Gao Xingjian Research Articles

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Rebecca Rovit, Associate Professor Michel de Certeau, in his writings on everyday life and spatial practices, specifically “Walking in the City,” articulates a rhetorics of walking, comparing it to pedestrian “speech acts,” which manifest themselves as a “spatial acting-out” of topographical place.1 For him, “walking as a space of enunciation” is like a performance act that functions as an utterance. Moreover, de Certeau suggests that space is a “practiced place,” where we transform street space through our enunciated embodiment. The relationship of place to space for de Certeau encompasses an ordered environment of what is “here,” not “there.”2 His analysis of rhetorical gestures, including quotidian practices of movement, reveals the power dynamics embedded in governmental institutions which organize and regulate urban space. The authors of the six articles featured in Volume XXXIII.1 similarly open discursive spaces of enunciation, inviting us to reflect upon a sampling of performance acts whose utterances alter or resist the physical space in which they occur. The essays also engage us in spectatorial and aural spaces, where we may acknowledge our own agency in the cultural, dramaturgical, and linguistic worlds they present. Phillip Zapkin, for example, proposes a model of tragedy from ancient Greece, in “Reading Two Greek Refugee Plays in the Season of the Syrian Refugee Crisis,” to suggest an emulative response we may bring to contemporary issues of refugee (im)mobility. The author’s focus on spatiality and enunciative acts in two plays recalls Agamben’s biopolitics, eliciting our ethical accountability to see in antiwar plays from centuries ago a democratic model for protecting today’s displaced. Warren Kluber centers antiwar “worlds” in his “Theatre of Operations / Operating Theatre: Militarist and Medical Theatrical Frames in Edward Bond’s Lear.” He examines the spectatorial relationship we may have with performances of the post-WWII playwright, whose theatricalized, martial backdrop to Lear urges us to recognize what being human is like in the age of war. In “Between Theory and Practice: Tracing Improvisation with British Muslim Youth,” Asif Majid calls attention to the creative spaces of “in-between” as he theorizes the social dimensions of his devised theatre practice in Manchester (UK), exploring how race, gender, and religion intersect within the liminal world of theatrical improvisation. Dramatic space intrigues Letizia Fusini as well, as she explores the post-exilic dramaturgy of Gao Xingjian in her article, “From Refuge to Prison: The Self as Tragic Space in Gao Xingjian’s Plays Between Life and Death and The Death Collector.” She positions “Self-as-Spatiality,” drawing on Sartre to highlight a “poetics of captivity” in which boundlessness and confinement coalesce. In “Ionesco’s Forgotten Plays: Meaning and Speech Acts in ‘The Niece-Wife’ and ‘Bedlam Galore,’” Jeremy Ekberg’s analysis of modernist dramaturgy focuses on linguistic and psychophysical spaces in Ionesco’s post-war short dramas. The author builds on the work of J. L. Austin [End Page 1] to reveal an ambiguous dramatic world in which speech acts figure predominantly, offering a perspective where performative utterances subvert and make meaning. Meaning-making, performance, and temporality also occupy Nicole Winsor in her “Comparative Modernist Performance Studies in the Context of the Postcolonial: A Not So Modest Reappraisal.” This essay extends a scholarly debate that began in the JDTC in our Fall 2016 issue, where Julia Walker and Glenn Odom proposed a new paradigm of Comparative Modernist Performance Studies. In our Spring 2017 issue, Aparna Dharwadker expanded this debate on pertinent issues related to postcolonial performance. Winsor now joins the discussion, locating geographic, temporal, and theoretical spaces in which to situate both articles. This final essay provides a fitting opening of discursive space for future issues of the journal. With this Volume XXXIII.1 I end my four-year term as Editor. For the past eight issues of the JDTC, I have had the privilege to work with many fine scholars, from the United States to the Pacific Rim, publishing their work in Theatre and Performance Studies, while enlisting the best reviewers I could find from a wide range of departments and international universities. I began my term in January 2015, making a transition to Editor from what had been a collective...

