China Perspective Issues

Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 for his works begun in China in the early 1980s. After moving to France in 1987, he has also written theoretical texts proposing not a major principle or ism, but the opposite, the absence of ism and a “cold” literature, free of all political or ideological influence. He has since had to confront the inherent contradictions between being famous as well as weak and isolated, the latter condition being conducive to producing literature and art in line with his convictions. This article looks at his work through the prism of the absence of ism.

From Soul Mountain to One Man’s Bible, Gao Xingjian’s fiction is committed to a labour of transgressive remembering: excavating minority heritages eclipsed by the dominant culture, protecting individual memory from established historiography, and sounding the dark areas of personal memory, less to indulge in “repentance” than to examine identity. The writing of memory, thanks to fictionalisation, thus comes to resemble an exorcism that makes it possible to defy prohibitions by casting out external and internal demons and by imposing the existential prescription against normative judgement.

Gao Xingjian and Ōe Kenzaburō share an interest in margins that was the basis for a conversation between them in 2006. A closer comparison of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain( Lingshan, 1982-1989) and Ōe Kenzaburō’s The Silent Cry ( Man’en gannen no futtobōru, 1967) also reveals a shared distrust of modernity, and a more precise preference for the margins of local culture. This cultural critique of modernity can be documented in their essays. However, although their respective doubts about modernity and central culture translate into similar formulations of an individual ethics, Ōe does not share Gao’s vision of a detached writer of “cold literature,” but rather continues to explore the political implications of his ethical stance. It is argued that their respective definitions of literature can be viewed as explorations of an alternative form of modernity.