by Xingjian Gao
As spectacle, the hallucination scenes in the last part of the play are the most dramatic and effective. The images are horrifying and dreamlike, and their accompanying earnestness and intensity make them disturbingly real. One recurring image in these scenes is the big eye, which appears twice and each time sends shudders down Woman’s heart. The first one, painted on a man’s hand, denotes the eye of other people and the opposite sex, and Woman feels that this eye has been following her all her life. The second is the eye carried by the headless woman, presumably embodying the soul of the heroine, and the eye is the inner eye. The fear of being spied upon lingers and terrorizes Woman as she feels that her judgement day is approaching.
In The Other Shore, Gao Xingjian resorts to externalization to realize his idea of self-examination by using different characters to portray the divided self, the observer and the observed. In Between Life and Death, he goes one step further towards subjectivizing and neutralizing the self: the two versions of the self are combined and contained in one character. The narrating “I” is the experiencing “she,” even though the two are distinguished from each other in the use of deixis. The former, referring to her own story in the third person, distances herself not only from past experiences but also from the actions and emotions of the present. Ubiquitous in its presence, the “I” reveals itself only through narration, depending on discourse to prove her being (despite the fact that language is evasive and is itself in a state of chaos). The gap between the two selves remains unbridgeable from beginning to end. The narrating “I,” like the big black eyes in the play, is always observing and implicitly evaluating, and so tends to transcend the immediacy of the moment. On the other hand, the “she,” as the reification of “I” and the object of narration, can only aspire to the physicality of experience, the world of suffering and emotion. Thus the “I” plays the role of a “cold” and detached observer, but the irony is that it cannot be without the impassioned “she” and her worldliness.
The shift in narrative mode underlines the horror because of the need for objectification, but the play is more than the story of a fallen woman and her search for salvation. It is an examination of the dark secrets of a woman’s inner world haunted by fears of rejection, ageing, death and the final judgement, and even of life itself, leading up to the impossibility of absolution despite her hysterical protestations. Narrated in the third person, these fears are given full expression, free from self-pity which tends to be inhibiting and selective. Apart from the psychological exigencies, the narrative situation eventuates in a split of the character, creating tension between the narrating “I” and the experiencing “she.” In light of Gao Xingjian’s idea of the neutral actor, the actress playing Woman, by positioning herself in an in-between space, can be in and out of her role in the course of performance. She addresses the character she is portraying as “she,” and thus carries out a “disinterested observation” of her own performance in the same way that the two big black eyes observe Woman’s actions. As the writer says in the postscript: “The narrator in the play, i.e., Woman, should not be regarded the same as a character. She is both in and out of the character, but still preserving her status as an actress.” At times she appears to share the character’s emotional torments, but mostly she is with the audience, on the outside looking in.
The playwright also requires that the props in the play, the coat-hanger, the building blocks, the jewellery box and the dismembered mannequin, etc. are to be “enlivened,” regarded as living characters, in their encounters with Woman. As in traditional Chinese theatre, the props are the bases and extensions of the performance process. For example, Man turns into a coat-hanger after he has been strangled by Woman; the building blocks are a reminder of Woman’s memories; and the jewellery box represents the grave in which Woman buries herself and her past. Together with the other on-stage but non-speaking actors—the actress who performs the various psychological manifestations of Woman and the actor who plays Man, the ghost, the clown and the Old Man—the props as “living” characters combine to create a “psychological arena” where the drama of Woman’s consciousness is revealed and played out, not only within the heroine herself but also among the various performing roles.
