55

Sleepwalker is trapped in the black hole of the doorway and some crime both

involuntary and voluntary. The criminal act is to occasion the self-interrogation of

Sleepwalker which turns out to be unbearable and so frustrating that he dramatically
strangles the tramp who is at his side and cant stop laughing. Sleepwalker says to
himself at the end of the play about forgetting this evil in ones heart which is not
erasable. The monologue is one of the ambivalence manifesting ones struggle to be free
of guilt and yet remain trapped in guilt -

55

In contrast to the idea of an autonomous and strong self prevalent in the period of enlightenment, the
noumenal self is considered as weak or nothing pursuant to the theoretical proposal of postmodern thinkers
such as Foucault who posits the self as nothing but historical construct, the accidental result of a particular
intersection of contingent systems of power-knowledge. However, some critics argue that in the midst of
the antihistorical and historical responses to the dilemma of the postmetaphysical self, the weak self is still
coherent enough for ongoing self-creation and world-creation through action. In other words, they consider
that a deepened awareness of the role played by history in recent theories can in fact provide a way to
salvage the self from the dead-end. See Linda Marie Brooks ed. Alternative Identities: The Self in
Literature, History, Theory, 12-14, 109-140. In the realm of theatre, the postmodern stage serves as an
agent in manifesting a phenomenology of absence which reveals a weak truth ridded with absence
marked by death and adrift in time. But instead of a complete denial of presence, the disclosure of theatre is
rather a play between presence and absence. See Mark Fortier, Theoy/Theatre, 30-31.

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youre not a shadow of other people, youre real and really existits a futile
struggle, youve tried to pitch evil against evilbut in the end you still cant
help falling into their trap. ..It doesnt matter whos the instigator, cases like
who did what to whom first are never resolved, and you still have to cover
your tracks whether youre guilty or not guilty, but how can you possibly be
not guilty? Anyway the verdict is not for you to decide..evil is in your heart,
you have to eliminate the feeling of evil in your heartyou are born with this
feeling, you cant eliminate it , everybody has it, theres no way you can be
innocent, but itll be alright as long as you dont think about it.56

At the end of the play Sleepwalker wants to return home and pretend nothing has
happened but is blocked by an anonymous person dressed in black. The couple grapples
with each other off stage and the play closes with a coarse scream suggesting an open
end as to whether the Sleepwalker succeeds in crossing over. If the play is, as Gao says,
an exhibition of the reality of the feelings in the psyche which reveals the nightmare in
the inner world of man, what does it reveal in the first place about the writers own
psyche and his nightmare and how does the displaced condition of the social freak in the
play echo with that of other unhomliness lives?

Lin Kehuan comments that Nocturnal Wanderer is the most complex play of Gaos
who is apparently over-ambitious in attempting to cover too many themes at the same
time.57 But a closer look at the play and considering it from the perspective of the exile
condition of the playwright would find out that the play is no more than a variation of
the same theme which is repeatedly foreground in Gaos post-exile work, that is, one of
self-interrogation and an attempt to walk out of the shadow of the traumatic past. At this
juncture, we may recall that in One Mans Bible, the writer seeks to speak face to face
56

Ibid., 186-187.
Lin Kehuans seminal paper Tripartite: an aesthetic? Or a technique? in Hong Kong Drama Review,
vol 8 2009, 235-246.
57

215

with Maos dead body exhibited to the public in the crystal casket who has taken off
his Commander-in-Chief army uniform and his Great Leaders mask. The writer
admits Maos success in making himself a Superman and making his ghost hovered
over more than one billion Chinese. What the writer wants to make explicit is that Mao
could kill people at will but he should not make everybody speak his words. The writer
declares that as long as Mao was revered as leader, emperor, god, he would not return
to that country. He adds that it was impossible for a persons inner mind to be
subjugated by another, unless that person allowed it. Having spoken to Maos ghost,
the writer declares that he finally accomplishes the difficult task of walking out from
Maos shadow-

You no longer live in other peoples shadows, nor treat other peoples
shadows as imaginary enemies. You simply walked out of their shadows and
stopped making up nonsense and fantasiesyour only fear is only
unknowable deathhaving savored virtually all of the sensations to be
experienced in life, you simply laugh at the futility of searching for
meaning58
The statement of the exile writer reveals the incessant nightmare which haunts him and
his strong desire to cut off the past and walk out of the shadow of the political trauma
symbolized in Maos icon. But to walk out of the shadow one needs to walk in and
relive the experience. This play written prior to the novel could be read as the writers
attempt to break his defense mechanism and address the trauma which mentally tortures
him. If we read the play as a thought drama and the construction of the theatre space as
the unhoming of the writers psyche, we would start to see that the dreamscape is
conjured only to have it dispelled. Images including the god-like gangster and the rascal
58

One Mans Bible, 409-411.

216

could be read as a symbol of the vicious controlling force, the prostitute as the
entanglement of desire and the tramp as the imaginary other of the sleepwalking
protagonist who laughs at himself. With the shadowy doorway symbolizing darkness
and evil forces, the sleepwalker is coerced under force to enter into the black hole
whereby he starts to be entangled in incessant troubles. The creation of the symbolic
images on the stage one by one and then the subsequent erasure of these figures through
the dramatic action of killing demonstrates the psychological effort of the playwright to
eradicate the nightmarish images which haunt him. While all these freak and
nightmarish thoughts come from within ones own mind, the symbolic act of
Sleepwalkers thrashing on the skull assembles his desire to destroy the undesirable
thoughts that dwell in him. The ambivalence lies in the ambiguity as to whether the
Sleepwalker could really walk out of his dream and forget this nightmare as if nothing
has happened.

As mentioned earlier, our defense mechanism helps us to guard against our

unconscious desire not to recognize or change our destructive behaviour but repression
of the unconscious would incessantly return such as in dreams. Temporal return to a
former psychological state and to relive the unpleasant experience would then carry
with it the opportunities for active reversal. Hence, the dreamscape manifested in the
play could be regarded as the playwrights effort to acknowledge and work through
repressed experiences and emotions so as to alter the effects of a wound and seek
psychological remedy for mental disturbances. According to Freud, the latent content of
the repression is embedded in our dreams. Dream displacement occurs whenever we use
a person, event or object as a stand-in to represent a more threatening person, event or
object. Hence the sleepwalker in the dreamscape can be regarded as a displacement of
217

the haunting self which the exile seeks to expel. 59 While the above interpretation
provides a way of reading the play, the conscious playwright is constantly making
efforts to make ambivalent and unfix the meaning of the dramatic text. As a case in
point, such ambivalence is embedded in the unclear stage instruction of the inside and
outside of the doorway. The dramatic action of the symbolic figures straddles both
inside and outside the shadowy doorway suggesting that there is no clear distinction
between this side and the other side. If the past is to be undone through regression or
evil is to be expelled through confrontation, how is it to be achieved if the passage to go
back is no longer clear? As Sleepwalker says at the beginning of Act III, you cant find
the way from which you came. How can you go back if youve forgotten how you
came? As mentioned above, the Sleepwalker explicitly construes that cases like who
did what to whom first are never resolved how can you possibly be not guilty?
Theres no way one can be innocent. At this point, is Gao espousing the truism that man
is born evil and seeking empathy of his Western audiences in the religious sense? As he
says, this play is about God and Evil? At this juncture, it would be helpful to recall
Gaos revelation on the collusion of the oppressor and the repressed in the course of
political trauma. While the play apparently dwells on some universal idea of man is
born evil, it also seems to address the more complex issue relating to the sense of guilt
derived from the master and slave instinct, that of the unhomely confessional impulse
of man to confess against himself and others so as to redeem his sin.

In One Mans Bible, the implied-I recounts how a girl the past-he fell in love with
in the university had betrayed him and reported his negative comments on a

59

Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 17-23.

218

revolutionary novel. In a rational and distanced tone, the narrator says that the girl did
not set out to harm him and in fact had feelings for him, the more passionate a woman,
the more she had to confess her emotions to the Party: it was like the religiously devout
needing to confess the secrets of their inner hearts to a priest.60 The implied-I even
admits that such a compulsion is also inscribed in him. He recounts that he saw his
mother and grandma burning deeds to houses and land when he was young. Had he in
fact been questioned, he probably would have reported them, because they were
colluding to destroy criminal evidence despite their love for him.61 To make the play an
allegory of modern man, the master and slave psychology and sense of guilt undergoes
transposition in Gaos play. Through the dramatic act of criminal conspiracy which
Sleepwalker is lured into, the play is transposed to becoming an absurd drama in which
an innocent man you is an everyman trapped on an evil course, being accused of
killing the woman and driven to knock dead the rascal and strangle the tramp
accidentally.

Kundera raises questions in The Art of the Novel that, when History (or what
remains of it: the suprahuman force of an omnipotent society) takes hold of manIn
the face of the Court or the Castle, what can K. do?62 Gaos Nocturnal Wanderer
echoes Kunderas remark and emulates the Kafkan aesthetic familiar to the continental
audience. As Kundera points out, it becomes a Kafkan situation when man becomes the
shadow of a mistake in the file, and is punished without knowing the reason for the
punishment. The absurdity of the punishment is so unbearable that to find peace the
accused needs to find a justification for his penalty. Kundera calls it the
60
61
62

One Mans Bible, 18-19.

Ibid., 16-17.
Kundera The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 99-120.

219

autoculpabilization machine when the accused seeks his offense. For Kafka, the
ontological hypothesis of the world is the bureaucratized universe. For Kafkans heroes,
there is nothing intellectual but only obedience and discipline. To a certain extent,
Gaos Sleepwalker is like Kafkans protagonist who is apparently also subjected to the
hypnotic eye of power, the desperate search for ones own offense, the condemnation to
conformism, the phantasmic nature of reality and the perpetual rape of private life.
However, the playwrights ingenious use of the split voice of the protagonist speaking
in a second-person position makes possible the double performance of an obedient self
and a thinking self.63 While Sleepwalker is absurdly trapped in the mechanism of a
criminal act and half-obediently carries out the order, he is also a conscious being
voluntarily submitting himself to his self-trial rather than being trailed by the Court as
in Kafkas fiction.

64

At the end of the play, Sleepwalkers confession of evil within

himself against which no body can escape from could be seen as the protagonists
mental struggle to disentangle himself from the master and slave dialectic by exposing it
and overtly addressing it and fleshing it out on the stage. In terms of Kristeva, it
suggests the ending of an antagonistic position against political power and the
insuperable opposition between the masses and the individual. The strategy suggested in
the play is to forget, to squash the skull to pieces and to go home and end the unhomely
wandering. But the open ending with the protagonists grappling with his shadow seems
to suggest an ambivalence on the part of the writer as to whether the crossing over is
63

Ibid., In Kunderas appraisal of the German exile writer Brochs Sleepwalker to which Gaos play bears
a similar title, he considers the ontological hypothesis of the world revealed in the trilogy is one of terminal,
that the absence of moral imperatives is the protagonists freedom and deliverance and the cheerful,
guilt-free murderer predicts the end of the Modern Era of Western culture. While there is also farcical act in
Gaos play, the sleepwalker is described as a conscious being and aware of his guilt.
64
In a dialogue with a French writer in 1993, Gao says that this play contains the reality of Western
society as evil forces such as the mafia is prevalent in the society. Gao, Meiyou zhuyi, 75. In Gaos
dialogue with Liu Zaifu in 2005, they compare this play to Kafkas fiction. Liu points out that what makes
Sleepwalker different from K is that evil forces are both outside and inside the protagonist. Gao, Lun
zhuanzuo, 319-323.

220

possible.

Freud uses the term uncanny to signify the feeling of discomfort and strangeness
which arises in the self particularly at the place one should feel most secure, such as in
the encountering of evil in Sleepwalkers moment of private stroll.65 Bhabha elaborates
the idea of the uncanny or the unhomely as a description between the ambivalence of
the public and the private, and things that should be hidden and shown. It is the making
visible of the forgetting of the unhomely moment in civil society which creates an
uncertainty at the heart of the generalized subject of civil society.66 The effect of
literature of unhomely lives is not simply a transformation of the content of political
ideas but the public sphere of banality that the unhomely stirs. It is at the liminality
between the banal act of freedom and its historic denial which raises the silence where
one finds oneself entering into a strange house. It is the silence of the uncanny and
obscurity of the images, the ambiguity which Benjamin calls the figurative appearance
of the dialectic, and the dialectic of a standstill where the meaning of the real
world resides as in parentheses. Bhabha construes that while seeking a worlding of
literature, there lies the need of a critical act that attempts to grasp the sleight of hand
with which literature conjures with historical specificity, using the medium of psychic
uncertainty, aesthetic distancing or the obscure signs of the spirit-world, the sublime
and the subliminal. Gao, in speaking about the entrapped condition of the modern man,
uses abstract theatrical images of good and evil which are de-historicised and
de-contextualized but with an implicit historical and political undertone, split voices of
aesthetic distance, obscure language flow and black comedy effect. As Bhabha has

65
66

Julian Wolfreys, Key concepts in Literary Theory, 99-100.

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 10.

221

construed, Gao as a literary creature and political animal has seemingly expressed to the
audience of the world his concern with the understanding of human action and the
social world as a moment when something is beyond control but is not beyond
accommodation. Through the sleepwalker, he seeks resilience by embracing the
problem. Like other fiction writers of the unhomely lives, he has endeavored to create
on the stage an art as the fully realized presence of a haunting of history.67

5.5 Assemblage of sin and Zen

The setting of Weekend Quartet (1995) is presumably the imaginary home of a

painter who lives with a woman writer. The play starts with a young couple visiting a
household situated in an old farm in the countryside. The setting is ostensibly western
as the house is described as spacious with many rooms and a large garden which used to
be a farmstead keeping horses. Is this apparently bourgeois setting of the third play
written in French a manifestation of Gaos assimilation into the culture of the adopted
country, an imaginary home if not real?

The Polish Jewish migr Eva Hoffman writes in her autobiography Lost in
Translation about the process of her assimilation into the American Society. Despite
being a graduate from Harvard majoring in English Literature, she says that not until
she started to write reviews and articles for the New York Times that she began to think
of English as her first language. Considering that language is the profound text of
identity, Hoffman says that when English words appear in her dreams, she knows that
she is experiencing a transformation into a different consciousness. Holding onto the
67

Ibid., 9-18.

