Dionysus on the Other Shore: Gao Xingjian's Theatre of the Tragic 9004423389, 9789004423381

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Dionysus on the Other Shore

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Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel

In co-operation with P. K. Bol, D. R. Knechtges, E. S. Rawski, W. L. Idema, and H. T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 147

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl

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Dionysus on the Other Shore Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic By

Letizia Fusini

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Pentheus torn apart by Agave and Ino, ca. 450–425 B.C.E., Musée du Louvre. Photo courtesy of Jastrow, Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fusini, Letizia, author. Title: Dionysus on the other shore : Gao Xingjian’s theatre of the tragic /  by Letizia Fusini. Description: Leiden, The Netherlands ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series:  Sinica leidensia, 01699563 ; vol. 147 | Includes bibliographical  references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019050943 | ISBN 9789004423299 (hardback) |  ISBN 9789004423381 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Gao, Xingjian—Criticism and interpretation. | Gao,  Xingjian—Tragedies. | Chinese drama (Tragedy)—Themes, motives. Classification: LCC PL2869.O128 Z733 | DDC 895.12/52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050943

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0169-9563 ISBN 978-90-04-42329-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42338-1 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: A Dramaturgical System with Tragic Characteristics: Rethinking Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Dramaturgy 1 1 Gao Xingjian and the Question of Culture 1 2 “A New Form of the Tragic Must and Will Be Born”: Gao Xingjian’s “Tragic Plays of Self” 6 3 A Theatre of the Tragic: Methodological Considerations 10 4 Dionysus on the Other Shore 13 1 From Oedipus to Dionysus: the Gaoian Tragic Self from Philosophy to Dramaturgy 18 1 Introduction: Tragedy and the Tragic—an Inextricable Dyad 18 2 Gao Xingjian, Tragedy, and the Tragic Condition 22 3 Modern Man’s Predicament: Subjectivity as Un-safe Haven 26 4 The Daimon within: When Oedipus Is Not Enough 33 5 From Philosophy to Dramaturgy: the Tragic Mode 37 5.1 The “Render of Man”: the Dionysian Archetype 39 5.2 The Premises of the Tragic Mode: Brecht, Dramatic Estrangement, and Gao’s Neutral Actor 43 5.3 Tripartition as a Form of Sparagmos: the Gaoian Tragic Mode 47 6 Bonds and Boundaries: the Gaoian Self as a Tragic Field 52 2 Toward a Theatre of the Tragic: The Bus Stop, The Other Shore, and the Transition from Absurdity to Tragedy 59 1 Introduction: Gao Xingjian’s (Tragic) Modernism: from the Homeland to Existence 59 2 The Bus Stop: Absurd or Pre-tragic? 66 2.1 The Bus Stop vs. Godot: Social Absurdity, Existentialist Parody, and a Touch of Metadrama 67 2.2 Creative Appropriation and Re-functioning: The Bus Stop in-between Parabolic Drama and Pre-tragedy 73 3 Beyond Absurdist Drama: the Tragic Field as a Performative Device 76 4 Performing the Tragic Field: The Other Shore 81 4.1 A Play of Relations: Rehearsing the Tragic 83 4.2 Sparagmos and Daimons: The Other Shore as a Dionysian Realm 85

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4.3 Disrupting the Self: the Kinetic Field of Cohesive and Divisive Forces 86 4.4 From Selflessness to Self-consciousness: a Beneficial Sparagmos 89 4.5 From the Other Shore to the Tragic Field: “The Other Shore” from Individual Play to Dramatic Trope 91 5 From a Theatre of the Absurd to a Theatre of the Tragic 93 3 Between Cohesion and Division: the Tragic Field and Mode in Gao Xingjian’s Post-1990 Plays of Self 99 1 Introduction: Like “a Rip in the Paper Sky,” a Universe on the Edge of Chaos 99 2 Between Life and Death: the Spatialization of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of the Feminine Self 102 2.1 The Two Layers of the Tragic Field: Schismatic Performance and Psychodrama 104 2.2 Between Memory and Psychosis: the Tragic Field of the Self in-between Life and Death 106 2.3 The Tragic Abyss and the Spatialization of the Tragic Field: Performing a Journey into the Self 109 2.4 From Sparagmos to Tragic Nonentity: the Human Self as Stage Prop 112 3 The Sleepwalker: the Psychologization of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of the Masculine Self 116 3.1 Self-centered Performance and the Mind as a Theatre: toward an Interiorized Sparagmos 118 3.2 Nowhere Yet Everywhere: Pan-Dionysianism and the Tragic Field of Subjectivity and Alterity 123 3.3 Unveiling the Abyss of Evil: The Sleepwalker as a Play of Tragic De-formation 126 4 Dialogue and Rebuttal: the Gendering of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of Language 130 4.1 A Play of Appearances: Role-playing and the Theatricalized Self 132 4.2 Till Death Do Us Unite: the Tragic Field of Genders 136 4.3 Behind Words is a “Crack”: the Posthuman Condition and the Tearing Apart of Language 139 4.4 On Yet Another Shore: the Monk as the (Tragic) Fool? 146 5 The Death Collector: Dionysian Frenzy and the Apotheosis of the Tragic Potential 148 5.1 “Every Situation Is a Trap”: the Tragic Space 150 5.2 Voices from the Other Shore (of the Self ): the Return of Dionysus 156 Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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5.3 Unpacking the Tragic Mechanism of Intermingling Subjectivities: the Agon of the Divided Self 160 6 Mysterium Tremendum: Tragic Acting, Katabasis and the Religion of the Self 165 4 Escape and Modern Tragedy 170 1 Introduction: Gao Xingjian, Escape, and Cross-cultural Tragic Modernities 170 1.1 Tragedy and Modernity: the Death of Tragedy vs. the Return of the Tragic in Postwar Euro-American Intellectual Discourse 174 1.2 Modernity and Tragedy: the Modern Tragedy Complex and the Search for (Modern) Tragedy in Early Republican China 177 2 Escape: a Modern Tragedy? 184 2.1 From Modern to Postclassical: the Persistence of Dionysus in Our Time 188 2.2 Bound by the Dionysian Subtext: the Agon and the Tragic Community 194 2.3 Not an Infra-tragedy: Space, Darkness, and the Myth 202 3 Tragedy and Its Double(s): Reassembling the Fragments of Dionysus 207 Conclusion: Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic as Thirdspace: towards a Transcultural Model? 212 Bibliography 225 Index 238

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Acknowledgements This book is the crowning achievement of an eight-year academic journey that started in September 2011, when I returned to SOAS as a newly enrolled PhD candidate in the Department of China and Inner Asia. Over the past eight years, many people have helped me in various ways and to all of them I wish to extend my deepest and most heartfelt thanks, as follows. First of all, I wish to thank my main supervisor Dr Rossella Ferrari for her first-class supervision, which included unwavering intellectual and moral support, rigorous knowledge and, most importantly, an unlimited patience when reviewing all drafts of this work, even during her maternity leave. I also wish to thank the other members of my supervisory committee, Dr Cosima Bruno and Dr Xiaoning Lu for their advice and guidance. I am also grateful to my doctoral examiners, Prof. Miriam Leonard and Prof. Natascha Gentz who provided insightful comments on the earliest complete version of the present work. Since 2012, I have had the chance to participate in several academic conferences and workshops where I could present parts of this project, receiving constructive criticism and advice and making new friends and acquaintances. I thank all of them. Moreover, I thank the SOAS Faculty of Languages and Cultures and the SOAS Doctoral School for providing conference allowance every year of my doctoral degree. Still within the scholarly realm, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Dr Mary Mazzilli, whom I met during my MA studies at SOAS in 2009–2010 and who ignited my interest in the study of Gao Xingjian’s plays. Over the years, she has continued to be a great source of inspiration to me, as well as a precious mentor, colleague and friend. Furthermore, special thanks go to Prof. David Der-wei Wang who offered some very helpful suggestions during a master class at the University of Cambridge in May 2014. Another big thank you goes to my lovely colleagues at UCL Library Services where I have been working since February 2012. They witnessed and shaped my professional growth, showing support for my career ideas and facilitating my working life from what has been and is a second home to me. Particularly, I thank my line manager Robert Pinckney for his words of encouragement and invaluable support. I also would like to thank Dr Qin Higley and the editors of the Brill Sinica Leidensia Series, Prof. Barend J. ter Haar and Prof. Maghiel van Crevel, for this wonderful opportunity, as well as the anonymous readers of my manuscript. A final acknowledgment must go to Mr Thomas Smith for his professionalism and accuracy in proofreading and copyediting every single word of this book.

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Among my friends, I would like to thank my former PhD colleagues Hannah Erlwein and Angela Becher for their company and crucial emotional support in some very difficult moments. Furthermore, I thank Francesca Agrò, Paola Corvinelli, Silvia Toro, Silvia Picchiarelli and Emma Duester for putting up with me for all these years. Special thanks to Mariana Münning in whose company I began to tread the path of academic life in London. Finally, I cannot thank enough my family, in particular my parents Ivano Fusini and Rosa Schiano for giving me the opportunity to pursue my dreams and my brother Lorenzo for believing in my abilities. Above all, I give thanks and praise to God whose wisdom, strength and guidance helped me in writing and completing this book.

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Introduction

A Dramaturgical System with Tragic Characteristics: Rethinking Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Dramaturgy 1

Gao Xingjian and the Question of Culture

Since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, the Sino-French exiled writer Gao Xingjian has never ceased to attract scholarly attention worldwide. His entire œuvre, which spans across genres and media and encompasses the literary and the visual arts, has been examined from multiple angles and has generated a plethora of critical interpretations and conceptualizations. By this time it would thus seem that nothing particularly new could be said about his work, especially his plays, which have been the object of a number of booklength studies published over the past two decades.1 So far, the theatre of Gao Xingjian has been scrutinized perhaps even more systematically and variously than his fiction writing, amongst which is the novel Soul Mountain, the Swedish translation of which by Goran Malmqvist was instrumental in determining the decision of the Swedish Academy to confer the award to Gao. Moreover, one should note that the theatre has always occupied a privileged role in Gao’s career as an accomplished total artist. As early as the 1960s, during his undergraduate years in Beijing, Gao set up his 1   See Henry Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism London 2000: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Sy Ren Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, Honolulu 2004: University of Hawai’i Press; Jessica Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo: Gao Xingjian’s Writing as Cultural Translation, Hong Kong 2008: Hong Kong University Press; Izabella Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image, Leiden 2008: Brill; Todd J. Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics in the Plays of Gao Xingjian, Basingstoke 2014: Palgrave Pivot; Mary Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays: Transnationalism and Postdramatic Theatre. New York 2015: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama. For edited collections, which contain essays on Gao’s theatre, see Kwok-kan Tam (ed.), Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, Hong Kong 2001: The Chinese University Press; Noël Dutrait, L’Ecriture romanesque et théâtrale de Gao Xingjian, Paris 2006: Seuil; Michael Lackner and Nikola Chardonnens (eds.), Polyphony Embodied: Freedom and Fate in Gao Xingjian’s Writings, Berlin 2014: De Gruyter; Mabel Lee and Jianmei Liu (eds.), Gao Xingjian and Transmedia Aesthetics, Amherst, NY 2018: Cambria Press. For Chinese-language studies, see, amongst others, Liu Zaifu, Gao Xingjian lun (Essays on Gao Xingjian), Taibei: Lianjing chuban shiye gufenyouxian gongsi, 2004; Gao Xingjian and Fang Zixun, Lun xiju (On Drama), Taibei: Liangjin chuban shiye gufenyouxian gongsi, 2010.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_002

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Introduction

own dramatic troupe, with which he staged and performed key plays by Ibsen and Chekov.2 Subsequently, after working as a translator from French—a job he obtained by virtue of his degree in French language and literature— Gao returned to work for the theatre and soon became a leading figure of the Chinese experimental theatrical scene during the opening up period of the early 1980s. His choice to leave his home country for good and pursue artistic work in Europe was dictated by the repressive cultural climate of those years and by a ban issued by the PRC government on his last pre-exile play The Other Shore (Bi’an, 1986). Having now spent half of his life in China and the other half in a Western country, and having integrated a vast array of theatrical traditions (ancient, modern, and contemporary) in his dramaturgical work, it is no wonder that the majority of the available scholarship on Gao’s theatre has focused on the question of his (double) cultural identity. Is Gao Chinese or French? Or is he both or neither? Famously, the PRC authorities have never acknowledged Gao as “the first Chinese Nobel recipient,” not only because at the time of the award he had already given up his Chinese citizenship for French citizenship, but also because since the 1990s his work has taken a bilingual turn, as Gao now writes in both French and Chinese. Critics such as Sy Ren Quah, Izabella Łabędzka, Todd Coulter, and Mary Mazzilli have elaborated at length on the related concepts of transculturalism and transnationalism to encapsulate the undeniable fluidity and the intrinsic heterogeneousness of Gao’s identity as an artist. While Quah has looked at Gao’s dramatic quest as a site of interand intra-cultural dialogic exchanges and Łabędzka has re-examined the influence of twentieth-century Western playwrights on Gao’s search for a “total theatre” (wanquan de xiju), Coulter and Mazzilli have taken this approach one step further, towards a more holistic direction. By highlighting his endeavor to navigate across a variegated theatrical panorama in order to produce “a different form of theatre,”3 Coulter has presented Gao as a “mercurial theatrical figure,”4 one that enacts a flight from all cultural labels by negotiating, synthetizing, and rebranding elements from different cultural systems. Therefore, he states, Gao’s hybrid theatrical language traverses cultural and national boundaries to access the realm of the individual, “the level of existence.”5 Still, Coulter does not seem to be aware that Gao’s influences are not limited to French

2  Quah, Gao Xingjian, p. 6. 3  Coulter, Transcultural Aesthetics, p. 2. 4  Ibid., p. 123. 5  Ibid., p. 120.

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Absurdism and Chinese modern drama in the guise of jingju.6 Not only is jingju (Beijing Opera) a condensed style of pre-modern forms of Chinese theatre, but Gao’s appropriation of traditional Chinese theatre practices was significantly altered by his reading of Brecht, whose notion of epic theatre was itself partly indebted to jingju. Absurdism, too, was far from being a unanimous, monogenic theatrical phenomenon but was essentially a cluster of trans-European experimentalist trends whose representatives never felt as if they were part of a group or movement. In applying the category of postdramatic transnationalism to Gao’s post-exile œuvre, Mary Mazzilli finally put an end to past academic discussions about Gao’s tiered cultural identity, which Jessica Yeung has identified as suspended in a limbo in between China and the West—a liminal space within which Gao has acted as a cultural translator of different theatrical systems.7 Not only did Mazzilli refrain from “defining Gao’s theatrical work in strict cultural and artistic categories,”8 but she also pertinently stressed that modern(ist) Asian and Western theatres are the result of innumerable mutual exchanges, which are not even limited to the twentieth century.9 They stretch back to as early as the Greek and Roman ages10 and were intensified through the establishment of the Silk Road. In light of Mazzilli’s definition of postdramatic transnationalism as embodying “a post-essentialist discourse that defies monolithic definitions,”11 Gao’s theatrical achievements—as noteworthy and significant as they may be—could be simply viewed as a tiny portion of a super, comprehensive, dialogic cultural phenomenon, which theatre historian Nicola Savarese has termed Eurasian Theatre. For my part, I have always been fascinated by Gao’s repeated refusals to be considered a “Chinese” writer and by his vigorous self-presentation of his work as “the voice of the individual.”12 In this sense, I do not agree with Yeung when she states that the entirety of Gao’s work is “culturally different” and that one cannot extrapolate its meaningfulness without undertaking a contextualized 6  Ibid., p. 117. 7  Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, p. 12. 8  Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, p. 5. 9  For more on the topic of intercultural exchange in Western and Chinese theatres during the twentieth century, see Min Tian, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: TwentiethCentury Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre, Hong Kong 2008: Hong Kong University Press. 10  See Nicola Savarese, Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance Between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present, trans. by Richard Fowler, London 2013: Routledge. 11  Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, p. 9. 12  Gao, “The Case for Literature. Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Prize Lecture,” trans. Mabel Lee, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2000/gao/25532-gao-xingjian-nobel -lecture-2000-2/.

