Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

It is impossible to recreate the laws of social change or humankind’s inherent nature. No one foresaw that the collapse of the Berlin Wall would bring to an end the communist bastion of the USSR and Eastern Europe, and no one anticipated that the fragmentation of the Western bloc at the end of the Cold War would immediately cause an economic crisis. Subsequent globalisation plans were initiated to benefit the Western nations, but no one foresaw that these would instead promote rapid economic development in Third World countries and not arrest the decline in Europe. Western commentators have repeatedly predicted the collapse of China’s totalitarian rule, but the opposite has occurred, and contrary to repeated predictions in the Western media, the phenomenal rise in China’s economy has not led to political democratisation. These important developments, which have taken place in the world within the short space of twenty years, were totally unexpected.

One can only continue to question one’s knowledge of the world, and this is also the case with regard to knowledge of humankind. Knowledge of humanity can never be exhausted, so how can one talk about reforming human nature? Who can play the role of the Creator to recreate humanity? In the twentieth century the myth about new people and the new worlds created by violent revolutions were equally terrifying. If humanity is unable to understand itself, how will it be able to understand the world? In the chain of history the individual can only continue to seek to understand the existential situation of humankind itself.

Literature is a testimony left on the existential situation of human beings. The writer does not need to make moral or ethical judgments, and does not assume the role of judge and adjudicator on morality. Both literature and history may be said to be testimonies that record the experiences and feelings of human beings. However, today people know little about the political history of ancient Greece, and only the history specialist carries out research on it, yet there are many people with knowledge of Greek literature.