222

memory of loss keeps one a stranger or immigrant in a new land. Transmuting memory
into a nourishing undercurrent of the river of self while flowing ahead into a new
language or way of being is what signals the arrival of citizenship in an assimilated
culture.68 Gaos case is apparently different from Hoffmans, rather than seeking a self
flowing ahead into a new language, the issue which concerns him is to seek
self-expression as a playwright through language flow. For Gao, language flow is a
term to supplement the notion stream of unconscious which can only be manifested
through the art of conscious language use within the confinement of grammatical
structure. 69 The question for the playwright is more about establishing his own
discursive assemblage on the theatrical platform of modern European theatre that will
register his typical Gaoist theatrical accent.

Weekend Quartet is a play with four scenes and four characters combining drama,
poetry, and narrative. According to the playwright, the fours actors perform as if they
are members of a quartet playing in a concert, remaining conscious of first, second or
third person speaking positions while engaging in a monologue with him/herself and
dialogue with other speakers. Despite the imaginary setting of a bourgeois-like
household, no realistic stage design is to be constructed on the stage save for a few
movable doors, chairs and tables in different combinations. The actors of the theatre
ensemble are to remain on stage at all times as if they are players in a quartet. They can
change costumes behind the doors and there is no need for exits. Critics have pointed
68

In Martin Tucker, Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century, 323-324.

Gao, Meiyou zhuyi, 47. A critic explains that languo of flows in Joyces Finnegans Wake refers to the
language of the female character which is liquid, flowing and maternal and a replacement of the sacred
male logos. The female characters plaintive cry of mememormee echoes her earlier riverrun and sets
the text in motion, proclaiming the simultaneous flow of the river Liffey and the novels languo of flows.
Alan Roughley, Joyces Writings of Exile in Roger Whitehouse, Literary Expressions of Exile (New
York, Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 176-178.
69

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out that Gao stubbornly gives heed to his creativity and always tries to make a
difference each time in his work. In the play, Gao proceeds with his experimentation
and says that this play can be read as a novel, or radio drama. The play presumes the
dramatic structure of a quartet. Other than a four part structure, it is the polyphonic
utterances delivered by either one, two, three or four actors which gives a musical sense
to the play. Isabella Labedzka notes that this play is among those from which Gao
attempts to create a music of language of a new type and which marks the traits of his
experimental theatre.70 Labedzka, in postulating that the idea of Gaos theatre is one
from word to image, refers to Gaos idea of polyphony as a dramatic structure to
conjure diverse sound effect through the intertwining and overlaying of parallel
dialogues. Polyphony is achieved through the performance by a number of voices,
creating chords constructed of one or more leading voices and two or more
complementary voices, and by clashing the dialogue of a number of characters with a
monologue.71 In highlighting the aesthetic and technical aspects of Gaos plays alluding
to multidisciplinary arts (including the ink painting of the writer and cinema technique),
the critic contends that the heterogeneity of Gaos artistic production is a modernist
creative attempt to regenerate artistic language, expand the limit of perception and
establish a new type of contact with the audience. Gaos idea of theatre of heterogeneity
has developed for him an individual drama and theatrical style which has become easy
to recognize.72 But in the case of Weekend Quartet, how is an audience or reader to
make sense of this play which in its essence plays with a vigorous shift of speaking
positions among four voices and which is designed also to be a radio play and a novel.
Is the playwrights proclamation of the multiple uses of the play-script in fact a strategy
70
71
72

Isabella Labedzka, Gao Xingjians Idea of Theatre- from the word to the image, 103.
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 110.

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to defy naming of this play under particular category?

What is easily recognizable or formulaic of Gaos plays, other than the use of
enunciation strategy, would be the writers incessant self-questioning, the sense of a
carceral system which subjected the self under the gaze of a panoptic eye, and the
exposition of internal psyche such as fear of death.

73

Autoeroticism generated by

self-talking and paranoia towards deadly forces paradoxically serve as creative catalysts
in the construction of an artistic self that is distinctive of the playwright. In Weekend
Quartet, we see less of the deadly threat of a carceral system but a threat transformed to
that of the ambivalence of the artistic self seeking comfort in his discursive assemblage
of language flow. Through symbolic discursive exchange on the stage, the artist charged
himself with verbal resources to heed an aesthetic need to gear himself to a new artistic
realm. The four characters, namely, an old painter, a woman who never writes, a
middle-aged writer with writing block and a young girl with artistic energy but without
substantial talent, play out an ensemble of a polyphony echoing the creative desire of
the exile writer to experiment with a new form. At this juncture, the door image
continues to serve as a symbolic image on the stage but becomes a convertible agency
for multiple meanings in the playful discursive assemblage. In a dialogue between the
old painter and the young girl who appears to be asking questions about the painting,
the meaning of the door symbolizing darkness becomes non-sense in the
communicative act. As the painter says, meaning is to be visualized and not
understood
73

According to Gerald Doherty, authoritarian forces in association with the religious and secular give rise
to James Joyces response to pathological desires of autoeroticism, paranoia, and humiliation as seen in the
Portrait of the Young Artist. In Gaos case, such responses come from the inscription of ideology and
political trauma on the self in China. Gerald Doherty, Pathologies of Desire (New York: Peter Lang
Publishing Inc. 2008).

225

A door
What did you say?
Nothing. Once its opened
May I ask what are you painting?
Oh yes, a door, once its opened
I see.
Total darkness, so dark that you cant see things clearly.
Are you talking about your painting?
You say youre talking to yourself.
I understand it now.
You say you dont need to understand, just see.
Right74.

On another occasion, the door is where the old painter and the young girl play
hide-and-seek during which the old painter breaks his leg in the play. The young girl
Cecile sings-

Close this door, open that one. Im overhere! (Sneaks behind the door and
hides.)
A Cinderella carrying her crystal shoes. Look at them, so busy running up and
down and panting for breathDid you break a bone? Oh.god!75

Gaos foregrounding of a musical pattern and the iterative use of images distinctive
of his work would likely remind his French audience of a convention in association with
earlier playwrights such as Samuel Beckett. Becketts critics point out that one of the
characteristic structures of his plays is the reliance of basic and formal pattern which
accounts for their distinctive shape. One of the radio plays Beckett writes is called

74
75

I refer to Gilbert Fongs translation of Weekend Quartet in The Other Shore, 207-208.
Ibid, 239.

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Words and Music and his critics note that his plays often assign words to be uttered by
actors as instruments like those of a score. Beckett is fascinated with what he calls the
stratum of movement which underlies the written word with the kind of form one finds
in music where themes keep recurring. While repetition is essential to provoke a kind of
recognition in the audience, the asymmetry of a repetition with variation ensures that the
sameness is not quite the same76 Emphasis given to voices and the pleasure of listening
to the text is also a characteristic of Duras plays of which is associative of Becketts.77
In fact, Gaos plays also share the traits of Duras in its economy, lack of details which
tend to bring in the local colour, lack of dramatic conflict of the traditional kind and
self-reflective autobiographical nature. In Weekend Quartet, iterative images bearing the
idiosyncratic traits of the playwrite, such as the re-circulation of the bloody image of
cutting oneself and the embodiment of a plastic leg remind us of the woman in Between
Life and Death. In the monologue of the old painter, the uncanny images undergo
another transsexual interchange as this time it is the man rather than the woman who is
covered in blood and embodying a plastic leg-

A shadowy image in the middle of flickering candlelight, its the back of a

woman. You quietly approach her, hoping that shell turn aroundSo you
softly put your hands on her shoulders. She turns sideways and tilts her head
to face you. Oh, no, an old womans dry and crumbling face!......You want to
see if this is a dream, so you clutch the broken glass pieces in your hands,
squeeze them hardand the blood keeps oozing outyou bend down to
touch your footIts not real! Its made of plastic!78

In Becketts later work, he expresses a feeling of exhaustion to say anything

76
77
78

John Fletcher ed., Forces in Modern French Drama (London: U of London P., 1972), 198-199.
Bradby, Modern French Drama, 264-265.
Weekend Quartet in The Other Shore, 208-209.

227

further and playfully constructs in Breath an inhalation and exhalation lasting no more
than 30 seconds. In Gaos case, despite the continuous questioning of the
meaningfulness of utterance, he maintains that when a writer narrates, there should be
something worth saying. While continuously questioning what there is left to be said,
the exile writer maintains that the meaning of his existence lies in his continuous
expression. The paradox of playing between the liminality of saying and not saying,
meaningfulness and meaninglessness is construed as Gaos Zen language repeatedly
alluded to by his critics. The question to ask is whether there is an alternate way of
making sense out of the nonsense other than using a convenient concept such as Zen.
Is it a pathological symptom of the exile writer who is being trapped by his own
commitment to invest his existence on continuously speaking, as emulated in his I
express therefore I exist? How far has the writers assimilation to the adopted country
obliged him to engage in postmodernist aesthetics prevailing in the performing arts in
the West? If the absurdity of Beckett comes from a pessimistic post-war worldview that
there is nothing more to say about the future and a solipsism of an aesthetic creed that
the artist can only create by descending lower into himself and dwelling on a narrative
time which is entirely personal, how far is Gaos absurdity a self-mockery of the self
entrapped in an obligation to speak in the midst of a postmodern condition? The writer
Daniel in the Weekend Quartet speaks in the second person about his exile condition
with a total cut-off from the past. Despite enjoying unlimited freedom like a birds flight,
he questions the meaning of writing in drift within an endless gap or caesura The
problem of language seems to have transformed from one of political sanction to
language itself-

Youre a stranger, destined to be a stranger forever, you have no hometown,

228

no country, no attachments, no family, and no burdens except paying

your
taxes
You have lost all memories, the past has been cut off once and for all.
You have no ideals, youve left them behind for other people to think about.
At this time you wish, for example, to be a leaf wafting in the wind, or
better
yet, a bird flying at an angle from a tiled rooftopif suddenly there
comes a
gun shot or if your heart fails, would you leave any trace once youve
fallen
from the sky?
You, you wander between one word and another, between one phrase and
another, there is no end, how could language or freedom of speech mean
anything to you any more?
The same language was once like a clattering steel shackle, impeding you and
weighing you down, but now it has become as frivolous as this little slut
here79

While the image of slut or prostitution often resurges in Gaos work, in the context of
this play, it is suggestive of the writers ambivalence in cursing while feeling seduced
by the promiscuity of drifting words. Does Daniels remark suggest the playwrights
self-mockery of the situation of a postmodernist exile writer whose identity is entrusted
in nothing but language? The playwrights ambivalence towards the post-modernist
aesthetic of play is virtually fleshed out in Cecile who is apparently playful, seductive
and with a life empowering energy juxtaposing Ann who has turned middle-aged and
become indifferent and lifeless. Ceciles carefree and mindless demeanor gives flesh
to the idea of promiscuous play-

I have nothing, Im a bit sad.

I still have a pair of tits, theyre so firm
What more should I say? Oh yes, I also want to write a little something
Its just some empty talk which nobody understands, like trying to chat with
79

In The Other Shore. 221-222. Caesura, according to Benjamin, is the truth of time which lies in the
suspension of meaning between the lines.

229

men about art.

Cecile as an instrument of word play is immediately followed by Daniel the writers

response-

You are not sure

If its to pursue excitement
Or its to prove
Youre as frivolous
Or you just want to see
Whats going to happen?80

As in Gaos other plays, this play starts with the banality of life of a bourgeois couple
meeting friends on a lazy afternoon and is elevated to postmodern sublimity through the
use of symbolic and dream language at the end. There is no clear distinction between
the utterances of the characters and voices are interchangeable. The desire of Daniel the
writer to reach to the other side of the door is carried out by the old painter. The
imaginary scenic description by the painter in a state of epiphany conjures the poetic
images of the playwrights own ink painting comprising watery images of black and
white, snow, birds, door and split.81

If there is any meaning in this play of word-play

composed in the form of the so called quartet, it serves as a radical mockery against the
readers attempt to think or make sense of the fragmentary lyrics which appeal less to
the mind than the senses. The old painter, says in half apologetic tone and playful voice
about the pleasure of letting go the devil and making others suffer. The evil
confronted by the sleepwalker is now transformed to becoming the devil of
80

Ibid., 225-226.
Examples of such images from copy of Gaos painting are at appendix 1-3. From Darkness and Light: an
exhibition of recent work by Gao Xingjian ( Taibei : Xingzheng uan wenhua jianshe weiyuanhui, 2001);.
Lingyizhong meixue (Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2001).
81

230

promiscuous and seductive word-play. The crime is to let others suffer for your
happiness in the enjoyable sinful act

Gosh! My foot is busted! This foot, it doesnt listen to your commands. Oh, a
wooden leg! Only devils have hoofs, and youre not a devil. But theres a
devil in every mans heart, the question is whether or not its set free, if it got
out, youd be the happy one, though other people would have to suffer for
your happiness. You have sinned deeply, you should have left that young girl
alone, but how would you know if shes a little dove or a little whore if you
hadnt tried?
One foot is light, and the other one heavy, its like riding on the clouds.82

What is this devil which the playwright let go and is sinful? Is it really the old mans
erotic desire for a young girl at the superficial level? A critic says that Beckett shares
with James Joyce the sin of tantalization and hiding away, a kind of writing deliberately
to be obscure and a process of self-concealment so as to be discovered.83 The verses
chanted by the actors at the end of a parable but not speakable suggests the collusion
of Gao with his western predecessors in committing the sin of tantalization. Is this sin or
Zen? The playwright apparently has left it to the readers to decide. The discursive
assemblage that Gao creates for himself on the stage which sets out to be an imaginary
bourgeois house with a big garden turns out to be an unhomely assemblage not even
the actors want to play in. Gao the playwright ends the play in self-parody with the four
actors talking about this play which is much ado about nothing-

What play?
Taborskys father is called Taborsky.
82
83

The Other Shore, 231.

Gary OConnor, French Theatre Today ( London: Pitman, 1975), 51-55.

231

Very funny:
Exactly, anything else?
Theres an island in the Pacific Ocean, it never sinks no matter what happens.
Do you want to dance?84

Quah Sy Ren, in his analysis of Gaos post-exile plays, alludes to the concepts of
nothingness of Sartre and Zhuangxi and concludes that Gaos protagonists negation
of meaningfulness of language has its roots in their state of subjective alienation. Quah
considers that Gao has chosen repeatedly to represent this grievous aspect of human
existence and thus reveals his modernist pessimism. While he is free from political
oppression, he is absorbed by the sense of futility that has perplexed many other writers
who contemplate the nature of human existence.85 But viewing from the perspective of
Gaos effort to establish himself in the local theatre with his specific version of
absurdity and vigor in proposing a different kind of theatre, he seems to have been
actively engaged in the cultural arena of the adopted country rather than overwhelmed
by a sense of futility or alienation. If Beckett has created with his own work a highly
spiritual and rarefied parody of Western culture, Gao in his specificity and self-mockery
is parodic of the overt language play of the postmodernist aesthetic. Parody is an
intellectual activity not born of despair but of wit and perception as seen in Becketts
aesthetic.86 Where Gao differs from Beckett is that while Beckett has less and less
things to say in his plays, Gao with his haunting desire to speak, continues his babbling
in a fragmentary and obscure language flow, simultaneously challenging and providing
opportunities for his critics to make sense of and interpret his work with its intricacy
and ambiguity.