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Introduction

reading thereof.13 Although it is indubitably important to know the cultural context in which a writer operates, it is also fundamental that the critic brings his/her own perspective to ensure the effectiveness of the hermeneutic process and to further expand the interpretive horizon of a literary work. Moreover, although I acknowledge that an author’s individual declarations should not be taken at face value, on the other hand I think that, in the wake of Coulter’s and Mazzilli’s respective contributions, it is the existential, acultural level of Gao’s dramaturgy that needs to be further excavated in order to appraise its deep meaningfulness and relevance to readers and playgoers across the world. What was it that made Gao into a Nobel Prize recipient if not the “universal validity” of his œuvre? Arguably, it was its ability to “make profound revelations about … human nature,”14 as Gao asserted in his Nobel Lecture. To follow on from Mazzilli’s book, which has liberated Gao’s work from binary, East-West conceptualizations and has related Gao’s post-exile plays to a contemporary, holistic theatrical context, I intend to orient my analysis towards achieving a better understanding of Gao’s existential(ist) turn as a playwright. I am particularly interested in his dramatization of the human condition as congenitally flawed, and my aim with this study is to prove that, despite his striking affinity with certain principles of Existentialism, Gao’s theatre has expressed a truly individual take on the question of human nature, one that has transhistorical roots and is tied to the big questions of meaning. Overall, what does Gao’s theatre denote about the place of the individual in the cosmos, his destiny, his anxiety to grasp the meaning of life and to transcend the limits of his own finitude? And how does Gao translate such excruciating queries into a dramatic form that is suitable to express them? This book seeks to answer these questions by introducing a brand-new critical trajectory to analyze Gao Xingjian’s seemingly15 existentialist dramaturgy since the mid-1980s up to the early 2000s. Taking my cue from Gao’s view of the Self as tragic and his transhistorical definition of tragedy as a psychical battle against the (potentially) deleterious influence of subjectivity, I re-examine a selection of both pre- and post-exile plays from the perspective of tragic theory. These include the pre-exile plays The Bus Stop (Chezhan 1982)—which I deem as “pre-tragic”—The Other Shore, as well as five post-exile plays16—Escape (Taowang 1990), Between Life and Death (Shengsijie 1991), The Sleepwalker 13  Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, p. 165. 14  Gao, “The Case for Literature.” 15  I will further explain in Chapter One why I think that Gao’s view of the Self as a source of tragic distress differs substantially from that of Sartre and Camus. 16  The post-exile plays are those that Gao wrote after 1987 when he left China and moved to France, where he still resides.

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(Yeyoushen 1993), Dialogue and Rebuttal (Duihua yu fanjie 1992), and The Death Collector (Kouwen siwang 2003). Other post-exile plays, such as Necropolis (Shencheng 1988), Tales of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing zhuan 1989) and Snow in August (Bayue xue 2000) are not discussed here because they do not deal with the theme of the tragic Self, focusing instead on rewriting traditional Chinese tales and legends. Moreover, Weekend Quartet (Zhoumo sizhongzou 1999) and Ballade Nocturne (2009) are also excluded from this study, for analogous reasons. In Weekend Quartet, as Gilbert Fong rightfully notes, “there are no crises pushing the characters to the brink of their sanity” and “its concerns are not so much existential in a philosophical sense.”17 Similarly, Ballade Nocturne is characterized by “a cyclical closure,”18 namely a dramatic structure, the opposite of the tragic one, wherein time is frozen and the enacted catastrophe irreversible.19 Surprisingly enough, so far, Gao’s engagement with dramatic tragedy has not attracted sufficient scholarly attention, despite the fact that he subtitled his first post-exile play—Escape—as a “modern tragedy” (xiandai de beiju). Previously, only a few scholars have hinted at the possibility of considering Gao’s plays as expressing the tragedy of modern humanity20 but these prompts have not developed into a full-fledged theory or study. In Towards a Modern Zen Theatre (2000), Henry Zhao succinctly notes that “all of Gao’s Zen [i.e. post-exile] plays are tragedies and all end in violence.”21 In Ink Dances in Limbo (2008), Jessica Yeung compares the “tragedy” of the lone character of Man in The Other Shore to the “tragedy” of Hou Yi, the male protagonist of A Tale of Mountains and Seas, which she views as the result of the hero’s lack of recognition by the masses.22 She also points out how several of Gao’s postexile plays are characterized by the presence of a “tragic individual” whose predicament consists in his/her being prevented from affirming his/her individual freedom.23 In her Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image (2008), Izabella Łabędzka applies Jean-Marie Domenach’s theory on 17  Gilbert Fong, “Introduction to The Other Shore,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. by Gilbert Fong, Hong Kong 1999: The Chinese University Press, pp. xxxviii–xxxix. 18  Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, p. 215. 19  See Sypher Wylie, “The Meanings of Comedy,” in Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Comedy: Meaning and Form, New York 1965: Harper & Row, pp. 20–53. 20  By this expression I mean the collective recognition of a new sense of tragic transcendence. What was once a metaphysical transcendence, whereby human actions were determined by the will of the gods or by fate, is now an internal characteristic of the human psyche. 21  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 33. 22  Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo, p. 110. 23  Ibid., p. 106.

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the democratization of the tragic in our day.24 She provides a brief list of dramatic phenomena, such as the disintegration of plot and language, the depersonalization of characters, the circularity of speech, and a lack of action replaced by incessant talking. Her comments are nevertheless rather general in that she does not refer to any play in particular. I particularly question her aligning Gao’s plays with Domenach’s notion of “infra-tragedy,”25 a neologism which designates the tragedy of the common man and of everyday life, the collapse of a once glorious dramatic genre into the “lower” realm of comedy, as suggested by the Latin prefix infra which means “beneath, below.” As I will seek to demonstrate in this book, the plays analyzed here do not feature what Łabędzka calls “‘incomplete’ humans—pariahs, human wrecks, beggars and sick people.”26 Rather, Gao’s post-exile characters present themselves as male and female archetypes, nameless liminal figures placed within a mythical— i.e., a distant and secluded—dimension. Below, I shall aim to demonstrate, in a preliminary manner, that throughout his early exile years, Gao developed a dramaturgical system with tragic characteristics, and it is my contention that, rather than writing tragedies in the classical sense of the term, he subconsciously reinvented the genre according to his own tragic worldview. 2

“A New Form of the Tragic Must and Will Be Born”: Gao Xingjian’s “Tragic Plays of Self”

Although Gao’s repertoire only includes one self-acknowledged, conventionally structured tragedy (Escape), I maintain that his earliest experiments with the genre date back to the pre-exile play The Other Shore, which, as has been widely acknowledged, marks an evident turning point in Gao’s artistic path. As Gao’s very first tragic play, The Other Shore inaugurates a series of attempts at a new kind of drama that are best exemplified by his post-1987 dramaturgy and that can be situated within the realm of twentieth-century’s endeavors to either resuscitate ancient tragedy or to give birth to a type of tragedy more attuned to the modern Zeitgeist. Some of these endeavors, with particular reference to the French nouveau théâtre, were enthusiastically acknowledged in a 1955 speech given by the French writer Albert Camus, who had a real fascination for Greek

24  I will deal with Domenach’s theory more extensively in Chapter Four. 25  Izabella Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 174. 26  Ibid.

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tragedy and was heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s tragic optimism.27 It would be all too easy to justify the relevance of Camus’ statement to Gao by resorting to the latter’s linkages with the Theatre of the Absurd. Instead, what I find interesting and relevant to my case study is a comment that Camus had made a decade earlier, still on the topic of modern tragedy, in which he had asserted that “a great form of the tragic must and will be born,”28 and had affirmed the duty of himself and his contemporaries to pave the way “for its arrival.”29 It is worth noting that Camus here does not precisely define modern tragedy, and that in lieu of “tragedy,” he uses the broader, more encompassing expression, “form of the tragic.” He thereby suggests that tragedy’s afterlife might not be bound to a religious adherence to structural patterns of the past—or to a supposed, pre-existing tragic canon—let alone to the Aristotelian rules. Instead, it is the playwright’s individual tragic sensibility that can carry the old genre towards new shores and untrodden paths, thereby contributing to its regeneration. Throughout this book, I intend to illustrate Gao’s ability to fashion a new dramaturgy of the tragic as reflected in his “tragic plays of Self,” as I call the works analyzed here in order to distinguish them from the rest of Gao’s repertoire. I maintain that their essential tragic nucleus consists in “underscor[ing] the hopelessness of our attempt to master the Self and the world,”30 as Rita Felski argues of tragedy in general. Overall, these works distinguish themselves for their neutral ambience, universalist character, and almost no or little reference to China and Chinese culture. Owing to these basic characteristics, my recourse to a tragic framework of analysis should not look suspect, as in this case I am not superimposing a Western category onto a non-Western or culturally different text. Throughout the twentieth century the notion of East and West as rigidly discrete categories has turned out to be decreasingly relevant. Similarly, the concept of tragedy has undergone numerous transformations, and discussions of tragedy have entered the realm of philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and religious studies; they have also expanded from the theatre to other genres such as the novel, and to other media such as cinema. The category of tragedy is therefore as fluid and holistic as that of the postdramatic employed by Mazzilli in her study, and, what is more, it has traversed more than two millennia, has gone through 27  Albert Camus, “On the Future of Tragedy,” in Philip Thody (ed.), Selected Essays and Notebooks, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1970: Penguin Books, pp. 192–203. 28  Albert Camus, cited in Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy, Peterborough, Ont. 2006: Broadview Press, p. 209. 29  Ibid. 30  Rita Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy, Baltimore 2008: John Hopkins University Press, p. 11.

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Introduction

periods of artistic crisis, and yet it has never lost its continued relevance and its sharp edge. Although as a form of drama, it originated in a specific cultural context (the Athenian polis of the fifth century BCE), it has shown supreme flexibility and has come to express a deep-seated, broadly applicable intuition, namely that the source of human evil is ingrained in human nature. Precisely, with their distinctive treatment of the Self as an Other in disguise, Gao’s plays of Self seem to fulfil George Steiner’s proposition that “a core of dynamic negativity underwrites authentic tragedy”—a negativity which arises from the presence, in the dramatic world, of “nonhuman agencies hostile … to intrusive man.”31 I see these works as representing a self-standing block of Gao’s dramatic repertoire in that they dramatize several types of kunjing, i.e., limit-situations in which the individual(s), literally confined within the claustrophobic prisoncell of his/her own individuality, swings between the opposite poles of selfassertion and self-destruction. In so doing, they reveal the fundamental ambivalence of the human Self as well as exemplifying Robert Heilman’s view on tragedy, wherein “it is in tragedy that man is divided; in melodrama, his troubles, though they may reflect some weakness or inadequacy, do not arise from urgency of unreconciled impulses. In tragedy the conflict is within man; in melodrama, it is between men, or between men and things.”32 Furthermore, some of these plays systematically deploy the dramatic device of the shifting pronouns33 (or “tripartite performance”), which can be rightfully acknowledged as a purely Gaoian innovation and which consists in otherizing the method of performance, treating the fictional Self as alternatively an “I”, a “(s)he” or a “you.” Although Gao describes the shifting pronoun device as a method of selfintrospection and quiet observation that the actor-character deploys in order to balance his/her personal, dramatic and theatrical identities,34 I contend that this does not entirely tally with what emerges from a textual analysis of the 31  George Steiner, “‘Tragedy’, Reconsidered,” in Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy, p. 32. The mention of the nonhuman, however, should not lead us astray and make us think that evil has an utterly transcendental source. Rather, I take it to refer to the dark forces that inhabit the human mind, itself an organ, which is still largely a mystery from the perspective of science. 32  Robert Heilman, cited in Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy, p. 7. 33  Gao has used this technique also as a narrative device, yet with a significantly different (i.e. non-tragic) purpose in his two novels Soul Mountain (Lingshan 1989) and One Man’s Bible (Yi ge ren de shengjing 1999). 34   Kwok-kan Tam compares the effect of this technique to artistic Cubism. See “Gao Xingjian and the Asian Experimentation,” in Kwok-kan Tam (ed.), Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, Hong Kong 2001: The Chinese University Press, p. 204.

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corresponding plays.35 Rather than conveying a Zen-like attitude in observing the mind, or a Brecht-like detached and scientifically-driven perspective on the staged events, this technique is arguably tailored to dramatize what Gao himself regards as a major theme of most of his (mainly post-exile) plays, namely, “the predicament of modern man” (xiandai ren de kunjing),36 which expresses a negative and tendentially pessimistic view of human nature. From the viewpoint of dramaturgy, this rather gloomy Weltanschauung is reflected in Gao’s quasi-obsessive tendency to portray characters in agonizing circumstances who experience escalating identity crises based on recurring limit-situations. Regarding their sense of identity, these characters are internally divided, as shown through their uneven way of talking, which shifts from third and/ or second person narrative mode to direct speech and back again, therefore suggesting a fundamental psychical imbalance. This method of representing psychical imbalance is unique to Gao’s dramaturgy and does not feature in classic absurdist theatre. Moreover, these characters are engaged in a continuous battle to grasp their own Self, itself a double-faced, Janus-like entity that functions as a powerful and inescapable dismembering force. In other words, while they have a compelling hunger for a unified Self, the latter eventually crushes them, leaving them with a bunch of fragments, or driving them to madness and ultimately to extinction. Contrary to Domenach’s claim, whereby modern “infra-tragedy” is dominated by “holes and emptinesses … non-values, non-senses, absences,”37 Gao’s tragic characters are animated by an overflowing amount of passions reflecting an agonizing and desperate pursuit of the Self (one’s own and the other’s) as an object of a quasi-religious desire that I associate with the category of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum theorized by Rudolf Otto. These characters’ frenzy of self-knowledge and/or self-determination is animated by a kind of hybris that can be compared to the flight of Icarus towards the sun, as Gao’s characters destroy themselves through their very own ambitions. Like the sun, both attractive and repulsive, the human Self is characterized by a fundamentally ambiguous nature—one that renders it prone to express the tragic as an instance of fragment (“condition, part of a structure”) and fragmentation

35  My impression, in this sense, echoes Jessica Yeung’s thoughts as regards Gao’s theoretical writings, which she considers “to be more the expression of the writer’s own artistic inspirations than an objective description of the texts.” See Ink Dances in Limbo, p. 14. 36  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, pp. 116–119. 37  Jean Marie Domenach, Le retour du tragique. Essai (The Return of the Tragic. Essay), Paris 1967: Editions du Seuil, p. 265.

