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The Nobel Laurel Finally Bestowed on A "Chinese" Writer
Ming Dong Gu, Ph. D.Assistant Professor, Foreign Languages and LiteraturesRhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee
The Nobel Prize of Literature for the year 2000 has been awarded to a Chinese writer named Gao Xingjian.
Who is Gao Xingjian? Very few Chinese know this name. Nor do the students in my Modern Chinese Literature class at Rhodes College. I briefly told them that he was a writer who flourished in China in the 1980s. In the late 1980s, the Chinese government found that his writings deviated from the government policy and consequently banned them. He then disappeared from the Chinese literary scene. I also pointed out that in the broad anthology of modern Chinese literature we were using, not a single piece of his writings appears.
Gao Xingjian's award was indeed a total surprise to the Chinese reading public and writers alike. It is quite understandable. Besides having been banned in China, his Nobel Award-winning novel, The Other Shore (in Chinese it is called "Lingshan," which, literally translated, means "Soul Mountain" ), had sold about 200 copies.
In receiving the award, Gao had several advantages over his fellow Chinese writers.
First, in spite of the vigorous denial by the Nobel Prize Committee, political consideration played a part in the decision. Gao exiled himself from China after his books were banned in China. After the 1989 student democratic movement in Tiananmen Square, he openly denounced the Chinese government and wrote and staged a play describing the life of exiled Chinese dissidents who had fled from China. For this and other politically-oriented activities, the Chinese government declared Gao persona non grata. And among the Nobel Prize Selection Committee members, the only person who knows Chinese language and literature was denied entry to China because of his support of Chinese dissidents. Even if the selection genuinely had nothing to do with politics, people could still relate the two in view of the Nobel Committee's past record of awarding the prize to political dissidents. Nothing escapes politics, and the award was certainly a political statement even if no conscious political motivation swayed the decision.
Second, Gao Xingjian's writing has an edge over that of other Chinese writers in its technique and literary style. Gao graduated from college with a major in French. He has a command of Western literature rarely equaled by other Chinese writers. He was among the first to introduce Western avant-gardist writings and modernist writing techniques to China. His award-winning fiction also displays a visible Western writing influence, which obviously appealed to the Nobel judges.
Third, Gao is now a French citizen who has resided in Western Europe since 1987. While his writings are not available in China, they have been translated into different foreign languages, widely circulated in the Western world and highly praised by some Western literary critics. Literature is a language art. The Chinese language uses a writing system that totally differs from alphabetic European languages. When Chinese writings are translated into European languages, much of their literary qualities become lost. Gao Xingjian's writing, however, loses very little in translation.
Finally, the Nobel Prize Committee has long been accused of being Eurocentric and ignoring Chinese literature. In a word, all the deciding factors favored Gao Xingjian.
Gao Xingjian was born in Jiangxi Province, China, in 1940. Encouraged by his educated mother, he began to pursue traditional and Western forms of art early in his life. He received training in music, painting, calligraphy and Chinese and Western classics. He recalled that even during the war years when his family had to move from place to place, the family always carried a piano with them.
He is also a famous playwright. Some literary critics compare him to Cao Yu, the founder and greatest master of modern Chinese drama. He has also written a collection of novellas, and is a literary critic. His works have been translated into a dozen foreign languages, and his plays have been staged in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Finally, he is a talented painter. During his self-imposed exile, he relied heavily on his painting skills to support himself. He has published several collections of paintings and had scores of exhibitions in Europe, Asia and America.
What sort of writing is Gao Xingjian's prizewinning novel, The Other Shore? Thematically, it is about a spiritual search, a pilgrimage to a sacred mountain in Southwest China. Despite the ardent search, we are told at the end that the soul mountain is nowhere to be found. The impossibility of locating it perhaps symbolizes the impossibility of finding a spiritual haven in this world, or that the ultimate meaning of the search lies in the search itself. The destination is always the other shore, beyond reach.
Some Chinese readers regret that Gao Xingjian renounced his Chinese citizenship because, strictly speaking, he does not count as a genuine Chinese writer.
Is citizenship that important? In the history of American literature, T.S. Eliot and Henry James renounced their U.S. citizenship and became English subjects. No one would deprive them of their rightful places in the American pantheon of literature just because they were no longer U.S. citizens. Any great literary work does not belong to a single nation. It is the spiritual wealth of all humanity.
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