Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

kinds of pressing needs, including the need for freedom of thought, yet these all vanish into nothing behind this abstract façade of “the people.” If writers do not want to be connected with the political authority or stand at the rostrum to help in the election of a political party, then there is no need to flaunt themselves as the spokespersons of the people. Otherwise, the authentic voice of the individual is lost in political verbiage, and the writer becomes a political megaphone: literature is sacrificed when it is hitched to the war chariot of politics.

The writer is not a prophet and is not obliged to fabricate beautiful fairy tales, or to make promises about tomorrow to the people or chosen people, and the writer is definitely not obliged to produce an illusion of a utopia to incite the masses to follow into war upon the world. Furthermore, in the century that has just passed all this has occurred many times.

The writer is not the saviour of the world, and although such Nietzschean superman images were common in the twentieth century, the writer is not capable of shouldering Christ’s mission. Because God was dead, it was possible for countless people with a bloated self to pose as saviours of the world. It would be more interesting to view the romanticism of Nietzsche as literature instead of philosophy because the exaggerated image of the superman replacing the martyred Christ of tradition is a unique creation. Yet this does not truthfully portray people and is simply the hallucination of a philosopher. The true situation of people in modern society is not as Nietzsche claimed but as depicted by another writer, who also wrote in German: Kafka.

Kafka was silent because he was not able to publish his writings during his lifetime, but he had a profound understanding of twentieth-century humankind’s predicament in the modern industrial society. Popular literary histories of today commonly regard Nietzsche as the beginning of twentieth-century modernism, and it is as if modern literature began with Nietzsche. In fact, it would be more correct to locate Nietzsche at the end of nineteenth-century Romantic literature; Kafka, instead, should be accredited with declaring the birth of modern literature. Kafka created