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Introduction

(“process, an unfolding”),38 incarnated not by Oedipus—the tragic figure par excellence in Aristotle’s eyes—but by Dionysus, the god of character, theatre, intoxication, and ritual madness. 3

A Theatre of the Tragic: Methodological Considerations

With regard to my search for a tragic framework of reference for this study, I am hugely indebted to William Storm’s theory of tragedy based on his analytical study of the figure of Dionysus as the patron-god of tragic drama (After Dionysus 1998). Therein, he argues that the tragic act is encapsulated in the dismembering mechanism—the so-called sparagmos—performed by the god Dionysus, whom he defines as “the render of man,” the double par excellence, and a mythical allegory of the “daemonic energies which prey upon the soul and turn it to madness or which poison our will so that we inflict irreparable outrage upon ourselves and those we love.”39 More precisely, we could again use Steiner’s words to characterize Dionysus as “a ghostliness the more maddening because it is altogether psychological,”40 that is, Dionysus inhabits the mind of the character as well as permeating the interstitial spaces between two or more characters, thereby corroding their relationship. The centrality of the Self reverberates through this framework as Storm indicates it as the starting point of his theory when he argues that the common denominator of tragedies from the Greeks to the present day is “a transcendent inquiry into the nature and limitations of the self.”41 The uncanny encounter between the individual and his own Self disguised as an Other is regulated by a mechanism which, still according to Storm, affects the relationship between “character and theatrical cosmos”42 and engenders a dynamics of cohesion and division with respect to this other-within-the-self that is a major presence in Gao’s plays. According to Storm’s theory, which breaks the “dominance of the Oedipus myth,”43 the essential tragic matrix can be found in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, which not only features the ritual dismemberment of the protagonist, but also features Dionysus as a character who, like a consummated dramaturge, 38  Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism, Cambridge 2010: Cambridge University Press, p. 7. 39  George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, London 1961: Faber & Faber, p. 7. 40  Steiner, “‘Tragedy’, Reconsidered,” p. 36. 41  William Storm, After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic, Ithaca, NY 1998: Cornell University Press, p. 51. 42  Ibid., p. 85. 43  Felski, “Introduction,” p. 5.

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orchestrates a horrific spectacle by disrupting a whole city, its inhabitants, and its sovereign, and, most importantly, by operating multiple changes of identity. These concern both his fellow characters and himself. That is why Storm’s reinterpretation of Dionysus as the god of split personality and hybridity, and of the tragic as a splitting energy, adheres wholly to Gao Xingjian’s understanding of the tragic as an internal divisiveness, as the coexistence of Self and Other within the same personality, of light and shadows. For Gao, the tragic is a psychical experience that we go through when we take shelter inwardly and then find that this imagined shelter becomes a prison, a hell-on-earth. Still on a methodological level, one cannot stress enough the importance of approaching Gao’s tragic plays not as “tragedies” in the classical sense but as plays “in the tragic mode,” and, more generally, as a theatre of the tragic, for, overall, it enacts a (tragic) dynamism through which the self is irremediably torn to pieces with no possibility of recomposition. Such a perspective appears to be in line with recent studies aimed at rethinking tragedy as a form of literary expression and which do not necessary make reference to a supposed set of plays forming a tragic canon. As Rita Felski notes, “Thinking of tragedy as a mode offers several advantages in adjudicating the question of tragedy’s historical transformations. A more elastic term than ‘genre,’ ‘mode’ lends itself especially well to the complicated history and vicissitudes of tragic art,”44 thereby accommodating new and non-orthodox transmutations of the early matrix, and also taking into account the fact that “ancient tragedy,” too, “is a highly experimental genre.”45 Further to this, the notion of “mode,” which I equate with “dramatic mechanism,” helps us go beyond the stale belief that tragedy is about suffering as such and that the meaning of “tragic” is akin to “very sad.” In so doing, I concur with Storm who argues that the essence of tragedy is not pathos but division—the tragic destiny equalling the impossibility to keep the Self all in one piece. The theoretical and methodological framework which sustains this research also benefits from a range of concurrent critical approaches such as Marc Szuszkin’s theory of the tragic space,46 Georges Bataille’s concept of the tragic community47—which I use extensively for the analysis of Escape—as well as

44  Ibid., p. 14. 45  Simon Goldhill, “Generalizing about Tragedy,” in Felski (ed.), Rethinking Tragedy, p. 60. 46  Marc Szuszkin, L’espace tragique dans le théâtre de Racine, Paris 2005: Harmattan. 47  Georges Bataille, “Nietzschean Chronicle,” in Allan Stoekl (ed. and trans.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1929–1937, Minneapolis 1985: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 202–212.

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Introduction

Edward Soja’s48 and Homi Bhabha’s49 notions of thirdspace and interstitiality. The latter two are nominally borrowed to develop Storm’s idea that the tragic mechanism is a relational process affecting the “interstitial spaces,” or “connective fabric,”50 as he calls them, between the characters. Specifically, I argue that Gao’s theatre of the tragic is governed by “a super-character,”51 an allpervading fragmenting energy, which operates in an invisible zone and haunts the dramatis personae from within and from without. Moreover, this dismantling energy is diffusive as it is passed on from a character to the other or between different areas of the Self. In other words, the tragic mechanism does not arise from discrete structural or emotional elements but happens within a metadramatic thirdspace, which is not cultural but existential and psychological. On the other hand, this book omits other theoretical approaches, which reinterpret the Theatre of the Absurd as a modern reincarnation of tragedy.52 This choice is based on a number of reasons. First, Gao’s post-exile characters do not engage in philosophical speculations about the absurd. Although these plays are all virtually plotless, they do not lack dramatic action and, I argue, there is always a detectable correspondence between language and action. Second, under this line of thought it is generally claimed that in the twentieth century tragedy incorporates several elements of comedy, thereby rejecting the classic dramatic categories and presenting the tragic as a principle of irrationality and negation. As argued above, Gao’s plays do not endorse negation but division. They do not deplore the irrationality of the cosmos but seek to show the schismatic latency of reality and of the Self. Third, it is risky to define the tragic mode through another category such as the absurd, which, as Michael Y. Bennett has shown, has “a long and complicated lineage, with

48  Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford 1996: Basil Blackwell. 49  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London 1994: Routledge. 50  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 113. 51  B  ert O. States, Hamlet and The Concept of Character, Baltimore 1992: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. xix–xx. Storm elaborates at length on Bert O’ States’ dramatistic model of analysis as based on Kenneth Burke’s earlier reflections in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Berkeley 1973: University of California Press. 52  See, among others, John Conteh-Morgan, Concepts of Tragedy in the Writings of Albert Camus, University of Sussex 1978, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation; Peter Norrish, New Tragedy and Comedy in France, 1945–70, Basingstoke 1988: Macmillan; Muriel LazzariniDossin, L’impasse du tragique: Pirandello, Valle-Inclán et le “nouveau théâtre”, Bruxelles 2002: Publications des Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis; Ken M. Newton, Modern Literature and the Tragic, Edinburgh 2008: Edinburgh University Press.

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many different versions and definitions of the word and concept.”53 Addition­ ally, I refrain from applying a purely comparative perspective to the study of Gao’s theatre of the tragic. Firstly, unlike other modern tragedians such as Camus, Sartre, or Cao Yu, Gao’s dramas are not based on a reworking of pre-existing tragic characters or narratives. Secondly, Gao’s characters are not conventional, full-fledged dramatis personae. They are rather semi-archetypal individuals inhabiting a hybrid, meta-dramatic world. With exception of Escape, they all variously experience a dilemma between their theatrical and dramatic identity. This conflict is not exactly or primarily between the desire for freedom and the limitations of destiny, but between the theatrical self and the dramatic self. All other conflicts, if any, might descend from such a matrix. Therefore, I avoid adjusting Gao’s idea of the tragic Self to the models provided by individuated tragedies. Rather, I find more reasonable to employ Gao’s definition of the Self as a transcultural source of tragedy in the quest for a more general dramatic archetype that does not refer to any tragedy in particular, as a model or term of comparison. Finally, one must acknowledge the lack of a unanimous scholarly consensus on the essence of tragedy, which also affects the codification of a universally acknowledged tragic canon, which does not exist either. This means that choosing the tragedies against which we might want to compare Gao’s post-exile plays can be risky and would involve a number of considerations that fall outside the scope of this book. 4

Dionysus on the Other Shore

This book consists of four chapters. Chapter One explores Gao’s idea of tragedy as it emerges from his only available definition thereof, as well as its critical and theoretical implications. Given the absence so far of any previous studies in this field (i.e., Gao Xingjian as a tragic author), this preliminary task is a necessary step toward the construction of the theoretical background of this book. Overall, the chapter contextualizes and elaborates on Gao Xingjian’s philosophical idea of the tragic Self by placing it in the wider context of like-minded critics and scholars and, next, by relating it to his dramaturgy of shifting pronouns, which will be reconfigured as a form of sparagmos or tragic “mode,” mainly based on William Storm’s Dionysian-based reconceptualization of tragedy. I will show that though seemingly reminiscent of the tragic character of Oedipus, the tragic potential of the Gaoian Self can be adequately decrypted 53  M  ichael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter, New York 2011: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 3.

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Introduction

by applying a different tragic archetype, that of the god Dionysus, the patron of drama and personification of the Other-within-the-Self. Ultimately, the Gaoian tragic Self, due to its internal stratification which combines both selfhood and otherness, is seen as a sort of thirdspace defined by a dialectical interchange of opposite energies, thereby fitting not only Gao’s mention of the dramatic space as a “psychological field” but also Storm’s own theory of the “tragic field” of cohesion (of the character with the invisible Dionysus) and division (within the character’s Self). Through a textual analysis of the pre-exile plays The Bus Stop and The Other Shore, Chapter Two aims to reconstruct the transition from absurdity to tragedy, which affects the latter play and is somehow anticipated in the former. I argue that The Bus Stop contains a few pre-tragic elements that deserve to be highlighted and further investigated. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first scrutinizes Gao’s treatment of the absurd and, more specifically, of the Beckettian source, and the relationship between The Bus Stop, Waiting for Godot, and the notion of absurdity. As a premise, the analysis below seeks to understand the kind of absurdity that Gao produced, and whether or not The Bus Stop can be described as an absurdist play. In this regard, I aim to show that The Bus Stop does contain elements of absurdist drama that helped pave the way for Gao’s later tragic turn, which is why I call them “pre-tragic.” The second section discusses in further detail the concept of the tragic field as a performative device, thereby providing a model to be used for the analysis of The Other Shore in the third section. The concluding section aims to show how the transition from absurdity to a different kind of drama has been described in scholarly criticism on Gao Xingjian’s works, as well as anticipating the idea— further developed in Chapter Three—that The Other Shore inaugurates a new period in Gao’s dramatic work, because it presents the “other shore” of the play as a particular articulation of what Rachel Falconer has called the “katabatic imagination,” namely, “a world-view which conceives of selfhood as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return,”54 and which we will re-encounter in a significantly matured way in the post-exile plays. Chapter Three investigates the workings of the tragic mode and field as reflected in four of Gao Xingjian’s post-1990 plays of Self, namely Between Life and Death, The Sleepwalker, Dialogue and Rebuttal, and The Death Collector. The textual analysis of the case studies is prefaced by a discussion in which I argue that Gao’s characters continue inhabiting a sort of “other shore” which has infernal characteristics and is pervaded by dismembering forces that 54  Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945, Edinburgh 2005: Edinburgh University Press, p. 2.

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compel them to look beyond, into the gaping void of their own psyche. The ensuing case-by-case investigation looks closely at key dramatic tropes in Gao’s plays, such as the dismemberment of the dramatic Self, the recurrent use of limit situations and constricted spaces, the divisive nature of gender relations, and the agony of verbal language. Overall, I argue that all these plays variously stage a terrifying journey into the abyss of the (feminine and masculine) Self, thereby portraying the encounter of the individual with the Other which dwells inside the Self through a Dionysian-like “invasion” of personality that engenders a condition of “hyper-divisiveness” involving conflicts, intersections, doubling, and fragmentation. This condition is modelled on the ambivalent relationship between Dionysus and Pentheus, and which leads to a tragic outcome—the annihilation of the Self through a violent act of sparagmos. The chapter concludes by arguing that Gao’s post-1990 characters are all examples of what William Storm calls the reconceived “tragic man” and that through their marked ego-centrism they come to see the Self as a mysterium tremendum, i.e. an object of sacred fervour, hidden and awe-inspiring, something that both attracts and repels, akin to a daemonic Will. Chapter Four deals with Gao’s only consciously written tragedy, the 1990 play Escape, which is the only post-exile play of Self that does not feature any cases of “schismatic performance,” as I have redefined Gao’s dramatization of the tragic mode through the technique of shifting pronouns. Due to the characteristics that set it apart from the other post-1990 plays analyzed in Chapter Three, such as the absence of dramatic sparagmos, the seemingly Aristotelian structure, the appellation of “modern tragedy” in the subtitle, and a Chinarelated political event as a starting point of the action, I decided to examine it individually. Moreover, I have postponed the analysis of Escape towards the end of the book, because, though it is “different,” Escape still shows marked Dionysian characteristics, which cannot be ascertained without the support of the discussion in Chapter One. Specifically, Chapter Four investigates the extent to which Escape can qualify as a modern tragedy, and whether its tragic potential can be decoded through the pattern of the Dionysian tragic field theorized by Storm, even in the absence of a proper tragic mode. To answer the first question (whether it qualifies as a modern tragedy), I attempt to contextualize this play within the critical scenario of post-World War II EuroAmerican and pre-World War II Chinese intellectual discourses regarding the role of tragedy in the modern and contemporary age. In particular, following Łabędzka’s argument, I ask whether Escape fits the definition of Jean-Marie Domenach’s “infra-tragedy,” while, on the other hand, I investigate whether Gao’s notion of modern tragedy as reflected in this play may or may not follow in the footprints of Republican Chinese intellectuals’ search for modernity

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Introduction

in Western-style tragedy. In this regard, the analysis of the dramatic texture of Escape also includes a comparison with Thunderstorm (Leiyu 1937), a modern (i.e. Western-style) Chinese tragedy by the prominent playwright Cao Yu, whose play I selected for its historical importance and intercultural configuration. To answer the second question (whether Escape’s tragic potential can be decoded through the pattern of the Dionysian tragic field), I start by examining Gao’s idea of modernity in relation to dramatic tragedy and proceed to an analysis of the classical “fragments” that, I argue, form the text of the play and which are bound by a Dionysian tragic field informing its subtext and therefore less detectable without an ad hoc scrutiny. I finally define Escape as a metatragedy in “post-classical” form, whose text and subtext incorporate at least three different tragedies: the carnage at the nameless Square, the fragmented Aristotelian tragedy, and the latent Dionysian tragic field. Hence, this book is a study of Gao Xingjian’s understanding and dramatization of modern man’s predicament through a dramaturgy based on tensions, lacerations, subjugations, and divisions, which I reinterpret as a form of tragedy, and independent from any comparison with the Theatre of the Absurd. This study will not only contribute to a new appreciation of Gao’s perception of and approach to the Self as an object of dramatic enactment, but will also provide a new interpretation of his notion of the “other shore” as seen through the lens of Dionysian tragedy. Concomitantly, given the presence of female tragic characters in Gao’s plays, this study also aims to expand the boundaries of William Storm’s theory, which was limited to male characters and once criticized as “an unconscious description of a specifically male dismemberment anxiety.”55 Overall, my aim is to show that in Gao’s subconscious refashioning of the genre, tragedy moves from the traditional linear plot with a prologue, development, and epilogue to become a field of opposite energies, concurrently cohesive and divisive, and in keeping with Storm’s theory of the tragic “after Dionysus.” In conclusion, aside from assessing Gao Xingjian’s individual contribution to world tragedy by reinterpreting his dramaturgy of “the rift” as a “theatre of the tragic,” this study reframes Gao Xingjian’s newly investigated post-exile plays of Self—along with the pre-exile The Other Shore—as “thirdspace tragedies.” These are tragedies that, by working between opposite polarities—Self and Other, cohesion and division, reality and imagination, antiquity and modernity—actually occur within a less visible thirdspace, a dynamic realm 55  Jennifer Wise, “Review of After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic”, Comparative Literature, 2000, no. 52, vol. 3, p. 258.

