Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

verbal suffixes, and he strives to make every Chinese character function to its fullest potential. If a monosyllabic verb can replace a disyllabic verb with the same meaning, Gao will use the monosyllabic verb. On the premise that writing, reading, and the actualisation of language are all psychological activities, and that to observe and comment on an object are not passive acts, he has argued that a person is not like a camera, which does nothing more than mechanically release a shutter or lens. The eyes of the person behind the camera are constantly choosing images, adjusting the focus, and the line of vision and focus is always shifting. If one uses language to describe an image in front of one’s eyes it is a process, even if it is a so-called objective description. In the eyes of a living person there are no purely objective images, and even if the person is supposedly detached, there will be feelings, and an image will evoke responses. To capture an image in language is complex, and because the process relies on language, the writing includes naming and making judgments and associations. Gao noted that seventy-seven of the eighty-one chapters of Soul Mountain are devoted to such observations, and that it was his intention to find a form of Chinese language that could express the psychological processes involved.

In the same essay he states that to use language to capture mental images is even more difficult; because mental images are more ephemeral than anything observable in the external world, pursuing these in language is virtually impossible. This is why he does not describe dream states but only deals with the “impressions left by dream,” which he arranges into a flow of language. He cited chapter 23 of the novel as an example of such impressions. He argued that literature is a way of describing human existence, so it is necessarily associated with human feelings. If the language of literature is devoid of human feelings and is only form for the sake of form or language for the sake of language, it will be an empty linguistic structure that over time will become a pile of linguistic garbage. In contrast, though ancient Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, Cervantes’s (1547–1616) Don Quixote, Dante’s (c. 1265–1321) Divine Comedy, Goethe’s (1749–1832) Faust, Kafka, and Joyce all