84
85
86

In The Other Shore, 250.

Quah Sy Ren, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, 161-162.
OConnor, French Theatre Today, 55.

232

In an interview, Gao refers to the challenge posed on the actors of Weekend

Quartet which requires them to maneuver the vigorous deictic shifts to change their
speaking position between I, you, and s/he. As he notes in the post-script, the actor,
other than playing his/her own character, also adopts the identity of a neutral actor when
speaking to him/herself as you or s/he. At the same time, the you and s/he may
both be an address to the other characters, and the you may also point to the audiences.
Gao points out that this technique is also to generate a kind of psychological distance
not unlike Zen enlightenment. 87 Given this clue, the language game in Weekend
Quartet could arguably be understood in the light of the playwrights effort to
interweave Zen aesthetics in his experimental theatre. It also allows us to read the
unhomely assemblage of Gaos exilic discourse synonymously in alliance with the
Zen notion of non-abiding. D.T. Suzuki, in explaining the Zen doctrine of
no-mind(wunian ), points out that no-mind together with formlessness (wuxing
) and non-abiding (wuzhu ) are the three pillars of the Zen doctrine of the
Sixth Patriarch Huineng. Referring to the Patriarch, Suzuki explains that formlessness
is meant to be in form and yet to be detached from it; by the unconscious (no-mind) is
meant to have thoughts and yet not to have them; as to non-abiding it is the primary
nature of man. 88 In the light of this, Weekend Quartet can be considered as a
valorization of the Zen philosophy as it has a form mimicking a music composition and
yet this form alienated the audience by its formlessness as manifested in its plot-less
structure and fragmentary interchange of dialogue and monologue. The language which
resembles daily dialogic interchange is semantically sound and commonsensical and yet
87

Gao Xingjian & Gilbert Fong, Lun xiju, 156-157.

Barrett William ed. Zen Buddhism- selected writings of D.T. Suzuki (New York: Doubleday, 1996),
189
88

233

meanings do not carry forward to make ideas intelligible or coherent. For example, near
the end of Quartet no 3, each of the four characters are engaged in separate monologue
recalling past memory, expressing their desire and feelings in poetic language, but these
thoughts and feelings are contingent and without context so as to enable the audiences
to cast judgment. In the subsequent scene Quartet No. 4, the characters begin with the
idea of playing games and the door became their props. The game takes a playful turn
when the old painter plays with a toy pistol pretending to shoot his middle-age
girlfriend who is kissing the writer. The play which pitches at the level of farce seems to
have something happening but nothing really happens. The painter appears to have seen
something outside the door and yet nobody indeed sees anything, as shown in the
following dialogue between the painter Bernard and his partner AnneLook! ThereWhat did you say?
Its gone.
Whats gone?
It was right there, now its not there any more.
Youre seeing thing!
Look, over there!
What did you say?
(Turns around and smiles.) Now theres absolutely nothing.89
The idea of seeing and not seeing anything betokens the essence of the play and its
tantalizing attraction which is at the same time slippery due to its elusiveness. In Zen
Buddism, the Patriachs notion of nothingness emulated in the phrase from the first not
a thing is is regarded as the fountainhead of Zen experience.

90

As such, one might

arguably postulate that this play of unhomely assemblage which is much ado about
89
90

In The Other Shore, 243.

Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 183.

234

nothing is the playwrights modern rendition of the Zen idea of nothingness and
non-abiding, or a syncretism of the nothingness of modernist/postmodernist
aesthetics with one originated in Chinese philosophy/religion. In describing her
experience in entering the theatre world which is a foreign country to her, Cixous talks
about the writing experience as one to create emptiness in oneselfat first there is
nothing, it is barren and all a sudden a camel or a bird arrivesand becomes the
character of this plateau. Everything she does with the theatre begins with a
non-occupation just like the emptiness of an interior plateau of which the
desertedness is suddenly animated. Writing for the stage is for Cixous an experience of
trance, of emptiness and an evacuation of self. 91 If emptiness for Cixous is an
experience to be embodied, the idea of nothingness for Gao is foregrounded on the stage
as a metonymic act of seeing nothing.

Gao is unequivocal of his being mesmerized by the Zen wit of Huineng who shows
a skeptical attitude towards language use. Paradoxically, Zen wit is inseparable with
language as it is through the vehicle of peculiar phraseology that Zen masters
disseminate their teachings to disciplines.92 The pseudo dialogue between the painter
and Cecile and that among the actors chanting the nothingness of the play referred to
earlier in the above serve to illustrate the playwrights appropriation of the verbal
method used in Zen teaching. The peculiar phraseology of Zen teaching aims to disrupt
the logic of the life world based on opposition and duality and to illuminate a new way
of seeing things through asserting paradox, contradiction, speculation into every detail
of daily life. According to Suzuki, affirmation is a technique, amongst others, used by
91

Eric Prenowitz, Selected plays of Helene Cixous (London: Routledge, 2004), 2,3.
Gilbert Fong points out that wuzhu and jingguan are two key terms in understanding Gaos Zen theatre.
Lun xiju, 17
92

235

Zen masters in their teachings pertaining to say something but in fact nothing is said.
For example, a master says in a sermon, when you look for the patriarch, you cannot
see him. The muskmelon is sweet even to the stems, the bitter gourd is bitter even to the
roots. In another case, a student asks, I read in the Sutra that all things return to the
One, but where does this One return to? The master replies, when I was in the
province of Tsing I had a robe made which weighed seven chin. When another master
was asked, what the Buddha was, he replies, I know how to play the drum, rub-a- dub,
rub-a-dub! To the question what Zen was, another master answers Namusambo!93

If the masters abrupt and peculiar replies are to strike the disciplines to
self-enlightenment, what effect is being actualized in Gaos transposition of the Zen
technique to the stage? Critics point out that Becketts Waiting for Godot links up the
old tradition of commedia dellarte through the plot and character design and the use of
music hall and circus is also apparent amidst the seriousness of his plays. Becketts
work demonstrates a mix of the demotic and poetic, the banal and the sublime, and
seriousness with wit. The faubourg slang of Vladimir and Estragon reminds audiences
of Beckets Irishism.94 In comparison with Becket who was also a French exile, Gao
has similarly brought to the French theatre a dramatic form with a Chinese accent
peculiar to the local audience through his use of Zen language. Gaos unhomely
assemblage presented on the stage can be seen as a dramatic strategy to bring home to
the theatre stage an essence of Oriental wit. But how is the Zen technique to be rendered
to bring enlightenment to the local audiences despite cultural differences? Zen
technique such as koan is first and foremost one of no-mind, ie, instead of the intellect,

93
94

Ibid 122-123.
John Fletcher ed, Forces in Modern French Drama, 200-203.

236

which forms only a part of our being, it is the entire personality, mind and body which
is thrown out into solving the problem and the spiritual tension conjured by the koan
exercise.95 Gaos explanation of his koan technique used in Dialogue and Rebuttal
(1992) complies with such a Zen standard, as he claims that his play lays bare a spiritual
condition in which enlightenment is to be attained through the actual living of life
which is no logic. As the title suggests, Dialogue and Rebuttal is a play of questions and
answers whereby a man and a girl are seen entangled in sexual tension and undergoing a
Zen experience of enlightenment. In other words, audiences are invited to put aside their
intellect and to witness a Zen performance which is a mimicry of an illogical life
fleshed out momentarily by the actors on the stage. According to Suzuki, a koan is
generally some statements made by an old Zen master, or some answers of his given to
the uninitiated. The idea is to unfold the Zen psychology in the mind of the uninitiated
and to reproduce the state of consciousness of which these statements are the expression.
That is to say, when the koans are understood, the masters state of mind is understood
which is satori or enlightenment without which Zen is a sealed book. In koan, to ask
the first question means more than half the way to its own solution, for it is the outcome
of a most intense mental effort for the questioner to bring his mind to a crisis.96

In Dialogue and Rebuttal, Gao the playwright initiates a koan and acts out
simultaneously as the Zen master and the questioner bringing out the questions and
answers leading the uninitiated to a mental and dramatic crisis, as manifested in the
dialogue and rebuttal between the man and the girl. The first question is raised by the
man who is presumably undergoing a psychological impasse which is the
95

Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 136.

96

Ibid., 134-135

237

pre-condition of the questioning Whats love? Try to explain it to me.

It cant be explained.
Theres no harm in trying.
There are things you can explain, and there are things you cant. Dont you
know that?
Of course I do, but I still want to know about love.
What a fool!97
The play first starts with some trivial conversation between the couple centering around
differences between the sexes, politics, writing, and proceeds to dreams and language
war leading to the couples battling with their bodies and reciprocal acts of violence.
The first half of the play which ends with the couple stabbing each other with a knife
can be taken as the pointer pointing to the first direction of koan which is, in Zen
standard, a process of searching and contriving demanding the involvement of the
entire personality, mind and body of the uninitiated.98 This process is to point to the
condition where there is a realm of truth into which the intellect as such can never
enter. In the play, it is the impasse of the incommensurability between the two sexes,
and problems centering around love, sex, fear and death which cannot be resolved. In
the process of searching and contriving, the playwright, other than displaying the
psychology of the couple through their feelings of loneliness and fear, goes to the
extreme intensity of virtually removing the head of the characters so as to demonstrate
the removal of the worst enemy of Zen experience-the intellect. In the second half of the
play, the man and girl are shown to be undergoing the effect of Zen consciousness
97

In The Other Shore, 97.

The knife used by the characters is symbolic. In Zen terms, to cut and divide with a knife is symbolic
of the operation of the intellect which is discrimination in terms of analytical knowledge, the relative and
discursive understanding used in everyday life. According to Buddhist experience, the power of
discriminating is based on non-discriminating. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 183.
98

238

which eventually break out into a state of enlightenment. But before it is mature
enough for the couple to receive the abrupt awakening strike of enlightenment, the
playwright cum Zen master takes a detour to heighten the spiritual tension of the couple.
The man and girl turned into a corpse which presumably is not yet ready to comprehend
the living truth.99 But the couple which is still alive continues the dialogue and rebuttal
throughout the second act and eventually attains their enlightenment after going through
their respective psychological dream experience. In her dream, the girl addresses herself
as she viewing herself as an object undergoing torture and going through a hell like
experience so as to overcome her fear. She saysShe sees it now, theres a crowd surrounding a woman, theyre cutting open
her stomach to dig out her internal organs
They are butchering her, theyre dissecting and discussing at the same time.
Theres also a woman mixed in among them, cant tell how old she is
She lifts her head and looks around. A pair of hollow eye sockets! She takes
to her feet at once!...
If she feels she not guilty, whats there to be afraid of?
Shes afraid because she feels shes guilty, she feels guilty because shes
afraid. And if shes not afraid then she no long---(Pauses.) Thats even more
horrifying than Silent Extinction
A silkworm, which gets enmeshed in its own cocoon.100
As for the man, he addresses himself as you and is apparently also undergoing a
dream like experience of seeing himself walking down a pitch-dark corridor searching
for a way out and then realizing that the journey is no end and one needs to keep on
going. The man comes to realize that-

99

Corpse is a figure in Zen pointing to the pseudo-Zen followers who are incapable of enlightenment.
Ibid,13
100
In The Other Shore, 126, 131.

239

Behind the door, perhaps there is nothing

(Laughs to himself) That doors of yoursno doubt its something out of
nothing
What if you cant find a way out? Isnt that just as good?
You keep on babbling only to show that you are you, that youre not like
other people
You are you because youre still talking, thats all there is to it
You cant understand the meaning of your own words, youre just the slave of
language...
You cant free from languages entanglement, just like a spider--(shakes his
head)
No, youre not a spider, but youre still a spider. (shakes his head)101
The psychological impasse of the two agents which is to be overcome and let go
through the Zen experience is demonstrated at the end as one of fear and guilt for the
girl and that of the impasse of language for the man. The pseudo dialogue between the
couple before the end of the play illustrates the process of the opening up of the mental
door prior to the fulfillment of the Zen experience. In Zen terms, when the koan is once
solved it is compared to a piece of brick used to knock at a gate, when the gate is
opened the brick is thrown away. An intuition of Zen when attained, the wall against
which the practitioner has been beating hitherto to no purpose breaks down on its own,
and an entirely new vista is opened before him/her.102 But before the couple comes to
the chanting of the crack, the playwright asserts the last question and answer which is
considered the most absurd, irrational or illogical whereby logic and discriminative
power has no crack to insert its intellectual teeth. It might be compared to the three
chin of flax when a Zen master answers the question what is Buddha? which is

101
102

Ibid., 129-132.
Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 136, 141.

240

considered as a statement par excellence in Zen tradition.103

In the last koan exercise,

the man designated as the questioner manifested the playwrights intention to make him
the one lagging behind the girl in coming to enlightenment. In the last pseudo dialogue,
the man keeps on asking questions until his mental door is finally opened manifested
by his following the repetitious chanting of crack by the woman. The playwright at
this juncture displays another verbal technique of Zen teachingparrot-like repetitions.
Words in this Zen technique became nothing but sounds. The understanding must come
out of ones own inner life and what the echoing does is to give this chance of
self-awaking to the earnest seekers of truth. In the last scenario, it is the man who is all
ready to break into a certain note, not learned from anybody else but discovered within
himself.104Makes
Makes what?
Winter
Teapot makes winter?
Makes
And then--?
Teapot
And then makes teapot?...
It is what? Speak!

Crack
What crack?
A crack
What kind of a crack?
A crack line..
Whats this crack like?
103
104

Ibid., 137.
Ibid., 125.