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of potentialities akin to a Hölderlinian caesura, that can be fully brought to surface only through an ad hoc methodological exploration. What is at work in this both dramatic and metadramatic thirdspace is the discovery of a fundamental reality that affects humanity transculturally and transhistorically, as Gao himself reckons. This reality has been fully encapsulated in the words of French philosopher René Habachi, who defines the tragic as “the intuition of something riven.”56 This is an unmendable laceration, a wound that never heals, a “crack” that is constitutive of man’s essence, as the couple in Dialogue and Rebuttal acknowledges amidst their language spasms. On the whole, it is hoped that the new perspective that this book offers will provide a lens through which some central concerns of Gao’s dramaturgy can be further decoded, and their value and innovative flair better appreciated.

56  René Habachi, Il momento dell’uomo (Man’s Moment), trans. by Bruno Pistocchi, Milano 1985: Editoriale Jaka Book Spa, p. 9.

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Chapter 1

From Oedipus to Dionysus: the Gaoian Tragic Self from Philosophy to Dramaturgy 1

Introduction: Tragedy and the Tragic—an Inextricable Dyad

The concept of tragedy as both an art form and a Weltanschauung is still one of the most debated in scholarly criticism. Starting with Aristotle’s Poetics as early as the fourth century BCE, much ink has been spilled in an attempt to pin down the essence of dramatic tragedy. During the twentieth century, this topic has grown in prominence, becoming a major concern of dramatists, philosophers, and literary critics alike. Nevertheless, they still have not reached consensus on how to determine the “tragicness” of a dramatic work. Arguably, the definitions of tragedy currently in circulation equal the number of critics who have set them forth. The question as to what is the ultimate source of tragedy, its sine qua non, remains virtually unanswered. As Peter Szondi indicates,1 this conundrum might relate to a paradigm shift in the criticism of tragedy, which occurred in the nineteenth century in the context of German Idealism.2 A number of German philosophers ranging from Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) to Max Scheler (1874–1928)3 provided different definitions of dramatic tragedy based on their interpretations of what they named das Tragische, namely the tragic as an ontological absolute and intellectual category. Although those definitions originated mostly in philosophical abstractions rather than in dramatic literature, they still bear some connection to specific examples of dramatic tragedies of the past.4 The latter, in fact, still constituted the point of departure for their philosophical systems on the 1  Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. by Paul Fleming, Stanford 2002: Stanford University Press, p. 2. 2  German Idealism is a philosophical movement that flourished in Germany between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century as a reaction to Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason. Its chief representative was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who rethought the supposed limits of human reason, ascribing to it the ability to grasp the absolute or the so-called “thing in itself,” which Kant had declared unknowable. 3  Although a philosopher of the tragic, Max Scheler is a case in point because he identifies the notion of the tragic with an immanent reality rather than a man-made metaphysical speculation and/or interpretation. 4  As Véronique M. Foti says, “Notwithstanding Hegel’s interest in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and in Shakespearean tragedy, German Idealism remained almost obsessively preoccupied with

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_003

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tragic, which aimed to supplement the ideas presented in Aristotle’s Poetics. Traditionally regarded as a sort of sacred book of tragedy, for generations of dramatists and critics the Poetics has been treasured as the first reference point whence to draw the golden rules for composing and identifying full-fledged tragic works. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s ritualistic interpretation of tragedy is said to lack “insight into the phenomenon of the tragic,”5 and this is what prompted the above philosophers to address the concept of das Tragische critically. This tendency has survived into the mid-twentieth century, becoming a recurrent trend in Euro-American scholarship. Academics have been struggling to provide a workable definition of tragedy as an aesthetic phenomenon through what is, in fact, an investigation of the essence of the tragic. Although these two research perspectives have often intersected, they have resulted in the concept of the tragic becoming increasingly severed from dramatic tragedy. Literary tragedy came to be viewed as a secondary aspect of philosophical tragedy or even assimilated into it. In other words, the tragic, which was reinterpreted as a particular view of the human condition, came to be seen as a spirit, in the Hegelian sense of the term, or as a “structure of feeling,” as theorized by Raymond Williams,6 determining the ontological structure of the corresponding genre, hence pre-existing to it.7 Tragedy became somehow unnaturally confined to the realm of metaphysics, hence generating the misconception that “there is no tragedy without transcendence,”8 but only melodrama.9 Another consequence, which Szondi correctly highlights, is that the very act of looking for the essence of the tragic or attempting to grasp the tragic as an absolute in the Hegelian sense: … is itself not free from the tragic. It resembles the flight of Icarus. The closer thought comes to the general concept, the less that the substantial, the source of thought’s uplift, adheres to it. Reaching the height of insight […] Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone.” In Véronique M. Foti, Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Tragedy, Albany 2006: State University of New York Press, p. 8. 5  Szondi, On the Tragic, p. 2. 6  Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford 1977: Oxford University Press, p. 132. 7  See the first chapter of Conteh Morgan, “Concepts of Tragedy in the Writings of Albert Camus”, pp. 4–39. This introductory chapter meticulously investigates the problem of tragedy in twentieth century literature and criticism. 8  Karl Jaspers, “Basic Characteristics of the Tragic,” in Arthur Coffin (ed.), The Questions of Tragedy. A Selection of Essays on Tragedy and the Tragic, Lewiston 1991: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 91. Jaspers’ emphasis. 9  For a differentiation between tragedy and melodrama based on the element of transcendence see Robert B. Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience, Seattle 1968: Washington University Press.

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into the structure of the tragic, thought collapses, powerless…. It therefore appears that philosophy cannot grasp the tragic—or that there is no such thing as the tragic.10 Based on the above, we can derive two extremely important observations. First, envisioning tragedy and the tragic as pure and disincarnate essences posits a number of theoretical problems due to the virtual impossibility of defining an absolute principle. Second, the tragic as a category of interpretation should be stripped from its metaphysical content and reintegrated within tragedy. This, incidentally, is also what Szondi advises, although he does not supply a well-developed theory of his own. Similarly, this observation can be extended to dramatic tragedy, whereby one can assert that there is no such a thing as the tragedy par excellence nor can there be a universally valid theory of tragedy based solely on conceptual speculations. Terry Eagleton has brought attention to the predicament of tragedy as an academic subject by declaring tragedy to be “a theory in ruins.”11 In his view, the impossibility of effectively conceptualizing tragedy is a consequence of its potentially triple identity: “Like comedy, it [tragedy] can refer at once to works of art, real-life events and worldviews or structures of feeling.”12 Furthermore, he observes that, during the twentieth century, tragedy went through a process of modernization, which deeply and inevitably altered its original features. Tragedy’s development throughout modernity brings about the necessity of re-analyzing and re-categorizing the genre, thus multiplying the number of theories and theoretical approaches as well as intensifying the complexity of the on-going debates aimed at essentializing tragedy.13 Overall, tragedy seems to be like Proteus, its essence being impossible to capture. Still, the good news is that, having apparently lost its original rigidity or prescriptiveness, it is now legitimate to envision tragedy as a flexible, creative dramatic mechanism that lends itself to many possible adaptations and forms of expression. Here, the word “mechanism” is of paramount importance because it can potentially be seen as a common denominator for all tragedies, ancient and modern, and because, as a structural pattern tied to dramaturgy, 10  Szondi, On the Tragic, p. 49. Szondi’s emphasis. 11  Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Malden, Mass. and Oxford 2003: Blackwell, p. 49. Eagleton’s emphasis. 12  Ibid., 9. Morris Weitz, meanwhile, ascribes the perennially debatable nature of the concept of tragedy to the fact that “tragedy is a term whose use entails that there cannot be an exhaustive set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its use.” See Weitz, Hamlet and the Philosophy of literary Criticism, London 1964: Faber and Faber, p. 135. 13  Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 200.

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it is easier to discern than a purely philosophical, hence speculative idea. In a study investigating the relationship between the tragic and historical consciousness, Barnaba Maj argues for the existence of an element of continuity between ancient and modern tragedy. Contrary to Szondi, Maj maintains that the idea of the tragic has always been present in dramatic tragedies since the Greeks. Its distinguishing feature would be what the Greeks called deinón and the Latins tremendum,14 namely a terrifying, bloodcurdling discovery.15 The latter concerns less the confrontation between the human and the divine than the realization of a gaping void that enwraps a human being’s soul. Therefore, according to Maj, what tragedy aims to explore is not the tremendum in the gods but within humankind.16 What I find most interesting in Maj’s text is the close connection that he forges between this idea and its dramatic representation within tragedy, as if the one could not exist without the other. Specifically, by harking back to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as based on action (drama) rather than narration (epos), Maj notes that the suggestive power of tragedy lies in the manner in which the staged events concatenate and intersect. In tragedy, the actual focus is no longer on the linear content of the story (as in epic) but on “the profound motives of the action, its intersections, the heterogenesis of the outcomes that it [tragedy] inevitably encounters.”17 Ultimately, Maj subsumes the above aspects under the term mechané, which he borrows from Bruno Snell and uses to replace Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “tendentiousness” of tragedy,18 namely its tendency to reshape the narrative fabric of the epos. Further on in his study, Maj discusses the transformations of the tragic in the modern and contemporary age, thereby signalling a significant shift from myth to history and a dispersion beyond the realm of drama. Nevertheless, he still circumscribes the tragic to a mechanism that unveils the tremendum in humankind. While here I do not discuss whether tragedy and the tragic can be found outside the realm of drama, as I envision them as primarily a dramatic binomial, I still think that any new theory of the tragic should be based on a set of dramatic/performative elements. Theoretical musings can provide a starting point for analysis but certainly cannot be considered exhaustive.

14  Barnaba Maj, Idea del Tragico e Coscienza Storica nelle Fratture del Moderno (Idea of the Tragic and Historic Consciousness in the Fractures of the Modern), Macerata 2003: Quodlibet, p. 10. 15  Ibid., p. 60. 16  Ibid., p. 53. 17  Ibid., p. 51. 18  Ibid.

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True to these ideas, I shall here follow a procedure that aims to identify a general dramaturgical principle under which I will subsume Gao Xingjian’s individual “form” of the tragic mechanism. To do so, I will commence with the analysis of the playwright’s succinct remarks on this subject. 2

Gao Xingjian, Tragedy, and the Tragic Condition

At a conference in Stockholm in 1991, Gao Xingjian delivered a speech on the theme of literature, briefly touching on the topic of tragedy: One’s misfortune comes not only from political oppression, social custom, fads and the will of others. As I see it, it is also derived from the self. The self is not God…. It is what it is and we can never run away from it. Such is the destiny of mankind. The classical Greek tragedies of fate and Shakespearean tragedies about the individual indeed share the same source with the tragedies that deal with the self of modern man.19 Despite its apparent laconicism, the above utterance holds a wealth of information about Gao’s intellectual contribution to world tragedy. This deserves to be thoroughly explored in order to discern an autonomous frame of reference within which Gao’s tragic dramaturgy can be situated and delved into. In my view, what I consider particularly striking in his definition of tragedy is firstly, that he does not overtly seek to pin down tragedy’s supposed essence or sine qua non. As a matter of fact, and unlike countless other intellectuals and critics who have strived to achieve perfect categorizations, Gao does not venture to explain what tragedy is. Secondly, he does not philosophize about the concept of the tragic as an ontological absolute and intellectual category. On the contrary, his idea of tragedy appears to be firmly rooted in the realm of concrete reality. Instead of envisioning tragedy as a well-defined structure that expresses a certain vision or “tragic sense of life” à la Unamuno, he opts for a simpler, matter-of-fact approach which borders on the meta-tragic. In other words, he is preoccupied with what tragedy is about; what it dramatizes. Quite straightforwardly, Gao indicates misfortune as tragedy’s preferred topic of interest. Yet, unlike Aristotle, who put forward a “definition by emotional effect,”20 using 19  Gao Xingjian, “About Escape,” in Escape & The Man Who Questions Death, trans. By Gilbert C. F. Fong, Hong Kong 2007: The Chinese University Press, p. 70. 20  Oscar Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy, Washington D.C. 1982: University Press of America, p. 10. Mandel’s emphasis.

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subjective emotions such as pity and fear as a litmus test to gauge the tragic quality of a play, Gao’s is a “definition by situation,” one prompted by the question of identifying tragedy’s “subject matter and internal concept.”21 Still not conforming to the Aristotelian model, Gao’s does not include a “definition by formal elements,”22 for no mention is made with regard to tragedy’s possible configuration as a dramatic genre. Furthermore, I argue that the above quotation—which is neither ontological nor aesthetic—states that the tragic pre-exists and determines tragedy, that is, it constitutes its original source. But let me explain that in more detail. Gao does not seem to subscribe to the idea that what constitutes a tragedy is any sort of misfortune whatsoever, and, in so doing, he seems immune to the effects of what I call tragedy’s “semantic drift,” whereby tragedy would be synonymous with “a very sad event” or with an artistic representation of pain and suffering (both moral and/or metaphysical). Most notably, in the purview of tragedy he does not include any of what an authoritative book on tragedy—The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (2007)—lists as typically tragic phenomena such as “death, loss, injustice, thwarted passion, despair.”23 Rather, he highlights a combination of external and internal factors that engender the tragic predicament. These are the Other—in its multiple facets of politics, society, and conflict-ridden relationships—and the Self—that very same individuality that we all strive to fulfill throughout our own lives. At any rate, he focuses on the Self, qualifying it as an inescapable presence. This element of necessity, which Gao associates with selfhood more than with otherness, seems to suggest that the downfall of the tragic hero does not stem from a capital error (the Aristotelian hamartia) nor can it be ascribed solely to the responsibility of the individual’s conscious acts; rather, it is deeply ingrained in human nature, perhaps even at subconscious level, and may be derived from the relationship between character and cosmos. The tragic that inheres in material existence and that literature gives voice to, is, in Gao’s own words, less of a personal vision than of a condition; a truth that the author limits himself to acknowledge as manifest but that he has certainly not invented. When noting that the Self is “what it is and we can never run away from it. Such is the destiny of mankind,”24 Gao is pointing out that it does not matter how much effort we put in attempting to overcome the limitations of our being; it does 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid. 23  Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, Cambridge 2007: Cambridge University Press, p. 1. 24  Gao, “About Escape,” p. 70.

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not matter how much we fight to subdue the forces that inhabit our mind; it does not matter how hard we try to transcend our facticity in an attempt to negate it or to possess it, as any such attempt will engender a mechanism of self-destruction, a vicious circle that starts off with self-worshiping and ends up with self-annihilation. In arguing so, Gao seems to appropriate the idea that every over-reacher is meant to meet with his own abyss, like Ulysses while crossing the Pillars of Hercules. Still, at the same time Gao seems to note that the premise of the tragic downfall is contained in the effort of avoiding it. As Mandel puts it, “tragedy asserts … that ‘men die and are not happy’ … not as a mere outcome of their own efforts, but necessarily as a condition contained in the effort…. Inevitability is the sine qua non of tragedy.”25 In other words, Gao maintains that the tragic condition lies not in some sort of personal guilt— otherwise he would talk of a tragic act that infringes a pre-determined order of the world—but in a structural order that mankind experiences as constitutive of the Whole yet does not control. Seen under this light, Gao’s convictions about the tragic tally with Max Scheler’s view that “in every genuine tragedy we see more than the tragic event. We see over and above it the permanent factors, associations, and powers which are in the very makeup of the world.”26 The tragic is for Gao an ineluctable mechanism that finds its most relevant incarnation in the contradictory workings of the Self. To summarize, Gao conceives the tragic as an a priori, a “fundamental phenomenon and structure of meaning,”27 and a misfortune that befalls on us by virtue of how we function as individuals. This is independent from our individual will, yet dependent on a kind of “overarching Will,” which another renowned philosopher of the tragic, Arthur Schopenhauer, called “Will to life” and which is akin to a burning desire to know the thing-in-itself: the a priori. As we shall see below, for Gao, the Self is expression of the tragic in so far as it does not coincide with the self of a single person. The latter is rather an aspect of it, a contingent phenomenon. But it is the noumenon—the “negative”—that is the core of the tragic. To clarify the difference between the tragic as a condition and the tragic as a vision, I will briefly resort to Albert Camus’ definition of the tragic that emerges from his 1955 lecture, “On the Future of Tragedy.” Therein, he explains that tragedy “occurs when man, through pride, enters into conflict with the divine order, personified by a god or incarnated in society. The more justified this revolt, and the more necessary, then the greater the tragedy which stems 25  Mandel, A Definition of Tragedy, p. 23. 26  Max Scheler, “On the Tragic,” in Robert W. Corrigan (ed.), Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan, New York 1981: Harper & Row, p. 21. 27  Hans G. Gadamer, quoted in Storm, After Dionysus, p. 76.

