Chinese Exile Gao Xingjian of France Gets Nobel Literature Prize

PARIS —  After nearly a century of existence, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded Thursday for the first time to a writer in the world’s most-used language, dissident Chinese exile Gao Xingjian, whose works are banned in his native land.

Now a citizen of France, Gao’s life and work mirror the tumult of modern China, while blending Chinese themes with narrative forms that originated in the West.

During the upheaval of Mao Tse-tung’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, in which millions perished, the author was sent to political re-education camps and toiled for six years as an agricultural worker. During that chaotic period, he burned a suitcase filled with manuscripts to avoid their falling into the hands of government officials.

“In the writing of Gao Xingjian, literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses,” said the Swedish Academy, which selects the winner of the Nobel in literature. “He is a perspicacious skeptic who makes no claim to be able to understand the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.”

“Art and propaganda are two different things,” the novelist once said. Gao is also a playwright, critic and artist--he paints the covers of his own books with India ink.

The Chinese-born writer’s masterpiece, the nearly 700-page novel “Soul Mountain,” was written in the 1980s. It recounts the wanderings of an ethnologist among the minorities of southern China as he searches through space and time for his origins, inner peace and freedom.

The Swedish Academy called the book “masterful,” saying it recalls “the grandiose idea of German romanticism of a universal poetry.”

The 60-year-old author will receive a cash prize of $915,000. He is the first literature prize winner to come from outside Europe since Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe won in 1994.

Though Gao is the first Chinese to win the literature prize, that will hardly gladden the heart of Beijing authorities. His works have been outlawed in his native land for a decade, and he is officially deemed persona non grata.

The Swedish Academy said it had no political agenda in singling out Gao as a dissident from Chinese communism or as a writer from the world’s most populous country. The Swedish judges maintained they were simply honoring great literature.

Gao was born in 1940 in Jiangxi province, the son of a banker and an actress. He attended the Peking Foreign Language Institute, specializing in French and later in translating surrealist poets.

Only in 1979 was Gao allowed to publish and to travel abroad, notably in France and Italy. In the 1980s, he became one of the most prominent avant-garde figures of post-Maoist China, publishing short stories, essays and plays. His 1982 “Alarm Signal” became the first experimental play staged in Beijing in years.

The 1983 play “Bus Stop,” which teetered on the cutting edge because of its absurdity, was denounced by Chinese officialdom as “the most pernicious text written since the creation of the People’s Republic.” It led to Gao being targeted in a crackdown on “spiritual pollution,” a code phrase for unwelcome Western cultural influences.

When another stage production, “The Other Shore,” was banned in 1986, Gao embarked on a 10-month walking tour of Sichuan province to avoid further harassment. He left China in 1987 and was admitted to France as a political refugee.

After the 1989 massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Gao resigned his membership in the Chinese Communist Party and joined the dissident movement.

Yet another of his plays, “Fugitives,” employs that slaughter of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pro-democracy demonstrators in central Beijing as its backdrop. Chinese officialdom responded by outlawing Gao’s entire opus and declaring him an undesirable.

In his apartment in a working-class housing complex in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet, Gao on Thursday called his Nobel Prize “a miracle.” He got the news, he said, in a two-minute telephone call from Stockholm.

“It is a great happiness, a great luck,” Gao, dressed in a gray sweatshirt and gray jeans, told Reuters Television in fluent French. “They announced it to me very simply and told me I had to prepare a 45-minute speech. I said that’s very long.”

Living in an apartment decorated with his own paintings in white, black and gray, Gao said he did not think his Chinese origins played a role in his selection. “One must first be a writer,” he said.

“Gao has been one of the most important writers in creating what didn’t exist before: a spoken drama in China as distinct from music drama, dance and the old traditions,” Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary, told a news conference in Stockholm.

Gao renounced his Chinese citizenship and became a French national two years ago.

This year’s Nobel Prizes conclude today with the announcement in Oslo of the winner of the peace prize.