241

A crack.
To hell with the crack!
A crack
Only one crack?
A crack
Another crack?
A crack
(Exploding.) A cr-a-ck-?
A crack
(Laughs bitterly.) A crack.
A crack
(Talking to himself.) A crack.
A crack
(Murmuring.) A crack105
Gao, as an admirer of the Patraich Huineng, emulates the masters wisdom of abrupt
and instantaneous awakening in the no-mind through the agent of peculiar
phraseology, as seen in his use of absurd dialogue, dream language, and non-sense.
Gaos use of the split voices having the actors addressing themselves as she and
you and the dramatization of the pseudo dialogue between the characters is his
ingenious creation to create an effect of alienation enabling the subject to achieve
self-detachment and self-observation which is fundamental in Zen Buddhism. The idea
of detachment is also achieved by having the monk acting as a commentator of the
couples Zen experience at the meta-narrative level. The monk mimics gestures in
response to the words and action of the couple, such as juxtaposing the girls stabbing
of the man with his axing and hammering of a wooden stick on the ground.106 While
the playwright admits his use of Zen technique in the play, he is not unaware of the
105

In The Other Shore 134.

Huinengs idea of no-mind (or unconscious) is inseparable from consciousness, as valorized in his
saying to have thoughts as not having them. According to Suzuki, Huinang does not preclude the idea of
self-observation or jingguan valorized by the Northern school led by Shenxiu emphasizing on meditation
through gazing at a specific object so as to reach original purity. The latter method is being criticized as
self-trapping as the self tends to cling to and abide in the object. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 195, 213.
106

242

paradox that the play, as a conscious and intellectual verbal and communicative act to
illuminate the idea of Zen with an audience in mind, is itself in contradiction with Zen
spirit which in the playwrights words is a parable but not speakable. To resolve the
dilemma and redeem his sin, the playwright speaks through his surrogate to address
the impossibility of speaking. In the first act, when the man asks the question about
what love is, the woman warns him that it is not something explainable. In the second
act, she again addresses this sin of speaking the unspeakable It ought not to be said it cant be said but she said it regardless, its her
misfortune, its her disaster, its her sin107
As for the man, after his self-questioning of his continuous babbling of saying
nothing, he proceeds to question the effectiveness of language in delivering Zen
experience:

Is the pain exposed and mourned one of a human being, that of the man

who owns the house? Or is it simply language mourning itself? How can feeling be
rendered if not through language? The self-questioning apparently elevates to becoming
a self-parody when the man questions himself from the third person and the audience
point of view-

This one, that one, what are they mourning? What is there to mourn? Its all
utter nonsense!108
Suzuki points out that Zen Buddhism which preaches the idea that unattainability
of all things is Reality itself is not a hazy abstraction, not a mere conceptual
postulation but a living experience in its deepest sense.109 Gao, the exile writer, has

107
108
109

In The Other Shore, 130.

Ibid., 132.
Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 193

243

incessantly expressed the idea of the imperceptibility of life and unattainability of

ultimate truth in his work which amounts to almost becoming an obsession. But as far
as the critics are concerned, it seems not so much the imperceptibility of life but the
imperceptibility of Gaos language which is hard to break in, not because the door is
closed, but, as Iszabella Labedzka says, the door is held slightly ajar. It becomes an
intellectual game for critics to be able to peek into the playwrights small, theatrical
room of imagination. The critic notes that the lack of comprehensive knowledge of
either of the Eastern or Western cultural traditions on the part of the readers makes it
difficult to decode dramatic compositions of the playwright with their complex
contextual, aural and visual layers and to translate them into the language of the stage.
As regards Dialogue and Rebuttal, Labedzka notes that one should have a basic
knowledge of Zen in order to be able to understand the concept of incorporating famous
koans into dramatic structure.110 It bespeaks the difficulty in understanding Gaos plays
and the cultural gap which might hinder an audiences appreciation of the play which is
meticulously calculated and designed to emulate the essence of Zen. Labedzkas effort
to bridge the gap is seen in her comparison of similar techniques used in Zen and the
theatre of absurd which both aim to expose the limitations of language and logical
thought through answering a question on the nature of enlightenment and constructing
nonsensical problems. Acknowledging Gaos idea that strangeness and illogicality do
not constitute the purpose of artistic creation, the critics attention is after all drawn to
the effect of the grotesque conjured by the playwright in combining features which are
at the same time terrifying and funny, fearsome and ridiculous, fit for demons as well as
for clowns.111 Although Zen Buddhism is basically of Chinese origin, it would be

110
111

Labedzka Izabella, Gao Xingjians Idea of Theatre, 6,7, 137.

Ibid.,137, 139, 141, 142.

244

erroneous to presume that Chinese critics would feel more at ease with Gaos Zen
aesthetics. Hu Yaoheng points out the difficulty of Gaos text due to his
deconstructionist style and free play of language. He takes note of the use of koan in
Dialogue and Rebuttal and Gaos own analogy that the play is not about plot but the
way to speak or the act of speaking itself. However, Hus predilection for the
interpretation of the play is still one which rests with the content. Comparing the play
with Gaos Escape, he concludes that the play illuminates the idea that one cannot
escape death with which a sense of haunting fear and loneliness would come hand in
hand. Zen Buddhism which preaches the idea of knowing ones self-nature through
intuitive knowledge is a means to salvation but there is no guarantee. 112 As an
interesting contrast to Labedzkas approach, Hus reading is tilted towards the content
while the latter is one of technique. Another Chinese critics emphasis turns towards the
social issue. Jessica Yeung reads the play as merely repeating philosophical clichs
and lack both sensitivity and subtlety. The exile condition of the playwright and his
estrangement from China on textual production becomes the circumstances upon
which Yeung makes her comments that the post-exile plays reflect nothing but intense
existential crisis which is the beginning and the end, presented as the only condition of
life. To the critic, the characters of these plays have repeatedly announced that life is
utterly meaningless, that each person must face his extinction in psychological isolation,
and that such is the only condition of life. 113 With Yeungs remark that Gaos
post-exile plays shows no possibility of redemptionor self-destruction is presented
as the only possible pattern of human behaviour, she probably considers that Gaos
plays speak more of sin than Zen. Nevertheless, Suzuki has explained that Zen is not the

112
113

Hu Yaoheng, Bainian gengyun de fengshou, 34, 65.

Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, 91, 143-144.

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same as existentialism as it never espouses the cause of doing-nothing-ness or putting

annihilating time in place of eternity. Zen has eternity in momentarism whereas
momentalist is not conscious of eternity.114 Gao once explained that Zen only comes
forth in the momentary performance through the actualization of the actors, other than
that, rehearsals outside the performance or the text only contains a passage to Zen.115
The question of momentarism or eternity, sin or Zen, in the absence of performance,
becomes a matter of actualization of readers/ critics in their respective private reading
act. The writer, in committing the tantalizing sin to speak the unspeakable in absurd
language in order to render the ultimate Real of Zen, is not unlike the man in the play
who is caught in an impasse of language.

5.6 Unhoming postmodernism

Near the end of the Weekend Quartet, the writer Bernard and the old painter talk
jokingly about writing a play about suicide and the big Finish, and Cecile echoes that
she wants to finish herself off. As if to carry out this joke and continue self-parody, Gao
actualizes his plan in completing the play The Man who Questions Death in May (2000).
The play written at the turn of the century is largely an inner monologue between an old
man and his alterity, the imaginary other who resembles the god of death luring the old
man to hang himself. At the beginning of the play, the neurotic old man misses his train
and finds himself locked in alone in a museum of contemporary art during his brief visit.
The old man philosophizes about modern art and condemns the falsity of the exhibits
which are nonsense. The old man then proceeds to dwell on his reflection on life and his

114
115

Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 265-267.

Gao, Lun xiju, 152-157.

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desire not to be controlled by old age and death. At the end of the play the old man then
decides to hang himself upon his own will. In an interview, Gao explains that the theme
of death is metaphorical and the play is largely about his thoughts as a creative artist
towards post-modernity. 116 The question to ask is how far is this play a cultural
statement of the writer and what is this metaphorical death to do with postmodern art? Is
Gao proclaiming the death of postmodernism, the death of postmodern artists or his
own death?

In this play, Gao demonstrates his ingenious handling of psychological materialism

by virtually putting on the stage a man being imprisoned within an institution of
contemporary art. Although there is no explanation that the old man is an artist, the
absurd condition of no escape from the institution enables the actor to burst with outcry
to break away from the cultural prison. The play carries with it double meaning as it
addresses both the surface level of condemnation against the postmodern art while
providing an occasion for the actor to confront himself when threatened by the
imminent question of death. Paradoxically, it is exactly this double fold of dramatic
narrative which gives the postmodernist edge to Gaos play. As a cultural concept, the
idea of postmodern or the term postmodernism is a complex term that always carries
with it a double fold which makes the notion an ambivalent concept. The actors
bombardment against the banality of contemporary art associatively is on the side of
Jamesons Marxist criticism against postmodernism as the cultural logic of late
capitalism which bears with it the trait of banality, depthlessness and incessant play.
But postmodernist aesthetic also embraces a critical edge. As Fortier points out, the

116

Gao Xingjian, Kouwen siwang ( Taibei : Lianjing chuban, 2004), 78-79.

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notion of theatre, other than those which are commodified under capitalism, is in
general a marginal cultural activity in the postmodern world. Instead of refusing to
engage with the postmodern situation, some theatre workers consider that theatres
functions as a resistance to postmodern impoverishment lies in its ability to contradict
and rupture the indifference of contemporary culture. In other ways, theatre of the
margin can enact as a postmodern resistance to the status quo of postmodern
commodification. There is a positive outlook in postmodern performance which restores
critical distance allowing the audience to reconsider the world he/she lives, thereby
performing a resistant political function. But this is not to speak of politics in a
traditional way or make explicit commentary or take political positions, but to raise
uncertainty through postmodern representation.117 As the drama proceeds in the Man
Who Questions Death, the old mans outcry takes a critical turn indicting Nietzsches

pernicious influence on the modern world through the notion of the death of God.118
The old man, as the playwrights surrogate, laments that having pronounced the death of
117

Fortier, Theory/Theatre, 122-123.

Mabel Lee considers that the play mounts a powerful and sustained attack on Nietzsche and modernity.
She reminds us of the political edge in Gaos criticism against Nietzsche. In One Mans Bible, Gao is
explicit in portraying Mao Zedong as the embodiment of Nietzsches Superman whose ego is bloated by his
self-perception of his hero status as the savior of the nation, that he is in fact God. Through his clever
deployment of a multitude of lesser Supermen who also had bloated egos, Mao manages to wreak havoc
upon the entire population during the Cultural Revolution. Gao, Escape and the Man Who Questions Death
(Hong Kong: The Chinese UP, 2007), xvi. I consider Gaos Nietzsche-obsession in its negative sense
problematic. Instead of speaking against the real Nietzsche, it might be more appropriate to say that Gao
is against the appropriated Chinese Nietzsche. In fact, it is hard to provide a unique interpretation of
Nietzsche, as his philosophy predicates on a wide range of ingenious thinking, such as arguing that true
metaphysics is literature. As for Nietzsches declaration that god is dead, the argument is made in the
context that the Christian metaphysical demand for truth have turned on against itself, as it is unable to live
up to its own ideal. According to Sontag, there is an ideal of seriousness, of sincerity, underlies all of
Nietzsches work, which makes the overlap of his ideas and those of a true aesthete so problematic. In
addition to Wilde, Barthes who Sontag cites as true aesthete, Gao certainly deserves to be enlisted. Despite
Gaos overt criticism of Nietzsche, his aesthetics in fact shares the traits of the latter such as a predilection
for relativistic criticism, pursuit of ever newer forms, historical contingency, metaphorical function of
language etc. Edgar ed., Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, 297-298; Susan Sontag ed., A Barthes Reader
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1996),xxviii, xxx-xxxi.
118

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God, and afraid of being left behind, everyone charges toward being God and the
superman. Speaking in the ambiguous voice of second-person, the babbling of the old
mans criticism against you seems to be addressing himself as well as the audience in
general-

You know that you just cant become God. So you resort to metaphysics and
dabble in philosophy, claiming that you think, therefore you areHowever,
its not so easy to become a thinker, so you put on an actThis isnt so much
cheating as satisfying your own ego, a rather harmless form of
self-gratification..So you declare: the day of judgment has arrived. And
since God is already dead, the artists who have destroyed art have to face their
own death as well.119

The French audience familiar with post-war modern culture might grasp from the
monologue a criticism directed against the Western idea of enlightenment and human
liberation that served to legitimatize modern culture. But why did Gao bother to remind
the Western audience about this quite familiar notion? Is it a gesture to gain the
empathy of the audience so as to engage them further to the question of death in the
philosophical realm as the play proceeds? Other than the self-parodic tone of
condemnation against the thinking self and the admonishment against the artists sin in
destroying art, the postmodern edge of this play would be the playful mingling of the
meaning of death on the level of the public and the private; that of the impasse of
western modern culture with that of an individuals reflection on the ontological
question of life and death.

In Between Life and Death, the playwright speaks through the female body and
119

Escape and the Man Who Questions Death, 85.

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seeks purification through the ritual of the theatre. In this play, through the embodiment
of the male actor, the playwright exorcises the deadly threat of postmodern aesthetic as
well as the death threat engulfing the corporeal self. While the playwright proclaims to
hang the thinking self who thinks he is god, it is ironic that it is exactly the instinct of
the free will which empowers the will to death of the protagonist. What makes the
notion of death in the play intricate is that this man who talks himself to his own death
avows his own insignificance and emulates the image of a weak self typical of the
postmodern epoch. This is an age without hero and the one who thinks and acts as if he
is a hero is only self-deceptive. Hanging the weak self to death hence embarks on the
symbolic meaning of ending an era of nihilism which leads nowhere. So is this weak
selfs death a self-sacrifice to stand in both for the end of postmodernism and the last
extinction of the egotistic little god who thinks himself the almighty? Or is this intricate
death a deliberate act, as death, like life, is absurd and without causation? May be it is
just the jouissance of death that the playwright wants to flesh out through the actor as
an agent? The old man proclaims-

Youre toying with death before its sudden arrival, as if you were directing a
playto put it more succinctly, a farce. Suicide is always a tragedy; when
you murder yourself, its bizarre, but its also interesting, and you get some
pulsating pleasure out of it, not unlike that of orgasm, at the moment of
extinction
In the face of this increasingly vulgar world, a world as degenerate as art, and
in the name of a loser, someone who has wasted his entire useless life away,
you proclaim the death of this weak and helpless person.120

Hu Yaoheng considers that this play shows that existentialism is deeply inscribed

120

Ibid., 102, 106-107.

