Gao Xingjian: I had to face facts

Gao Xingjian in conversation with Guillaume Basset

Guillaume Basset: You’ve said that your novel, Soul Mountain, helped you to get rid of your homesickness for China. You began to write it in Beijing and you finished it in Paris, seven years later. Did you write the book with this purpose in mind, or was this simply the outcome?

Gao Xingjian: I began writing the novel in China without thinking that it would ever be published. Publication was impossible, since I had already been censored and was even censoring myself. I said to myself, “This self-censorship is pointless, I should write for myself, without thinking of being published.” So I started to write the book, serenely, but with a great deal of passion. Then fate decreed that I should come to France—though not right away. I was first invited by the French, but the Chinese government refused to grant me a visa, since at this time the French were seen as too concerned with human rights. In the end I went to Germany, and from Germany I traveled to Paris. I had an artistic leave of absence on the condition that I write something for the theater. At the same time, I was working on the book. This continued until the events of Tiananmen Square. At that point I said to myself, “Now the book needs to be finished. If not, it will get even longer.” Because I had to face facts. I knew that I would never go back to China. I needed to finish the book as quickly as possible.

GB: What is striking about this book, and about your work in general, is the explosion of the subject. That is to say, there are entire chapters written in the first or second person and the third person is also omnipresent—all of this without the reader feeling any rupture in the subject, but rather a variation...All of chapter fifty-two is a debate between these three persons. Why this choice?

GXJ: It’s because of consciousness. All human consciousness, reflecting on itself in a fundamental fashion, must be based on the person, on the subject. And there are only three grammatical persons in all languages, as far as I know. This reflects how human consciousness develops. For this to happen, there must be at least three persons. That’s the beginning of consciousness, of observation and self-observation. If human consciousness exists, it runs in the furrow of its language: its realization is therefore based on these three subject positions. This was a discovery for me. It greatly influenced my writing—not just novels, but plays too. What’s most important is not the character but rather the subject who watches, listens, observes the world, reflects and thinks. This is more interesting that describing a character as he or she is, summarily defined. In classical novels, one creates a type of character, which can be very interesting and complicated, but I’m doing something else. Even the “I” that I make isn’t a defined “I,” but rather a point of observation. The reader can very easily enter and identify with it, and so travel toward the interior. It’s a kind of introduction for the reader or spectator to a given situation. Once inside, the reader follows the character’s itinerary, but this creates a space for the imagination to track through. It’s an evocation, and so the character is never described, not even his face: I describe it as vaguely as possible to stimulate the reader’s imagination. The reader can fill it out with his own experience. It’s a way of opening up, of inviting the reader in, so that he can follow the character’s itinerary.

So there is no description; there is only narration, there is someone who speaks, who observes. Descriptions like you have in the novels of Balzac, who takes pages to describe the atmosphere of a salon, or in Hugo, whith long passages of scholarly discussion—this is one way of writing. As for me, on the contrary, I evoke a situation and have the reader enter it, so that he experiences it, feels it. For me, the important part of a novel is the narration. A character is not important, what’s important is a situation that evokes something curious, a situation one enters into little by little.

As for my work in the theater, it’s also based on this idea of human consciousness. This isn’t a concept, but a fundamental phenomenon on which all culture, all knowledge is based. It’s universal, which means that one isn’t limited to this or that culture. It’s the same thing in the theater: there are many characters, twists and turns of the plot, relations between a number of people. But I don’t present a story, I create a situation. One can select actors very freely. Anyone can play my characters. There are no criteria. Usually, to play a role one selects an actor who fits the part. Not in my work. Any actor will do, because I don’t make this or that character but rather create a situation anyone can identify with. In this situation each member of the audience must say to himself: “I would have reacted like that. Faced with such a situation, one must react like that.” I find this more suggestive than imposing a character or story, because if one cannot share in that story, there’s a refusal. There needs to be something that integrates the audience into the situation. So the story isn’t important. There has to be an adventitious logic to the situation. One must find basic elements for creating up the plot. This being the case, one cannot simply use the “I.” Therefore, you don’t imprison people.

GB: This is why, in Sleepwalker, Soul Mountain, and The Shadow if the Silhouette, it’s always a story of people traveling, in motion to create situations. Is it also this movement of destroying barriers that led you to painting? Do you paint with this same sort of wayfaring in mind?

GXJ: No, That’s something else. When I paint, I don’t read. I get rid of language because all ideas, notions, and concepts are not visual. Everything that is linguistic is not visual. One says “a word,” but in fact it’s an idea: one cannot say “a cup,” without eliciting the immediate response, “Which cup?” The word is already an abstraction, and then one has to define it. Words are abstractions that do not have faces. When painting, I listen to music. It creates an ambiance, an emotion. I’m seeking a vision. One must evoke, in oneself, a being or vision that isn’t the representation of any real thing, as they say when speaking of figural painting. The other idea of visual art is that of presentation, and this is especially true in contemporary art. One presents an object. One puts the public face-to-face with a presence. So there are, traditionally, these two elements or schools of thought: representation and presentation. But in my case it is neither one nor the other: it’s rather an evocation. One must evoke something, and in this case the vision is not figurative, nor is it an abstraction. It is neither seen nor unseen, but rather guessed. Just as in narration—and this is no doubt how these two techniques are interlaced—one must present a possibility, a space for the observer, not just for the painter. In this way, everyone can benefit according to their own visual experiences.

GB: The spectator makes your painting his own via evocation, just as the reader makes your book his own via the situation.

GXJ: That’s right. The painting attracts the observer’s attention. One can look at a painting for a long time, because it stimulates the imagination—just as one can read the same book over and over again.

GB: Have you always painted and written at the same time, or alternately?

GXJ: One can’t do both at the same time. That’s why I plan what I’m going to do each year. To write, one has to hear a voice, not just words. One has to hear a true speaking voice. Language is important, but more than writing it’s the voice that counts. It’s an interior voice that speaks. Not a text, but a voice. My first drafts are often done into a tape recorder, and afterwards transcribed.

GB: Does this voice speak French, or Chinese?

GXJ: It depends on the language I’m writing in.

GB: So you choose the language first and then go in search of the voice.

GXJ: That’s right. If I’m writing in French, I don’t listen to anything but the radio. I leave it on at all times—for example, France-Culture—so that I am bathed in language. This is the secret, to be bathed in and by language.

GB: Are you currently working on any writing projects?

GXJ: No. Two collections of plays are coming out but these are republications, one of them an anthology of eight playlets. At the moment I’m preparing a big exhibit in Barcelona along with an art book done in collaboration with a Spanish painter. The exhibit will include a short film that I’m making.
In Paris 28 August 2008