Literature (translated by Mabel Lee):
Gao's signature credo remains that writers should live "without
isms," the title of one of his essay collections. By a life without
isms, Gao, an atheist by conviction and pragmatist by bent, means a
humane, tolerant acceptance of life's uncertainty coupled with joy in
life itself. The writer without isms "opposes totalitarian
dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to the status
of God or Superman." (Gao hates Nietzsche's egoistical vision of man,
and he denounces the German philosopher as much as he does political
suppression of the individual.)
Gao frames his position as a human-rights issue. "To be without
isms," he writes, "is the minimum right of a human being," the core
of "intellectual freedom," a "form of resistance against death by a
life that is full of vitality."
Literature, consequently, "has no duty to the masses," has "nothing
to do with politics," and "can only be the voice of an individual."
Imagine that frail young man who stood before the tank in Tiananmen
Square to be a writer, and you pretty much have Gao's view.
Literature for Gao comes from "the surging of blood in the writer's
own heart." It is "subservient to nothing but truth" and "has no
taboos." Once "literature is contrived as the hymn of a nation, the
flag of a race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a
class or group," it is nothing but "propaganda." Gao advocates what
he calls "cold literature," a literature in which observation "is
superior to and loftier than judgment."
...
Particularly eye-opening here to a non-Chinese reader will be the
essay titled "The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation." In
it, Gao declares that a second problem afflicts modern Chinese
literature beyond its stultification by "isms." In his view, the
"Europeanization of the Chinese language," through compound words and
convoluted syntax, has made it "intolerable" and "unreadable." Gao
seeks, instead, "a pure form of modern Chinese."
Carlin Romano, "Chinese laureate a literary Olympian," Philadelphia
Inquirer, May 20, 2007
