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Gao Xingjian's literary works have always functioned in the interstices between China and the “West.” The award of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature to Gao Xingjian has stirred ambivalent responses within Chinese literary circles. Some rejoiced at this news while others considered Gao an inappropriate choice. This book makes a detailed analysis of his entire output. A brief survey of the development of Gao's writing career serves as a good starting point to understand his works, and here contextualisation is a key principle in the analysis of Gao's works. His works of different periods have functioned as one kind of mediation or another between the Chinese and the Western literary polysystems. Therefore, the different aspects of the concept of cultural translation are evoked to illustrate those various functions of mediation in Gao's works.

This chapter shows that the formal structure of Gao Xingjian's early plays are essentially modernist. In other words, the paradigm of modernism is translated into these plays. Although it is not exactly a theory, modernism functions as one. It is a writing paradigm with which a way of seeing and comprehending what constitutes reality is constructed through the depiction of the characters' relationship with their environment. Likewise, Gao Xingjian's plays written in the early 1980s show successful acculturation of a modernist theatrical paradigm, that is, how European modernist dramatists construct their views on the human condition, into the Chinese polysystem. Transformation and “disfiguration” are necessary to the process, given that the circumstances in the Chinese target culture were widely divergent from those of the European cultures.

Gao Xingjian's works published after he left China in 1987 show a comparable impulse on cultural self-translation. Some of his plays including Nether City and Stories in the Books of Mountains and Seas take material from Chinese mythology and folklore. In this way, the “Chineseness” embodied in this material is carried over into these plays, and therefore into their exilic existence. A more conspicuous attempt to translate the self's past in China into his present exilic existence is found in Yigeren di shengjing, translated into English as One Man's Bible by Mabel Lee, in which the narrator's past and present are interwoven together throughout the novel. One Man's Bible is a companion novel to Soul Mountain. The links between the two are at the same time thematic and structural. Both texts talk about the same scepticism towards language, literature, and representation.

It was only in the relatively relaxed atmosphere in the years after the Cultural Revolution that Gao Xingjian was able to get published. It is therefore important to contextualise his early writings within the framework of post-Cultural Revolution literature. Between 1980 and 1981, Gao published over a dozen essays introducing European modernism. Most of them were later collected in his theoretical work Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan (A preliminary Exploration of the Techniques of Modern Fiction). A Preliminary Exploration did not include all of Gao's essays on modernism, but only those on the general features of this writing paradigm. Case studies were featured in three other essays on French modernist writings. French literature has in general significantly informed Gao's literary orientation. His entire career up to this point was connected with the education in French literature he had received before the Cultural Revolution.

People are increasingly dependent on English translations to get to know “other” literatures with the dominance of the English language. In fact, Gao Xingjian's success is very revealing of the power of translation. Like other works in “minor” languages, Gao's works are essentially received abroad through translation. Translation is surely a powerful instrument. The value of translation is beyond doubt since its very aim is to facilitate understanding between people of divergent cultures, who would not otherwise be able to communicate. However, anybody who has any experience of translation realises that a translation does not equal the source text. In literary translation, the convention of literary writing, including generic forms, rhetorical devices and expectations of the literary readership in the target culture, often determine the form a translation needs to take. Gao's remark on the French translation of Soul Mountain is very revealing of the difficulties one often encounters in translation.

The novel Lingshan, translated into English as Soul Mountain by Mabel Lee, represents the most important turning point in Gao Xingjian's writing career. There are two reasons to support this claim. First, after the success of his translation project of modernism, Gao departs from high Modernism and makes an attempt at translating the postmodernist writing paradigm in this novel. Second, it is with this novel that Gao receives recognition from the “West” and a pathway is open for his works to enter the canon of “world literature.” According to Gao, it was in 1982 that the idea of the novel was conceived and he started working on it. Therefore a contextual analysis on this novel needs to consider not only the circumstances of its publication, but also those of its conception and development.

Before Gao Xingjian left China in 1987, eighteen of his short stories were published. Like his essays on modernism, these stories show a similar transition from a relatively conservative to a more experimental position. This change is most obviously marked by a shift from the dominance of naturalist realism to psychological realism. It is worth noting that the act of narration is presented as a conscious action in both “Stars” and “Pigeon,” although it serves different purposes respectively. Such an awareness later becomes a consistent feature in the repertoire of Gao's writings. In “Stars” it highlights the existence of a source of the story and promotes a sense of factuality, whereas in “Pigeon” it celebrates fictionality by demonstrating the narrative capacity of the artistic imagination. This view is very close to the one suggested in his call for modernism in A Preliminary Exploration.

From 1986 onward, Gao Xingjian's plays displayed an increasingly distinctive emphasis on the split between the individual self and the collective. The concern for the well-being of the individual turns into fierce criticism and interrogation of the Communist ideology of collectivism and the more traditional Chinese practice of demanding the individual's conformity to community ethical codes. However, this does not yet describe the full picture of Gao's individualism since in his plays written after 1986, the liberal humanist individualism is engaged in all kinds of interplay with a host of other sentiments and ideologies including nationalism, nihilism, and even Buddhist philosophy. The subjectivities of the individuals portrayed in those plays are therefore also inscribed with the traces of conflicting and varying cultural and ideological influences. This chapter examines the portrayal of the individuals in this group of plays.

Modern Chinese literature was born in the early twentieth century as a secular project that cast religion as the “superstition” of the other—the uneducated masses, women, and ethnic minorities. “Ghosts” were the master trope that signified all the dark forces that had hampered Chinese progress. The mission of modern literature, as the founding generation envisioned it, was to emancipate the benighted and exorcise the myriad ghosts from a rational, enlightened society. But more often than not, the heterotopia of religion proves not only unsettling, but also peculiarly magnetic, condensing nostalgia, hope, and promise for disenchanted moderns. Chapter 1 reads four texts from the twentieth century—“The New Year’s Sacrifice,” The White-Haired Girl, Soul Mountain, and “Here Comes the Ghost Eater”—in an effort to understand how modern writers come to terms with the aporias of secular modernity through the figure of apparitional stranger who refuses to be exorcised.