Dialogue and Rebuttal 對話與反詰 (Duihua yu fanjie) (1992)
Gao Xingjian appears to have a love-hate relationship with language. He has said that he wants to enhance the expressiveness of the Chinese language, yet he also condemns the ascendancy of language in modern drama, which he says has deprived the stage of its theatricality. With Dialogue and Rebuttal he claims to have made a determined effort to destroy language[0-39]and to cast doubts on its meaning-generating functions.[0-40]The play is made up of a series of dialogues between a man and a woman, generically known as Man and Woman, two strangers who have just had a brief sexual encounter. In the aftermath of their physical contact, they shut themselves out from each other in the ensuing conversation, refusing to engage in any meaningful communication. Woman flaunts her sexuality and laments her plight as a woman, but her fear of ageing and dying fails to arouse any sympathetic response in Man. Man is only interested in gratifying his prurient curiosity, as when he listens with relish to Woman’s stories of her sexual caper in India and her alleged rape by her physical education teacher when she was a young schoolgirl. In the absence of love and understanding, only desire is left as the embodiment of physicality, and their conversation merely serves to uncover the loneliness, boredom and futility of their lives.
The dialogues between Man and Woman, invariably short, non-expressive and generally indicative of an indifference towards each other, are interrupted by the characters’ monologues narrated in the second (Man) or the third person (Woman). These digressions evince a move away from the drama between the two characters, who then become the objects of observation, evaluation and commentary by their own alienated selves. At times the monologues, as in the moment of “sudden enlightenment” in Zen Buddhism, serve to expose the truth of the predicaments in which the characters are trapped, but they also further neutralize their relationship. Even though the plot is dependent on the presence of Man and Woman, it is even more dependent on the absence of interaction between them. Communication is only one-way, from the narrating self to the experiencing self, not between the characters, as each is preoccupied in their own cocooned world.
At the end of the first half, the non-communication eventually leads to boredom and a bizarre game of sexual perversion, in which Man and Woman stab each other to death. As in The Other Shore, language inevitably alienates and ushers in violence. In the second half, communication remains impossible between the kindred spirits, for in most cases, the ghosts of Man and Woman are not talking to each other but to their own dead bodies or to the other’s head lying on the stage floor. At this time, even sexual desire, which was the only channel of interaction in the first half, has lost its attractiveness. Man keeps looking for a door to escape from his predicament even though he knows that there is nothing behind that door, and Woman is preoccupied with reminiscences of the violence and suffering in her life, striving fruitlessly to ascertain her existence by the production of discourse. They are like dancing partners who nonetheless insist on being distanced from each other and shy away from any direct emotional contact. In the end, words have lost their referential function and the game of free association, with its occasional and accidental overlaps of meaning, is the only hint of their participation in a dialogue and of their existence. The irony is that both Man and Woman are already dead, their physical being already taken away from them by their nonsensical game of desire, which was meant to verify their being alive in the first place. Their deaths have prevented them from talking to each other—only their souls are talking to their bodies.[0-41]All that remains in language is a “crack,” the ever-increasing communication gap between humans. At the end of the play Man and Woman have become crawling worms; the reification of their human selves signifies a regression, or a recognition of th
eir true identities and the true nature of human existence.
Witnessing and punctuating this drama of futility is the Monk and his acrobatic tricks. Like Man and Woman, he is also enwrapped in his own world and he makes no effort to communicate, or as Gao Xingjian puts it, there seems to be an invisible wall between the Monk and the other two characters. In one sense he is a foil, for while the acting of Man and Woman is naturalistic, his is highly ritualistic, and when they are hysterical and metamorphosed in the realm of the dead, he is composed, indifferent and above all, wordless, in sharp contrast to their rambling, meaningless verbosity. Even though he remains unfazed from beginning to end, he is not beyond laughing at himself. His attempts at a one-finger headstand, standing an egg on a stick and other antics are illustrations of the futility and frustrations of human endeavours.[0-42]He is transcendental but not totally otherworldly, his antics being the follies of his own humanity. He listens carefully (this is symbolized by cleaning his ears, a gesture imbued with Buddhist meanings), and he observes with indifference that he has seen through the emptiness of human desires and sufferings. Perhaps the personification of Gao Xingjian’s idea of “indifferent observation,” he is content in the wordless wisdom accorded to him by his attainment of the state of Zen. If the drama between Man and Woman is “dialogue,” the Monk’s pantomime tricks are a “rebuttal,” an unspoken challenge to and ultimate denial of any possibility of meaning in language and in life’s activities.