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in Gaos work but it also indicates that Gaos aesthetic has extended from one of the
private to a larger humanistic concern.121 Considering that the writer always regards his
work as his self-expressive agent where his existence dwells, the staging of death of a
self contains within it an impact which is both personal as well as cultural. Mabel Lee
points out that the personal health problems of the writer in 1999 which required him to
be hospitalized has attributed to the writers reflection on the issue of death.122

Is it not

that the ritual of death on the stage also helps to exorcise the fear of death which has
shifted from one embedded in political threat to that of corporeality? To die is to enable
a re-birth. The descent to hell is a passage to the sublime. Different from the
I-protagonist of Soul Mountain, the passage to death is more than metaphorical but a
reality of the lived person. Having gone through the trauma of remembering the past
in the One Mans Bible, the exile writer claims that what remains now is to play a game
with death, as encountering death is to overcome the impasse of life. 123 In his
transformation to becoming a transcendental exile, the problem of self-salvation for
the writer becomes one of overcoming the impasse of life which is death of the
corporeal self. The writers philosophizing on the issue of life and death in the public
arena of the adopted country hence also becomes a psychological process of
self-therapy. In the psychological realm, fear of death is not merely fear of biological
death but translated into fear of loss in general. It is more the psychological death that
one fears. Mans fascination towards death, particularly the interest in its representation
in all forms, illustrates a desire and self-defense to displace our own fear on the subject
upon the object of gaze.124 But if this object of gaze turns out to be a replicate of the

121
122
123
124

In Hu Yaoheng, Bainian gengyun de fengshou, xi.

The writer was hospitalized many times during rehearsals in France and Taiwan.
One Mans Bible, Ch 59.
Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today, 23-26.

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subjects self manifested in the hanging of the old man in this play, it illustrates the
subjects desire to visualize his own death so as to overcome the fear. The
self-conscious writer now turns his minds eye to gaze upon death through the artistic
distance of the stage. As the old mans split self says,

You can only maintain your life now with self-observation, keeping an eye on
death, this most meaningless death, which gobbles up everything like a
bottomless black hole.
Who could rid you of your worries for you? Nobody, only you yourself can
do it. Be happy and make merry before death arrives; if nothing else, its one
way to entertain yourself.125

The writers emphasis on self-salvation and self-reliance on ones own willpower to

overcome ones own problems is again foreground here. The will to confront and
overcome death is also a will to live. If the death threat of the interior exile in Soul
Mountain is imbued with politics against the self, this death threat for the exterior exile
after a decade of exile provides an opportunity for life transcendence. What remains
unchanged for the writer is his existential edge which believes that man is active and
creative. Man is a conscious being and also conscious of his relations with other men
and the eventual death. If man cannot transcend the existential problem of the
determinism of death or nothingness, man can at least choose the principle on which he
chooses to live with and confront death with a laugh. Liu Zaifu points out that what is
unique in Gaos work is his prevalent consciousness towards the self and the world in
which he lives.126 This stubborn self-consciousness is what makes Gao excel as a
survivor in his exile in the physical and spiritual sense.

125
126

Ibid., 88-89.
In Gao, Kouwen siwang, 69.

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5.7 A transcultural home? A Chinese home?

Gao as a playwright as well as a painter fluent in French enjoys the privilege of

immediate cultural exchange with his counterpart and audiences in Europe. In an
interview during the production of the Man Who Questions Death in Marsielle, the
French director and actor appraise the inspiration that Gao has brought to rejuvenate the
Western theatre. The theatricality and ritual-like style of Gaos theatre and the use of
pronominal strategy provides an alternative acting style and challenge to the Western
theatre and actors. They consider that the so called neutral actor or the non-archetypal
character of Gaos plays resembles Becketts character and hence is not unfamiliar to
French actors.127 Having become a French citizen and gained recognition in the French
cultural arena, Gao pertains to a personal identification which transcends cultural stigma.
In other words, he refuses to have an identity pre-fixed by geographical boundary and
prefers one which walks with his shoes as a world traveler. In his dialogue exchange
with Huang Chunming and Ye Shitao who are considered nativist writers during his
visit to Taiwan in 2001, he colludes himself with their aesthetics which pertains to dig
deep into human nature and avows to speak an authentic voice while remaining
skeptical against literature which submits itself to ideology and nationalism. He
considers it opportunistic to promote a literature emphasizing the native and ethnicity.
Human nature deeply embedded in writers work transcends the limit of territory,
national boundary, ethnicity and language. He is Chinese and also a French citizen, but
he is more willing to call himself a world traveler. While Gaos ostensive stance to
disavow nativism receives critical response from Ye Shitao who retorts that Gao cannot
127

Ibid., 77-88.

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cut off his sanguineous relation with his parents and the native people, Gao is able to
seek common ground with the nativist writers in upholding integrity of writers who
should be independent and not become the government spokesman.128

Gaos self-translation in terms of his identity as an exile writer pegs on the

personal and the world, in short, he bestows himself with a particularity in terms of his
skeptical view towards ideological hegemony and idiosyncratic artistic style and a
universality in terms of a transcultural aesthetics giving heed to complexity of human
nature and the lived world. His idea of an exile writer who transcends culture is most
prominent seen in his speech The Case for Literature, delivered in the Nobel Prize
commemoration ceremony. In the speech, Gao makes no hesitation letting the world
know about the problem of Chinese literature in the twentieth century which is worn
out and almost suffocated because of politics and incessant revolution. Rather than
espousing a notion of Chineseness, he incessantly highlights the importance of
personal voice which delves deep into human nature and questions their existential
condition encroaching on the momentarily present. On the level of the personal, he is
unequivocal that literature to him is talking to oneself as it is a way to preserve human
consciousness in secrecy. There is a compulsion in him to write as there is recompense
and consolation in the pleasure of writing. Soul Mountain is a novel he writes for
himself without the hope for publishing. Quoting Cao Xueqin and Kafka, he valorizes a
form of cold literature by writers living at the margins of society devoted to spiritual
activity rather than the market. While giving central position to the writers self, Gao is
quick to point out that poetic feeling is not unbridled egotism. Poetry is concealed in the
distanced gaze which also examines the person of the author and overarches both the
128

Gao, Lun chuangzuo, 234-235 & 257.

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characters of the book and the author to become the authors third eyes. As the self is
chaotic, the writer must always look back at ones self while questioning the world. He
affirms that literature is for the living and affirms the present of the living. It is the
eternal present and the confirmation of individual life that constitutes the absolute
reason why literature is literature. Alluding to Qu Yuan, Dante, Joyce, Thomas Mann,
and Solzhenitsyn, Gao says that to go into exile appears to be the inevitable fate of the
poet who seeks to preserve his own voice.

On the level of language, he construes that language is intricate and difficult to

grasp and yet allows communication between separate individuals across time and space.
As the creator of linguistic art there is no need to stick on oneself a stock national label
that can be easily recognized. Literature transcends national boundaries and writers
today receive multicultural influences outside the culture of ones own race. He
highlights that language is not simply for the transmission of meaning but also gives
heed to the auditory senses which expresses feelings and affirms a persons existence.
He explains his use of tripartite pronouns which creates a sense of distance in fiction
and provides actors on the stage with a broader psychological space. It is the writers
narrative method that gives concrete form to his perceptions.129

The image that Gao presents himself to the world audience is one of a
transcendental exile who dwells on a self as a conscious being who is always
self-reflective. Facing an international audience, Gaos speech demonstrates a balancing
act between the particular and the universal, one which highlights the commensurability

129

Gao Xingjian, Cold Literature (The Chinese UP., 2005), 10-35.

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of human nature while emphasizing the importance of personal style. While he valorizes
the indispensable multicultural influences on modern writers, he takes heed to speak
against the pseudo-dialectic of opposition between the traditional and the modern or the
subversion of one to uphold the other. While the Western audience might interpret the
pseudo-dialectic Gao pinpoints as one which falls within the Western tradition of binary
opposition, to the Chinese intellectual community, Gaos extrapolation is all the more
clearly directed to the ideological contestation hovering over China for a century, an
antagonism which attributes to his self-initiated exile. In response to Gaos speech, Su
Xiaokang, a Chinese diasporic intellectual, considers that Gao has accurately addressed
the key problem of the two drastic discursive reforms in China in the past century, one
of the May-fourth which pegs literature with nationalism and realism and one of Maos
Yanan talks of literature and art which pegs literature with class ideology against
Western imperialism. Though Gao does not adhere to a kind of Chineseness in his
self-representation, he avows that Chinese culture lives in him and his Chineseness
can be seen in the epic dimension of some of his post-exile plays in which legendary
and historical figures such as Huineng and Zhuangzi are portrayed. 130 The question to
address in the following is not how Gao presents Chineseness in a global context as
he is unequivocal about his stance of not selling antique, but how his Chineseness is
being read or translated by others. A case in point is that in spite of Gaos effort to
dispel the ghost of Lu Xun by admonishing explicitly the political side of Lu Xun who
avows to shed his blood for the nation, Gaos commentators continue to peg him with

130

Gilbert Fong distinguishes Gaos plays into two broad types, namely, the psychological plays and the
epic plays. Examples of the latter include Shanhaijing Zhuan (1995), a play initially intended to be written
for the state theatre in his pre-exile years. (See Meiyu zhuyi, 244), Mingcheng (1988) a dance drama
commissioned by the Hong Kong Dance Company and Bayue xue (2000) commissioned by the Taiwan
cultural institution. See Lun xiju,3.

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the cultural icon in their discussions.131

5.7.1 Spectre of the forefather

When commenting on Gaos earlier works, William Tay considers that Gao, in
juxtaposing the silent man in Bus Stop with the solitary traveler in Lu Xuns poem The
Passer-by, alludes to the allegorical figure to represent a sense of flickering hope and
vague aspiration for the future. Tay construes that the resurging of the image of the
lonely passer-by as prelude to Gaos play may suggest that the struggle and journey are
not yet over.132 While Tay seems to put forward the proposal that Gao is succeeding Lu
Xuns unfinished task in a metaphorical sense, the point to note is that the use of the
poem might also be a camouflage in exchange for approval to stage the play which is
revolutionary in form. Bus Stop is among those pre-exile plays, as stated in Gaos
open speech and various occasions, that were written with rigorous self-censorship
but still being banned. Lim Wah Guan, in his seminal paper, On the Margins of Both
East and West, overtly states his stance of Lu Xuns influence in Gaos post-exile
plays. He suggests that while the play Nocturnal Wanderer obliquely carries a
biographical implication of Gao, the portrayal of the selfish and evil deeds of
Sleepwalker who kills people is likely to inspire the audience to contemplate and seek a
more positive solution for society and the lot of individual man. Referring to the
self-critical and reflective characters in Gaos various plays, Lim construes that the
calling of inward self-redemption and self-reflexive attitude of Gao is inherited from Lu

131

In Parisian notes, Gao says that Lu Xun the writer was squashed to death by Lu Xun the politician.
That was the misfortune of literature but obviously not of necessity the misfortune of Lu Xun himself.
Cold Literature, 72-73.
132
William Tay, Avant-garde theatre in post-Mao China: The Bus Stop in Soul of Chaos, 73.

257

Xun who is the most vocal in modern Chinese literary history in advocating the Chinese
people to reflect. Lim cites three inferences to his argument, that of Lu Xuns reflection
on the unconscious crowd watching the killing of a Chinese, the creation of the
unconscious Ah Q and the self-reflectivity of the intellectual protagonists in his fictions
such as Guxiang.133 While Lims observation aptly spells out the characteristic of
self-consciousness shared between Gao and the cultural icon, what needs to be added is
that Lu Xuns cultural ambivalence, procrastination and self-reflectivity is less overt and
more deeply embedded in his work, the so called hidden dark side as extrapolated by
Xia Jian. For Gao, the self-reflective and self-examining dynamic is integrated in and
foregrounded by means of Gaos idiosyncratic device of the split subject. In One Mans
Bible, the exile writer you foregrounds his reflection on the past self he and overtly
subjected the retrospective self to interrogation. The split self of the sleepwalker in
Nocturnal Wanderer and that of the old man in The Man Who Questions Death also
achieves similar effects of self-questioning. While Gaos use of pronominal tactics vary
between his novels/fictions and differ from one play to another, his readiness to expose
himself naked and the unequivocal exposure of the repressive libidinal desire of the
self also makes him grossly different from Lu Xun. In this respect, Gao might be closer
to Yu Dafu who is prone to seek expression through exposing the libidinal self.

As a descendant of the cultural icon, it is apparent that there is an anxiety in Gao to

expel the fatherly ghost. The re-configured kid in Gaos quasi-autobiography One
Mans Bible shows no interest in Lu Xuns works and disappoints his uncle who intends
to nurture his political consciousness. Conversely, this little Gao is most enthusiastic in

133

Lim Wah Guans seminal paper On the Margins of Both East and West in Hong Kong Drama Review,
vol 8, 2009, 163-182.

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creative writing encouraged by his mother and interested in reading Western literature
in his teenage years. The teenage dream in which he embraces a cold western female
sculpture in his sleep carries significant psychological impact reflective of the writers
libidinal displaced as a desire for the other culture and the feminine. Gaos clear
reminiscence of this anecdote reflects the dreams significant symbolic meaning to him.
Under the exile writers retrospective lens in the quasi-autobiography, the past-he is
described as little worm who likes to write erotic poems. Gaos re-configuration of
himself conjures a psyche of a decadent youth starkly different from that of Lu Xun
who avows to shed his blood. While there is good reason to believe that Gao seeks
self-redemption in the quasi-autobiography through exposing his past experience as a
leader of the red guard during the Cultural Revolution, there is an embedded message
that Gao aims to demonstrate through the past-he, a self who is also an everyman, the
danger of a blind ego deluded by heroism and ideology. In this regard, the
quasi-autobiography could be read as supplement to underscore the writers political
stance foreground in the play Escape which has given rise to much disputes on his
unsympathetic view towards the students heroic demonstration in the June Fourth
movement. If there is no escape for the young Gao as a Chinese subject from the
political turmoil in the Cultural Revolution save to act as a performer as best as he could
in order to survive, there is, at least in Gaos implicit view, a choice for Lu Xun to
decide for himself his role in midst of the cultural movement in the early decades. Lu
Xun has once claimed that his work should be burnt as they are useless, implying his
pessimism towards the function of literature. He chooses to take a political turn and
speak aloud in the public before the students. For Gao, he embraces his weak voice
when speaking inside and outside his work. Lu Xun cries out save the children, Gao
laments the need to save oneself. Gao demonstrates a desire to expel the phantasm of
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the forefather, but ironically, the more he laments self-salvation, the more he is echoing
his ghostly father who is desperate to envisage an awakened younger generation. While
Lu Xuns work is read against its grain during the Mao regime at the service of
political propaganda, the ambiguity of Gaos work also submits itself to appropriation
of his critics who might feel obliged to provide a unique interpretation of Gaos work
and suture the gaps with their interpretation.134

5.7.2. Philosophical syncretization

Gaos Chineseness is radically spelt out by Hu Yaoheng in his survey of Gaos

plays. Referring to the Confucian notions of the meaning of life as human relationship,
and li (ritual) and ren (benevolence) as regulating concepts which subjugate man to a
recognition of self as social relation, Hu considers that Gaos concept of self as
manifested in his plays is more or less in line with these Confucian notions of self. To
close Gaos gaps with the Confucian fillings, he cites examples from various plays to
indicate that Gaos connection with the world through his language and thoughts is not
unlike the extension of the idea of ren to the cosmic world which gives prior importance
to human relationships. The rope Gao uses in The Other Shore as a theatrical tool to
demonstrate the multiple possibilities and forces of human relationship is cited by Hu.
Hu considers that the individualistic, shallow and selfish figures in Gaos plays such as
the woman in Between Life and Death, the one-night stand sex partners in Dialogue and
Rebuttal, and sleepwalker the criminal in Nocturnal Wanderer serve to illustrate Gaos
134

In literary theory, gap may mean the notion of Isers filling in the interpretative gap by reader or
Althussers lacunae of the text which requires to be exposed. For Artaud, it means the rupture between
things and words to be overcome by theatrical representation in its nakedness without transposition.
Mark Fortier, Theory/Theatre, 42. Henry Zhaos reading of Gaos work from the perspective of Zen
aesthetics is a typical example of critics effort to fill in the gap of Gaos work.

