Soul of dissent

Soul of dissent

The French writer Jean Paul Sartre once said that it was the fundamental duty of a prisoner to escape from prison. Defending this tradition of fierce freedom, one could argue, it is the fundamental duty of a writer to rebel against authority, mock it, escape if he has to, and then write about its excesses. By conferring the Nobel Prize for Literature on Chinese dissident writer, Gao Xinjian, the Nobel Committee this year has saluted the new voices of dissent. In the past, dissenting voices such as Boris Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and some others were equally rewarded for their struggle against totalitarian dictatorships. But that was confined to Europe. The Marquezs, the Soyinkas and the Mahfouzs expanded the horizons of the Nobel, making it universal. By rewarding Gao, the award salutes an important anti-establishment voice from an Asian dictatorship for the first time. Coming as this does at the turn of the century, just 11 years after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, this surely sends a boldmessage to authoritarian regimes everywhere.

Today, Gao is China's best known dissident writer. Unfortunately, the 60-year old novelist, playwright and painter had to destroy all his early writings, including 15 plays and several novels, at the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. He was punished by being sent to the countryside for `rehabilitation'. His avante-garde ideas and his attempt to introduce the Theatre of the Absurd to Chinese audiences caused a literary furore. His works were condemned by Communist party officials as "spiritual pollution" and he was placed under surveillance. He made his debut as a playwright only in 1982, with the widely acclaimed play Absolute Signal. This was, unfortunately, banned by the authorities the following year. That was a particularly difficult period for Gao. He was wrongly diagnosed with lung cancer and was about to be incarcerated. The double shock of public condemnation and the experience of confronting his own mortality inspired him to embark on a journey. He fled Beijing and found freedom inthe forests of Sichuan, where he wandered alongside the Yangtze river for 10 months. Here he employed the strategy of storytelling to fight his loneliness.

While covering 15,000 km by foot, he conceived of his magnum opus, Soul Mountain, a 528-page novel about a place called Lingshan. This has been widely acclaimed for its linguistic ingenuity as much as for its staunch dissidence. He left China to live in Paris in 1987. Since then he has supported himself through his large black and white Chinese paintings and the performances of his brilliant plays. In the second chapter of Soul Mountain, while writing about the obsession with social realism under Mao he describes a conversation: "The men and women all used to form a circle around the fire and dance right through to daybreak, but later on it was banned. `Why?' I know quite well but I ask. I'm being dishonest again. It was the cultural revolution. They said the songs were dirty so we changed to singing Sayings of Mao Zedong songs instead." To those who see this award, like the Chinese authorities, as a merely political ploy, it is important to remember that good literature is about universalhuman values, especially freedom.