Monk’s on-stage presence invokes a meaning beyond words. His role is meaningful in its meaninglessness, evincing a negative capability discernible in the hopeless world of Man and Woman. There remains in this paradox a capacity, a virtue that comes with the loss of referentiality, an attitude towards life derived from the understanding of the illogicality and the unstated meaning of language in Zen.[0-43]Gao Xingjian claims that he has no intention to promote Zen Buddhism or to expound its teachings: he is only interested in nudging the audience into contemplation, so that they can come close to the state of wordless and unspoken wisdom.[0-44]At the end, the Monk reveals a greyish blue sky, which is eternal and peaceful, a symbol of the quiet acceptance of the way of the universe.
Nocturnal Wanderer 夜遊神(Yeyoushen) (1993)
The subject matter of Nocturnal Wanderer is a dream, and through the dream the inner world of the protagonist, Traveller, is revealed in all its horror and insidiousness. The world of reality, with which the play begins, inspires the dream and provides the dramatis personae for the dream world. Traveller enters the dream world and becomes Sleepwalker, who embarks on a journey of self-discovery in his encounters with Tramp, Prostitute, Thug and Master, the various characters corresponding to the passengers Traveller meets on the train. The metamorphoses of people in the real world into dream world characters are accomplished in and through Traveller’s psyche and its workings: they are imaginings and representations indicative of his secret fears and desires. In this way the dream is set up as an exploration of Traveller’s consciousness.
Gao Xingjian has said that the play is about good and evil, about man, Satan, and God, and about man’s self-consciousness.[0-45]In the dream, goodness, seen as Sleepwalker’s conscience and innate sense of rectitude, is invariably suppressed and displaced by evil, either voluntarily or as an expedient. And Sleepwalker, an everyman figure whose only wish is to take a stroll in the night, just cannot escape being encroached upon by evil—Thug who threatens his life, Master who wants to control his thoughts, and Prostitute who tempts his soul (she later turns into his friend and critic exposing the lies in his life). Man is not born evil; in the case of Sleepwalker, evil is thrust upon him by a world infested with crime and violence. Consequently he is transformed into a murderer more flagitious than Thug or Master, someone who readily abandons his sensibility, his conscience and his sense of morality. He kills Tramp, who with the sagacity of a Buddhist monk represents salvation for his soul, thus depriving himself of any chance of redemption. He even rejects his head, which symbolizes thinking and reason, as he tramples upon it and breaks it into pieces.
At the end of the play Sleepwalker becomes fascinated by evil; in fact, he is obsessed with it. But just when he manages to bury his guilt by rationalization, feeling happy for himself in his newfound pleasure in violence, he encounters his double, perhaps the narrating “I” in the nightmare. The two grapple with each other in a fight: Sleepwalker still has to run the gauntlet of his own self. Traveller has embarked on a journey of being and existence, but he discovers only violence and horror. Evil is ubiquitous in the outside world, but the real horror is that it also lurks inside the self, jumping at any chance to rear its ugly head. Traveller as everyman, or “archetypal man”[0-46]thus finds himself threatened by what surrounds him and what resides within him. In dream as in reality evil is invincible and irresistible, for as Sleepwalker finds out, it is the only means with which to fend for oneself; however, even this recourse to evil represents nothing more than a meaningless resistance against a world of meaninglessness. In the final scene Traveller and all the other passengers are gone; what remains is nothing but an open book which has inspired the nightmare.
