Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

In “The Position of the Writer” Gao Xingjian rejected the commonly held view that Nietzsche represents the beginning of modern literature and argued that it is Kafka who created an exact portrayal of modern humanity’s true predicament: that in all social relationships, including family relationships, the human being is insignificant, in fact nothing more than an insect. Gao Xingjian noted that Kafka had recognised that those trumped-up utopias of his time were like the fortresses of his novels: it was impossible to get into them. He was also painfully aware that Kafka was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century and that a century later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation for the individual has worsened: the autonomy of the individual has been progressively eroded as each person vanishes into obscurity within one or another group identity. Gao contended that it is only in serious literary creations that transcend financial gain and politics and do not follow fashionable trends that the voice of the individual can be heard and that the individual can preserve independence and integrity. But such a frail person with neither power nor capital is much the same as an insect in present times. Nonetheless, people are different from insects because they have the capacity to think, and he warned that the individual must be aware of this and be able to exercise this capacity to think. He is adamant that creative activities should neither be tied to the “war chariot” of politics nor succumb to market trends and fashions. The stance he adopted in literary and art creation is born of many years of struggle to win the right to freely express his creative self, and he will brook no compromise.

The thrust of Gao Xingjian’s creative endeavours has always been to produce works that will in the first instance gratify his own aesthetic sensibilities. By asking probing questions, such as what sparks the creative process, and by examining the creative process itself and the actualisation of a creative work, he has arrived at new ways of understanding narration, performance, theatre, and the visual arts that he has applied to his creations in these different genres. During the process of creation, Gao’s psychic reality is not a conglomeration of random creative impulses: