Language Ideologies in Gao Xingjian’s Literature: a Linguistic Anthropological
Study of Chinese Diaspora Literature in Europe
Lijing Peng
It is language that speaks, not Man. Man begins speaking but Man only
speaks to the extent that he responds to, that he corresponds with
language, and only insofar as he hears language addressing, concurring
with him.
M. Heiddegger
Poetry, Language, Thought
In this presentation I will use some texts drawn from Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul
Mountain to explore an linguistic anthropological approach of reading. Soul
Mountain is a collection of loosely connected stories about an imaginary journey to a
fabled destination, and what one sees and hears on the way. The genres employed
are highly diversified, ranging from travelogues, folklore, myths, reports to artistic
criticisms and lyric proses, etc. The spatial archetypes of the route are mainly
ethnically and culturally marginal areas in Southwest China. But in general the
journey is more about an inner pilgrimage and a soul exile.
The novel is very complex in its form. Just to draw a few examples, in a moment one
comes across a rumor of a female victim of rape and murder, told by a witness in
everyday language; and this chapter is immediately followed by reports of Panda
conservatory, narrated in a style of ethnographic writing; and not long after that one
enters a scene of a magnificent Buddhist ritual depicted in classical Chinese. And
each narrative ascribes to a different personal pronoun. “You” is on a journey to Soul
Mountain and hears a lot of mythical descriptions of it basing on very old stories; “I”
is wandering along the Yangtze River encountering various real people and
societies. And there are other narrative pronouns. All of them are different
reflections of the same character on the journey. The above-mentioned chapters are
all very good separate writings. But for many, it is difficult to have a sense of the
connections between the texts, and the sense of connections between texts and the
writer, and the sense of connections between the novel as a whole and readers.
As the first Nobel Laureate in literature (2000) to write primarily in the Chinese
language, Gao Xingjian has composed novelistic and theatrical works that bear very
diversified interpretations in both artistic and political perspectives. Among the big
amount of studies, one sums up well both historical and structural aspects of Gao’s
writing. Sabastian Veg concludes that the use of different personal pronouns in
sequential chapters in the same novel is deliberated by Gao Xingjian to decentralize
the narrator’s role. The author writes under the circumstances of eluding from
political center and institutions; so the author would not go into creating another
power center or language institution in literature. (2010). And here the literary
regime can be easily understood in Foucault’s scholarship.
As Deleuze and Guattari note in their study of Kafka, that literature tends to
deterritorialize (1986), Gao Xingjian self-consciously tried further decentralizing the
author who is a parallel institutional embodiment, so that literature can better
reveal the human condition and the writer self. This decentralization also aims at
diluting the strong effect of writing on marginal community and marginal space. As
Gao Xingjian himself suggested, that all those efforts of searching for origin,
searching for locality, searching for self in literature usually end in trapping author
or readers into some sort of ideological institution. And it was his desire to self-exile
from these thought restrictions.
Professor Veg also states in the same study that Gao Xingjian’s retrospection on
modernity and modernism corresponds to his envisage of the tragic result from the
collision of modernistic thoughts and socialistic nationalism. As we can see in Gao
Xingjian’s own account, he considers Soul Mountain as an experiment of freeing
language and literature from both the existing literary regimes and historical
contexts.
Now comes the question again: besides seeing this novel as author’s self-conscious
experiment which eludes from political regimes and ideological constraints
operating in certain literary forms, how can we still read it as a piece of art? How can
we consider the connections between different texts in this novel, and the
connections between the novel and people who encounter it in the process of its
circulation?
In asking these questions, I am referring to Roman Jakobson’s classic question of
‘what makes a verbal message a work of art?’ (1960) and Michael Allen’s inquires in
his new work In the shadow of World Literature, about defining how a text should be
read in different text traditions and historic-religious traditions (2016). And there
probably is a ready answer embedded in a comment of Samuel Beckett on James
Joyce’s’ writing:
‘Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff
is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read –
at least it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to.
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.’
“Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” (1929)
I will come back to this point later. Now I would like to invite you to join me in
reading one paragraph in Soul Mountain. In the seventieth chapter there’s a piece of
art criticism:
——面对龚贤的这幅雪景，还有什么可说的没有！那种宁静，听得见霸雪纷纷落下，似是有声
又无声。
Viewing Gong Xian’s1 landscape painting, what can you say? The silence - snow is falling,
seemingly audible and yet soundless.
——那是一个梦境。
That’s a dream
1
Gong Xian（cf. 1618-1689）, a painter who’s famous for his ink-using skills in landscape
painting.
Image I: Gong Xian’s Landscape covered by Snow (Freer Gallery of Art).
——河上架的木桥，临清流而独居的寒舍，你感觉到人世的踪迹，却又清寂幽深。——这是一
个凝聚的梦，梦的边缘那种不可捉摸的黑暗也依稀可辨。——一片湿墨，他用笔总这样浓重，
意境却推得那么深远。他也讲究笔墨，笔墨情趣之中景象依然历历在目。他是一个真正的画家
，不只是文人作画。
Wooden bridge over the river, living alone in a thin house by water, you feel the traces of
human world, but your world deep and serene. — This is a condensed dream; the fringe of it,
the unpredictable darkness, is remotely recognizable. — a patch of wet ink, he always
thickened the ink, but furthered the view. Yet he appreciated sketching; the scene stands
vividly in the fun of sketching. He was a real painter, not some literati who painted. ——所谓文人画那种淡雅往往徒有意旨而无画，我受不了这种作态的书卷气。
The so-called ‘Grace’ in literati’s paintings is usually full of meaning and short in image; I can’t
bear this affected bookishness.
——你说的是故作清高，玩弄笔墨而丧失自然的性灵。笔墨趣味可学，性灵则与生俱来，与山
川草木同在。龚贤的山水精妙就在于他笔墨中焕发的性灵，苍苍然而忘其所以，是不可学的。
What you meant was a very trying loftiness, a play of sketching and a loss of natural
spirituality. The taste of sketching is acquirable, the spirit, however, is more with the
mountains and floras. Gong Xian’s paintings of mountains and water are particularly fine,
because of the spirit embedded in his sketching, boundless and carried away, and inacquirable.
——八大也不可学。他怒目睁睁的方眼怪鸟可学，他那荷花水鸭的苍茫寂寥不可以模仿。
Bada (Bada Shanren’s art)2 is also inaccessible. His raging square-eyed esoteric birds are
learnable; his lotus and ducks blanketed by loneliness are impossible to imitate.
Image II. Zhu Da’ paintings: (left) Mynah bird on an Old Tree (Forbidden City, Beijing); (right)
Lotus and Birds (Shanghai Museum)
——八大最好的是他的山水，那些愤世嫉俗之作不过是个山的小品。
The best of Bada (Bada Shanren’s art) is his paintings of mountains and water; and those
cynical artifacts are no more than light-hearted sketches.
Bada Shanren (1626-1705), born Zhu Da, widely recognized as the best painter in his period,
famous for his ink-washing painting.
2
Image III: Zhu Da’s Dry-pen Mountains and Water (Nanjing Museum)
——人以愤世嫉俗为清高，殊不知这清高也不免落入俗套，以平庸攻平庸，还不如索性平庸。
People take cynicism as loftiness, hardly realizing that this loftiness is also in the pattern of
cliché. Rather than using one mediocrity to go against a mediocre other, one may as well stay
mediocre.
——郑板桥就这样被世人糟蹋了，他的清高成了人不得意时的点缀...
Zheng Banqiao3 (his art) is destroyed by people like that; his loftiness has became
decorations in lives of those not in their moments...
——最受不了的是那"难得胡涂"，真想胡涂胡涂就是了。有什么难处？不想胡涂还假装胡涂又
拼命显示出聪明的样子。
The worst is 'Where ignorance is bliss, it's folly to be wise’(Zheng Banqiao’s Motto). If one
chose to be ignorant, so be it! What’s the difficulty? Don’t want to be ignorant, yet pretending
to be while pulling every string to look smart.
Zheng Banqiao (1693-1765), born Zheng Xie, a famous painter and calligrapher who resigned
from his official position because of his discontent with social inequality.
3
Image IV: Zheng Xie’s painting and Calligraphy works: (Left) Orchid, stone and bamboo
(Forbidden City, Beijing); (right) Nan de hu tu (usually translated as 'Where ignorance is bliss,
it's folly to be wise’, stone rubbing from tablet stored in Xi’an Beilin Museum)
——他是个落魄才子，而八大是个疯子。
He's just a wit coming down in the world. But Bada is a real madman.
——先是装疯，而后才真疯了，他艺术上的成就在于他真疯而非装疯。
At first he pretended to be mad, and later truly he became a madman. And all his
achievements came from his real madness.
——或者说他用一双奇怪的眼光来看这世界，才看出这世界疯了。
Or rather say he watched the world with his esoteric eyes, so he could see that the world was
crazy.
——或者说这世界容忍不了理智的健全，理智便疯了，才落得世界的健全。
Or just say that the world could not bear full sanity, and thus the sanity went mad, in order to
let the world be sane.
Various questions could be raised from this interesting art criticism. For example, what is a real
painter here? And what is the difference between a real painter and ‘some literati who painted’?
Correspondingly, what is the difference between a wit coming down in the world and the real
madman? Why has the best art come from madness? And interestingly, seen from the critic here,
the arts of the wit are not bad in themselves, but just totally distorted by ‘people’ who misused
them for their own hypocrisy (‘destroyed’).
This paragraph is dense with multi-layered indexes. The artistic conceptions are delivered
through a classical Chinese rhetoric. The fragments of conceptualizing the spirituality in
traditional Chinese painting are composed in a style closer to classic prose. And the critical
comments are written in modern Mandarin. Readers would have to master the classical Chinese
rhetoric in order to grasp the poetics here. Not to mention that to understand the critical
comments one would need knowledge of what a literati and an artist are supposed to be like in
the context of traditional Chinese academy. However, it is the idea in the critical comments that
connects this text to others in the novel. Even if one does not know anything about Zhu Da, Zheng
Banqiao or sketches and spirituality in classical Chinese painting. In reading this paragraph, one
can still find the binding elements. Here there is an art conception that has a flavor of Buddhist
thoughts and other hermit attitudes; and there is a basic idea criticizing the literary institutions
carried on by literati but abandoned by madman, etc. etc.
This paragraph illustrates a dialectical understanding of Gao Xingjian. The literati carries on
shaping the society and state, while the madman breaks through patterns and sets up exemplars
of artistic spirituality which would become representations of his time for the generations to
come. In the chapter of Buddhist ritual mentioned above by the Irish poet, the narrator ‘I’ is
restricted by the disciplines of the Buddhist temple but greatly inspired by the mysteriousness
and splendidness of the ritual itself. In the ethnographic accounts we also see this dialectical
thought. We see people following the rules of natural conservatory, restricted by sexist
discriminations and social prejudices; but throughout this novel individual reactions to these
social frameworks are bold and refreshing. And from these very different characters we can
always find a reflection of both Zhu Da and Zheng Banqiao, a devoting madman and a literati
being restricted. One can clearly see the social institutions and insurmountable power relations
that shape the society. But the madman character in every individual always brings about very
complicated reactions that change the artistic and ideological image of the society. This duality is
also Gao Xingjian’s own thought towards institutions in China and in Europe. He eluded from
most of them, but he did not deny them.
In this manner Soul Mountain can be read as intellectual historiography. Only the intellectual
elements are more obvious in archetypal characters such as Zhu Da and less distinct on the girls
and workers. But together they form an intellectual history of Chinese society, which belongs to
everyone, from intellectual elites to minority communities. But at the end, the author looks into
this history and believes that he has either witnessed most or made his best efforts in recording
most. But he does not understand it. And he does not fit in.
Chapter fifty-four:
你恍然领悟，你徒然找寻的童年其实未必有确凿的地方。而所谓故乡，不也如此？无怪小镇人
家屋瓦上飘起的蓝色炊烟，柴火灶前吟唱的火卿子，那种细腿高脚身子米黄有点透明的小虫，
山民屋里的火塘和墙上挂的泥土封住的木桶蜂箱，都唤起你这种乡愁，也就成了你梦中的故乡
。尽管你生在城里，在城市里长大，你这一生绝大多数的岁月在大都市里度过，你还是无法把
那庞大的都市作为你心里的故乡。也许正因为它过于庞大，你充其量只能在这都市的某一处，
某一角，某一个房间里，某一个瞬间，找到一些纯然属于你自己的记忆，只有在这种记忆里，
你才能保存你自己，不受到伤害。归根到底，这茫茫人世之中，你充其量不过是沧海一勺，又
渺小，又虚弱。"你应该知道，在这个世界上你所求不多，不必那么贪婪，你所能得到的终究只
有记忆，那种源源俄陇无法确定如梦一般，而且并不诉诸语言的记忆。当你去描述它的时候，
也就只剩下被顺理过的句子，被语言的结构筛下的一点碴计。
“You suddenly realize that the childhood you are aimlessly searching for may not be a real place.
And the so-called ‘home’, is it not? No wonder that blue smoke above the houses in little towns,
the cooks singing in front of the hearths, the cream-color, half transparent insects with long and
thin legs, hearths inside the houses and bucket bee hives sealed with mud and hung on the wall
all arouse nostalgia, and all become hometown in your dreams. Although you were born in city,
grew up in city and spend most of your life in the cities, you still cannot see the gigantic city as
the hometown in your heart. Perhaps because of its size, you can best be in somewhere in this
city; and in some corner, some room, some moment you may find some memory only belonging
to yourself. And only in this memory you can protect yourself from harm. In the end, in this big,
wide world you are a drop in the ocean, small and feeble. You should know by now, that you want
not very much from this world, and need not be greedy, all you would get in the end is only
memory, those continuous, unsure, dream-like, and speechless memory. When you try to
describe it, only the structured sentences and dross left behind the language structure will be
there.”
Now I would like to come back to Beckett’s comment on James Joyce’s works:
‘Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff
is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read –
at least it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to.
His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.’
“Dante … Bruno . Vico .. Joyce” (1929)
It is interesting to point out here that Gao Xingjian considered the massive use of personal
pronouns in the Sinophone narratives is a sign of influences of European languages. And at first
he did not think it worked very well in the Sinophone narratives. Diaspora literature is a field
where language and cultural elements from different text traditions collide. Gao Xingjian’s
writing includes various language styles that he derived and deliberately learned; and the power
of the text sometimes comes from the ruptures between different language elements. This is also
an effort mostly inspired by European absurdity theatre popular at the time that Gao Xingjian
entered his mature writing stage. In this manner, such an intellectual history can be both
independent from the author self, and significant in establishing a new immigrant identity in the
new ‘Republic of letter’.
And also I would like to cite another piece of Beckett’s writing on his own literary creations:
‘It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official
English … To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it
something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer
today. … Is there any reason why the terrible materiality of the word should not be capable of
being dissolved … a literature of the unword’
Letter to Axel Kaun, July 9, 1937
The language crisis in Beckett, which is a crisis of faith in the English language …witnesses the
charged language issue of his native country and the absurdity (‘senselessness’) which language
ideology inevitably engineered, most especially the enervation of English in Irish public life. Gao
Xingjian experienced the end of liberalism in the 1980s in China. After that he tried to discharge
the language he used in writing from the formal regulations, for the structured language no
longer capable of describing the human conditions in his mind and in his experience. As himself
once wrote:
“…his flow of language used for tracking psychological activities clearly cannot be achieved
through conventional methods of narration, description, or rhetoric because they are too
regulated, and it certainly cannot be achieved through old sayings and allusions. Capturing these
perceptions requires avoiding old sayings and allusions, avoiding existing patterns of writing,
and searching for fresh narrative methods and a more vibrant language. This requires returning
to the source of language—that is, when constructing a sentence, one must listen intently to the
language of the inner mind, even if it is not spoken aloud, because this sound of the language is
linked to the words and sentences and is the starting point of language. The basic substance of
language is sound. At this point, it is necessary to draw attention to the common misconception
that the written language is the same as the spoken language.” (2012: 30-31)
But just as Gao Xingjian ended the Soul Mountain with a declaration that the narrative “I” knows
nothing in the end, it is also difficult for one to know how to read and place this intellectual
history within the European context.
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