Gao Xingjian was born in 1940 in the province of Jiangxi (2). After taking a degree in French, in 1962 he worked as a French translator at Peking’s Foreign Languages Institute before being sent, during the Cultural Revolution, to schools for managers in Henan, and then in southern Anhui, to undergo "re-education". In 1975 he was recalled to Peking to work on the French edition of China in Construction, then in 1977 to a post at the Liaison Committee of China’s Writers’Association. In this capacity, he came to France in 1978 as Ba Jin’s interpreter. In 1982 his play "Alarm Signal" was produced at the Popular Art Theatre in Peking, opening the way to experimental theatre in China. In 1983 the same theatre put on the play "The Bus Stop" (3), which was immediately banned even as foreign critics were hailing the birth of avant-garde theatre. At the end of 1987, he visited Germany and France. From that period onwards, his plays have been performed on stages across Europe and in the United States: Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Veroli (Italy), Poznan, Gnynia (Poland), Nuremberg and New York.

Gao Xingjian’s literary output has been considerable: thirteen plays, three books on theory, three novels, numerous short stories, articles on fiction, drama, painting and contemporary art. Moreover, his creative activity has not been limited to literature, far from it: he has extended it to painting (4) and theatrical production.

The centrepiece of this abundant output, the long novel (562 pages in the Chinese edition) The Mountain of the Spirits (5), was written between 1982 and 1989. Gao Xingjian has repeatedly said that he never expected to publish it, and even less to earn any money from it; this enabled him to suffer censorship with equanimity, and to sustain a tone of untrammelled freedom. The Mountain of the Spirits is the writer’s fundamental attempt to put into practice his own literary theories about the novel, while "coming to terms with nostalgia for his homeland", as he put it himself (6). A distinctive feature of this novel, unlike the author’s plays written in China, is that it is largely unknown to the reading public of mainland China. It was finished in Paris in 1989, and published in 1990 in Taiwan (7). When it came out in France in 1995, the novel was an undoubted success from the start; with one accord, the French press lavished warm praise (8) on the book, which sold widely and was reprinted several times.

Gao Xingjian has spoken extensively about his literary ideas, both on the theatre and on fiction (9), in the course of seminars, public meetings with his readers, and interviews.

He has recently published in Chinese a novel that is as significant as The Mountain of the Spirits (10; it amounts to a final condemnation of the Chinese communist regime, and also to a long poem on the life of an individual confronted with that regime. It was timely for us to question him about his personal commitment and his creative work ten years after his departure from China.

Gao Xingjian talks with Noël Dutrait

You have been in France now since 1988, and you have declared that you would not return to China as long as the Communist Party remains in power. Ten years later, what is your position?

I spoke those words after the Tiananmen massacre. At the time I wrote a play, Abscondingr (11), which the Chinese authorities published as a sample of reactionary writing in a collection they held up to criticism, called Collection of Reactionary Remarks by "Elites" in Exile Abroad. Later they sealed off my flat in Peking. So I said that, for as long as I lived, I would not go back to a so-called homeland dominated by totalitarianism. These last years, the policy of openness adopted in mainland China has definitely not led to democracy on the political front; for intellectuals, the control exerted over freedom of expression is no less strict than before; while human rights are still not guaranteed. I feel no wish to return to a country that has banned my work. China, my own personal China, is in my heart. I need no other.

Your book The Mountain of the Spirits has been very successful in France. How do you explain that success?

As Gérard Meudal, the Libération journalist, put it, the book is about an individual who is opposed to all forms of oppression; it is also, as the critic for Le Monde observed, a novel about man and nature (12). Although it is concerned with the events taking place in China, the book goes beyond that concrete environment. The difficulties of man’s existence, and the hope that each individual has of finding relief from them, on the spiritual level, are the same in the East as in the West. So if the book has had a certain resonance for French readers, it is not only because of their interest in Chinese culture.

You have said that, thanks to The Mountain of the Spirits, you have come to terms with nostalgia for your homeland. In your latest, as yet unpublished, novel, Yige ren de shenjing (The Bible of a Lonely Man), why do you come back to the subject of China and its most recent history?

When I finished writing The Mountain of the Spirits in France, I thought I had finished with nostalgia for my homeland, a nostalgia that becomes a heavy burden for exiled Chinese writers in the West. One of the end results of living in exile is that it enables the artist to conserve his creative force, but he or she must then face up to a new reality. That is why I turned my attention towards subjects that concern life in the West; in the five plays that I have written since that moment (13), the Chinese background has gradually become blurred. I am profoundly convinced that a man who has left his homeland, so called, can not only live, but also continue to work creatively. It is only afterwards that he can look back to examine the painful experience he may have lived through in his own country. I thought I had established enough distance to come to terms with that experience but, in fact, it was not so. I have worked on three successive versions of the manuscript, and spent three years, to succeed at last in destroying this tumour in the midst of all those memories that I had striven to forget. This was the necessary condition for literary creation: art does not consist in airing one’s grievances and, if one cannot take pleasure in the creative process, it is better not to venture into such sensitive areas. If I did go back into my past to write this novel, it was also to seek relief for hidden suffering and to enrich my interior life, so that later on I might write something even better.

