Introduction A Dramaturgical System with Tragic Characteristics: Rethinking Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Dramaturgy

1 Gao Xingjian and the Question of Culture

Since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, the Sino-French exiled writer Gao Xingjian has never ceased to attract scholarly attention world- wide. His entire œuvre, which spans across genres and media and encompasses the literary and the visual arts, has been examined from multiple angles and has generated a plethora of critical interpretations and conceptualizations. By this time it would thus seem that nothing particularly new could be said about his work, especially his plays, which have been the object of a number of book- length studies published over the past two decades.1 So far, the theatre of Gao Xingjian has been scrutinized perhaps even more systematically and variously than his fiction writing, amongst which is the novel Soul Mountain, the Swedish translation of which by Goran Malmqvist was instrumental in determining the decision of the Swedish Academy to con- fer the award to Gao. Moreover, one should note that the theatre has always occupied a privileged role in Gao’s career as an accomplished total artist. As early as the 1960s, during his undergraduate years in Beijing, Gao set up his

1 See Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism London 2000: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Sy Ren Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, Honolulu 2004: University of Hawai’i Press; Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writing as Cultural Translation, Hong Kong 2008: Hong Kong University Press; Izabella Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image, Leiden 2008: Brill; Todd J. Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian, Basingstoke 2014: Palgrave Pivot; Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre. New York 2015: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. For edited collections, which contain essays on Gao’s theatre, see Kwok-kan Tam (ed.), Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, Hong Kong 2001: The Chinese University Press; Noël Dutrait, L’Ecriture romanesque et théâtrale de Gao Xingjian, Paris 2006: Seuil; Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens (eds.), Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, Berlin 2014: De Gruyter; Mabel Lee and Jianmei Liu (eds.), Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics, Amherst, NY 2018: Cambria Press. For Chinese-language studies, see, amongst others, Liu Zaifu, Gao Xingjian lun (Essays on Gao Xingjian), Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gufenyouxian gongsi, 2004; Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun, Lun xiju (On Drama), Taibei: Liangjin chuban shiye gufenyouxian gongsi, 2010.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_002 2 Introduction own dramatic troupe, with which he staged and performed key plays by Ibsen and Chekov.2 Subsequently, after working as a translator from French—a job he obtained by virtue of his degree in French language and literature— Gao returned to work for the theatre and soon became a leading figure of the Chinese experimental theatrical scene during the opening up period of the early 1980s. His choice to leave his home country for good and pursue artistic work in Europe was dictated by the repressive cultural climate of those years and by a ban issued by the PRC government on his last pre-exile play The Other Shore (Bi’an, 1986). Having now spent half of his life in China and the other half in a Western country, and having integrated a vast array of theatrical traditions (ancient, modern, and contemporary) in his dramaturgical work, it is no wonder that the majority of the available scholarship on Gao’s theatre has focused on the question of his (double) cultural identity. Is Gao Chinese or French? Or is he both or neither? Famously, the PRC authorities have never acknowledged Gao as “the first Chinese Nobel recipient,” not only because at the time of the award he had already given up his Chinese citizenship for French citizenship, but also because since the 1990s his work has taken a bilingual turn, as Gao now writes in both French and Chinese. Critics such as Sy Ren Quah, Izabella Łabędzka, Todd Coulter, and Mary Mazzilli have elaborated at length on the related concepts of transculturalism and transnationalism to encapsulate the undeniable fluidity and the intrinsic heterogeneousness of Gao’s identity as an artist. While Quah has looked at Gao’s dramatic quest as a site of inter- and intra-cultural dialogic exchanges and Łabędzka has re-examined the influence of twentieth-century Western playwrights on Gao’s search for a “total theatre” (wanquan de xiju), Coulter and Mazzilli have taken this approach one step further, towards a more holistic direction. By highlighting his endeavor to navigate across a variegated theatrical panorama in order to produce “a dif- ferent form of theatre,”3 Coulter has presented Gao as a “mercurial theatrical figure,”4 one that enacts a flight from all cultural labels by negotiating, synthe- tizing, and rebranding elements from different cultural systems. Therefore, he states, Gao’s hybrid theatrical language traverses cultural and national bound- aries to access the realm of the individual, “the level of existence.”5 Still, Coulter does not seem to be aware that Gao’s influences are not limited to French

2 Quah, Gao Xingjian, p. 6. 3 Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics, p. 2. 4 Ibid., p. 123. 5 Ibid., p. 120.