Bernard Shaw's Bridges to Chinese Culture

Bernard Shaw's Bridges to Chinese Culture

Towards a theatre of the tragic: a new critical trajectory for Gao Xingjian\u2019s (post-exile) dramaturgy of the riven self

Although the theatre of Gao Xingjian has been widely researched, the tragic potential of his dramaturgy has hitherto received little attention. Scholars have hinted at the possibility of interpreting certain plays by Gao from the perspective of tragedy; however, this suggestion was never developed into a full-fledged theory. Both his pre and post-exile work has been variously categorized as experimentalist, absurdist, grotesque, and Zen, but never as tragic. Existing scholarship focuses mainly on issues of transnationalism and transculturation with regard to dramatic aesthetics and dramatic technique, whereas Gao’s intentional engagement with tragedy as both an art form and a philosophical outlook—which can be traced back to Escape (Taowang1995), inspired by the Tiananmen Square events of 1989—has generally been overlooked. This paper aims to present a new and fresh critical perspective on Gao Xingjian’s (mainly post-exile) dramaturgy of the predicament of modern man through a reexamination of two of its most salient elements: the dramatic technique of shifting pronouns and the performative concept of the “other shore”. By elaborating on Gao’s transhistorical definition of tragedy as the eternal confrontation between the individual and his own Self (“About Escape” 1990), and drawing on selected scholarship on tragedy and the tragic, this paper ultimately characterizes Gao’s plays as “thirdspace tragedies”, owing to the presence—at a subtextual level—of an interstitial psychological field dominated by multiple tensions, lacerations, subjugations and divisions which affect the characters and their relationship to external reality and/or the realm of imagination.

L’érotisme comme oubli dans Le Livre d’un homme seul de Gao Xingjian

Forgetfulness is not necessarily a lapse of memory. There exists a type of forgetfulness which has to do with a quest of knowledge. It is a happy or voluntary forgetfulness. Individuals or human beings are in quest of this type of forgetfulness when they find themselves “threatened” either by a sorrowful or atrocious past, when they feel pains to brood over a past event. This therefore creates in the mind of individuals a state of depression, making their conscience stricken with unhappiness and painfulness. The narrator in Gao Xingjian’s Le Livre d’un homme seul shows a strong willingness to forget about Chinese Industrial Revolution. In his determination to forget about the past, the narrator resorts to erotism and the company of women as an outlet. The following question can therefore be asked: what relationship does the writer establish between these two notions which are apparently distinct? How does he move from erotism to forgetfulness? This paper attempts to provide answers to these questions while questioning the notions of erotism and forgetfulness in order to bring out the relationship that the novelist establishes between these two worlds where everything seems to be opposed, one being psychic and spiritual; the other being sensual and physical.

Translation from Chinese of Poems 1–9 from 'Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts' by Gao Xingjian

The 2000 Nobel Laureate for Literature, Gao Xingjian, suffered cardiac arrest while directing rehearsals for his mega-scale opera Snow in August that was due to premiere in late 2002 at the National Opera House, Taipei. He recovered, and the opera premiered as scheduled with the help of a co-director before he returned to Paris to direct the Comédie Français premiere of his Quatre quatuors pour un week-end. He underwent surgery in February and March of 2003, but was soon again back at work. The year 2003 had been designated “Gao Xingjian Year” by the City of Marseille, and he would direct his new play Le Quêteur de la Mort at Théâtre du Gymnase, and then his Snow in August at Opéra de Marseille. It was during rehearsals for the former that he collapsed again, and was hospitalized: the play was co-directed by Romain Bonnin, 23–26 September 2003. Large exhibitions of Gao’s artworks had been held earlier that year, but the performance of Snow in August was postponed. During his recuperation for most of 2004, he sometimes wrote poems, some of which he later polished or rewrote for his collection Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (2012).These translations from the Chinese into English of the first 9 poems in Wandering Spirit and Metaphysical Thoughts (2012) are by acclaimed translator Mabel Lee.