Many people have already born witness to China’s Cultural Revolution. In writing this novel, what more do you personally hope to contribute?

So far, the writing that has dealt with the Cultural Revolution has been generally designated the term "scar literature". Nevertheless, one may wonder, who are the authors of these scars? I feel no interest in the writers who are muzzled by the administrative authorities, nor in books that are the products of self-censorship. What I wish to show is how the Cultural Revolution—the most radical manifestation of the communist revolution in this century—turned people into hired henchmen even before it made them objects of sacrifice. I seek also to show the powerlessness and the fragility of the individual caught up in this violent storm. Perhaps this would be a more suitable task for the contemporary historian; but I am limiting myself to presenting a personal case, one that is intended more as a psychological document, and one that cannot be found in those archives already opened up or likely to be. I offer it as matter for reflection.

You have recently exhibited your latest ink paintings in l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue (14). What significance does pictorial expression have in your creative work?

Ever since my childhood, I have always been keen on both painting and writing, but I never believed they would become my profession. Speaking in general, when I am tired of writing, I paint; and when I am tired of painting, I write. Painting calls upon how one sees things, and on physical force; writing, on one’s intellectual capacity; each regulates the other. Painting enables me instantly to conjure up before my eyes my own interior perceptions: it is a small personal world that is quite complete and leaves no room for doubt—and that often astonishes even me. It is a pure act of creation. Often I have no idea what I am about to paint, and literature itself cannot match the pleasure that I take in this discovery.

You are famous in China for having profoundly reformed the art of writing for the theatre; and you have written several plays in French. What place does dramatic art hold nowadays for you?

Writing my new novel has taken me a long time: my plans for writing new plays have been held up. Between now and the end of the year I intend to finish a play that was commissioned from me by the French Ministry of Culture called Le Quêteur de la Mort (The Death collector). Next year two of my plays will be put on in France, and I myself will be producing one of them. I am also planning a book of theoretical reflections on painting. For the next year at least, I shall have to put fiction writing to one side.

In an article called "Meiyou zhuyi" (I Have No Doctrine), you declared that you were permanently opposed to "isms" (zhuyi in Chinese). That amounts, does it not, to asserting a new dogma?

"Isms" are theoretical constructions; but the world, and man himself, existed even before theory. One may explain existence with the help of theoretical constructions, but if one lives by theory alone, whatever it is, it will lead either to absurdity or to catastrophe. That has been proved many times over in the history of humanity. Man’s richness, the world’s richness, both are infinite; their variations are inexhaustible. My doubts over principles are born of my own experience. I fear them like the plague; it is better to keep as far as possible from them. Even when I reflect on literature and art, I do not shackle myself with this kind of theoretical constraint. Moreover, I remain at the level of free expression. I am happy to speak, without attempting to pass myself off as a theoretician. When I uttered the phrase "I have no doctrines", it was only to express a feeling; but I refuse to be bound by definitions, deductions, proofs and so on. Similarly, in my novels I expose the reality, but I offer no conclusions about it.

On reading your article published last summer in Le Monde, "The Spirit of Liberty, My France" (15), one can understand that you have found a private space in France where you can live a normal life and give free reign to your creative work. How do you see the future for your former compatriots who cannot leave China?

The future of the Chinese people who live in mainland China is up to them. There is no shortage of prophets to predict the future of China. I shall not act as spokesman for the Chinese, or for the Chinese people. Such spokesmen exist already in sufficient numbers: why should I do the same thing? What is more, I think that speaking about the future can quickly become misleading or an anaesthetic.

Beckett wrote a tragedy on the absurdity of waiting; and I myself wrote a comedy on that theme, eighteen years ago. A friend informed me recently that this play—which in its time had been banned in Peking—had been performed again in Romania and had created some stir. This play too was drawn from my own experience. I translated into a literary form what was close to my heart at the time. You can see that literature knows no frontiers.

Writing is a personal affair and cannot depend on the power of anyone else. If I have chosen France, it is because this country is at least democratic and guarantees more liberty to the individual than does China—even though many French people complain that they do not have enough of it. In any case, I can write what I want: that is my good fortune. But I expect nothing of the future.