Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

Chapter 2

The Art of Fiction

Fiction is generally regarded as a genre that cannot be without a story and characters, and indeed these are prerequisites for traditional fiction. But rather than discussing the writing methods or techniques of traditional fiction, I intend to use this opportunity to consider how fiction can be written otherwise than by telling a story.

Fiction underwent an evolutionary process from the telling of a story to the creation of characters, so it is worthwhile surveying the history of fiction. From Journey to the West and Water Margin, to One Thousand and One Nights, to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Panagruel, and even to Dickens and Gogol and Hugo, fiction fell within the framework of telling a story, and though these works contained some vivid characters, it was in plot that they excelled. Then a shift of emphasis away from the intrigue and variation of the plots to the portrayal of characters made plot secondary, and the creation of characters with striking personalities came to be pivotal in the art of fiction. With Cao Xueqin’s Dream of Red Mansions in Asia and from Balzac to Tolstoy in Europe, fiction sought to reproduce real society’s multitude of vibrant denizens, so the plot weakened to make way for depictions of the environment and the context of life. Such realist fiction provided broad vistas of social life and created lively images