In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 / The Existentialist Square: Gao Xingjian’s Taowang Of the four writers in this book, Gao Xingjian is not only the oldest and the longest established but also the one with the most complicated reception history. Born in 1940, he is the only author here to have grown up in pre-­ communist China, in an environment where his early interests in Western literature, art, and music were safely encouraged. This childhood knowledge of an alternative sociopolitical reality perhaps made more acute his later experiences during the Cultural Revolution, when he, in a notorious gesture, burned a suitcase full of manuscripts to avoid persecution , and yet could not resist continuing to compose in secret in a reeducation camp for years afterward. Much of this biographical history would be literary lore to only a handful of scholars were it not for the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its landmark one-­ hundredth anniversary year, the Prize was awarded to Gao, propelling him into international fame. At the same time, it spawned mythologies of his life and work that shed light, above all, on the cultural-­ political dynamics of the post-­ 1989 world. The millennial Nobel and its attendant cultural politics will therefore serve as my study’s first nodal point for the post-­ Tiananmen literary diaspora’s global significance. From this discussion of contexts I will tunnel backward , first to Gao’s own essays from the 1990s in which he lays out his aesthetic philosophy, then to his 1989 Tiananmen play Taowang, with its dual portraits of state power and gendered violence. As I will argue through the arc of this chapter, what has been crucially obscured in the post-­ Nobel discourse on Gao is Tiananmen’s cardinal role in shaping his theories of writerly individualism and existential flight—­and this political relation must be retrieved if we are to counteract his conceptual erasure of 36 / the existentialist square totalitarianism and a possible world amnesia about the massacre and its implications for human responsibility. Part I. The Prize and the Polis nobel politics In 2001, the French journalist Jean-­ Luc Douin conducted an interview with Gao Xingjian, the newly crowned 2000 Nobel Laureate in Literature, the transcription of which was then published in Label France, a news magazine distributed officially by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The preface to this interview, after naming Gao as the first Chinese writer to be awarded the Literature Prize, goes on to introduce him thus: “A victim of the Cultural Revolution in China, this dissident of the Tiananmen generation, a political refugee in France since 1988, became a naturalized French citizen in 1998” (Gao, “Literature”). Conspicuously, this biographical blurb constructs Gao’s writerly persona from a primarily political perspective , and the signposts it establishes prepare the reader for an excursion into, not one writer’s aesthetics, but one citizen’s complex struggles with national politics. This deft interweaving of personal and national history divides Gao’s life into three phases: first, that of “victim,” implying involuntary subjection to and unjust suffering at the hands of state power; then, that of “dissident,” indicating active resistance to a tyrannical government; and finally, that of “refugee,” signaling failed resistance and forced flight from the homeland. That Gao, like thousands of others, in fact fell victim to events of the Cultural Revolution is not to be denied. His second novel, One Man’s Bible, a semi-­ autobiographical account of his Cultural Revolution experiences, amply testifies to this. What is debatable, though, is the description of him as a “dissident of the Tiananmen generation.” The implication of this phrase is ambiguous on several counts. For one, Tiananmen has symbolically spawned multiple generations in twentieth-­ century Chinese history, from the May Fourth movement of 1919 and the lesser-­ known March Eighteenth Incident of 1926 to the April Fifth movement of 1976 and, most recently, the pro-­ democracy movement of 1989. The historical referent here is most likely the last. Yet Gao, who was already forty-­ nine years old by that time, can be considered “of this generation” only if one expands the category to include not solely the student protesters at Tiananmen Square but any participant in one of the numerous demonstrations around China that spring, whether in Beijing or elsewhere. Along this expanded interpretation , we can also note that the biography withholds two significant points: first, that Gao’s final departure from the PRC in 1987 predates the [18.117.216.229] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 08:44 GMT...

Share