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message about the importance of benevolence. Hu says that Gaos subversive reading of
legendary figures in Shanhaijing and the satire against the heartless Zhuangzi in a dance
drama shows that Gao belongs to the mortal world and is not standing outside it. His
revelation of mans painful experiences is a sign to show that he is looking for an ideal
place to posit himself. According to Hu, Gaos denial of Confucian stereotype in fact
comes from his admiration of Confucian ideal. Gaos plays purpose is to incite
audiences intuition and eureka through showing the darkness of the human soul.

135

Hus charitable reading and Confucian turn to illuminate the benevolence of Gaos
artistic intent and appraise the contribution of Gaos works in enlightening audiences
seemingly wants to bring back the prodigal son to the Confucius home of benevolence.
In reading Gaos text, there is apparently a symbolic exchange in process within which
Hu inscribes the symbols with meanings of his Confucian worldview. Is Hus reading
after all a reading of the text of his own mind? The subject reader-response theory of
David Bleich argues that instead of relying on textual cues, readers are actually
interpreting the meaning of their own symbolization, in short, they are interpreting the
meaning of the conceptual experience they have created in response to the text.136
While Hu highlights Gaos benevolence in reading the deplorable behaviour of the
dramatic figures portrayed by the playwright, his moralistic stance and recuperation
of the cultural meaning of Gaos plays in the context of Confucianism may be
considered a regressive act of acculturation and a strategy to read against the grain
displaying a sense of cultural essentialism in his interpretation of Gaos transcultural
theatre. Gaos portrayal of the unfathomable dark side of human nature as epitomized
in the iterative metaphoric black hole, and the exposure of the chaotic existence of the
135

Hu Yao-heng, Bainian gengyun de fengshou, 75-79.

David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Balitmore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978). Lois Tyson, Critical
Theory Today, 164-165.
136

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characters seem less to preach a moral of benevolence than exposing life as it is, that of
the naked reality of life which many of the serious writers strive to illuminate. While
there is no doubt that Gaos portrayal of the life-world in the plays and narrative
bespeaks the writers implicit dialogic relation with the social world, Hus response
statement predicated on the pedagogy of Confucianism of which the essence is to
regulate and orientate individual behaviour in a network of social relation with
designated performance and moral duties appears to be ironic, as the writer has claimed
that genuine literature is transnational and not moral teaching but affirms the present of
the living. In fact, as an aesthetic response to his exilic condition, Gao is seen to have
made an effort to obliterate the national and realistic setting or the so called
Chineseness in most of his plays staged in the host country by de-contextualizing and
de-historicizing the semantic content. 137 As an exile playwright in a transnational
context, Gaos effort to write abstract plays in fact colludes him with other
transcultural exile writers such as Beckett who, being subjected to a new cultural
condition, endeavours to explore an artistic language communicable to the world
audience. The fact that the avenue of contemporary theatre as a public place for modern
performances would make it imminent if not compulsory for an exile playwright to gear
to a transcultural context and strive for artistic transcendence seeking a new idiom.

Spivak says that to translate a text, one needs to keep a maximum distance in the
translation process and undo previously taught habits in order to learn how to engage
fully with the text. From the point of view of cultural translation, Hus suturing the gap

137

In a dialogue exchange with a French writer, Gao says that the exile condition incites him to deliberately
obliterate national and realistic setting in his plays. See Meiyou zhuyi, 75. One might argue that Gao still
adheres to a certain degree of Chineseness referring to the Chinese themes of some of his post-exile
plays like Mingcheng and Snow in August commissioned by Hong Kong &Taiwan cultural institutions.

262

of Gaos plays with the cultural fillings of Confucianism is worth pondering. It brings
us back to the question of Liu Xiaofeng mentioned in the earlier chapter on scholars
reflections on the philosophical issues pertaining to the existentialist questions of the
modern Chinese subject; and Lius contention of the need for a review of the relevance
of Neo-Confucianism in the contemporary context. In this connection, the question to
ask here is whether Gaos diasporic aesthetic emulates any Confucian traits and how far
Chinese philosophy is embedded in his exilic discourse. While it is beyond the premise
of this study to address thoroughly such an issue, at this juncture it is worth pointing out
that if there is a Confucian trait in Gaos work, it is less likely the pedagogical and
regulative concept of human relations based on ancient familial and imperial
relationship as hinted by Hu which is considered by some scholars as theoretically
ineffective in the modern era, but rather, an emulation of the philosophy of xinling
(heart and soul) which is considered by scholars to be the essence of Chinese
philosophy or the so called Neo-Confucianism and which is bestowed with modern
relevance and transcultural currency. 138 In short, the philosophy of xinling which
emanated from the teachings of Confucius and Mencius and emulated by the xinxue
school in the Song and Ming gives recognition to the latent power of the
self-conscious mind/heart (zhijue xin ) bestowed in all human being capable of
doing good and empowers the self to become an ethical being. In essence, xinxue

138

Lao Siguans Musion and Hope: On Contemporary Philosophy and Culture :

(Hong Kong: The Chinese U of HK, 2003). Lao and scholars of Neo-Confucianism such
as Tang Junyi argue that the essence of Chinese philosophy lies with the philosophy of life (shengming
), namely, idea about the nature of heart/mind (xinxing ) and the philosophy of becoming an ethical
being (chengde ji xue ) inherited from the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. Mou Zongsan
argues that the postulation of a priori of goodness in human nature or the moral metaphysics of Chinese
philosophy is superior to Kants moral theology. Mou Zongsan , Zhongguo zhe xue shi jiu jiang
(Taibei : Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1983), 442-443. Interestingly, Gaos protagonists have
repeatedly exclaimed, what a life! in both his novels and plays, suggesting the writers conscious
philosophical attempt in questioning life.

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emulates the pre-given goodness (shan ) of human being postulated by Mencius and
the practicing of the illustrious virtue (liangzhi ) promulgated by Wang
Yangming and other philosophers of the school. Hu says that Gaos conception of self is
in alliance with that of the Confucian notion of self, but if such a proposition is to
remain sustainable, it would have to be justified by fabricating the Confucian rubrics of
Gaos aesthetics. As mentioned above, the idea of xinling of the xinxue school expounds
on the potency and latent power of the individual self to exercise moral scrutiny and to
distinguish between good and evil. Liangzhi which is postulated by the ancient
philosophers as a pre-given entity endowed in heaven (tian) and dwells in mans heart
as a spot of illuminating intelligence.139 This spot of illuminating intelligence in a way
seems to echo the dim blue light repeatedly mentioned in Gaos work and serves to
bridge Gaos aesthetics and philosophy genealogically with Neo-Confucianism. Gao
repeatedly alludes to this spot of illuminating light which empowers and sustains the
protagonists will to struggle against the perversity of life, to question, to remain true to
oneself and cling incessantly to creativity.140 This life-sustaining illuminating dim light
provides a handle which guides the protagonist to pertain to self-salvation and sustain
the ontological existence of the self. As described by Gao at the ending chapter of One
Mans Bible, it is this dim blue light residing in the artists heart that provides guidance
to lead him out of darkness, emanates a feeling that was indestructible, and heightens
ones awareness of existence. Apparently, Gao seems to have syncretized the aesthetics
of Xinxue which is infiltrated with the art of Zen and daoist wit.141 Liu Zaifu, in writing

139

In the words of Wang Yangming:

, .
140

Mabel Lee notes in her seminal paper The resonance of Zhuangzi in Gao Xingjians creation that what
is particular of Gaos painting is that the heart-mind of Gao is manifested in his painting as a location of
illuminating brightness. Examples of such images from copy of Gaos painting are at appendix 4-6. From
Darkness and Light: an exhibition of recent work by Gao Xingjian & Linyizhong meixue.
141
Tian Banxiang notes in Escape, recluse, zen that the idea of escape of the Chinese literati has all along

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about Gaos aesthetic of self-salvation, construes that liangzhi in the Gaoian sense
meant the embracing of an ordinary heart underscored by Zen philosophy,
self-examination and an adherence to the weak selfs inward search for truth and
goodness. Liangzhi stands for the writer cum intellectuals emulation of conscience of
the self and self-admittance of ethical responsibility. Liangzhi for Gao is contrary to the
so called social conscience many intellectuals claimed to embrace but failed to give
heed and speak out the truth.142 If liangzhi in classical philosophy is endowed with a
double meaning emanating the selfs latent ability to distinguish between good and evil
and sustain goodness, the modern version of liangzhi as embedded in Gaos philosophy
is to acknowledge the need for the individual to subject himself to self-scrutiny,
recognize the selfs immanent pertinence to human dignity and restore the weak selfs
awareness of existence. The bottom line of liangzhi, in Gaos words as referred by Liu,
is that when one finds that if preserving ones human dignity is impossible, and one
isnt killed and doesnt commit suicide, then, if one does not want to die, the only
option is to flee.143 In this regard, Gaos stance is not incongruous with Confucius
teaching, as pointed out by Liu Xiaofeng, that the ancient saint holds the view that one
should set himself adrift in the sea if dao does not prevail. If the essence of
Neo-Confucianism, or philosophy of xinling, as pointed out by some scholars, resides in
its orientative power to provide guidance for man to become an ethical being whose
ultimate goal is to achieve moral good and social order, such a philosophy under Gaos
modern scrutiny is transformed to becoming an ethic which would sustain the dignity of
the weak self and justify ones escape from a society where perseverance of human
dignity is impossible. In this light, the efficacy of Gaos aesthetic seems more than the
been emanated in the philosophy of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Confucianism and Zen.
142
Liu Zaifu, Gao Xinjiang Lun (Taipei: Linking, 2004), 165-193.
143
One Mans Bible, 405 & Ibid.

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seeking of a place to posit himself within the world as Hu has claimed, but a
self-struggle to preserve human dignity so as to keep the dim light aglow and an effort
to sustain self-awareness towards lifes existence.

To preserve and enhance ones perception of lifes existence, Gao postulates an

aesthetic of self-doubt and self-interrogation through the third eyes examination against
the self in a cold distance. Liu considers this third eye aesthetic which is transposed in
the form of pronominal narrative strategy in Gaos works and which serves to act as the
spiritual judge of the writers inner-self Gaos creative invention. The third eyes cold
observation of the self, or in Chinese philosophical terms, jingguan can be considered a
gongfu of the self to achieve self-preservation and sustain an ethical state of being.
While the idea of jingguan might appear to be in collusion with Buddism, the notion is
in fact first promulgated by Laozhi as a way to attaining dao.144 However, it should
be noted that such a concept of self-introspection is not culturally exclusive but also a
familiar proposition in modern Western philosophy. While the plausibility of
introspective self-awareness remains a contentious issue in Western philosophy as one
might argue that as the eye cannot see itself, so the self, understood as a subject of
awareness, cannot be aware of itself as an object, modern literary writers in the
twentieth-century are devoted to the cult of introversion which expounds on the pursuit
of the life of the mind and individual consciousness as a means to apprehending lifes
existence. Confronted by a spiritual void in the midst of modern development in the
cities, self-salvation and personal freedom is gauged by the intensity of ones awareness
of his existential situation. The assertion of human potentialities and inexhaustible

144

Fang Keli , Zhongguo zhe xue da ci dian (Beijing : Zhongguo shehui kexue
chuban, 1994), 711.

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resources of the human mind through highly subjective introspection is apparently

deemed as aesthetic in itself.145 What makes Gaos proposition distinguishable from his
western predecessors is that his elucidation of existential aesthetics and heightened
introspection is deliberately transposed as an aesthetic strategy to solving the problem
of self-subjectivization through the objectification of the self at a distance alluding to
the Chinese aesthetic of jingguan. The traditional gongfu of self-introspection is
transposed in the modern context as a strategic and aesthetic response of the diasporic
intellectual to addressing the problem of the self intricately entangled in politics,
ideology and history. This aesthetic of self-distancing is particularly relevant in the light
of the intellectuals self-entanglement with the century-old cultural politics in China.

Apart from the aesthetic use of pronominal strategy, Gaos taiqiquan practice with
actors as a part of the gongfu to underscore the director/playwrights tripartite acting
method and aiming to attain a state of non-thinking to loosen up the body and
visualize the self as an object provides another occasion for us to further extrapolate
Gaos Chineseness in terms of his transposition of Chinese philosophical idea into
aesthetic practices. The complementary idea of jing and dong (movement) which is
central to the technique of taijiquan is a traditional notion genealogically linked to
ancient Chinese philosophy inclusive of Daoism, Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism.
The latter even promulgates dongjing as essential to the gongfu of the literatis inner
moral practice. How could we then extrapolate the Chineseness of Gaos diasporic
aesthetic in relation to this philosophical notion of dongjing? If we consider the
145

Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 414, 817-818. Chen Laifen, Fictionality and Reality
in Narrative Discourse ( diss. U of Washington 1990) 74-75. Lao Siguan notes that the idea of subjective
self and idea of self-consciousness promulgated by Lu Xiangshan and subsequently elaborated in Wang
Yangmings xinxue is comparable to the idea of self-reflective thinking in western philosophy, see Lao,
Xinbian Zhongguo zhexueshi,390- 400.