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from the conflict.”28 Specifically, Camus links the tragic with man’s conscious rejection of an absurd status quo and not with the status quo per se; the latter can also be ignored or passively endured by the individual, which would in that case be contented with being alienated, like the character of Meursault in the first half of the novel The Outsider (1942). Conversely, Gao sees the tragic as “embedded in something. It has an identifiable ground.”29 It is not a response to the evil that surrounds us, as it happens in the tragedy Caligula (1944) but a powerful inner force that pervades the world and operates from within the individual yet also transcending him/her. Interestingly, the identifiable ground appears to be dual: on the one hand, the Self as a tragic potency; on the other, its literary hypostases: the “classical Greek tragedies of fate and Shakespearean tragedies about the individual,” to which Gao adds “the tragedies that deal with the self of modern man.”30 Another important observation can be made in this regard, namely, that by crystallizing the source of tragedy around subjectivity and by indicating the latter as a recurring leitmotif of all tragedies from the Greeks through to the present day, Gao is ascribing to the tragic Self a “metaphysical quality,”31 one of which Roman Ingarden defined as “certain essences that are usually revealed, in complex and often very disparate situations or events, as an atmosphere which, hovering over the [people] and the things contained in these situations, penetrates and illumines everything with its light.”32 Furthermore, even though Gao’s definition of tragedy is neither structurally nor substantially Aristotelian, a deep-seated Aristotelianism can still be discerned between the lines or, better still, in a potential state, which I will discuss later on in this chapter. This Aristotelian affiliation can be first ascribed to Gao’s allusion to the Self as the source of tragic misfortune. The term “misfortune” is mentioned by the Stagirite as one of the three main ingredients of tragic drama; the so-called peripeteia, which means a sudden reversal of fortune and equally points to a specific dramatic device that translates in artistic terms life’s raw materials. I anticipate that for Gao, such a reversal of fortune will coincide with the protean nature of subjectivity, which can turn from a comfortable refuge into a suffocating prison, and its tragic purview lies precisely in the irresistible power of attraction that the overarching Self exerts onto the limited self of the character. The Gaoian Self is like Ulysses’ Sirens 28  Camus, “On the Future of Tragedy,” p. 197. 29  Brenda J. Powell, The Metaphysical Quality of the Tragic: A Study of Sophocles, Giraudoux, and Sartre, New York 1990: Peter Lang, pp. 1–2. 30  Gao, “About Escape,” p. 70. 31  Powell, The Metaphysical Quality of the Tragic, p. 2. 32  Roman Ingarden, as quoted in Ibid., pp. 18–19.

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who hold a promise of absolute knowledge, which they “sell” to the seafarers in the alluring guise of a sweet and seductive yet illusory chanting. The Self—as Gao sees it—cruelly deceives its pursuers. But Gao’s correlation with Aristotle is not limited to this aspect, for the idea of the ineluctability of the human Self recalls the story of Oedipus Tyrannous, the tragic character par excellence according to the Poetics. In this chapter, I will further unravel the connection between tragedy, the tragic and the Self, which is merely sketched in Gao’s epigrammatic statement preliminarily analyzed above, and in so doing, I will put Gao’s tragic philosophy in dialogue with a network of like-minded critics and analogous theories in the attempt to illustrate how these ideas contain the promise of a full-fledged dramaturgy of the tragic. 3

Modern Man’s Predicament: Subjectivity as Un-safe Haven

Gao Xingjian’s quasi-obsessive concern with selfhood33 seems to have its origins most notably in the trauma of having grown up under a totalitarian regime bent on collectivization, which forced him to seek loneliness in order to be able to cultivate his literary talents. Furthermore, as Gilbert Fong testifies, Gao is a very reserved person whose suffering in his homeland was mainly due to a kind of “eremitic disposition,”34 which was exacerbated by the tremendous distress brought about by the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976. Generally speaking, whenever Gao has expressed his views on the workings of the Self as a psychological—not literary or dramatic—entity, he has always done it in relation to his philosophy of fleeing. In “Jottings from Paris” (Bali suibi), he contends that the only way for an individual to preserve his/her own human dignity, individual personality, and spiritual independence is to abscond. Absconding is intended as the act of getting rid of the troubles that follow the individual’s inevitable confrontation with society. Whether society is represented by political authority or parties, public opinion, prevailing morality, collective rights, or even fashion, the only way out of that existential chaos is to leave it at one’s back. The alternative is to submit and perish under the stranglehold of an increasingly massified society, where the individual is constantly at risk of being swallowed up by an all-encompassing anonymous crowd.35 33  I define this preoccupation of Gao’s as verging on obsession because it is also a distinguishing feature and trait-d’union of the majority of his post-exile plays. 34  Gilbert Fong, “Introduction to The Other Shore,” p. xv. 35  Gao Xingjian, “Bali suibi (Jottings from Paris)”, in Meiyou zhuyi (Without -Isms), Hong Kong 1996: Tiandi tushu yuxian gongsi, p. 21.

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In this light, it is only natural to look at the Self as a sort of precious sanctuary or, better still, as a comfortable retreat, a safe place of the soul where the individual can find absolute freedom, knowledge, and self-fulfilment, and a kind of private “field” that no external enemy can encroach on. However, Gao warns us that the Self’s true nature is far from being a paradise or safe haven—that probably exists only in our imaginations. To enter the realm of the Self means ultimately to remain locked inside, to feel trapped, and be overwhelmed by forces that work against us, like tiny eddies in a whirlpool. This kind of tragic reversal reveals how subjectivity can be a potential antagonist, something capable of expanding beyond any imaginable boundaries, and which relishes invading the vital space of the individual’s soul, causing a haunting feeling of oppression akin to existential angst. In Gao’s own words, this psychical peripeteia occurs when “after we got rid of politics, of the divine authority, of the nation and so on, … we suddenly discover that the Self is a chain, it is a bear trap that keeps us prisoners, that we would like to jettison of and escape.”36 It would not be excessive to contend that Gaoian selfhood has the ambiguity and silent insidiousness of a Trojan horse—god-like in its appearance, yet ready to strangle the individual from within, reducing it in rubble and ruins. This idea of the Self as a bosom enemy, a threat greater than any other coercive power coming from outside, and which colonizes our psyche, suggests that for Gao subjectivity may not be monolithic and unilateral but multifarious, rhizomatic, and potentially divisive. This condition of internal divisiveness is a consequence of the peripeteia mentioned above, whereby the encounter with one’s subjectivity transforms selfhood into an instance of alterity, the polar opposite of what our mind had imagined. Within the confined space of human subjectivity, the being of man is revealed as nothing more than “the being of a surface, of the surface that separates the region of the same from the region of the other.”37 While man is stuck in-between, the Self bifurcates to assume a double nature. I call this “the-Other-within-theSelf” to distinguish it from all the external hurdles previously indicated as “the will of others.” The reason why Gao describes it as fundamentally inescapable is that, unlike all physical encumbrances, which are more or less transient, the Other-within-the-Self is deeply ingrained in the being of man to the extent that it forms a structural component of his psychical architecture. To flee the Self, for Gao, does not mean to lie to one’s self—like Sartre’s bad faith—nor does it mean to negate who we really are. In my view, fleeing the Self is equivalent to pursuing an imagined, boundless idea of selfhood as a 36  Ibid., p. 125. 37  Gaston Bachelard, quoted in Storm, After Dionysus, p. 86.

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mirror-image of God or whatever heroic figure, only to eventually discover that, as Gao contends, “the Self is not God”38 but a disintegrating force. By the power of its attractiveness, the individual perceives the Self, or better said, self-knowledge, as an existential necessity, a sort of primordial hunger that no one can quench and that dissolves the boundary between birth and death; it is there, in that liminal thirdspace, that the transformation from an imagined God to an asphyxiating—and terribly real—egocentric hell-on-earth becomes manifest. This is what Ricardo Quinones has termed the “tragic contraction,”39 whereby tragedy’s time and space are concentrated within a single excruciating moment strikingly akin to the principle of the three dramatic unities of Aristotelian descent. In Gao Xingjian’s vocabulary, the tragic contraction-cumreversal is referred to as a “predicament” or kunjing, in the original Chinese. “Modern man’s predicament,” as he specifies, is a no-exit situation and an internal tribulation;40 it means to be at the mercy of a dynamism that raises us up while simultaneously crushing us. Before delving into the notion of kunjing, which I will develop at a later stage in this chapter and which can assist in further elucidating the triad Self-reversal-tragedy, I shall attempt to provide a visual explanation of this predicament also to support my claim that “fleeing the self,” for Gao, essentially conceals a form of desperate quest for Self; an act which discloses a modern sensibility. We can picture modern man’s predicament through an example that I deem extremely appropriate to Gao’s case. The example comes from Giovanni Pascoli’s poem “The Last Voyage”41 (“L’ultimo viaggio”, in Poemi Conviviali, 1904), an early twentieth-century revisitation of the classical myth of Ulysses, which re-envisions the once self-assured Greek hero as a modern anti-hero in the midst of an identity crisis, which explodes during a second (and fatal) encounter with the Sirens. More specifically, Pascoli imagines the Homeric character as an elderly man pervaded by a feverish desire of knowledge whereby he feels compelled to embark on a new journey throughout the Mediterranean to reclaim his past memories and to ensure that what he saw and experienced during his seafaring adventures was not a dream. Ulysses flees his present 38  Gao, “About Escape,” p. 70. 39  Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Cambridge, Mass. 1972: Harvard University Press, p. 362. 40  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, pp. 116–117. 41  Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) was an Italian poet, teacher, and classicist and is considered to be one of the most influential representatives of Italian Decadentism. The English translation of the verses from the poem “L’Ultimo Viaggio” [The Last Voyage] that I have quoted here is mine.

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condition of a mortal being approaching death to travel again through every stage of the journey that once made him immortal, and in an attempt to recompose the myth of his own Self, now other-from-himself. His predicament consists of feeling insecure about his identity and feeling nostalgia for what has since faded. Throughout the journey, which proves fruitless because nothing seems as he remembered it to be, Ulysses gradually experiences an internal feeling of divisiveness. Whereas he had been unsure of the effective reality of his past adventures, now the meaning of his entire life escapes him, and he is overwhelmed by his demand for the truth. Toward the end of the journey, Ulysses passes by the rocks where he heard the Sirens singing for him and “felt that a quiet force under the smooth sea, pushed the ship towards the Sirens.”42 Ulysses is eager to hear them again saluting him as a hero, but they stay silent and seem to ignore his forceful cry: “It’s me, it’s me, that I come back to know! A lot I saw, like you see me, yes; but all that I set my eyes on throughout the world, set their eyes on me, asking me: who am I?”43 Ulysses laments that the existential question for identity bounced back on him several times in the past and that he, who had hoped to gain self-knowledge and fame by experiencing the Other, was questioned by everyone about his name and provenance. Finally, a short, snappy couplet encapsulates the moment of the tragic reversal, of the dissolution of the mythical Self, and of the tragic contraction of life and death. Ulysses’ tragic predicament is immortalized as follows: “Tell me who I am, who I was! And the ship shattered against the two rocks.”44 The Sirens being nothing but rocks emerging from the abyss, epitomizes the end of Ulysses’ heroic character and the unattainability of a certain idea of Self. The last voyage of Ulysses, undertaken in order to escape a spiritual death, terminates with an act of folly that precipitates the old seafarer and king into an abyss of oblivion, severing forever the hero from the man, the imagined Self from the real self, the God from the nullity, in what appears as a rending process of selfcancellation. Furthermore, one should note two things: first, what drives Ulysses to undertake a journey à rebours is doubt. This word, from the Latin dubium, has the same root of duo (two) and signifies an oscillation between different and opposite thoughts, an internal state of divisiveness. Second, Ulysses does not deliberately choose to sail towards the Sirens, but is urged to do so by an aquatic force that pertains to him—because Ulysses identifies with the sea—yet is greater than his will. Following on from this, one can argue 42  Giovanni Pascoli, “L’Ultimo Viaggio”, in Arnaldo Colasanti (ed.), Tutte le Poesie (All Poems), Roma 2001: Newton & Compton Editori, p. 566. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid., p. 567.

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that along with the crumbling of his myth, Ulysses is presented as an antiindividual, because the individual, by definition, is that which cannot be severed from itself—it is the un-divided. When we pass from philosophical speculation to dramaturgy, we shall see that Gao’s post-exile characters are not individuals as such, but dyadic entities torn between the aspiration to reach infinity and the harsh reality of a hardcore limit that blocks them from achieving a state of pure self-knowledge. Gao’s rhetorical question asking “Where is the individual? Where is Man with a capital M?”45 tallies with the idea, upheld by several writers, scholars, and critics of the modern and post-modern age, that authentic selfhood is merely a utopian construct. His conception of the modern Self as haunted by the spectre of “dividedness” fully relates to the modernist pattern of the breakdown of the Self. The Gaoian Self goes hand in hand with the Gyntian Self of the titular protagonist of Ibsen’s 1867 dramatic poem Peer Gynt, which is equally tragic because, while Gynt—similarly to Ulysses—wanders around the world taking up multiple roles, in his old age he finds out that an empty core lies at the heart of his being. Gilbert Fong observes that for Gao, “the relationship between the first-person self and his ‘other’ hangs in a delicate balance, covering the whole spectrum of subjectivity and objectivity.”46 Fong further decodes this internal precariousness through Lacan’s psychoanalytic thought, wherein “the other is basically a locus of the subject’s fears and dears …”47 which accounts for the impossibility to grasp it fully. However, I argue that an explanation of the Gaoian selfhood as tragic reversal would not be accurate enough without putting it in relation with Jean-Paul Sartre’s two notions of “intersubjectivity” and “viscosity.” The Other-within-the-Self is not simply a psychical double but a superior and selfdetermining stream of energy akin to the “quiet force” that thrusts Ulysses towards his fatal voyage, and deep down into the realm of his magniloquent memories. Ulysses’s last project could be configured as an attempt to make his “being-for-itself” (être-pour-soi)—Sartre’s term for “consciousness”—match up with his “being-in-self” (être-en-soi), so that they may form a well-sealed whole. However, the two halves of being are naturally distanced and the only way of squaring them up would be becoming like God, which is entirely quixotic. While the “for-itself” is “a region of being in which everything is in question”48 45  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, p. 117. 46  Fong, “Introduction to The Other Shore,” p. xxiv. 47  Ibid., p. 23. 48  Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, Chicago and London 1980: University of Chicago Press, p. 67.