City of the Dead and Song of the Night

In the early 1980s Gao Xingjian 高行健 established himself quickly as one of the most innovative critics and playwrights of the People's Republic of China. Because he soon attracted the attention of t...

Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre by Mary Mazzilli

Reviewed by: Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre by Mary Mazzilli Tarryn Li-Min Chun Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre. By Mary Mazzilli. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015. Ebook, $72.99; cloth, $104.00. Since Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, his work has drawn a steady stream of attention from scholars of Chinese literature, culture, and theatre. Much of this scholarship has grappled with the same questions that caused controversy when Gao was awarded the Nobel: should he be considered a Chinese writer, when he has French citizenship and the government of the People’s Republic of China refuses to acknowledge him as such? Alternatively, can we brand him a writer of Chinese literature, even though he now also writes in French? Or are terms such as “transcultural” and “transnational” better descriptors despite the difficulty of precisely defining them? In Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre, Mary Mazzilli begins with a critique of the prevailing obsession with China in scholarship on Gao’s dramatic oeuvre and proposes instead a move away from issues of identity and the East-West binary. Her study builds on other work in this vein—such as that of Sy Ren Quah (2004), Claire Conceison (2009), and Todd Coulter (2014)—but offers a new intervention by decoupling plays written while Gao was still in China from those composed after the author’s self-imposed exile to France in 1987. Focusing on the latter group of “post-exile” plays enables Mazzilli to reposition Gao in relation to more global trends in theatre, namely the postdramatic turn of the late twentieth century. The goals of the monograph are twofold: first, to demonstrate the connections between Gao’s dramatic work and that of other contemporary European playwrights, and second, to show how this reconsideration of Gao reshapes our broader understanding of transnationalism and of postdramatic theatre. [End Page 239] Mazzilli offers a new critical term—“postdramatic transnationalism”—that brings the work of German theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann to bear on concepts of the transnational. She aligns the dramatic with earlier, binary models of transnationalism—“home country vs. destination country”—and the postdramatic with a more recent, fluid, and multivalent transnationalism that has “embraced its own hybridity” (p. 7). In Gao Xingjian’s post-exile work for the theatre, she contends, we see a form of contemporary transnationalism that transcends ideology and is akin to postdramatic theatre in its rejection of prescriptive (often nation-based) cultural and aesthetic norms. To borrow Gao’s own words, it is “withoutisms” (meiyou zhuyi). The book’s two lines of argument unfold in tandem over the course of its six body chapters, all of which are anchored by close readings of Gao’s post-exile plays. Chapter 1 begins with a thorough discussion of postdramatic theatre, with reference to Elinor Fuch’s The Death of Character (1996), Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (2006), and the work of Austrian playwrights Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek. In this chapter, Mazzilli argues that The Other Shore (Bi’an, 1986), written shortly before Gao left China, begins for the playwright a process of “breaking further away from the dramatic and exploring the possibilities of the theatrical” (p. 46)—in other words, a move away from realism, dialogue and linear dramatic action, and a closed “fictive cosmos,” and toward the use of dream images, monologue and narrative, physicality and musicality, and self-referentiality. Subsequent chapters follow this process of exploration chronologically and delve further into the use of postdramatic techniques in Gao’s later work. Chapters 2 and 3 take a comparative approach, demonstrating that Gao shares certain stylistic and thematic concerns with other contemporary postdramatic playwrights. In chapter 2, for example, Mazzilli reads Gao’s Between Life and Death (Shengsijie or Au bord de la vie, 1991) alongside British playwright Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life—Seventeen Scenarios for Theatre (1997). With reference to some of Lehmann’s key terms, she argues that both plays use “post-epic narration” to string together sequences of otherwise unconnected theatrical moments and that both create a “theatre of spectatorship” by self-consciously...

Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State, edited by Hans Steinmüller and Susanne Brandtstädter. London: Routledge, 2016. xvii+193 pp. £90.00 (cloth).

<i>Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State</i>, edited by Hans Steinmüller and Susanne Brandtstädter. London: Routledge, 2016. xvii+193 pp. £90.00 (cloth).

Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre

Using the prisms of postdramatic theatre and transnationalism, Mary Mazzilli provides an insightful study of Gao Xingjian’s post-exile plays. By developing the term “postdramatic transnationalism” through close readings of Gao’s texts, Mazzilli brings fresh insights into Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of the “postdramatic” while also reinterpreting transnationalism through postdramatic discourse.

Una lettura ‘bachtiniana’ dell’opera critica di Gao Xingjian 高行健

The polymorphous oeuvre of the artist Gao Xingjian 高行健 – born in China (1940), French citizen since 1998, now fully bilingual and bicultural – witnesses the devoted longing for a broader expressive richness in language, resulting from the elaboration of his primary linguistic and cultural awareness, and of another linguistic and cultural heritage, that has been consciously chosen and assimilated. This article examines one aspect of literary creation, that is the Sinophone critical oeuvre, through the essay Ziyou yu wenxue 〈自由與文學〉(2014). By observing the thematic and linguistic profiles we will discover that: firstly, there is a complementary plurality of languages, a tension towards a stratification of discourses and codes drawing from different – diatopically and diachronically speaking – linguistic and cultural systems, revealed by an intertextual and transcultural reading; secondly, in this essay characterized by heteroglossia – as a Bakhtinian concept (Bakhtin 1979) – the ontological clash arising from a plural linguistic and cultural awareness can often be solved by an intra-textual dialogic dimension.

Reshaping East Asia, Rethinking World Literature

This special issue of Symposium breaks ground in a new area for the journal: “East Asia,” broadly defined. The relevance of the literatures of East Asia warrants little exegesis: Gao Xingjian and M...

Double Notes by ‘I’ and ‘Another I’: Focusing on Into the Unfamiliar Time by Yi Inseong and Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

Double Notes by ‘I’ and ‘Another I’: Focusing on Into the Unfamiliar Time by Yi Inseong and Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

City of the Dead and Song of the Night by Gao Xingjian (review)

