Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

capitalist class and promoting the proletarian revolution. This sort of ideology did not collapse and dissipate together with the fall of the Berlin Wall but is deeply entrenched and continues to this day. On a recent trip to England I encountered a journalist who was shocked to hear me say that literature is divorced from politics, independent of politics, and beyond politics, reflecting that this trend of thinking is still fairly popular amongst many intellectuals.

The page has turned for the twentieth century. Communist totalitarianism in the USSR and Eastern Europe has disintegrated, and though China’s totalitarianism remains intact, the market economy has fully opened up, so it may be said that the communist utopia has been thoroughly smashed. The more-than-a-century-long war of attrition against capitalism has failed to arrest the spread of capitalism; instead rampant globalisation is heralding the steady victory of capitalism, and neither ethical judgment nor political criticism can eliminate or block this irrefutable reality. The communist utopia promoted by Marxism was not able to reconstruct society and instead has become historical sedimentation before its time.

Literature in essence is divorced from utility. But under a totalitarian dictatorship it is politics that prevails over literature and writers: the writer must be subservient to politics, otherwise he will not be able to write, not have the means to survive, and could even lose his life. The writer’s situation in the democracies of the West is much better, and one can write whatever books one wants and pursue whatever literature one wants, and as long as one does not depend on it for a livelihood, freedom lies in one’s own hands. The problem is, there are very few writers who actually enjoy such conditions because the laws of capitalist profits similarly apply to literature. If writers do not submit to the pressures of the market but persist in not following the fashions and do not toady to readers, they too will find it hard to survive. The pressure of globalisation on serious literary creation continues to increase unabated. And in democracies, politics also interferes with literature so that it is