The Case for Literature

by Gao Xingjian, Mabel Lee (Translator)

When Gao Xingjian was crowned Nobel Laureate in 2000, it was the first time in the hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize that this honor had been awarded to an author for a body of work written in Chinese. The same year, American readers embraced Mabel Lee’s translation of Gao’s lyrical and autobiographical novel Soul Mountain, making it a national bestseller. Gao’s plays, novels, and short fiction have won the Chinese expatriate an international following and a place among the world’s greatest living writers.
The bold and extraordinary essays in this volume—all beautifully translated by sinologist Mabel Lee—include Gao's Nobel Lecture (“The Case for Literature”), “Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth,” “Cold Literature,” “Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain,” and “The Necessity of Loneliness,” as well as other essays. These essays embody an argument for literature as a universal human endeavor rather than one defined and limited by national boundaries. Gao believes in the need for the writer to stand apart from collective movements, regardless of whether these are engineered by political parties or driven by economic or other forces not related to literature. This collection presents Gao's innovative ideas on aesthetics, and it constitutes the very kernel of his thinking on literary creation.
Praise for Soul Mountain:
“A brilliant sprawl of a novel that defies conventional notions of ‘the self’ and ‘literature.’”—Washington Post
“Startlingly poetic language . . . Bewitching narrative voices . . .One long immersion in buried strata of history and the psyche.”—Boston Globe
“Gao’s wanderer . . . has found survival . . . in words. And ultimately, it is the miracle of those words that wins Nobels.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

Genres: Literature, Nonfiction, Essays, China, Literary Criticism, Chinese Literature, Asian Literature

192 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2001

About the author

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born novelist, playwright, critic, and painter. An émigré to France since 1987, Gao was granted French citizenship in 1997. The recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is also a noted translator (particularly of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco), screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.

Reviews

[H]

from "Without Isms"

It was not until I wrote "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather" that I began to understand that in Chinese reality, memory and imagination are manifested in the eternal present, which transcends grammatical concepts and hence constitutes a time-transcending flow of language. For thoughts and perceptions, consciousness and the subsconscious, narration, dialogue and soliloquy, and even the alienated consciousness of the self, I turn to tranquil contemplation rather than adopting the psychological or semantic analysis of Western fiction, and unity is achieved through the linear flow of language. (69)

Rather than the starting point of modern literature, Nietzsche's Superman should more accurately be seen as the end point of romanticism. Kafka's self is a more accurate depiction of modern man. After him, a brilliant analysis of the self is to be found in some hundred thousand lines of posthumously published poetry by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. (75)

As a writer I strive to position myself between the East and the West, and as an individual I seek to live at the margins of society. In this era in which, to use Liu Xiaofeng's words, the physical body ridicules the spirit, this is a better choice for me. (77)

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from "Cold Literature"

This sort of literature of course did not just come into being today. Yet whereas in the past it mainly had to fight oppressive political forces and social customs, today it also has to do battle with the subversive commercial values of consumerist society. Its existence depends on the writer's willingness to endure loneliness. (79)

Cold literature is possible only if the pressures of politics and society can be escaped and a livelihood guaranteed. This is why it has been difficult for modern Chinese literature to be cold. (81)

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from "Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain"

It is my view that the only responsibility a writer has is to the language he writes in. He can reform his creations as much as he wants, talk endlessly, write about nothing and play with the language, but he must respect the rules inherent in the language, otherwise there will be no art of language. (84)

In Soul Mountain, what is related via the three changing pronouns in different perceptions by the same subject, and this encapsulates the linguistic structure of the book. The third-person pronoun "she" is best described as the male subject's experiences and thoughts regarding the other sex, with whom a direct link is impossible. In other words, the book is a long soliloquy in which the pronouns keep changing. I prefer to call this a flow of language.

Language is inherently not concerned with logic. As an expression of the psychological activities of humankind, it simply follows a linear process as it seeks actualisation. Moreover, it does not obey the objective concepts of time and space that belong to the physical world. When the discussion of time and space is imported into linguistic art from scientific aims and research methods, that linguistic art is entirely reduced to trifling pseudo-philosophical issues.

By not indicating tense, the Chinese language better reflects the basic nature of language. Actualized in language, present, past and future are identical and indistinguishable, and are not emphasised by inflecting the verb; only the psychological processes of the narrator and the listener or reader are involved. Moreover, reality and imagination, memory and thought have (90) no strict demarcations but are integrated within the process of the narration, which acknowledges only this actualisation in language and is not concerned with the real world. (91)

My relationship with myself has nothing to do with self-worship. The almighty heroes who have replaced God with the self and those who have tragically expunged the self disgust me equally. Apart from myself, I am nothing.

