Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

then what is right today will be wrong tomorrow, and as time passes and the location shifts, literature that follows this sort of political correctness will simply turn into a heap of waste paper.

Literature transcends practical profit-and-loss relationships. The writer confronts the truth of human life, and there is no need to manufacture any other criterion. Whereas the philosopher sets out to create a perfectly comprehensive explanation of the world—in other words, to locate the world in a thought system constructed by concepts and logic—the writer returns to the truth of human life in order to understand actual experiences of separate living individuals. Literature is not the vassal of politics, nor is it a philosophical explanation, but instead it must eradicate all isms and other interferences. The highest form of literature strives to approximate truth, and it may also be said that literature’s ultimate quest is to understand truth.

Literature induces all sorts of thinking about society and human life primarily because the experiences in the writer’s life are integrated into the literary images of a work. However, writings transmitted over the ages from ancient times to the present have stored their authors’ penetrating insights on people and the world, and such authors are at the same time thinkers of their times. Yet writers differ from philosophers in that the thoughts they express must be converted into the thoughts of the characters of their works, and the characters’ experiences in specific situations. Aristophanes’s mockery of Socrates is not at all dated, and the profoundness of Shakespeare’s revelations about human nature is still unparalleled in the work of any philosopher.

Literature is like a long river with an endless source, and writers are solitary travellers who are perpetually exploring and searching for the true picture of humankind’s physical and psychological world, and it is this that they strive to express. This too is an endless road because the understanding of the world and of human beings provided by literature likewise has no end.