267

traveling and exilic motif of Gao as one of movement, ie., of dong, this act of incessant
movement and self-exile is a pre-requisite to providing the occasion for the emanation
of jing, that is, the jingguan aesthetic of self-examination as bestowed in Gaos
narrative and dramatic style. It is in the actively self-imposed fleeing and distancing act
that the Chinese subject is able to achieve self-examination through jingguan, as Gao
has himself noted that one is exceedingly sunk in quietness during exile.146

While

ancient philosophers such as Laozi might give prime importance to jing over dong as
the state of ultimate perfection which manifests dao, dongjing to Gao would presumably
bear equal significance, given that Gao has proclaimed himself a world traveler who is
always on the move and avowed to be always explorative in his artistic creation. In fact,
as the writers name Xingjian () which alludes to the aphorism-,
in Yizhuan would have suggested, the propriety of the writer is one of
permanent changes, he as a gentleman would always strive for self-strengthening.
Scholars of Neo-Confucianism point out that , in Yizhuan is
expressive of the idea of tianming ( literally meaning heavens order) which is
unfathomable.147 In contrast to the ancient Chinese philosophers obsession with the
idea of unfathomable tian and mans relation to it, Gaos obsession is seen in his
repeated allusion to the abyssal depth and imperceptibility of literature, life and human
being. Tian Banxiang construes that Gaos exile aesthetic bespeaks the philosophy of
both Daoism and Confucianism, and that the writers apparent reclusive act is also
utterly engaging. Tians contention has appropriately augmented and correlated critics
diversified propositions which tend to either suggest that Gaos work is Confucian as in

146

Meiyou zhuyi, 116-155. This point is highlighted in Tian Banxiangs seminal paper Escape, recluse,
zen.
147
See Mou Zongsan, Zhongguo zhe xue shi jiu jiang, 436. This observation of the relevance of the
writers name comes from Ying Xiaodong,s A stuy of Gao Xingjians work.

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the case of Hu Yaoheng or contend that his aesthetic colludes with Zhaungzis
philosophy which emulates a particular Chinese kind of individualism.148

If Daoism and Buddhism have to a large extent inspired Western philosophers in

formulating their system of thoughts particularly in self-perception,149 it would not be
too far-fetched to say that Gao has in turn syncretized philosophical ideas deriving from
the modern West and Chinese tradition. The syncretization serves as an aesthetic
response to the existential situation of the Chinese self in the post-Mao era, and in a
wider context, it gives thoughts as to how an intellectual being should deal with the
modern living condition. How then should we evaluate the efficacy of Gaos
philosophical stance in the light of contemporary theories pertaining to issues such as
cultural identity and Chineseness? Cultural critics like Rey Chow proposes that it is
only with close study of specific texts and media, be they fictional, theoretical, or
historical that could Chineseness be productively erased and reevaluated in the
catachrestic modes of its signification and the very forms of its historical
construction. 150 She questions the efficacy of the strategy in resorting to the
post-structuralist theoretical move of splitting and multiplying a monolithic identity
(such as China or Chinese) from within. While Rey Chow gives heed to critical
discourse in demystifying the notion of Chineseness as a collective identity through
textual analysis, the problem lies with what happens after the erasure. The question
remains to be answered, if the human self or subject is wholly constituted or wholly one
148

See Mabel Lees seminal paper The resonance of Zhuangzi in Gao Xingjians creation in Hong Kong
Drama Review, vol 8 2009, 123-134. As mentioned in Ch 2 (footnote 49), Mabel Lee contends that Gaos
individualism should be understood in genealogy of Laozi and Zhuangzi which pertains to mental
independence and individuation against collectivity.
149
Mabel Lee points out that there are extensive direct and indirect borrowings from Daoism and
Buddhism by Western philosophers from Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and to Heidegger. Mabel Lee,
Gao Xingjian on the Issue of Literary Criticism in Soul of Chaos, 22-23.
150
Rey Chow, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field.
Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 18.

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of textualization, how could the agent be held responsible for engaging in or acting on
the basis of a critique of the conditions in which it itself lives? The question brings us
back to the subject of the self, as a critic points out, it is an issue of seeking a human
way of being for thinking and practicing politics responsibly.151 At this juncture, the
individual liangzhi emanated in Gao as pointed out by Liu Zaifu, and Gaos
highlighting of the split self, the third eye, the cold distance in examining the self and
the world, the heightened awareness of existence, the perseverance of self-integrity, and
the concept of self valorized in the moment of enunciation and performative speech
act are all of relevance not just culturally and politically, but also in theory and practice.
While Gaos philosophical babbling in his work sometimes appear to be narcissistic or
even pathological, his work demonstrates the aesthetic power of an integration of
philosophy and literature which makes it unique and bespeaks his ethic as a diasporic
intellectual.

5.7.3

Zen intelligence

While the issue of intra-cultural or intercultural translation in the philosophical

realm is not the main subject of this study, Henry Zhaos translation of Gaos works as
modern Zen theatre would be of relevance in examining how critics have endeavored to
set up a Chinese home for Gao the exile writer. In enthroning Gaos theatre as modern
Zen theatre, Zhaos attempts to theorize Gaos theatre above East-West antagonism in
aesthetics and cultural terms. Zhaos translation of Gaos plays as Zen theatre is made
giving consideration to Zen elements found in Gaos theatre such as dramatic

151

Bernard P. Dauenhauer, The Human Way of Being and Its Political Implications in Alternative
Identities: The Self in Literature, History, Theory, 179.

270

characters and tools bearing Buddhist connotations, the image of the nun who
disembowels herself in Between Life and Death, a monk resembling a clown playing at
intervals in Dialogue and Rebuttal, and some monks chanting Buddhist scriptures in
The Other Shore. The most prominent evidence of a Zen play is Snow in August which
tells the story of Huineng (638-713), the Sixth Patriarch of the Chinese Chan School. To
support his proposition, Zhao argues that the meta-dramatic structure of Gaos plays
such as the use of double roles of actors playing in-between the two plot layers in
Nocturnal Wanderer indicates a meta-structure similar to the concept of stratification of
the world in Buddhism. The consistent presence of women characters in Gaos plays is
to emulate the relationship between se and kong (desire and emptiness) pertinent to the
passage to enlightenment in Buddhism. While Gaos plays carry postmodernist traits
such as a plotless structure, Zhao construes that the aim of Gaos plays is to bring
enlightenment to the audience through gongan (or koan) which embraces Zen aesthetics
and makes his plays distinguishable from postmodern theatre. He also considers xieyi,
which literally means the expression of subjective state of mind, bespeaks the
aesthetic bearing of Gaos modern Zen plays. Zhao summarises in the following his
grounds for the establishment of Gaos Zen plays.

First, Gaos play does not build its dramatic interest upon plot, message, or theme.
It only ushers the audience to the paradoxical situation of the possibility of a meaning
and the impossibility of its full realization in the play itself. Secondly, the plays plain
and reductive language and its blankness creates a great pressure on the audience to
provide significance to it. Thirdly, the play tends to provide some metadramatic
indications aiming to induce audiences consciousness of manoeuvering/being
manoeuvered in watching the plays. Fourthly, the play strives to involve the audience
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by creating an unnamable transcendent deliverance that lies latent in their own minds.152
While it is tenable for Zhao to extrapolate Gaos plays Zen effect on the audience
embarking on the contingent and momentary theatrical experience, the problem of such
a notion rests with the naming itself which might give rise to a conceptual fallacy.
The nomenclature of Gaos plays as Zen theatre might lead the audience attending the
performance to look for Zen which in fact is not outside but inside themselves. The
concept might also bear the risk of becoming a cultural barrier as the notion of Zen or
Chan bears a Chinese or Oriental stigma. The good intention of Zhao to promote
Gaos theatre as a hybrid of East and West aesthetics might end up entrapping itself in
the notion of Chineseness. While Zhao notes that Gaos Zen theatre is Chinese in
essence but its significance is not bound to Chinese culture, the problem still lies with
the concept itself. If the essence of Zen is that all the meaning pertains to the present, it
would be a paradox to prefix the present with a name or thing prior to the experience.
In Huinengs words, where comes the dust when there is nothing in essence?

When discussing the translation problem of intercultural communication, Naoki

Sakai and Jon Solomon propose a kind of translation as address (as a social relation
between addresser and addressee) that is primarily practical and performative in nature,
hence undetermined and still-to-come. They construe that when positions of given
designation are assumed or represented to be prior to the act of address in
communication, such positions become identified with things that are supposed to be
outside of the social relations that produce them rather than the social relations
themselves ( such as in the case of an audience attending the theatre).153 Incidentally,

152
153

Henry Zhao, Toward a Modern Zen Theatre, 203-204.

Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, Traces: A multilingual series of cultural theory and translation (Hong

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the example the critics cite as an address in communication preceded by designated

positions is one of a Zen dialogue between Foucault and the Japanese monks which
serves to demonstrate the difficulty in surpassing pre-designated geographical and
national barriers. The critics point out that Foucault holds regard for the ninth-century
monk Rinzai (Linji in Chinese) who he finds to be a great Zen philosopher. Rinzai is
well-known for his practice of striking the befuddled student, a vivid example to
illustrate address designated as a relation based on the performative. In the dialogue,
Foucault cites the example of Rinzai to demonstrate that Zen itself is not wholly
Japanese, and by implication, not wholly Chinese. In Foucaults lexicon, Rinzai stands
as a figure for a philosopher who refuses both the tasks of school-building and of
translation inasmuch as they both relate to the project of national construction. But no
sooner Foucault advances this admiration in front of the Japanese monks for Rinzai, he
immediately retreats, as a show of deference to his interlocutor, back to the default
position of national institutions of translation. Foucault says, I read the French
translation by Professor Demieville, who is an excellent French specialist on
Buddhism. In response, a Japanese monk advances the thesis that, as held by Chinese
specialists, Zen is thoroughly Chinese. With the repetition of the words French
and Chinese, the critics lament that what is lost in the communication is the address
as such or generality of address preceding the assignation of enunciative positions
affixed to geographical and national boundaries.154

While the above example serves to illustrate problems of cultural translation

arising from a given designation as a priori of address in communication, how can

Kong UP, 2006) 7, 11.

154

Ibid., 15.

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one avoid this coming-first or pre in translating Gaos Zen theatre? Is naming
avoidable? Gao has great admiration for Huineng whom he calls the great thinker and
admits that he has transferred the essence of Zen language in his play Dialogue and
Rebuttal, but he seemingly has not taken over Zhaos idea to describe his plays as Zen
plays. In an interview he prefers to call Snow in August the omnipotent (quanneng)
theatre, giving heed to the theatricality of the hybridized dramatic form which mixes
acting, Chinese and Western operatic singing, modern choreography and acrobats rather
than dwelling on generic issues. In his often erasive manner, he calls his play four
unlikes: unlike opera, unlike traditional Chinese drama, unlike dance and unlike stage
plays. Hence his naming is by un-naming.155

If Gao does not take on Zhaos proposal to call his plays Zen theatre wholesale,
how does he as the director of Snow in August translate Zen to his actors in practice?
During the rehearsal of the play in Taiwan, Gao has apparently adopted a strategy to
reduce the well-trained Beijing opera actors to degree zero by erasing their
well-formulated gestures and singing methods. After emptying out the actors, he starts
to encourage them to fill in the gaps by themselves, gesturing and singing
authentically with their body and voice. While the director has all the authority in
directing a play, Gaos apparent cunning approach is more Zen than cruel. The way
that he strives first to empty out the actors pre-conceptions and then let themselves
arrive at an eureka is most creative. This creative process does not only help to liberate
the actors bound by a formulaic technique, it allows them to disentangle from being a
reified thing of automatic gesture and personalize their gesture through
155

Instead of using total theatre which is often in association with Artauds theatre, Gilbert Fong uses the
term omnipotent theatre in his paper Creative Homelessness: Gao Xingjian, Snow in August, and
Contemporary Chinese Drama in Hong Kong Drama Review, Vol 8, 2009, 279-288.

274

self-creativity156. This process of self-discovery of the actors is also a discovering

process for the director himself. Allowing the actors to embark on an auto-translation
would result in creative and bold shifts which might go farther than simply acting on the
instruction of the director.157 In so doing, Gao is also de-centering his power as a
director to enable the actors to be the author of their own creativity. In other words, Gao
is disseminating his understanding of Huinengs intelligence onto the actors, that of
self-enlightenment and eureka. Gao says whats modern about Huineng is that: he
does not consider himself a savior, he says you have to rely on your own salvation. Its
not me but you to bring yourself back to your own nature. In describing Gaos creative
imperative, Zhao notes that Gao does not flinch from the challenge of constantly
looking for new directions, no matter how successful his previous plays have been. This
ceaseless self-erasure has almost become a self-torment.158 To a certain extent, Gao is
also sharing with his actors this creative energy of self-torture which would elevate the
artists creativity to a higher realm. Wu Guoxing, the actor playing Huineng felt himself
in a process of onioning when his formulaic acting technique was put to a void. Wu
says that not until he succeeded in transposing himself in a steadfast posture on the
stage daring not to move an inch that he was given the liberation to move around and
the playful and carefree feeling was most enjoyable. Another actors comment aptly
sums up Gaos exilic imperative to let go Chineseness so as to make possible a
creative syncretism in his Zen play. The actor says that they have to jump out of the
156

According to Susan Sontag, the idea of degree zero for Barthes, as manifested in his reading of the Eiffel
Tower, is that it is this pure-virtually empty-sign that means everything. Like moralistic antitheses such
as good versus bad, it is empty but present, its meaning absent but full. In the same manner, impersonality
is the highest achievement of the personal. Susan Sontag ed., A Barthes Reader,xxiv.
157
Beckett is well-known for being the writer-translator of his works writing first in French and then
English as an exile. Studies found out that auto-translation as practiced by Beckett results in bold shifts
from the source text which are idiomatic and creative. In Gaos case, he says that he almost rewrites the
Chinese version of the French plays. See Mona Baker, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies
(London: Routledge, 1998), 17-20.
158
Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, 32.

275

traditional operatic formula but at the same time the gongfu is still there, in other
words, its to use tradition without traces and this is the most difficult. 159 This
jumping out bespeaks Gaos diasporic aesthetic, that of a no-ism so as to fill in the
what-ever, and that of a creation of a third space of incessant possibilities and
discovery, a site of becoming and always on the move, and a space of self-creation and
cultural inter-change.

