Stuart Jeffries T he surprise winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature sat on the edge of a friend’s bed in Paris and reflected on the journey that had brought him from China to France, from the obscurity of being a playwright and novelist known only to a small number of critics and intellectuals to the Nobel Prize.
There’s a little party of admirers and critics in the living room, but Gao Xingjian (60), his eyes a little tired, keeps getting dragged away to do interviews with journalists who had never heard of him before last week. He says that the Nobel Prize is “something that falls on you from the sky like a miracle. It’s a total surprise.” Gao, the first Chinese-language winner of the prize, is a political refugee from communist China who has embraced France, its language and its culture, yet remains in China a potent, and proscribed, figure of dissent. To explain his spiritual journey he describes a dream he had when he was 15. “I was sleeping with a marble woman. She was beautiful and cold – a statue that had fallen into the grass, and I was lost in an exuberant freedom. It was that freedom, that we call decadent, that brought me to France.”
Of course, it is more complicated than that. His early life was difficult. He was born under the sign of chaos, his mother giving birth while bombs fell during the Sino-Japanese war. When he was young he developed a taste for the French surrealists like Ionesco, several of whom he later translated into Chinese. They influenced his own writing, which offended the Chinese authorities who regarded the genre as decadent and worthless. During the Cultural Revolution he was forced to burn much of his early work, attended re-education camps and did hard labour in the fields for six years. It was a terrible time, Gao recalls. His wife denounced him and he burned “kilos and kilos” of novels, plays and articles. But writing was a compulsion, an obsession, and he carried on in secret. In 1979 he was allowed to publish, but ran into trouble again. A work of criticism was damned as “spiritual pollution and connivance with Western literature”. And his plays, such as Bus Stop (1983), a kind of Zen theatre of the absurd heavily influenced by Beckett and Artaud, though performed at the Beijing Popular Theatre, were officially regarded as too decadent. In 1987, he left China and settled in Paris. “I love Paris – it’s the best city in the world for artists.” After the Tiananmen Square riots of 1989, his flat in Beijing was seized. The massacre formed the backdrop of his most overtly political play, Fugitives, a love story. Its publication caused his work to be banned in China.
Gao lives in a two-room apartment on the 19th floor of a tower block in a tough suburb in the east of Paris. He spends 16 hours a day writing or painting. He became a French citizen in 1998 and does not consort with the Chinese community. He gets a little cross when I suggest that, like the Japanese 1994 Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, his work is little known and may well benefit from the exposure the award will give him. “No, that’s not true. I am well known. In Europe, my plays are performed a lot. In the past 10 years more than 30 of my plays have been produced. But these are not plays for a big audience.’ Yet I asked for his books at four Parisian bookshops last week, and they were unavailable. “Try Tuesday,” said one proprietor. “We’ve ordered a few because he’s won the prize.” Making their award, the Swedish Academy said Gao had produced “an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity”. They singled out his 1989 novel Soul Mountain for particular praise, calling it “one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves”. Based on a 10-month walking tour Gao took along the Yangtze River, Soul Mountain uses several narrative voices, interweaving tales of people Gao met on his journey. At one point, one of these narrators criticises the novel’s author: “You’ve slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own, and call it fiction!” I ask Gao if he wants to become popular. “These things are not in my power. They just happen.” Is he happy about winning the award? “Obviously! It’s the greatest prize. But I wasn’t waiting for this. It’s something that falls on you from the sky like a miracle.” The Chinese reaction was sour. Jin Jianfan of the Chinese Writers’ Association said: “He is French and not Chinese. The reason he won it is more political than literary.”