Reviewed by: City of the Dead and Song of the Night by Gao Xingjian Whit Emerson CITY OF THE DEAD AND SONG OF THE NIGHT. By Gao Xingjian. Translated by Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2015. 112 pp. Hardcover, $24.00. The new two-play collection by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, City of the Dead and Song of the Night, features an introduction by professor and translator Mabel Lee. Next, Gilbert F. C. Fong’s translation of City of the Dead is presented, followed by the playwright’s suggestions for performance. The last section of the book is Mabel Lee’s translation of Song of the Night. The layout of the short book is simple and equally accessible to literary readers and theatre practitioners. Mabel Lee opens the seventeen-page introduction with a brief historical and biographical overview of Gao and his oeuvre, ending with the hope that the translations will lead to more productions of Gao’s plays. Lee next [End Page 223] takes the reader on a more detailed look at Gao’s literary work, starting with the autobiographical novel she translated, Soul Mountain. Lee follows this section with an in-depth survey of Gao’s major literary works, interspersed with biographical facts. Transitioning from Gao’s novels to his criticism to his dramatic works, she frames his “impulse for autobiography” (p. xi) as a way to give voice to female characters that a male author normally could not. Through detailed examination of three plays as well as Snow in August, Gao’s jingju, Lee provides both plot summary and analysis, showing Gao’s innovative use of pronouns in order to distance the playwright’s voice from the characters’ and his exploration of the female psyche through male-female sexual relations in the dramas. It is through these two ideas that Lee analyzes the two plays in this book. Gao finished writing City of the Dead in 1991. This new translation from the Chinese original was done by scholar Gilbert C. F. Fong. City of the Dead is the first of Gao’s plays to focus on the male-female relationship. The plot of the play is taken from the well-known Chinese tale of the philosopher Zhuang Zhou testing his wife by returning home in a coffin, then secretly dressing as a prince and trying to seduce her. After the deceit is revealed, the wife is so distraught that she kills herself. Gao takes this tale further by showing the wife’s journey through the afterlife, where, as Lee puts it, her “tormentors in hell are presented as tyrannical, cruel, bullying, mendacious, foolish, ridiculous, and knavish males, and they can also be seen as theatrical exaggerations of male behavior toward females in real life” (p. xv). The one-act Song of the Night is the more recent play of the two, written in French in 1999 and rewritten in Chinese ten years later (p. xxi). The play is an illustrative example of Gao’s use of pronouns as a distancing tool for female characters. More of a character exploration than a traditionally structured play, the plot of Song of Night follows a young professional woman’s thoughts on sex, men, freedom, and relationship power dynamics. Gao employs an innovative deconstructive character technique by splitting the protagonist across three bodies; the character of She is performed by a female actress and two dancers. Lee notes that “Song of the Night has not yet been fully actualized in a theatre space” (p. ix). While the introduction places the two plays in a strong historical and literary framework, and the pairing lends itself to male-female sexual relations and autobiographical interpretation explained in the introduction, only a limited amount of space is spent with City of the Dead and Song of the Night. The introduction reads more like a standalone essay than a critical introduction, providing only brief analysis of the featured works. It concludes with a comprehensive list of further reading including, English-language translations of Gao’s plays, books, and critical essays. Gao Xingjian’s plays do not have the realism to which Western practitioners seem to cling, but both novices...

Gao Xingjian's Individualistic Revolt: Fiction, Biography, and Event

Based on a careful analysis of Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible by Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, this paper discusses how Gao’s writings reflect the various dilemmas he has gone through. The questions that will be addressed include, What happened to his pursuit of individualism at a time of increasing enforcement of collectivism? In what ways does his fiction become a testimony to the Cultural Revolution? How is Gao’s exilic narrative of China’s past different from that of other Chinese writers? How is Gao able to both deconstruct and reconstruct Chineseness in his novels?

Gao Xingjian’s Bus Stop: Dystopia in Contemporary China

This article aims to discuss how Gao Xingjian recontextualizes European dystopianism into China under Mao Zedong’s ideological manipulation of “utopia,” which the latter adopted from Karl Marx. The theme of absurd eternal waiting for a bus in Bus Stop is technically employed to criticize the Chinese dream of utopia and the idea of utopia itself as a whole. When the theme of waiting in Waiting for Godot is relocated into a Chinese context, it diverts from Western drama by means of Gao Xingjian's dramaturgical innovation as a blend of the East and the West. The absurdity in Bus Stop makes Chinese utopian desire fetishized as an eternal but ubiquitous zero, and becomes naked politics as utopia for desire and desire for utopia.

Gender in Gao Xingjian's Between Life and Death: The Notion of Originary Self and the Use of Tripartition

The relationship between the sexes and the female condition are underlying motifs in Gao Xingjian’s post-exile plays, yet very few scholarly studies of his work have focused solely on the analysis of gender in his plays. In those studies that have, most have directed their attention toward Gao’s novels, and many scholars have come to regard Gao as a misogynist writer. This paper examines Gao’s attitude toward gender through an analysis of his plays, specifically Between Life and Death (Shengsijie, 1991). The theatrical medium illustrates a more complex elaboration of gender representation than those seen in Gao’s novels—one that complicates conceptions of the writer’s misogyny. Focusing on Between Life and Death, I assert that Gao’s alleged misogyny is a misrepresentation. Regarding my theoretical approach, I make particular reference to feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. The debate is linked to Gao’s concept of an un-gendered/originary self and considers the use of dramatic devices—specifically focusing on the use of tripartition.

