Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

the romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that man who had sought to return to nature entered modern industrialised society and discovered that the idealised individual, too, was merely an abstract notion.

By the twentieth century, calls for basic human rights had become either shouts for revolution or empty words, but faced with political power and the market, this free and independent individual turned out to be weak and wretched. Society has never delivered on human rights, human dignity, and freedom of thought and expression without a charge, and the rational voice of humanism was completely drowned in the reality of commercial transaction and political gain.

Where are people’s authentic voices to be found? Literature. It is only literature that can speak about the truth of human existence that politics is incapable of addressing or reluctant to speak about. The nineteenth-century realist writers Balzac and Dostoevsky did not pose as saviours of the world, nor did they see themselves as the spokesmen of the people or the embodiment of righteousness—for after all, what is righteousness? They simply narrated reality, neither setting forth an ideology to criticise or judge society nor fabricating a blueprint for an ideal society. And it is precisely writings such as theirs that by transcending politics and ideology have provided truthful portrayals of humanity and society, revealing entirely both the dilemmas of human existence and the complexities of human nature, and that viewed both from an intellectual or aesthetic perspective have long stood the test of time.

In contrast, twentieth-century revolutionary literature attracted a group of talented writers and poets, most notably Gorky and Mayakovsky, but with the collapse of the communist revolution people simply lost interest in their songs of praise for the communist revolution. Such was the fate of their writings, and the writers themselves also died in obscurity. The new society that had been shaped with the hammer and sickle turned out to be even more inhuman and impoverished than the old society. In