159

Zhou Meihui . Xuedi chansi : Gao Xingjian zhidao "Ba yue xue" :

(Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2002), 51,68.

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CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION

When Bai Xianyong says that Chinese tradition of exile literature does not emerge
until the 60s and 70s, he points to the second generation of the Mainlanders in
Taiwan who voluntarily emigrate overseas. The diasporic aesthetic these migrs
emulate is one of nostalgia, melancholy, and the loss of double home. The diasporic
aesthetic of the political exile from the Mainland in the late 80s as manifested in Gaos
case is of a starkly different kind. Other than perpetuating the syndrome of obsession
with China, the new kind of dissident voice as exemplified by Gao is of double
alienation. The dissident voice is one which alienates the nation by questioning its
ideological hegemony and one of self-alienation through speaking in split. The voice
speaks as a counter-discourse against national myth and also against the myth of self as
the centered subject. Distance is not what the exile mourns but embraces so as to remain
at the margin which would enable the diasporic intellectual to observe with a cold eye,
attain self-interrogation and self-reflection.

Comparing Gaos diaspora aesthetic with that of other writers exiled from
autocratic regimes who are also victims of political censorship would show that they
share similar traits despite their different cultural background.1 Gaos narrative shares
similarities with these exiled writers in terms of the use of hybrid temporalities as
1

I mainly refer to Sophie McClennens The Dialectics of Exile in which she has embarked an ambitious
attempt to deduce a theory of exile writing based on her study of exile writing in Hispanic literatures.

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agency in describing the personal and historical past. As this study has illustrated, in
recounting the personal and historical past, the writer uses vigorous time shifts,
variation of narrative speed, and ellipsis. Other than the re-telling of myth and folk tales
which dwell on primordial time and the recounting of historical events which require
linearity, what makes Gaos narrative peculiar is its use of cognitive time and
simultaneous juxtaposition of the present and the past enabling the narrator to speak
back to history and seek redemption. In addition to the use of pronominal strategy
which enables the exposition of spacious mind time both on the page and the stage, the
foregrounding of psychic-time in the form of dreamy language flow gives thickness to
Gaos speech with its opacity and ambiguity, and hence also gives thickness to the self
in split. The overall effect is more than demonstrating playful narrative technique but an
emulation of the immanent chaotic nature of history, the self, and the lived-world which
is intricate, imperceptible and in a state of flux.

The idea of space as reflected in Gaos narrative and dramaturgy is one of

ambivalence which manifests a double edge of the writer as a free-floating traveler in
drift as well as an imprisoned self inscribed by history and the traumatic past and
engulfed in a prevalent sense of death threat, a claustrophobic fear against which the
subject seeks to escape, surpass and seek renewal

It is this doubleness of the spatial

existence of the subject which underpins the existential condition of Gao as a spiritual
exile. While the exiled writer is free to travel in the world of language, he is also aware
of himself being imprisoned in language. Hence the imaginary discursive third space of
Gao is always a contentious field of self-expression and self-struggle to delimit the
containment of language. Gao makes ceaseless effort to personalize his speech through
iterative metaphors and self-reflexivity, while overtly reminding his readers of the
278

inauthenticity and elusiveness of self and language. As a diasporic intellectual he seeks

to dwell on an authentic existence residing in freedom of expression and avows that I
express therefore I exist. But the irony is that his existence can never be authentic
as language as an agency for self expression is always elusive and never a stable entity.
His existence which dwells on a performative speech act is at its best an on-going drift
and an act of becoming.

Not unlike other exiled writers who seek refuge in the so called First World, Gao
as a diasporic intellectual, who invests in language as an aesthetic agency for
self-expression and a critical tool to question culture and human nature, is aware of his
need to respond to challenges posed by contemporary thinking such as postmodernism
and poststructuralism. At this juncture, it should be noted that while Gao seemingly
speaks inside and outside his work against lucid postmodernism predicated on ceaseless
language game and saying nothing, his questioning on master narrative, cultural
essentialism, truth system, modernist revolution and political action, and his effort to
understand the world and human nature which is beyond text emulates a branch of
resistant or dissident postmodernist politics and poetics which gives edge to his work.
The cutting edge of his dissident voice, which seeks self expression in an alternative
discourse and speaks critically against rationality, logocentrism, and the centred subject
while embarking on the ambivalence and uncertainty, has made his exilic discourse in
collusion with the dissident voices of female writers and that of the postcolonial
subjects who also seek to question cultural control and regain the possibility of
self-definition through the agency of speech, dream , jouissance and writing aloud.
Having said that, Gaos diasporic aesthetic cannot be categorized as postmodernist
per se, as he is also a modernist and an avant-garde par excellence who has
279

ostensibly demonstrated the modernist aesthetic of surrealism and psychic automatism

and is obsessed with the modernists spirit of originality and experimentation.2

In fact,

what makes Gaos voice genuinely dissident is that it is speaking from an individuated
third space of indeterminacy and syncretism vigorously dissenting from the aesthetic of
twentieth-century Chinese literature which, in Rey Chows words, is a path marked off
from the West born as a reaction to foreign imperialism, imbued with traditional
didacticism and modernist nationalism that in turn produced a revolutionary literature
and its barbaric Other of popular narratives, and eventually punctuated by socialism on
the mainland and colonialist capitalism3

While Gaos no-ism, which apparently seeks to defy the confinement of

ideological and theoretical framework, provides challenges to his critics who are often
agitated with a sense of unease either to repeat his words or appropriate him, the
aesthetic of what-ever giving heed to incessant new discovery and multiple possibility
somehow also legitimizes and empowers creative reading of his work by readers and
critics alike. It is also against this what-ever that critics are given the freedom to play
host in homing Gaos works in terms of Zen, Chineseness, feminism, postmodernism,
2

Yang Xiaobin, while criticizing the mainland nativists attempt in deteriorating radical Western theories
such as postmodernism and postcolonialism into conservative theories that helps endorsing the status quo
in current China and enhancing Eastern totalism, argues that it is not only possible but inevitable to
theorize contemporary Chinses culture in the light of postmodernism. He contends that the urgency to
conceptualize Chinese postmodernism does not necessarily result from a teleological impetus to emulate a
certain kind of literary development in the West but a discovery that the politico-cultural totality which
Chinese avant gardism faces up to belongs to the same discourse of modernity that Western literary
postmodernism attempts to cope with. Chinese avant-gardism expresses a discrediting of the grand
narratives of modernity not unlike those postmodern literary trends in post-Auschwitz Europe. While it is
infeasible to categorize Gaos work within the postmodern literary paradigm of contemporary China, his
work acutely coincides with the kind of postmodern Chinese avant-gardism which, according to Yang,
is featured by an impetus of subjective self-critique stemmed from an awareness that historical
catastrophes in China are to be examined within the collective/individual cultural subject and a confession
of the traumatizing violence of modernity within its deep formation. Yang Xiaobin, The Chinese
Postmodern (Michigan: U of Michigan, 2002), 238-245.
3
Rey Chow, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Toward a Rewriting of Modern Chinese Literary History.
(diss., Stanford U, 1986), 212.

280

critical theory, narrative theory, absurdity, existentialism, nihilism or whatever.

The cultural production of Gaos imaginative third space or he as a cultural product

is transcultural in the sense that it is always already transformed and hybridized.
Whether his cultural resources are derivative from traditional Chinese aesthetics or
modern western culture, what we see is Gaos individuated translated version which is
irreducible and personalized. Just as the Taiwan opera artist says, what is left are the
traces of the gongfu. We see in Gaos narrative Joycean language flow, mad
polyphony of multiple narrative perspective, jouissance, breasts of women portrayed in
western paintings, semen and sado-masochistic sexual metaphors of Jingpingmei, the
chain of female figures and male effeminacy of Hongloumeng, folk tales and gongan of
Lao Cans travelogue etc. In his plays we see syncretism of the Western absurd and
Chinese Zen, and hybridization of Artauds psycho-materialism and technique of
voicing out of emotions through gestures and props in Chinese opera.

Gaos diasporic third space is a de-territorialized field beyond the limit of national
literature and culture. It is a transcultural assemblage which seeks to communicate with
the world audience a history of trauma, the aporia of self, the libidinal, and deadly
experience. If cultural nationalism means the insistence of elements of culture which
cannot be modified or are deterministically linked to a nation, Gaos transcultural third
space is a de-territorialized space of conceptual and philosophical dialogue incessantly
questioning the self and de-limiting culture as an on-going process of re-creation. In
response to a postmodern condition in which inter-cultural transaction is a rule rather
than exception, instead of pre-fixing culture upon history which is itself questionable,
Gaos aesthetic provides an option to interpreting culture as an effect to the
281

transformation of the individuals cultural identity. Hence the self becomes a potential
self-conscious site of on-going cultural contest and transmutation.

Transculturation is a process which affects all cultures but for an exile writer the
question is most imminent as the cultural condition of exile would necessitate an exile
narrative which seeks to draw identity along other lines that are beyond the national
such as gender or sexuality, and the liminal being.4 Gao as a cultural practitioner has
demonstrated the Chinese diasporic intellectuals effort to negotiate with an exile
condition which calls attention to a new kind of humanism transcending geographical
borders and links oneself to others regardless of nationality or historical synchronicity.
This is not to subject the self to a universal aesthetic of globalism or ideology of
commonplace but a relation of the self and the others who are both subjected to a
lived-world of intricacy, complexity and imperceptibility. The ethic of Gao the Chinese
exile writer is to incessantly question the existential condition of the self and expose the
imperceptibility and possibility of the lived-world. If the aesthetic of Chinese exile
literature in the twentieth century is one of the sublime of misery, that of Gao is one of
the sublime of imperceptibility and possibility. While Gao shares with the exile
community in the transcultural arena a plight that is timeless and universal, he remains
to have his identity inscribed in the particular historical moment whence he commits
himself to becoming an exile spiritually and physically. In short, while Gao rejects the
notion of nation state and embraces transnational culture, he cannot escape or has not
sought to escape his cultural linkage with a past as explicated in his declaration that
Chinese culture lives in him.

Sophie McClennens The Dialectics of Exile, 25-27.

282

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Liu Xinwu . Liaojie Gao Xingjian . Xianggang : Kaiyi chuban,
2000.
Liu Zaifu . Gao Xingjian lun . Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2004.
Mou Zongsan . Zhongguo zhexue shijiu jiang . Taibei :
Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1983.
Shi, Shuqing . Wentan fansi yu qianzhan: Shi Shuqing yu dalu zuojia duihua
: . Xianggang: Mingchuang chuban,
1989.
Tang Junyi . Zhongguo zhe xue yuan lun . Xianggang: Ren
sheng chuban, 1966.
Tang Yijie ed.. Luan chuangtong yu fanchuangtong . Taibei:
Linking, 1989.
Wan Zhi . Gao Xingjian juzuo xuan . Xianggang : Mingbao
chubanshe, 2001.

295

Wang Dewei, Huang Jinshu ed., . Yuanxiang ren : zuqun de gushi

: . Taibei: Mai tian, 2004.

Wang Jinguang . Gao Xingjian, Yu Dafu, Wang Tao lun .

Xianggang : Luda wenhua chuban, 2006.
Wang Xiaoming . Wufa Zhimian de Rensheng:Lu Xun Zhuan :
. Shanghai : Shanghai wenyi chuban, 1993.
Xingzhengyuan wenhua jianshe weiyuanhui . Gao Xingjian
Taiwan wen hua zhi l . Taibei : Xingzhengyuan wenhua
jianshe weiyuanhui, 2002.
Ya Yi . Liu wang zhe fang tan lu . Xianggang: Xiafei'er chuban,
2005.
Zhao Yiheng . Gao Xingjian yu Zhongguo shiyan xiju : jianli yizhong xiandai
chanju : . Xianggang : Tiandi
tushu,2001.
Zhou Meihui . Xuedi chansi : Gao Xingjian zhidao "Bayue xue" :
. Taibei: Linking ,2002.
Zhu Chongke . Bentuxing de jiuge : bianyuan fangzhu, "Nanyang" xugou,
bentu misi (Entanglement of nativeness : self-exile, "Nan yang" fiction and myths of
nativeness) : . Taibei : Tangshan
chuban, 2004.

Works by Gao Xingjian cited

Gao Xingjian . 1981. Xiandai xiaoshuojiqiao chutan (An
introduction to the modern techniques of fiction). Guangzhou: Huacheng chuban.
----1990. Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Taibei: Linking.
----1995a. Shanghaijing zhuan (The Story of The Classic of Mountains and
Sea). Taibei: Dijiao chuban.
----1995b. Bian (The Other Shore). Taibei: Dijiao chuban.
----1995c. Shengsijie (Between Life and Death). Taibei: Dijiao chuban.
296

----1995d. Duihua yu fanjie (Dialogue and Rebuttal). Taibei:Dijiao

chuban.
--- 1995e. Taowang (Escape). Taibei : Dijiao chu ban.
----1996a. Meiyou zhuyi (No- ism). Hong Kong: Taiandi tushu.
----1996b. Zhoumo sichongzou (Weekend Quartet). Hong Kong: Xin
shiji chuban.
----1999. Yigeren de shengjing . (One Mans Bible). Taibei: Linking.
----2000. Bayue xue (August Snow). Taibei: Linking.
---- 2001a. Ling yizhong meixue . Taibei: Lianhe wenxue.
----2001b. Yeyoushen ( Nocturnal Wanderer). Taibei : Lianhe wenxue.
----2004. Kouwen siwang (The Man Who Questions Death). Taibei :
Lianjing chuban.
----2008. Lun chuangzuo . Taibei: Lianjing chuban.
---2010. & Gilbert Fong, Lun Xiju . Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2010.
Paintings by Gao Xingjian
Gao Xingjian. Darkness and Light: an exhibition of recent work by Gao Xingjian
: . Taibei : Xingzhengyuan wenhua jianshe weiyuanhui, 2001.
-----.Lingyizhong meixue . Taibei: Lianjing chuban, 2001.
------.Contemplating an inner vision. Hong Kong: Alison Fine Arts Ltd., 2004.

297

Appendix 1

Scene behind the Door

298

Ink on paper

73 x 105cm 2000

Fantasme

70 x 138cm

1993

Appendix 2

299

Appendix 3

Devant et derrire la porte 124.5 x 87.5cm 1996

300

Appendix 4

Une lumire intrieure

301

33 x 36cm 1998

Appendix 5

Realize

Ink on paper

302

123 x 148cm 2001

Appendix 6

Enlightment

Ink on paper

303

173 x 200cm 2001