What I experience are merely viewpoints or, one could say, narrative angles. I am a linguistic subject from whom perceptions arise. So my existence consists of narrating these perceptions. (92)

The importation of modern Western culture does not mean that contemporary Chinese literary creation will cut ties with its own cultural traditions. I am not anti-culture, but I reject the "searching for roots" label, because my roots have been under my feet from the time of my birth. It is simply a matter of how I understand these roots, including how I understand myself. (103)

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from "The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation"

Does the Chinese language, past or present, have a stable grammatical structure? In Chinese, words are made up of single characters, and the gender, number and case inflections found in Western languages do not exist. Nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives can automatically function as different parts of speech. Verbs do not conjugate: there are no distinctions of time, voice or mood, so there are no morphological changes to indicate the past, present or future, direct or indirect speech, condition or supposition. Subject and predicate are not always determined by word order, so there can be considerable freedom. The subject is often dispensed with, and it can be difficult to distinguish between a sentence without a subject and a sentence without a pronoun. Active and passive voice, and present and past participles do not exist. Relative clauses do not require conjunctions, and compound sentences have no time or voice restrictions. The relationship between words or between sentences does not require grammatical collocation, and is often concealed by implication and by the tone of words or sentences. (107)

Literary creation is also a way of life. Through writing, an author gets closer to the truth of his own life and to an understanding of himself and the world. What every writer searches for, it should be said, is simply a unique language that he can use to express his own feelings. It is quite normal to find differences in literary language among the large numbers of writers who write in the same language; the only thing they have in common is that they are all bound by the grammatical rules of that language. (120) . . . . In fact, during the process of writing there is much that is not written into a work. Language can only articulate a minute portion of a person's feelings; a huge part is lost. For this reason, I believe what I write is still far removed from what I actually feel, but I can only try to use language to get as close as possible to this truth. (122)

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from "The Necessity of Loneliness"

It is only when a child is alone that he starts to become an adult, and it is only when a person is alone that he can achieve maturity. . . . . To an ever greater extent, loneliness is a prerequisite for freedom. Freedom depends on the ability to reflect, and reflection can only begin when one is alone. . . . . When ideologies, trends in thinking, fashions or crazes are all-embracing, it is being lonely that affirms the individual's freedom. (165)

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review en Français • en Español • in English

Gao Xingjian est un auteur chinois ayant vécu la Révolution Culturelle. Après s’être exilé en France et pour le discours de la réception de son prix Nobel de littérature, il fait ce discours que je trouve très touchant et poignant à l’endroit de l’importance de la littérature pour la survie de l’individu.
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Gao Xingjian es un autor chino que vivió la Revolución Cultural. Después de haberse exiliado en Francia y para la recepción de su premio Nobel de literatura, hace este discurso que encuentro muy conmovedor acerca de la importancia de la literatura para la supervivencia del individuo.
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Gao Xingjian is a Chinese author who lived through the Cultural Revolution. After being exiled in France and in the context of the reception of his literature Nobel prize, he makes this speech that I found very touching about the importance of literature for the survival of the individual.

[Prooost Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book of essays and speeches covers a lot of ground in its 166 pages. Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, has had his viewpoint influenced by his life in China and his exile in the West (France). Under the communist regime, the content of books and plays is dictated by the Party; in the West, in can be dictated by fashion and commercial pressure. For his own part, Gao Xingjian has attempted a literature of the individual, avoiding any isms.

A quote at random:

Revolutionising form should not become a sort of superstition. Is there any certainty that what comes later will be able to negate what came earlier? The idea that only the new is good has become the disease of our times, and probably has become the collective subconscious of consumerist society. But art is not merchandise, and for the artist, being able to reject market forces is critical to his being able to write good works, because these forces exert pressures harder to resist than politics or social customs.

The reason I gave four stars instead of five, is that The Case for Literature contains a certain amount of the repetitiveness that such collections sometimes suffer from. But it's well worth reading.

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Xingjian is a Nobel laureate who wrote plays and novels in China, but at times had to burn his work, and for 5 years had to hide in the country so he was not abducted and killed. Finally He is credited with bringing flashbacks, stream of consciousness and the psychology of the characters to Chinese literature. He railed against Nietzsche and modernists in thinking that there were heroes, and wrote against all “isms”. It is sometimes difficult to sense what he is saying, but in focusing on the process of writing as liberation for the individual and as away to find the patterns in human existence he is inspirational.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick-to-read collection of short essays by Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian. Though the essays are short, they cover some pretty profound and erudite topics, including the future of theater, the impact of language on literature, and what literature should truly be all about.

[Lise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beaucoup aimé la première partie, moins la discussion entre les deux auteurs.

[Queralt]

isms mislead us all

[Leila Silva Terlinchamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

La raison d'être de la littérature é o discurso pronunciado por Gao Xingjian, em dezembro de 2000 ao receber o prêmio Nobel de Literatura.
Gao Xingjian nasceu na China, em 1940, mas, por razões políticas trocou o seu país pela França em 1988. Sua obra mais conhecida é A Montanha da Alma.

Em La raison d'être de la littérature Gao Xingjian discute o papel do escritor, da literatura, o papel do seu país e da política na sua formação. Segundo ele “O escritor é um homem comum, talvez ele seja simplesmente mais sensível, e os homens mais sensíveis são sempre mais frágeis. O escritor não se expressa como porta-voz de um povo nem como incarnação da justiça; sua voz é forçosamente fraca, entretanto, a voz deste tipo de indivíduo é muito mais autêntica.” E continua “Eu gostaria de dizer que a literatura não pode ser senão a voz de um indivíduo, sempre foi assim.” (...) “É a literatura que permite ao ser humano conservar a sua consciência de homem.” “....a criação literária é um luxo, uma pura satisfação do espírito.”
Estas são algumas frases isoladas do discurso e perdem muito da dimensão, mas dá pelo menos uma idéia do pensamento do escritor. Ele não deixa de lembrar os grandes escritores que não tiveram, como ele, a sorte do reconhecimento em vida, como exemplo, Kafka e Fernando Pessoa, o mais profundo poeta do século XX.
E agrade a academia sueca.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the ideas Gao XingJian has about writing more than his actual writing. So this book was interesting. Fleeing and the importance of loneliness. I think that stuff makes sense.