An exile gives hope to Chinese writers

The Swedish Academy has bestowed the first Nobel Prize in literature of the new century on the exiled Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian (高行健). The choice has surprised almost everybody; Gao is little known either in the West or among Chinese, either in China itself or overseas. However, as a leading modernist playwright and short story writer, he was highly esteemed in China's literary circles in the 1980s. Almost all his plays and stories departed from the traditional descriptive Chinese prose forms. Instead Gao adopted a contemporary Western writing style that could be seen as closely resembling the so-called stream of consciousness, expressing emotions and thoughts that are more familiar in existentialist writings.

After the death of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), existentialism, particularly in its formulation by the French author Jean-Paul Sartre swept through China, eulogized by intellectuals and college students. Many of those so impressed thought existentialist themes -- the absurdity and meaninglessness of human life -- could be used to combat communism.

Having studied French literature in Beijing's Foreign Language Institute before the Cultural Revolution, Gao was one of the first Chinese to become acquainted with Western modernism. His plays represent a lofty ambition to start a trend in China to break away from the restrains of both traditional Chinese prose and the Communist literary mentality. He used Western techniques to manifested the absurdity of China's reality in his plays such as Absolute Signal (絕對信號) and Bus Stop(車站). While these plays seemed to Chinese audiences and readers like a breath of fresh literary air, they fell foul of the "anti-spiritual pollution movement" in the mid-1980s and were banned. Gao left China for Paris in 1987, to permanently settle there in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In Paris he continued to write in Chinese, while make a living by painting.

After Tiananmen he wrote the play Fugitives (逃亡), in which the slaughter in the square is the setting of the play. Three protagonists, two men and one woman, try to escape from the massacre. Gao describes there plight as trying "to escape not only from political oppression, but also from the wretchedness of other people; and (what was) ultimately inescapable was themselves." His 1996 essay Why Do I Write echoed this theme.

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In Fugitives, he also expressed through the play's protagonists his contempt for the hollow concepts of "people," "country" and "collective will," all concepts that flooded Chinese literature not only during the communist era but throughout the 20th century. The play has one central theme, that trying to escape is human destiny. Obviously, this theme, as the themes in many of his plays and other writings, is heretical to China's authorities. But Gao's work is not trammeled by its Chinese background.

The background and characters of Fugitives could be easily replaced by another setting or group of protagonists. The aspirations of the characters in the play are to be met in every society, and it is for this reason that Gao's work can be said to be "an oeuvre of universal validity," as the Swedish Academy acknowledged.

Even though Fugitives was seen as a political play by the Chinese authorities, condemned in the official media and banned in China, Gao declared he had no intention to use literature to express political ideals.