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because it is made of nothingness, the “in-itself” is “the ‘brute’ being of things, that is, that which reveals things as objective.”49 As such, Ulysses’ attraction for his past is decipherable through the “for-itself’s” longing for the “in-itself,” for what is consistently one with itself. But, as we have seen, a reversal characterizes Ulysses’ quest for becoming a “for-in-itself,” a perfect unity of both, as his illusions clash against an intractable contingency. Throughout the last few seconds of Ulysses’ “pursuing flight toward,”50 the old man will be confronted with a truth in reversal: his enlightenment equals death as the sole absolute certitude of being-in-the-world. Instead of the Sirens he is “saluted” by “a big bunch of human bones and wrinkly skins,”51 and when he thinks of having reached his goal, he is engulfed by the waters, just as the “in-itself” does with the “for-itself.” Sartre has conceptualized this mechanism as the “viscous,” arguing that: The viscous is docile. Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold, by a curious reversal it possesses me … I want to get rid of the viscous and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me…. Here we can see the symbol which abruptly discloses itself: there exists a poisonous possession; there is the possibility that the In-itself might absorb the For-itself.52 In light of the above, the peripeteia of the I as un-safe haven, with the Self turning into an downward spiral is in keeping with Gao’s depiction of subjectivity as the equivalent of “a black hole, capable of sucking everything in.”53 As we shall see in the following chapters, Gao’s post-exile plays, including the preexile work The Other Shore, feature psychological and/or spatial peripeteias where characters are confronted with the tragic experience par excellence, “the experience of the abyss, as if one had fallen into a black hole in inner or outer space.”54 49  Ibid., p. 46. 50   Jean-Paul Sartre, Stephen Priest (ed.), Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings, London 2000: Routledge, p. 225. 51  Pascoli, “L’Ultimo Viaggio”, p. 567. 52   Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted in T. Z. Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest, New York 1984: Bantam, p. 402. Emphasis added. 53  Gregory Lee and Noël Dutrait, “Conversations with Gao Xingjian: The first ‘Chinese’ winner of the Nobel prize for literature”, The China Quarterly, 2001, Sept. 2001, no. 167, p. 743. 54  Louise Cowan, “Introduction: The Tragic Abyss”, in Glenn Arbery (ed.), The Tragic Abyss, ed. Glenn Arbery, Dallas 2003: The Dallas Institute Publications, p. 9.

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To summarize, and keeping in mind the Sartrian disquisitions outlined above, modern man’s predicament ultimately lies in the discovery that the Self of the individual is actually grounded in nothingness.55 This means that even when the individual is able to enter the realm of self-consciousness, thereby viewing his own self from a distance, he experiences the disillusionment of not being able to embrace it. It does not let the individual get hold of it, simply because, although it is, it is not there. For Gao the Self is an all-absorbing entity, whereas the fundamental project of consciousness, that is the desire to overcome its nothingness and become one with the I, is bound to fail. To be “oneself” could thus mean, as Fong puts it, “to compel the self to reluctantly admit to its own inadequacies, its fragmentation, its impotence to act, and its inability to eradicate the evil in and around it.”56 As for Sartre, for Gao subjectivity is absolutely not a continuum. Due to its always being in a state of flux “encompassing past and present, good and evil, long-lasting guilt and brief happiness, and life and death,”57 it consists of many fragments, torn between self-consciousness and the consciousness of the Other living inside the Self, in a never-ending inner conflict. Nevertheless, Gao’s view of the Self somehow transcends Sartre’s and existentialism in general, in that, while the latter maintains that there is no received and universal human nature,58 Gao upholds the idea of a universal Self, one that can “intensify the suffering and … create misfortune for others.”59 No one is immune from this malady, and as a hard core of human nature, this universal Self cannot but remind us of the tremendum, which, according to Barnaba Maj, would be the foundational ground of tragedy. Thus, as I have mentioned in the Introduction, one of Gao’s favorite narrative and dramatic techniques for expressing the tensions generated by the split in the subject’s mind is to use shifting personal pronouns. For him, in each character three psychological dimensions coexist. The Self can simultaneously be an “I”, a “You,” or a “He” or “She.” These pronouns represent the individual’s possible ways to address his own Self, not only to observe it from an external perspective but also to control it. However, while in Gao’s novels this technique enables the character to achieve a serene and deeper understanding of his own personality, in a dramatic context this mechanism leads the 55  The connection between Gao and Sartre on the element of nothingness, with some references to Daoism and Zhuangzi’s thought, has also been succinctly touched upon by Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theatre. 56  Fong, “Introduction to The Other Shore,” p. xv. 57  Ibid., p. xxiii. 58  Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Reader’s Guide, London 2009: Continuum, p. 12. 59  Gao, “The Case for Literature.”

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character to experience the loss of control on the Self and to perceive the latter as an intruder and antagonist. Gao’s concept of the tragic Self can therefore be described as both a quiescent and obscure force residing in the innermost depths of an individual’s soul, and a form of ancestral tension towards the divine and/or the unknown—the same drive to self-knowledge that caused Oedipus’ ruin. 4 The Daimon within: When Oedipus Is Not Enough The centrality of the Self in Gao Xingjian’s speculative notion of tragedy is not only reflective of his personal vicissitudes and character but also shows a striking intellectual consonance with several modern and post-modern interpreters of tragedies, which they see as sharing a common ground identifiable in “a transcendent inquiry into the nature and the limitations of the self.”60 Scholars such as George Steiner, György Lukács, Paul Ricœur, and Richmond Hathorn, to name but a few, have stressed the dual nature of the tragic Self, which is always compressed between two opposite extremes, thereby recalling the idea of the existential (or psychical) prison expounded above. With them, Gao shares the belief that the human being is a limited creature and that the limit par excellence is within and “lies in the human heart”61 where it grows into something other than the I yet also reflecting it like a mirror. The equation between the internal limit—which denies the human being the status of full-fledged individual, thereby fuelling his craving for psychical unity—and its tragic quality, which Gao has described by saying that “the self is what it is and we can never run away from it,” is strikingly akin to Kierkegaard’s observation that “the tragic, after all, is always the tragic,”62 an inescapable and never-changing category of existence. In Soi-même comme autre (Oneself as Another, 1992) Paul Ricœur theorized a close relationship between the contents of Greek tragedy and man’s difficulty to overcome the limits imposed on the development his own Self through the oppositional force which he termed as “sameness”—as opposed to “selfhood.” By this concept, Ricœur meant a sort of fatal determination, inscribed within the structures of the human nature, that simultaneously constitutes the being of man and impedes

60  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 51. 61  Annamaria Cascetta, Modern European Tragedy: Exploring Crucial Plays, London and New York 2014: Anthem Press, p. 2. 62  Ibid., p. 1.

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his own freedom.63 Earlier, George Steiner had referred to the archetype of the devastating “Other” as a central element of tragic drama: Tragic drama tells us that the spheres of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge this relevance. Outside and within man is l’autre, the “otherness” of the world. Call it what you will: a hidden or malevolent God, blind fate, the solicitations of hell, or the brute fury of our animal blood. It waits for us in ambush at the crossroads. It mocks us and destroys us. In certain rare instances, it leads us after destruction to some incomprehensible repose.64 In thinking through the devastating effects of intersubjectivity, both Steiner and Ricœur were probably inspired by the myth of Oedipus—Aristotle’s favorite tragic role—which is centered around the hero’s double struggle to avoid the fulfilment of his pre-prophesized destiny and to inquire about the truth of his own Self. Both repulsed and attracted by his ethos, or “character,” Oedipus is unable to prevent such a character from evolving into a daimon, namely, conforming with an external reality that an external being—the Oracle of Delphi—had announced to him. By paraphrasing Heraclitus’ catchphrase that ethos Anthropos daimon (character is man’s destiny), Oedipus is the Anthropos caught between an I and an Other that do not loosen their grip on him. Based on these similarities, it can easily be argued that Gao’s generic tragic formula does resonate with the tragedy of Oedipus Tyrannous. During the long flashback around which the play is structured, Oedipus progressively unravels his real identity, thus laying bare the fundamental correspondence of ethos and daimon. As Christoph Menke notes: “It can be said of Oedipus’s ruin that it did not happen to him, and above all it was not imposed on him from outside, but rather that it is of his own doing: it is nothing other than what it does, than who he is as an agent.”65 He further argues that, “If Oedipus (as the chorus says) is come to ‘a storm of cruel disaster,’ it is not simply as a result of killing his father and committing incest with his mother. It is also because these crimes come to determine who he is—his ‘identity.’ Indeed, who he is for himself.”66 63  Arthur Cools, “Selfhood as the Locus of the Tragic in Paul Ricœur’s Soi-même comme autre,” in Arthur Cools et al. (eds.), The Locus of Tragedy, Leiden and Boston 2008: Brill, p. 176. 64  Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, pp. 8–9. 65  Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theatre from Sophocles to Beckett, trans. By James Phillips, New York 2009: Columbia University Press, p. 7. Emphasis added. 66  Ibid., p. 8. Menke’s emphasis.

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In this sense, Oedipus’ tragic story advances the proposition that the tragic downfall is ultimately not due to a transcendent, external mechanism but is entirely grounded in personality, which is an immanent given. Similar Oedipal tragic patterns can be discerned in a myriad early modern and modern tragedies such as, for example, Macbeth, Racine’s Phèdre and Camus’ Caligula, which portray three different characters whose souls are literally “eaten up” by their own fragilities, obsessions, and passions, thereby confirming Gao’s intuition that a certain concept of the Self is a transhistorical nucleus of tragedy. Moreover, the contiguity of the Oedipus myth with Gao’s philosophy of the tragic Self reconfirms the latter’s substantial difference with Sartre, as Gao (and Sophocles before him67) maintains that the supreme root of human evil is found in the Self and not in the will of others.68 Nevertheless, I argue that, while lining up well with Gao’s philosophy of the tragic Self, the Oedipal pattern is not sufficient to decrypt what I view as the tragic potential of Gao’s dramaturgy of the tragic Self, which coincides with his theory and technique of shifting pronouns. Why is that? Firstly, the majority of Gao’s post-exile characters are not conventional, fully-fledged dramatis personae but rather semi-archetypal beings inhabiting a hybrid, metadramatic world where the boundaries between theatre and life appear more fluid and less neat than expected. Excluding Escape, they all variously experience a dilemma between their theatrical and dramatic identity. This conflict is not exactly or primarily between the desire for freedom and the limitations of destiny, but between the theatrical self and the dramatic self. All other conflicts arguably descend from such a matrix. Secondly, the Sophoclean tragedy of Oedipus does not seem to center on the process that led the protagonist to become other from himself, but rather emphasises the tragic as the experience of learning through suffering. The locus of the tragic in Oedipus is less in the discovery that the sinner who has provoked the gods’ anger is in fact himself and not someone else, than in apprehending that there is no Other as such69 and that therefore we are fully responsible of our actions, whatever good 67  See Oedipus’s dialogue with Teiresias, especially when the latter reprimands him for his accusations: “You blame my hard heart—look long at your own. What hides in there? See that before censuring me.” See also Oedipus’ words of hate to Creon (“You are foul as filth”) and the latter’s response (“And you are wrong entirely”). In Sophocles, Oedipus, trans. By Frank McGuinness and Ciaran McGrogarty, London 2008: Faber. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/oedipus-trans-mcguinness-iid-19550/ do-9780571284993-div-00000008. 68  This, as we shall see in Chapter Four, is also the main source of the tragic in Escape. 69  Oedipus: “I am the stem, the root of all evils.” https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/ oedipus-trans-mcguinness-iid-19550/do-9780571284993-div-00000008.

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or bad. In this perspective, the Other merely serves to make us aware of who we really are but does not treat us as if we were puppets without a will. Second, in declaring that “it was I myself,” Oedipus shows no sign of consciously experiencing a state of internal division. Quite the contrary, as he proves a model of self-determination at any rate. The Other as an evil latency or, as Ricœur describes it, “a persistence which we suffer, which sometimes prevails upon our will and our possibilities and which imposes itself despite us,”70 does not seem to play a significant role in this play, or perhaps we may better say that is not given enough centrality. In other words, what this tragedy lacks is a clearcut perspective on the power of Otherness as an inextricable and indelible structure of the Self. It lacks the motif of duality and of the Sartrian “viscosity,” which aptly encapsulates the mechanism whereby the subject finds himself inexorably “possessed” by that evil latency he sought to dominate. Although the Chorus does ask him “what god descended on you, whose hand hurled you into this black pit?”71 the dramatist does not fully develop that aspect of possession by a psychic inner force. Furthermore, Oedipus is still an individual, and the inner dynamisms by which he consummates his guilt (hamartia) and develops an urge towards transgression (hybris)72 are presented from without rather than investigated from within. By contrast, what interests me as a model for framing Gao’s tragic dramaturgy is a pattern that pushes at the forefront the workings of that quiet force that drove Ulysses’ ship toward the Sirens and that made him a victim of its hallucinatory powers. The quiet force is precisely the mechanism that engenders the tragic scission, and “possession” is the modality with which the “in-itself” triumphs over the “for-itself,” or, in Gao’s phrasing, the manner in which the Self develops into a hellish Other, thereby plunging the individual into a painful state of endless psychological agony. That force, I argue, functions as an internal daimon, a term that, as previously mentioned, has been generally translated as “destiny” or “fate.” However, in ancient Greek culture the daimon was typically not an impersonal energy or impulse but rather a minor god, an intermediary between man and the divine, and therefore an independent entity. According to Plato, each human being is assigned a personal daimon before the birth of his soul into a corporeal body. The daimon acts as a protector and inspires his behavior, thereby serving a purpose similar 70  Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan, Boston 1969: Beacon Press, p. 218. 71  Sophocles, Oedipus. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/oedipus-trans -mcguinness-iid-19550/do-9780571284993-div-00000008. 72  On the tragic as a transgression model, see Hans Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. by Erik Butler, London 2016: Routledge, chapt. 2.

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to the one performed by a guardian angel in Christian culture. Similarly, the daimones could be “souls of men from the golden age,” the souls of dead soldiers or even any deceased soul. They were ethereal spirits inhabiting a liminal space. Originally good and positive, after Plato they were re-conceptualized into “dark, lustful forces”73 akin to the rebellious angels of Christian theology. Choosing to focus on the daimon as a model for the Gaoian tragic Self implies a paradigm shift, which consists in diverting our attention away from Oedipus and his rigid sense of Self and re-focusing it on another key tragedy, which is dominated by the agonistic exchange of identities between a Self and an Other, a human and a god who are apart from each other yet related by blood. I am here referring to the dyad Dionysus-Pentheus in Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae. Together, the two figures constitute a hybrid, cohesivecum-divisive entity that more exactly tallies with how I describe the dramatic implementation of the Gaoian tragic selfhood. Below, and in compliance with Gao’s conviction that “theatre should deal with life rather than philosophy,”74 I will reframe his dramaturgy of the shifting pronouns—which I rename as “dramaturgy of the riven Self”—as a form of tragic mode, or, in Ricœur’s words, “as a specific modality of revealing the condition of selfhood in the concrete experience of a singular action.”75 5

From Philosophy to Dramaturgy: the Tragic Mode

I hold the view that if we search for narrative models that parallel those in Gao’s plays while trying to decode Gao’s reference to “the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies of the individual,” we are bound never to reach our objective. As Daniela Sacco says, the risk is “that of reducing the classics to a repertoire of variable and amendable plots and fabulae, which can be adapted to a wealth of different and mutable contexts.”76 In this sense, she advises that “rather than pinpointing plots and intrigues, one should postulate an inherently philosophical question: we should try to penetrate the creative mechanism of dramatic composition, comprehend its structure, and grasp the relationship between

73  Charles Stewart, “Demons and Spirits,” in Nigel Wilson (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, London 2006: Routledge, p. 216. 74  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, p. 117. 75  Paul Ricœur, quoted in Cools, “Selfhood as the Locus of the Tragic in Paul Ricœur’s Soimême comme autre,” p. 173. 76  Daniela Sacco, Mito e teatro. Il principio drammaturgico del montaggio (Myth and Theatre. The Dramaturgical Principle of Montage), Milano-Udine 2013: Mimesis, p. 184.

