 Gao Xingjian was born in Ganzhou (Jiangxi province) in eastern China. His father was a bank official and his mother an amateur actress, a member of a Y.M.C.A. theater troupe before the Communist Revolution, and an avid reader of Western literature. As a child Gao was encouraged to paint, write and play the violin. Gao studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute between 1957-1962, taking a degree in French and literature. In the early 1960’s, Gao’s mother was sent to the countryside, where she drowned in an accident, and Gao was forced into farm labor. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Gao was sent to a re-education camp because of his learning. He had started to write for himself, but fearing the consequences the aspiring writer burned a suitcase full of manuscripts, including novels, plays and articles, and spent six years at hard labor in the fields.Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, Gao introduced avant-garde ideas from European theatre, as well as the Theatre of the Absurd, to Chinese audiences. ON hearing that a banned author had won this year’s Nobel prize for literature for China for the first time, the state-sanctioned Chinese writers’ association described the work of the exiled novelist and dramatist, Gao Xingjian, as only “very, very average”. He studied French at university, and his first job was as a translator on the French-language edition of China Reconstructs. On the influence of studying French language and foreign literature, Gao Xingjian states:”There are many authors that I like, and I grew up surrounded by books. My father had many books in the house, and my mother had an appreciation for foreign literature, so we also had foreign authors in translation, and from a very young age I was reading not only children’s books, but real literature. At that time I read many of the classics from the Western and Chinese canon. After I studied French, this opened up a new arena for me and gave me access to foreign literature in the original. At the time, many French authors in China were banned, so it was still difficult to read certain French authors. And I read a great, great deal, so that during college I would sometimes read 50 or more plays in one week. I knew French, and I very rapidly became a part of French society, so for me, I never really felt that I became part of a Chinese artists’ community. I felt very much that as soon as I arrived I became a full member of French society.”He spent five years in a cadre school during the Cultural Revolution and later worked as a translator in the Chinese Writers Association. He published his first novella in 1978. In 1981, he transferred to the People’s Art Troupe as a writer, and has written numerous plays, of which the most famous and ‘abstract’ is Chezhan [The Bus-stop]. He now lives in France. Many of his works have been translated into English, Swedish and French. He was honoured with the title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1992. Foreign authors such as Samuel Beckett appear to influence some of Gao’s famous works such as his famou play “Bus Stop”, which is not surprising since he spent a great deal of time translating the famous author’s works. In fact several of his plays have been modeled on Samuel Beckett’s style of writing, however most of the plays have been banned from being shown within China. Gao Xingjian’s career as a writer was stopped in China when he wrote a play set against the background of the Tiananmen Square massacre. From the late 1980s Gao Xingjian has lived in exile in France. He holds French citizenship and writes as fluently in French as in Chinese. Gao has encountered a series of problems within his homeland not only due to his foreign based education, and his family’s stance on education, but also due to his current works which criticize communism, Han Confucianism, and many other cultural ideas and practices that are essential to China’s national identity. Gao Xingjian’s reflective and impressionistic novel Soul Mountain, completed in 1989, is based on 10-month walking tour along the Yangtze River. The journey took five months and resulted from the author’s personal crisis: in 1982 he had been mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer – the ailment killed his father – and next year the Communist Party criticised Gao’s works as “spiritual pollution”. Rumors spread that Gao was about to be sent to a labor camp. In the work Gao Xingjian used different literary styles, techniques, and a variety of narrators. “You know that I am just talking to myself to alleviate my loneliness. You know that this loneliness of mine is incurable, that no-one can save me and that I can only talk with myself as the partner of my conversation.” At one point, the narrator criticizes the author, saying: “You’ve slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend- like nonsense of your own, and are calling it fiction!” Soul Mountain is a travelogue, description of rural villages, a story of a love affair, pieces of folklore and history. One ofits central themes – as in Gao’s work in general – is skeptical attitude all generally accepted or authoritarian views: “Oh history oh history oh history oh history / Actually history can be read any way and this is a / major discovery!” Soul Mountain is an autobiographical, highly episodic epic that follows the protagonist’s wanderings throughout much of southwest China, driven both by the desire to escape official persecution back in Beijing and the search for renewed spiritual grounding. This vast remote region of China–with its primeval forests, diverse minority nationalities, and remnants of authentic Buddhism and Taoism–has long represented a reservoir of oppositional cultural traditions against the dominant Han Confucianism, of which it is implied that communism is just another version. A Review from the Virginia Quarterly Review states: ” the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in literature, requires its readers to have patience. Patience, for example, to believe that the short, episodic chapters are leading toward a cohesive whole. Patience, to wait for a narrator split into four personal pronouns–I, you, he, and she–to deliver a comprehensible story.” The book itself is narrated in two voices: a rational first person “I” and an emotional second person “you.” Gao stays with park rangers, old friends and Daoist monks. The “you” wanders a more fantastic, otherworldly Chinese landscape, looking for Lingshan–the “soul mountain” of the title. To the second person is allotted a series of frenzied sexual encounters with a series of rebellious women. Within this odd structure, there are repeated memories of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, episodes concerning “wild men” (the Chinese equivalent of yeti), reflections on China’s environmental degradation and comments on old ruins. Seeking out old singers and shamans like a connoisseur of extinct cultures. After concluding Soul Mountain Gao Xingjian wrote a short essay in which he rejected literature’s “duty to the masses” and stated that “literature is not concerned with politics but is purely a matter of the individual.” Gao Xingjian wanted to free artistic expression from its struggle for social approval, calling this kind of literature, that has recovered its innate, spiritual character, ‘cold literature’. Selected works:
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