Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

identifies with a certain cultural tradition, the work will be very much like a tourist advertisement and will be very boring.

Poets and writers of different times bring different experiences and use different means to deepen and enrich one’s understanding of humanity. The aesthetic experiences from ancient Greek tragedies to China’s Tang poetry, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Goethe’s Faust and Cao Xueqin’s Dream of Red Mansions do not replicate one another. These experiences, derived from the individual, are written in different languages, but transcending national boundaries and time they have become humankind’s shared spiritual wealth. This is owing to the interconnectedness of human nature, and as long as people have had some rudimentary education, they will have the propensity for mutual communication, feelings, and understanding. The writer transposes his aesthetic experiences into his works, and a sympathetic reaction is aroused when the reader of later times encounters these works. Further, supplemented by the reader’s own experiences, association and reflection are produced. It is in this way that the works left behind by a solitary individual have been transmitted to successive later eras, transcending national boundaries, transcending national cultures, and transcending languages. This is the enduring achievement of the writer.

When the writer recognises the predicament of the individual in society as well as his own limitations, makes choices according to his capabilities, and remains resolutely independent, he will not find it hard to win an abundance of freedom in the realm of literary creation that he controls. The writer emerging from the miasma of twentieth-century ideology no longer needs to attach himself to politics because literature is an affirmation of humanity’s awareness of his own existence and basically transcends practical benefits. And this has always been so.

30 July 2007

Paris