World Literature in Transformation

True “world literature,” according to Nobel committee member Horace Engdahl, will never be a common canon accepted by all, but a field of exchange and exploration. For Engdahl, the Nobel Prize serves as harbinger of such a community of interest across the globe and in the case of the work of its two Chinese-language laureates—Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan. Engdahl's lecture, given at the University of Nanjing, November 2, 2014, invites international readers to explore the complex relationships between international genres and Chinese traditions.

Literatures Topography and Network of the Chinese Diaspora: Gao Xing jian

Literatures Topography and Network of the Chinese Diaspora: Gao Xing jian

A Study on Gao Xingjian's Acting Method--focused on his theory of Neutral Actor

Gao Xinjian``s acting method is established through his insight from the pursuit of Modern Eastern Theatre of His theory of three states of acting or neutral actor is based on his idea of theatre, such as supposition of stage, on-the-spotness communication of theatre. Firstly Gao Xingjian tried to break away the great influence of the Stanislavskii acting method which became a main stream in Communist China, Secondly he tried to overcome the crisis of modern western drama which could not solve the contradiction between pursuit of self and alienation in society through the eastern way of thinking. He referred surely all the western drama theories, but also the traditional Chinese theatre experiences. Because eastern theatre is the theatre of the actor in essence, the actors of Chinese theatre as the subject of the theatre, could established the unique institution of Jiaose, role(major) playing system. Gao observed carefully the process in which actor creates the character in the Chinese theatre through ``Jiaose`` and presented this theory. If an actor with his own self enter into a state of neutral actor, standing on the stage and performing a character, he can be very cool-headed and can observe himself and the character with cold mind. Then he can perform in and out the character freely. To keep the distance of alienation, he suggested to presume an existence of the Third eye, to use a mask or make up, or changing the person pronoun. For example, the second personal pronoun ``you`` can make distance and objectify the role, the third personal pronoun ``he(she)`` can alienate the character. The actor also can become neutral from himself or character and feel free to express any kind of feelings or ideas. He believes a neutral actor in his cold mind state will become creative enough to find the way to express his feeling or psychological activities into visible image and action. He already had found how the traditional method of acting meet the eastern way of thinking and spirit of Zen. Gao Xingjian started his creating job from the contemplation on his personal self and on the world, and is continuously pursuing absolute freedom. He wants to establish the value of individual and stand up to the oppression of the power, so he needed to cognize himself. From it, he tried to get the universal truth, so he thought he, also the actors who create the worlds on stage need to keep the cold mind. At this point his acting method and his method of writing encounters. Because playwright``s pursuit of a unique theatre form comes from his cognition of life, he said. This is why in his theatrical work, the theory of three states of acting(theatre) and the neutral actor as the practicing method become coherent with the situation, characters, words and music of his play.

Travelling Without Moving: Navigating the Liminal Space between Memoir and Fiction

Contemporary travel literature provides many examples of the ways in which writers navigate the liminal space between memoir and fiction. Damon Galgut's Man Booker Prize-shortlisted In a Strange Room: Three Journeys, Robert Dessaix's Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives and Gao Xingjian's Nobel Prize-winning Soul Mountain challenge readers to question the boundaries of genre and reassess the importance placed on the separation of fact from fiction. In this paper, I examine the process of creating my own autobiographically-inspired travel narrative, Travelling Without Moving, which is poised in this same complex, delicate and problematic space. I consider narratology and the portrayal of emotional truth, the rhetorical shift from reportage to lyricism, and the paradoxical protecting and exposing of oneself. As a component of my practice-based PhD thesis, my creative work explores the primal psychological trauma of travel and questions whether travel can affectively transform us, which remains a point of contention between Emerson, Thoreau and their contemporaries.