Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

quite difficult for a writer who is unaligned with either the left or the right to have his or her voice transmitted in the media. In the West, the writer may enjoy freedom of expression and freedom to create, but the freedom to publish what is independent of politics has limitations.

In their quest for freedom of literary creation, writers travelled abroad from communist totalitarian countries to live in the West, but having extricated themselves from the oppression of a dictatorship they immediately found themselves enveloped in another kind of politics: so-called political pluralism is also a form of narrow ideology. When such perspectives are used to evaluate literature, the rich connotations of literature are buried in another political language. If the writer does not seek consciously to avoid these political labels, but uses these to increase sales, it will be a case of escaping one kind of politics and falling foul of another kind, and the casualty will still be the writer’s work.

Having penetrated every pore of every level of social life right through to the public media, politics deeply scarred twentieth-century literature and continues to affect people’s thinking. The morally indignant literature that trumpeted politics has long since vanished, but to purge literature of political control has not been as easy. How the writer today can transcend political advantage, transcend the market, remain unwaveringly independent, and be able to speak out in his or her own voice is precisely the issue I would like to address.

This of course is not impossible, but if the writer is committed to protecting his or her independence as an individual, I believe this requires first abandoning some delusions and fantasies. Take, for example, the writer who is the spokesperson of the people, which is an illusion manufactured by politics. The old term “the people” has been used throughout history by ruling monarchs and by the twentieth century was already a cliché. All political authorities speak in the name of the people, and even communist totalitarian and fascist dictatorships are implemented in the name of the people. But where can this vacuous “the people” be located? In real society there are countless people with all