Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

resolutely allowed his creative self to suicide in order to commit his pen to politics. Lu Xun’s heroic sacrifice for the nation was inspired by his Confucian upbringing and by the ideology of Nietzsche’s superman.

Nietzsche’s major works in Chinese translation were published in Hong Kong in the late 1980s, and Gao Xingjian read all these prior to leaving China. He developed a profound loathing for Nietzsche, and he indicted Nietzsche’s superman philosophy for inflating the individual’s ego that made rational thinking impossible. The individual could be deluded into believing that heroic actions could save the world, and symbolic totems—such as the nation, or even those as noble as democracy—could mobilise individuals into taking collective action. To become part of a collective meant that leaders had to be followed. What if the leaders were incompetent, sought publicity, and had no strategy for success? Would this not lead to the destruction of many members of the collective? In Gao’s view Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God had spawned countless lesser gods, like Mao Zedong, who believed he could remake the population according to his social-engineering blueprint, and like Chinese writers, who were deluded into thinking that their writings could save the nation. Gao further asserted that Nietzsche’s debunking tradition had activated a political dynamic of continuing revolution that had turned the creative realm of literature and the arts into a battlefield. These issues are raised in his controversial play Taowang (1990; tr. Escape, 2007), which censures the 1989 military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square but also critiques the actions of the student leaders. He attacked Nietzsche by name in his essay “Bali suibi” (1990; tr. “Parisian Notes,” 2005) and followed this with a more strident attack in “Geren de shengyin” (1993; tr. “The Voice of the Individual,” 2006). Thereafter, Gao’s indictment of Nietzsche would appear in virtually all his discussions on literature and art, including his Nobel lecture, “Wenxue de liyou” (2000; tr. “The Case for Literature,” 2006), and the two essays “Ling yizhong meixue” (1999; tr. “Another Kind of Aesthetics,” 2013) and “Zuojia de weizhi” (2005; tr. “The Position of the Writer,” 2010), which appear in this volume.