The Individual Writer’s Voice: Gao Xingjian’s Aesthetics and Creation

Authors

  • Stephen Conlon

Keywords:

Gao Xingjian, Chan Buddhism, postmodernism, tradition, communication, aesthetics, creativity, voice, pronouns, perception, renaissance, literary criticism

Abstract

Gao Xingjian offers a way beyond the currently prevalent ideologies that seem to dominate literature and literary criticism. He does this by creating major works that offer an aesthetic based on a return to the humanist traditions of literary art and the infusion of Buddhist and Taoist Ways to Enlightenment. His achievement is to blend Eastern and Western perspectives or perceptions that enrich each other and so make possible truly original art.

This essay discusses Gao’s views on art by arguing that once another, better, way to think and create can be enunciated, we may recognize the passing of what is currently often touted as the only correct or valid way to read and write literature in our universities and in the literary market. If it is possible to be original and cogent in expressing such an alternative, then perhaps we may re-shift our focus back onto the ways we have been writing before the advent of Postmodernist and Poststructuralist ideologies. In so doing, we may also return the writer’s voice to the discussion of literature and so re-establish the communication networks we need for great art which dialogues with us as individuals to flourish. Once this is achieved, a new renaissance may be possible that, in Buddhist terms, brings back to life what we thought was dead: literature is not exhausted; the author is not dead; art that sincerely represents the individual’s life and mind in verisimilar ways remains the most pressing need in this hyperreal age we have been told by literary ideologies we live in.
The form or style of this essay is offered as an alternative to the current turgid and unreadable ways of writing espoused in poststructuralist academic circles that have only resulted in a new poverty of literary criticism and of language. We may need to re-learn how to discuss literature in our own voices: Gao’s voice in his Aesthetics and Creation is an exemplary way to do so.

Author Biography

Stephen Conlon

Assumption University

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