Writers' Festival: The noblest of Nobel Prize winners

When Gao Xingjian left China for Paris in 1988, he never looked back.

"There was nothing like nostalgia," says the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000. "For me, it was gone, and you have to adapt yourself to a different life."

In town for the Prague Writers' Festival, Gao talked with The Prague Post in the courtyard of Hotel Josef, the nerve center of the festival.

While in admitted political exile, Gao is quick to refute the idea that literature can or, for that matter, should deal with political matters.

"This is an illusion from the 20th century," he said. "Literature is not only above politics, but above ideology."

Gao dedicated much of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, titled "The Case for Literature," to decrying the negative affect politics can have on literature.

"What I want to say here is that literature can only be the voice of the individual, and this has always been so," he said in the speech delivered Dec. 7, 2000, in Stockholm. "Once literature is contrived as the hymn of the nation, the flag of the race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a class or a group, it can be employed as a mighty and all-engulfing tool of propaganda."

Born in Ganzhou in southeast China, Gao studied French at university and later became a translator. By the early 1980s, he was considered a leading voice in Chinese absurdist drama. All his work is now banned by the Chinese government.

Gao is a novelist, dramatist, critic and painter. The book that is widely considered his magnum opus, Soul Mountain, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a journey to find the sacred mountain of Lingshan in rural China.

The Swedish Nobel Committee called the book "one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves."

Just before embarking on his own similar journey along China's Yangtze River, Gao was misdiagnosed with fatal lung cancer.

Literati praise the novel's experimental use of voice with chapters alternating between first- and second-person narratives, interjected with third person omniscient - all of which emanate from the same subject.

At first glance, most would term the style an experiment in the stream of consciousness technique, but Gao disagrees, preferring to call it "stream of language."

"Consciousness has to be structured within the grammatical. There is a limit," he says, singling out James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a book that goes beyond this limit. "You have to use a certain kind of filter. Language is first and foremost a human voice; it's not just intellectual writing."

A student of French from a young age, Gao now writes in both his native Chinese and his adopted language.

"It depends on the subject," he said. "There is a sensibility you can't find in Chinese, so I use French for drama and poetry. I am lucky to have this kind of adventure."

Along with his literary exploits, Gao's paintings have drawn international acclaim, a major retrospective of his works recently opened on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

"It's a completely different kind of expression," he says when comparing painting to writing. "When I paint, I just want to listen to music."

At age 70, Gao remains busy. His new play, "Ballade Nocturne," written in verse, debuted in Paris in March. It is his 19th play. In April, he published a text reflecting on theater and drama.

Up next for the septuagenarian is a foray into film.

"Cinema has been my dream since I was young," Gao says, calling his next project a "cine-poem."

"You cannot really classify it at the moment; the scenario is poetry," he adds. "It's a kind of conclusion of my work."

Let's hope not.

- Petra Nedellecova contributed to this report.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com