There are three levels of consciousness in Nocturnal Wanderer, each one penetrating deeper into the psyche of the protagonist. The first level is located in the real and objective world of the train coach; here Traveller speaks in the first person. On the second level, Traveller becomes Sleepwalker in the dream. And as he speaks in the second person, he creates a third level of reality made up of self-reflections, where he takes on the role of observer, insulated from the experiencing self of evil, violence, and gratuitous sexuality, a world he finds inexplicable. What happens in the dream world also reflects on the world of reality, for the characters in the dream, Tramp, Prostitute, Thug, and Master have been transmuted into being through and by Traveller’s feelings towards the world he is living in. The products of his mental processes, these “images of the heart” 心像 have ironically become the masters controlling his consciousness. Gao Xingjian has commented that:
Between Life and Death, Dialogue and Rebuttal, and Nocturnal Wanderer are concerned with the state of liminality between life and death or between reality and imagination. They also reveal the nightmare in the inner world of man. In these plays, the relationship with reality only serves as a starting point. What I strive to capture is the reality of the feelings in the psyche, a naked reality which needs no embellishment, and which is larger and more important than all the exegeses on religion, ethics, or philosophy, so that human beings can be seen as more human, and their true nature can be more fully revealed.[0-47]
In Nocturnal Wanderer, the key concepts are subjectivization and detachment: subjectivization transforms objective reality so as to delve into the meanings hidden behind the facade of the perceptible, and detachment objectifies such transformations as the other, so that a truthful picture of the subject becomes obtainable. Just as he demands that his actors be neutral observers of the performing self, Gao Xingjian also insists that his characters should observe themselves as the other through shifts in narrative mode. In this way the actor and the character he is playing are divided yet unified, and life as a multifaceted reflection of the self is incorporated into art.
Weekend Quartet 周末四重奏 (Zhoumo sichongzou) (1995)
Gao Xingjian believes in the constant renewal of his craft. With Weekend Quartet, his latest play, he appears to have made a determined effort to try his hand at something different—a realistic play devoid of the rituals and magical spectacles of his recent works. Whereas the previous plays are not keen on characterization, Weekend Quartet is peopled by characters with names and individualizing traits. With their varied backgrounds and personalities, they react differently to the dramatic situations in the plot, functioning like the different musical instruments in a quartet ensemble.
There is very little action in the four scenes (“quartets”), and there are no crises pushing the characters to the brink of their sanity as
in Between Life and Death and Nocturnal Wanderer. The story is made up of the kind of everyday happenings one finds in real life—an elderly couple, owners of an old farm in the country, is visited by a young couple whose relationship is as unstable as their older counterparts, and the uneventful plot revolves around their romantic entanglements which, like all of their lives, lead nowhere. Bernard is an old and famous painter. Increasingly weary of living, he is nonetheless afraid of loneliness and of growing old, and he tries to prove what remains of his virility by chasing after the young girls he employs as models. His companion Anne, a more sober and worldly type, has been an aspiring writer all her life, and she is equally obsessed with ageing and dying. To compensate for the lack of attention from Bernard, she flirts with their guest Daniel, a middle-aged writer. Daniel is at the end of his writing career—he has run out of things to write. A lost soul without any commitments, whether it is in ideology or love, he has nothing left in his life except his cynicism. Among this insipid bunch, Cecily, Daniel’s girlfriend, is like a breath of fresh air, even though her liveliness could easily have been contrived. An ordinary girl except for her attractiveness, she does not hesitate to use her charms to her advantage. She has no lofty goals but wishes to find a mate to provide her with food and a roof over her head. Towards the end of the play even she grows tired of her role as the femme fatale. Her outward liveliness can hardly contain the same death in spirit as that of the other characters.
As with most of Gao Xingjian’s plays, Weekend Quartet is not made up of external actions but of the interior landscapes of the soul. It is a play about characters and also about their self-examinations: they are likened to musical instruments playing life’s sorrowful tunes. Unlike the other plays in this collection, its concerns are not so much existential in a philosophical sense as the fears and worries of ordinary living, the realities of how to accommodate oneself to the banalities of day-to-day living. There are no real crises but trivial conflicts and verbal squabbles which, as in a musical quartet, make up the changes in the mood of the play. Quartets 1 and 2 are expositions and complications, while Quartet 3 is made more sombre with the expose of the characters’ dark inner secrets, and the final Quartet is spirited and gay, ending with a game of disjointed words and phrases in an acceptance of life’s impossibility of meaning. It is as if the play has finally come to terms with life in exploring into the truth of man’s existence.
