The Language of Exile

Abstract

Exile forces a writer to mature, to be more exacting with language. Being separated from your readership means your work loses all practical significance: there is no connection between writing and making a living. If you still want to write, it has to be purely for yourself and you must make greater demands on your language.' Gao Xingjian's work focuses on the painful transition of ancient, traditional China into the modern world. The effect of this on Chinese history and culture has never been explored in any depth since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000 recognised Gao's role in demonstrating that Chinese literary culture is still alive and capable of renewal, despite the depredations of the Cultural Revolution and the extremes of social realism demanded by the Party in the interests of revolutionary propaganda. Gao was able to publish a considerable body of work in China in the 1980snovellas, short stories, plays, critical essays and four books-though not without problems. In 1982, his play Absolute Signal played to packed audiences at the Beijing People's Arts Theatre; but in the following year the performance of Bus Stop was banned and described by a senior Party member as 'the most pernicious work since the establishment of the People's Republic'. In 1987, when Gao left to take up a fellowship in Germany, he took with him the manuscript q/Tingshan. Known in the West under the title Soul Mountain, it was completed in 1989 in exile in Paris, where he now lives. Essentially, it is the story of one man's search for inner peace and tranquillity; for the recovery and expression of the self of the individual, all but annihilated in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Writers and artists for whom their work was a matter of self-expression were ruthlessly and brutally silenced at that time. When, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, it became too dangerous even to hide them, Gao burned all the several hundred works he had written during the 1960s and 1970s. From exile in Paris, Gao continues to write, constantly experimenting with language, bringing together an awareness of the importance of the image and the renewal of language in today's visually oriented world. He is well known throughout Europe and the USA for his large-scale black-and-white Chinese ink paintings with which he largely supports himself. In the course of his own exile-first in Australia and now in the UK-the poet Yang Lian has met Gao several times. Here we print excerpts from their ongoing conversations on language, literature, the pursuit of the self and the joys, as well as the pains, of the writer in exile. JVH INDEX ON CENSORSHIP 3 2OO2