Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

There is no need to detail the anguish and torment experienced by literature and writers during the twentieth century, which has just passed, because even in the present reality the rampage of politics has not abated but on the contrary has infiltrated all aspects of cultural life via the media. The interference of politics is to be found in cultural institutions and cultural policies of government, and even common cultural activities cannot escape political and party-faction bias. The virtual identity card the writer must have is political correctness and class identification, and weighing heavily on his or her person is the intellectual burden of twentieth-century ideology. Furthermore, so-called literary trends—actually political trends—constitute a tight band of curses that restricts both literary creation and literary criticism. That literature became involved in politics is in fact the invasion of literature by politics. Of course, it could also be said that writers became politicians and used literature as a tool for social criticism and the promotion of politics or, it could be said, to serve politics. But like the two sides of a coin, whichever way one looks at it, politics invading literature or literature engaging in politics is a literary landscape without precedent before the twentieth century.

Up to that time there had been writers with ties to politics and even to political authorities, although they did not use their literary creations to promote politics. However, from the beginning of the twentieth century the widespread propagation of Marxism and the rise of the communist revolution deeply influenced generations of intellectuals, and writers naturally were amongst them. Literature that has humanity as its objective regards social relationships as innate to humans, but it is politics that best embodies the starkest modes of social relationships. Everyone was swept into politics and moreover could not escape from politics, and the political stance of a literary work became the primary criterion for literary criticism. Marxism’s materialist view of history and literature turned literature and the arts into tools of social criticism. This was not ordinary social criticism and would more accurately be described as a war of attrition against capitalism that was used for exposing the