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the latter and the contemporary Weltanschauung.”77 Louise Cowan goes one step further and theorizes the existence of tragedy as an active mechanism. She writes: An impressive number of twentieth-century thinkers have attempted to isolate tragedy in one of its elements, such as suffering, paradox, the destruction of a value, or the confrontation with the irremediable. Others consider it to issue from the ritual of sacrifice, the boundary situation, or the incarnation of political order. These theories—and there are hundreds more—advance single elements as keys to the tragic. Yet not one of them completely captures its forbidding though oddly exhilarating power. In seeking the sources of this power, however, one must first acknowledge that tragedy seems not to have a definable content or a specifiable structure. It presents itself almost as a kind of mechanism— or a sacrament—something that does something, that has an effect opera operato.78 The elements that define the tragic subjectivity for Gao, and that I have discussed at length, i.e., the self as a black hole, the aspect of the possession and the self as a daimon, are not directly linked to the “arrangement of the incidents” that Aristotle indicated as the most important component of dramatic tragedy,79 but make sense as tragic loci only if we reinterpret them as various articulations of the same dramatic mechanism, or sacrament in Cowan’s words. This explains why—being based on a strictly philosophical idea, and not on dramatic processes—Gao’s definition of tragedy, per se, is somehow unsatisfactory without the support of dramaturgy. In fact, much of Gao’s words on tragedy are limited to two of his plays, namely Escape and The Death Collector, but only because he puts it onto the lips of specific characters (respectively, The Middle-Aged Man and That Man) who limit themselves to proclaim it. Before Cowan, who argues that “without its art form, the tragic is likely to be kept in abeyance, an undischarged terror in the psyche,”80 Peter Szondi had observed that “the concept of the tragic disastrously rises out of the concrete situation of philosophical problems into the heights of abstraction; it therefore needs to sink down into the most concrete elements of tragedies if it is to 77  Ibid. 78  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss”, p. 3. Cowan’s emphasis. 79  Ibid. The “structure of incidents” according to Aristotle encompasses the traditional elements of the tragic form. 80  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 4.

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be saved.”81 It is from Szondi’s essay that I borrow my terminology of a “tragic mode,” for replacing the notion of a (philosophical) “concept.” Szondi, for his part, merely suggests that “mode” is another word for “plot” and envisions it as a dialectical modality or conflict. While retaining the element of dialectic opposition, I contend that the Gaoian tragic mode does not manifest as a plot—for his post-exile plays are virtually plotless—and, in so doing, I concur, again, with Cowan in conceiving of such a mode as a “pattern in reality” that “the Greek and the Shakespearean dramas educate us about.”82 Using an epistemological approach, Belgian scholar Muriel Lazzarini-Dossin has argued that the tragic (mode) would be a principle of negation, which becomes incarnate in a negated theatrical form, that is, by subverting the traditional categories of drama—temporality, identity, characterization, space, and language.83 Still, her conceptualization of the tragic fails to extricate itself from the phenomenon of anti-theatre, thereby presenting the former as a cognate of the theatre of the absurd, which, as it is known, lacks dramatic action and does not quite harmonize with Gao’s dramaturgical style, which aims at restoring the role of action over talking. Having literally hunted for a theory of the tragic capable of sustaining my early configuration of the Gaoian tragic mode as a mechanism of dialectical confrontation between the I and the Other and symbolic of a traumatic condition, I think I have found an invaluable support in William Storm’s After Dionysus: A Theory of the Tragic (1998), which portrays Dionysus, the god of drama, as “not only one of the ‘great powers that stalk the world’ but a dismantling energy that is at large and active in the tragic cosmos.”84 Below, I shall illustrate the characteristics of the Dionysian archetype according to Storm. Next, I shall show how Gao’s individualized usage of the Brechtian device of Verfremdung aptly fits with the modern idea of sparagmos as the epitome of theatrical divisiveness, of the schismatic yet binding relationship between the performed Self and the performing Self. 5.1 The “Render of Man”: the Dionysian Archetype Dionysus, a diegetic character in The Bacchae, is an ambiguous figure who manifests himself as the god of transformation and split personality, and therefore, as an epitome of duplicity. He has a double nature, not only because he is half god and half man, but also because he was born twice, first from his mother’s 81  Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, p. 56. Emphasis added. 82  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” 5. Cowan’s emphasis. 83  Muriel Lazzarini-Dossin, L’impasse du tragique. 84  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 26.

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womb and afterwards from his father’s leg. Furthermore, upon his return to Thebes, he does not disclose his true identity to the citizens but introduces himself as a stranger, a traveller coming from afar, namely from the middle East where the barbarians live. He claims that the god Dionysus himself has sent him over to announce him. In his words, Dionysus becomes an Other that remains virtually invisible until the end of the play, when everyone finally recognizes the god in the persona of the mysterious foreigner. Moreover, although he comes from Asia Minor, Dionysus is also directly related to King Pentheus’ family—the two of them being, in fact, cousins—so he is simultaneously Greek and Asian, civilized and barbarian. In sum, Dionysus is the emblem of a multiple but also fractured individuality that expresses itself through paradoxes and contradictions, which not only affect his origins and temperament but also his behavior toward others. The Dionysian mode consists therefore in subverting the normal order of things, whereby women are driven out of their homes to take part in ecstatic dances, and in bringing about a collective psychosis, whereby those very same women are forced to believe that they have killed and dismembered a puppet lion instead of a human being. Based on the above, it can be argued that Dionysus acts like a dramaturge. His ability to drive people mad and to get them do what he wants, to manipulate their minds, and to provoke collective hallucinations, reminds us of the work of actors and directors. Dionysus is the orchestrator of a massive, carnivalesque spectacle, by creating an unspeakable, upside-down reality that, however, does not exist as such but only in the people’s disturbed minds. As a matter of fact, the Dionysian presence manifests itself indirectly, namely through the god’s possession of the women, to the detriment of King Pentheus. Like the mythic Dionysus, in this tragedy Pentheus is killed and his body torn apart by the maenads, among whom is his mother, and whose ecstatic madness is actually a consequence of the god’s evil manipulation of their consciousness. During the ritualized murder of Pentheus, Dionysus remains hidden, acting as a mere onlooker. By scrutinizing the Dionysian double capacity of invading the Self of the individual (enthousiasmos, i.e. being possessed by the god) in order to disintegrate it, Storm concludes that the concept of the tragic can rightfully be equated with “the Dionysian effect of rending, which is indirectly related to that of ‘tragic’ disunion and separation.”85 This idea of Dionysus as the “render of man,” one whose work is to sever a person from himself or herself, “for deliverance or destruction or both,”86 links 85  Ibid., p. 24. 86  Ibid., p. 21.

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up with the image of the god as often portrayed as holding the two halves of a sacrificial goat, which would also explain the presence of “goat” (tragos) in the etymology of the word “tragedy.” The fact that “after suffering such an ‘invasion’ of personality, the character who is infused with the Dionysian spirit is torn apart—not simply killed or destroyed by other means but aggressively fragmented and left in pieces,” justifies Storm’s final association of the tragic process with the ritual dismemberment of the sacrificial goat, the so-called sparagmos. As he remarks: “The Dionysian phenomenon, considered in these purely ‘tragic’ terms, is not aligned with unity or cohesion but rather with fracture, with ekstasis and enthousiasmos, with separation and dispersal.”87 Despite the apparently Nietzschean terminology, we should note that Storm’s conception of the Dionysian tragic process differs from the Nietzschean prototype of Dionysian tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche argues that Dionysus represents the urge to overcome the limits of one’s individuality as a means of achieving a totalizing communion with the original Oneness that permeates the flow of life. The destruction of the principle of individuation, which Nietzsche indicates as the source of all evil and earthly suffering, is assimilated to a painful yet ultimately joyful experience because it enables the individual to clearly see the truth beyond the veil of Maya. Dramatic tragedy, for Nietzsche, provides a kind of “metaphysical solace,” whereby “for a brief moment we really become the primal essence itself, and feel its unbounded lust for existence and delight in existence … for all our pity and terror, we are happy to be alive, not as individuals but as the single living thing, merged with its creative delight.”88 By contrast, Storm argues that this pattern of selffragmentation and subsequent re-fusion of the individual within the All, which imitates the myth of Dionysus as the suffering god, who dies and is born again, “is by no means that of the tragic theatre.”89 As the tragedy of Pentheus suggests, the Dionysian dismemberment of the individual is permanent and there is no subsequent resurrection or salvation. Moreover, Nietzsche regards all tragic heroes as dramatic reincarnations of the agonizing Dionysus-Zagreus. In his view, Dionysus is a positive unifying figure, symbolizing a primeval oneness and a sense of community linking up the individual selves. Storm, however, regards Dionysus as a torturer and the

87  Ibid. 88  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Shaun Whiteside, London 2003: Penguin Books, p. 81. 89  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 23.

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orchestrator of a psychological “agon between irreconcilable terms.”90 In other words, Dionysus actively performs the dismembering process and his intervention within the dramatic cosmos is meant to exacerbate the principle of individuation by further disintegrating the individual and thereby hindering his quest for full selfhood. As further clarified below in the context of Gao’s dramaturgy, the Stormian theory seems better suited to frame what I deem as the Gaoian tragic pattern. This is because Gao’s characters do not experience a notion of tragedy as the art of metaphysical consolation, but rather one that discloses a “metaphysical terror.”91 This would coincide with the awareness that, far from being an indestructible unity, reality is more like an eternally open, bleeding wound, and Oneness is only an illusion. Furthermore, Dionysus is not only a fractured individuality but also a principle of rupture, because his action is aimed at disintegrating the human psyche through the mechanism of sparagmos, which is not only physical. In fact, the physical sparagmos of Pentheus is only a relatively minor part in the play’s overall story-line—the metaphorical sparagmos that precedes and determines the physical dismemberment is far more important. The Theban women become maenads under the latent influx of the god that they have not yet met in person. Dionysus knows that the only way to get Pentheus to meet the maenads and succumb to their fury is to drive him crazy. It is crucial to remark that Pentheus’ madness manifests itself through a series of hallucinations that culminate when he “sees” a double sun. This would confirm Storm’s argument that the Dionysian mode functions as a rending mechanism. As he points out: “The tragic, in short, is not simply that which is mournful, lamentable, or even catastrophic; it is that which is unmendable. As such, its core meaning is not grievous but rather divisive.”92 In conclusion, the Dionysian archetype not only helps us leave the unsure and elusive terrain of philosophical speculations but also provides us with the basis for theorizing a tragic mode that is first and foremost a way of dramatizing what Cowan calls “the tension at the heart of being, to which mortals resonate in their depths.”93 As further explained below, Gao Xingjian’s tragic mode is not primarily focused on dramatic emotion (i.e., tragic suffering) but on dramatic tension, action, and terror, as I will seek to show after briefly historicizing the theatrical practice of tripartition by connecting it to Gao’s early fascination with Bertolt Brecht’s dramaturgy and his theory of the V-effekt. 90  Ibid., p. 83. 91  Ibid., p. 86. 92  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 80. Storm’s emphasis. 93  Ibid., p. 7. Emphasis added.

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The Premises of the Tragic Mode: Brecht, Dramatic Estrangement, and Gao’s Neutral Actor In a 1996 essay, Gao characterizes his artistic quest as a search for the original roots of the theatre, which he identifies with the actor’s performance. For him, this is based on a suitable mix of dramaticality (xijuxing) and theatricality ( juchangxing). The first principle, he argues, refers to the ancient meaning of drama as dramatic action, and, more precisely, as a combination of change (bianhua), recognition ( faxian) and shock ( jingqi). Similarly, the second principle designates the exchange between actors and audience, which is made possible through the elimination of the fourth wall and the eradication of the dramatic illusion. By merging these two principles, we obtain the most important element of Gao’s theory of performance, namely the fact that theatre is about process (guocheng).94 As he points out, the dramatic process does not necessarily require a complete action or event but can also involve the amplification of a subsidiary psychological condition: “Concerning performance, not only are the events made up of actions, but also the psychological world of the characters. Every slight psychological activity is drama provided that it is presented through process, change, recognition, and shock.”95 The dramatic process that Gao develops through his plays has its origins in Bertolt Brecht’s anti-naturalistic acting system, which he complements with his in-depth knowledge of traditional East Asian performance practices related to Jingju, nuoxi96 and Japanese Kabuki. Such dramatic process involves the relationship between the actor and his role and is characterized by an internal gap that is constantly kept open between the two through various distancing techniques ( juli banfa). Gao ascribes the parentage of these estranging dramatic methods mainly to Brecht,97 who according to him reintroduced the concept of the actor as performer (banyanzhe) into Western drama.98 Since there is already a considerable amount of critical literature on Brecht’s influence on Gao’s drama,99 I will not deal with this topic in great detail. I will rather

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94  Gao Xingjian, “Juzuofa yu zhongxing yanyuan [Performance and the Neutral Actor],” in Meiyou zhuyi, p. 254. 95  Ibid., p. 255. Emphasis added. 96  N  uo theatre refers to a kind of exorcistic performance typically found in southern China. For more information, see Jo Riley, Chinese Theatre and The Actor in Performance, Cambridge 1997: Cambridge University Press. 97  He also mentions Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor in “Juzuofa,” p. 255. 98  Ibid., p. 257. 99  See Rossella Ferrari, Da Madre Courage e suoi figli a Jiang Qing e i suoi mariti. Percorsi Brechtiani in Cina (From Mother Courage and her Children to Jiang Qing and her Husbands. Brechtian Trajectories in China) Venezia 2004: Cafoscarina; and Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China, London 2012: Seagull

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concentrate on Brecht’s technique of dramatic estrangement (Verfremdung) and its impact on Gao’s theory of tripartite acting and his concept of dramatic process. Verfremdung is a neologism coined in opposition to the Hegelian-Marxian concept of Entfremdung and is typically translated as “alienation.” Other, more appropriate, translations are “defamiliarization” and/or “estrangement.” In the Brechtian lexicon, Verfremdung is usually understood as both a mode of dramatic presentation and an effect on the audience. Actively challenging the cathartic effects of bourgeois and naturalistic drama, it refashions the theatrical event by presenting it as a mediated experience, namely by interposing a dialectic filter between the staged story and the audience. Along with the usage of a collage of different media within a single theatrical show, which engender a mutual dialectical tension, the actor remains the main guarantor and performer of the Verfremdung through his constant interaction with the audience. His task consists in denaturalizing the incidents portrayed on stage by historicizing them, narrating them as past instead of re-enacting them in the present. In other words, his relationship to the role is that of a story-teller or a witness reporting his version of a street accident. In Brecht’s own words, “the actor must give up his complete conversion into a stage character. He shows the character, he quotes his lines, he repeats a real-life incident.”100 Through this method, the audience will learn to see beyond the appearances of the stage, grasp the implied reality of the portrayed incidents as socially and historically determined, and, most importantly, perceive them as mutable and changeable. All this cannot be achieved without presenting those facts and behaviors under an “estranged, unfamiliar light,” or calling the audience’s attention to the contradictory dynamics underlying the course of history and the related social progress. Aside from avoiding any emotional identification with the role, the performer must also be able to suggest a suitable and reproducible alternative to the way in which a given fact has occurred. Thus, the dialectical process of Verfremdung, which involves both performer and audience in equal degree, Books; Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theatre; Min Tian, The Poetics of Difference and Displacement: Twentieth-Century Chinese-Western Intercultural Theatre, Hong Kong 2008: Hong Kong University Press; Letizia Fusini “Estrangement Techniques with Chinese Characteristics: The Dialectics of Ver/Ent-Fremdung in the Drama of Gao Xingjian: Brechtian Reminiscences in Existentialist Disguise,” in Rui Oliveira Lopes (ed.), Face to Face. The Transcendence of the Arts in China and Beyond—Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Art, Lisbon 2013: Centro de Investigação em Belas-Artes. Min Tian in particular interprets Gao’s theory of the tripartite actor as a “displacement of Chinese xiqu through Brecht” (188). 100  Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, Cambridge and New York 1993: Cambridge University Press, p. 197.

