Gao Xingjian: I Really Wanted to Remind Them

Label France: How would you describe yourself today -as an exile, as a creative writer?

Gao Xingjian: I think of myself as a citizen of the world. A frail man, who has managed not to be crushed by authority, and who speaks to the world with his own voice.

LF: How did you come to write and to settle in Paris?

GXJ : In high-school, I was just as good at mathematics as I was at art or writing essays. My mother did not want me to go to the School of Fine Art; at the time, painters lived in great poverty, in servants’ quarters. Then one day, by chance, I came across an extract from the memoirs of Ilya Ehrenbourg. In them, he described his life in Paris in the early 1920s, and recounted how he had seen a woman enter a café, place her baby on the counter and slip away, saying she had an errand to do. She never came back. The woman who owned the café demanded an extra tip from all the customers to help raise the child. This story affected me deeply -I wanted to live like that. So I decided to learn French.

I remember too that my French teacher, in China, was also nostalgic about the Paris cafés in the days of his youth. He explained in class what a Paris café was by drawing in chalk on the blackboard a series of women’s shoes, with high heels, pointed, or with laces...

At the age of fifteen, having read an anthology of Prosper Mérimée’s work, I had a dream. I was sleeping with a woman of marble, beautiful and cold, a statue fallen to the ground in the grass of an abandoned garden, and I lost myself in an exuberant freedom. It is that freedom, what at home they call "decadent", that brought me to France.

LF: after a few painful episodes!

GXJ : First I was a translator of classic French authors... until 1966. During the Cultural Revolution I was a Red Guard, then I was sent to the country for ideological re-education. It was there I became aware that I was a writer. It is when you can no longer write that you realise you must write. Literature enables the human being to preserve his human conscience. I was already writing, since adolescence. Poems at first... Then I had to destroy it all. Constantly under surveillance, for fear of being denounced. I started again, hiding my writing under the straw mat I used as a mattress. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, I was able to resume my activities, translating Ionesco and Prévert.

My first published book was an essay on the art of the modern novel. I then became a target. I was labelled a "modernist", marginalised, in suspected connivance with Western literature. Guilty of "spiritual pollution". I was shaking the bases of revolutionary realism, and they demanded I make a public self-criticism in the press. I refused. I told myself I had to resist, to write for myself, without the slightest aesthetic constraints even if it meant not being published. This is how I wrote Soul Mountain, which represents what I believe in -an exploration of language in which the individual expresses himself with complete freedom. A mixture of fables, travel notes, annals, notes on daily life... The reverse of what was advocated by the authorities! I spent seven years writing it. I finished it in France. As a challenge. I had been invited here, I stayed here. I earned my living through my painting.

LF: You are actually a painter too. What distinction do you make between your literary expression and graphic expression?

GXJ : A distinction of sound. I listen. In literature, I hunt words as sounds. In painting, movement comes from the body. I paint while listening to music. I love music. Ever since I was very young I have played the violin and the flute.

LF: In your speech before the Swedish Academy, you stress the role of writing as an attempt to decipher Man.

GXJ : I really wanted to remind them that the writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party... loses its nature -it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world.

I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one’s life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes.

Interview conducted by Jean-Luc Douin