The Nobel Prize for Literature 2000
Gao Xingjian
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2000 goes to the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian
"for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths
for the Chinese novel and drama".
In the writing of Gao Xingjian literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the
history of the masses. He is a perspicacious sceptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world.
He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.
His great novel Soul Mountain is one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to
compare with anything but themselves. It is based on impressions from journeys in remote districts in
southern and south-western China, where shamanistic customs still linger on, where ballads and tall
stories about bandits are recounted as the truth and where it is possible to come across exponents of
age-old Daoist wisdom. The book is a tapestry of narratives with several protagonists who reflect each
other and may represent aspects of one and the same ego. With his unrestrained use of personal
pronouns Gao creates lightning shifts of perspective and compels the reader to question all confidences.
This approach derives from his dramas, which often require actors to assume a role and at the same time
describe it from the outside. I, you and he/she become the names of fluctuating inner distances.
Soul Mountain is a novel of a pilgrimage made by the protagonist to himself and a journey along the
reflective surface that divides fiction from life, imagination from memory. The discussion of the problem
of knowledge increasingly takes the form of a rehearsal of freedom from goals and meaning. Through its
polyphony, its blend of genres and the scrutiny that the act of writing subjects itself to, the book recalls
German Romanticism's magnificent concept of a universal poetry.
Gao Xingjian's second novel, One Man's Bible, fulfils the themes of Soul Mountain but is easier to
grasp. The core of the book involves settling the score with the terrifying insanity that is usually referred
to as China's Cultural Revolution. With ruthless candour the author accounts for his experiences as a
political activist, victim and outside observer, one after the other. His description could have resulted in
the dissident's embodiment of morality but he rejects this stance and refuses to redeem anyone else.
Gao Xingjian's writing is free of any kind of complaisance, even to good will. His play Fugitives irritated
the democracy movement just as much as those in power.
Gao Xingjian points out himself the significance for his plays of the non-naturalistic trends in Western
drama, naming Artaud, Brecht, Beckett and Kantor. However, it has been equally important for him to
"open the flow of sources from popular drama". When he created a Chinese oral theatre, he adopted
elements from ancient masked drama, shadow plays and the dancing, singing and drumming traditions.
He has embraced the possibility of moving freely in time and space on the stage with the help of one
single gesture or word - as in Chinese opera. The uninhibited mutations and grotesque symbolic
language of dreams interrupt the distinct images of contemporary humanity. Erotic themes give his texts
feverish excitement, and many of them have the choreography of seduction as their basic pattern. In this
way he is one of the few male writers who gives the same weight to the truth of women as to his own.
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