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cannot be called completed till the defamiliarization effect has passed from the performer’s consciousness to the spectator’s, and the latter has left the theatre with “a new understanding and grasp of social alternatives.”101 Unsurprisingly, Brecht called his non-conventional dramaturgy “dialectic drama” or “drama of the scientific age.” He did so with reference to the spectator’s transformation from a passive, spellbound watcher to a lucid, active observer endowed with a rationalistic attitude toward reality combined with scientific curiosity and a capacity to demystify the latent bizarreness of what is commonly held as natural, familiar, and socially acceptable. In her comparative study of Verfremdung and the more familiar concept of “theatricality,” Phoebe von Held sheds light on two different aspects of Verfremdung, as theorized by Brecht. The first, she argues, “emphasizes the initiating, explosive power of an aesthetics of alienation, which only brings back into motion dialectical processes of the subject,” as opposed to society, “and which is focused on the modalities of perception.”102 Conversely, the second “is more invested in a synthetic movement starting with the estrangement of the natural, by showing the inverted social conditions, and concluding in critique and potential social revolt.”103 While it is no mystery that Brecht employed Verfremdung mainly in the second sense, by conferring a strongly political orientation to it, the basic structure of the Verfremdung process, when emptied of its socio-historical implications, can be said to embody the basic mechanism of theatricality, also in the Gaoian sense. Again quoting von Held, it is useful to note: Alienation (i.e. defamiliarization) is considered as an issue intrinsic to acting itself. It is described as a process of encountering alterity, of exploring creatively the intervals and dualities between the acting subject and the character, if not the other within the self. To act means to deal with a dramatic figure as someone else and to exploit aesthetically the ruptures of self-consciousness.104 The reference to the “other within the self” cannot but remind one of the structure of the tragic Self, that I reconstructed earlier by combining Gao’s definition of tragedy, his view of the human Self and Sartre’s theory of the 101  Ibid., p. 191. 102  Phoebe von Held, Alienation and Theatricality: Diderot after Brecht, London 2011: Legenda, p. 30. Emphasis added. 103  Ibid. 104  Ibid., p. 16.

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viscous in-itself to flesh out my re-elaboration of the daimonic Gaoian dialectics of Self and Other. Similarly, writing about the dialectical nature of Verfremdung, Sean Carney reinterprets Brechtian dramaturgy as “a dialectical rewriting of tragedy,”105 by building his assumption on Peter Szondi’s hypothesis of the nature of the tragic as a dialectic concrete mechanism or process, on Rodolphe Gasché’s definition of dialectic as “structurally tragic” and tragedy as “correspondingly dialectic,”106 and on Raymond William’s view of tragedy as “a dialectic between human action and tragic order.”107 Nevertheless, in Gao’s post-exile drama, despite the tragic being presented as a dialectic mechanism (entailing cohesion and division), no light is cast on a possible alternative for overcoming the tragic tension and restoring order. This is because, as previously anticipated, an individual cannot escape the contradictory dynamics of his own Self and its disastrous effects on the psyche. For now, suffice it to say that whereas the Brechtian actor calls the character “(s)he” in order to elicit the spectator’s cognitive response to a socio-historical critique, the Gaoian actor says “(s)he” or “you”, in order to raise awareness of the human psyche itself as a dialectic process. By paraphrasing von Held, Gao retrieves the spirit of theatricality by substituting the political with the metadramatic. He then exploits the basics of the Brechtian device as “the perfect foundation for a dialectically oriented aesthetic that thrives on the tensions of opposites, dichotomies and contrasts.”108 Furthermore, Gao resorts to his knowledge of Chinese classical theatres to replace the politically engaged Brechtian actor with a “neutral actor” (zhongxing yanyuan). The achievement of the neutral attitude is part of the preparatory work that the actor typically undertakes before entering the stage and consists in transcending one’s individuality in order to be able to observe and reproduce the character’s own feelings through his body. As Gao observes, “On stage, this purified self becomes a third eye (di san zhi yanjing), controlling and harmonizing the performance. From time to time, the actor takes on the identity of the neutral actor and, observing himself and the audience and the role, shuttles in and out, reflects and acts.”109 Still, neutrality in Gao’s view does not equal rigidity, aloofness, or lack of expressivity. “The various acting techniques,” Gao specifies, “are not employed in order to dissimulate but to bring into play the true feelings of the actor, for although 105  Sean Carney, Brecht and Critical Theory: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics, London and New York 2005: Routledge, p. 174. 106  Ibid., p. 152. 107  Ibid., p. 176. 108  von Held, Alienation and Theatricality, p. 37. 109  Gao, “Juzuofa,” p. 257.

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the actor is in a condition of neutrality, he cannot separate from his own self.”110 For Gao, the neutral actor is such because he lends his own body to serve as a tabula rasa against which one can read the insignia of the character’s psychology, not without the participation of the actor’s own Self. Furthermore, the neutral attitude (zhongxing yanyuan de taidu) is preferable, because it enables the actor to better portray the inner psychological tension in the actor-character dialectic and push it up to its utmost degree. In keeping with Chinese traditional theatre, Gao’s neutral performance can be said to be intrinsically mimetic and extrinsically anti-naturalistic, hence the opposite of Brechtian performance. Whereas Brecht focuses on the interpretation of a sequence of events, Gao aims to showcase the inner dynamics of psychological processes, through a combination of participated actions and alienated, often emotionally loaded story-telling. Rather than freezing a certain process, he presents it in its becoming. In my opinion, this is what situates Gao’s neutral actor one step beyond Brecht’s.111 By opening up the recesses of the Self, those “intervals and dualities between the performed self and the performing self” (see above), Gao compels the performer to go through a rending mechanism analogous to the Dionysian sparagmos, thus introducing the consciousness of the tragic abyss into his post-exile dramaturgy. 5.3 Tripartition as a Form of Sparagmos: the Gaoian Tragic Mode In a 2010 essay discussing the role of the neutral gaze in his dramaturgical system, Gao clarifies the double goal of his theatrical research, which consists of “penetrating the mystery of the human self yet avoiding psychological analysis.”112 This is the essential formula of his post-exile stylistic and thematic re-orientation toward what he calls neixin de xiju, or theatre of the mind. His technique of tripartite performance represents his response to the issue of balancing attention to the workings of the human mind and becoming too analytical. There is, in fact, a risk of indulging in abstract, philosophical musings to the detriment of dramatic action and of dramatic emotion. To prevent this, a tripartite performance is constructed around the opposite poles of Self (wo) and self-consciousness (ziwo), whose reciprocal confrontation cannot but

110  Ibid., p. 260. 111  Likewise, von Held writes: “An aesthetic of standstill therefore imposes meaning even more vehemently than does naturalism, which simply ‘replicates’ the outer appearance of social conditions (in our case, psychological). It is all the more authoritarian because it claims to arrest action at exactly that angle where historical manifestation and subjective recognition unite” (Alienation and Theatricality, p. 67). 112  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, p. 36.

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activate a compelling dramatic tension (zhangli), as observed by Gilbert Fong.113 Such a tension, Gao points out, can also be readdressed to the character as a means of reflecting an analogous psychological stratification (xinli cengci). Therefore, the performer’s tripartite identity, which combines three different individualities within the same body-mind—the actor as a real person, the neutral actor, and the actor-character—is not merely a dramatic technique or an exercise for the actor but responds to the need of representing metadramatically a certain psychological disposition, an internal fight that not only affects the actor-character relationship per se but also the character himself. This becomes the epitome of the predicament of modern man, the leading theme of Gao’s post-exile plays. Through his dramaturgy of shifting pronouns (rencheng zhuan),114 the actor-character’s Self is presented as a disaggregated unit which epitomizes the internal feeling of laceration experienced by the dramatis persona and narrated/performed by the actor. The character’s individual Self is split into three separate entities: an “I,” a “you,” and a “he” or “she.” Specifically, the “you” and the “(s)he” function both as modes of estrangement ( juli fa) for better highlighting the character’s psychological conflict and as mirror-images of the character’s actual feeling of estrangement with his own self ( juli gan). In this way, the self is objectified and dissected but never recomposed, because the metaphorical process of dismemberment is not reversible. This multiple sense of a split personality propels the actor-character toward losing any cognition of who (s)he actually is, thereby leading him to ask whether there is, after all, an entity called “Self.” While this will probably become more apparent when analysing the actual plays, it is still important to note a major contradiction in Gao’s explanations of the theory and practice of tripartite performance. In several occasions, such as in a conversation with Fong, Gao maintains that through this kind of performance the actor is able to control and manipulate the character.115 Nevertheless, in response to Fong’s question about whether the actor splits himself into two or merges with the character into one, Gao asserts that the actor transfers in and out of the character.116 This process entails a mechanism of cohesion and division with and from the character’s own Self, which is akin to the tragic field of opposite forces theorized by 113  Ibid., p. 85. 114  On Gao’s technique of the shifting pronouns in both fiction and theatre see Mabel Lee, “Pronouns as Protagonists: On Gao Xingjian’s Theories of Narration,” in Soul of Chaos, pp. 235–256. 115  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, p. 71. 116  Ibid., p. 60.

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Storm, and which is also symptomatic of an ongoing psychological dismemberment affecting the performative dyad. It seems to me that rather than exerting an authoritative power over the character’s Self, the actor embraces the latter’s own emotional predicament to the point that it becomes by and by more difficult to tell the two apart. In other words, as in The Bacchae, the sparagmos mechanism is transferred from Dionysus, an allegory of the character, to Pentheus, an allegory of the actor. Dionysus, in fact, disguises Pentheus as an-other Self. Therefore, the Gaoian dyadic-triadic actor-character can be further decoded against the relationship between Dionysus and Pentheus, who are mutual alter-egos. During his dialogue with his cousin, Dionysus frequently otherizes himself, referring to himself as a “he.” Moreover, when recalling the scene in which Pentheus frenziedly attempts to catch the malevolent god, Dionysus talks about assuming a concurrently triple role as himself (invisible to Pentheus), as a sacred bull (a hallucination), and as Dionysus the god. Similarly, when Pentheus goes to see the maenads, he is simultaneously himself (a disguised body) and Dionysus (an invisible spirit who drives him where he wants). Shortly before getting his body physically dismembered by the women, Pentheus starts showing the signs of an interior(ized) sparagmos, thereby confirming the idea that the process of sparagmos should not be necessarily meant as a literal dismemberment. Metaphorically speaking, sparagmos can be associated with processes of deconstruction and dissection. Sparagmos can also be likened to a split personality resulting from a traumatic experience. Furthermore, and most importantly, sparagmos can be investigated as a theatrical paradigm, namely as the process of splitting the fictional character into two distinct dramatis personae: the actor and the role, or theatrical character and dramatic character. With regard to the Gaoian model, the meta-dramatic sparagmos can be said to go well beyond the mere perception of one’s Self as an-other and to express a mechanism of de-humanization of the Self, to dramatize the condition of the post-human. In her article “Theatrical Impulse and Post-humanism,” Yan Haiping argues that the characters of Gao Xingjian’s post-exile plays can be construed as incarnations of the modern Self’s struggle for integrity “in its subsequent journeys within a turbulent world of posthumanist if not posthuman modernity.”117 While Yan maintains that Gao’s theatre is an attempt to resuscitate the centrality of the Self by endowing it with a renewed “theatrical agency,” I would suggest that the “posthumanist impulse” of Gao’s theatre, as Yan calls it, lies in a complex exchange of opposing energies aimed both at constructing, 117  Haiping Yan, “Theatrical Impulse and Posthumanism: Gao Xingjian’s ‘Another Kind of Drama,’” World Literature Today, 2001, no. 1, vol. 75, p. 23.

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deconstructing, and refashioning the theatrical Self. The Self is placed in a condition of entrapment, then persecuted, tortured, and eventually crushed. Literally, the Self is crumbled in order to probe its limits. The posthumanist impulse in Gao’s drama is, further again, one of the multiple manifestations of the Dionysian sparagmos. The connection between the Dionysian sparagmos and the posthuman condition is further enhanced Matteo Colombi and Massimo Fusillo’s recent study on Artaud and the posthuman condition. By associating it with “the destructive experience of dismemberment that culminates in the creation of a new energy and identity,” they define it as “a mythic antecedent of the posthuman vision of the body.”118 While a full discussion of the posthuman condition would fall outside the purview of this book, I think it is important to mention that, in my opinion, Gao’s unique performance mode verges on the posthuman not because it creates multiple selves or connections between different parts of the self, thereby giving birth to a composite, non-natural subject,119 but rather because it enacts the demise of the idea of the human being as an in-dividual, one that has full possession of him/herself. What emerges from reading Gao’s plays is not the perception of a different type of being being born (or reborn) but of a pile of human rubble, which cannot by any means be recomposed. This image, I believe, ties in well with Gao’s view of modern man’s predicament as the impossibility of being freed from the grip of the hegemony of the Self. Moreover, by referring to Antonin Artaud’s theatrical ideal of a “theatre of cruelty,” Colombi and Fusillo relate the Dionysian sparagmos and its energetic impulse to the ritualistic performance patterns of East Asian theatres. Taking into account Gao’s fascination with Artaud, Colombi and Fusillo’s argument may be used to strengthen the connection with Gao’s hybrid and transcultural view of drama. They argue: Whereas psychologism deals with emotions as if they were abstract ideas and tries to describe and understand them rationally, Surrealism considers emotions as energies, which—emanating from the depths of the human unconscious—must be experienced at a distant remove from the judgements of the rational mind. Artaud demands a theatre that puts the unconscious and its emotions-cum-energies on centre stage, 118  Matteo Colombi and Massimo Fusillo, “Artaud, Barney, and the Total Work of Art from Avant-Garde to the Posthuman,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2013, no. 7, vol. 15, p. 3. 119  N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago 1999: University of Chicago Press, p. 3.

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hence his interest in non-Western(ized) cultures, whose performative ritual and magic traditions are based—as Artaud is wont to claim—on an “energetic” view of the world.120 As we shall see more clearly later on, in the context of Gao’s dramaturgy of shifting pronouns, the individual is simultaneously Self and Other, but his individuality is also made of deeply interconnected fragments. Whether it is a body that performs and a voice that narrates (in the third person), or interacts with itself (in the second person), or communicates with a second character (in the first person), there is always an interstitial thirdspace characterized by conflicting energies whose collision generates a multiplicity of rifts and cracks. The individual does not speculate on the tragic, nor does he or she put forward a tragic vision of his/her own; rather, he or she performs in the tragic mode, experiencing and communicating a kind of “morphogenetic fracture … a boundless caesura, an immense and unmendable crisis, … which cannot be compared to whatsoever other generative force.”121 By reconceptualising Gao’s performance mode as a manifestation of the tragic that inheres in the universe as an ancestral reality, one can cast a new and refreshed perspective on the rather vague concept of “performance in alienated voices,”122 which was initially coined to make sense of this specific dramatic device. In Chapter Three I shall attempt to show that Gao’s characters are not “alienated” in the sense of being isolated from the outside world, unable to communicate with their fellow human beings, and simultaneously estranged from themselves in the often-failed attempt to free themselves from their own subjectivities, but rather variously possessed by their internal daimon. They do not experience an “alienation” of personality but rather an invasion of personality from within as they perform an exploration of their own enigmatic subjectivities. The outcome of such a powerful invasion is not the impossibility to get rid of the Self but the frustration of being left with bits and pieces of it. With reference to Richard Hornby’s metadramatic theories, we can say that Gao’s characters role-play to signify not only their split personality but also their ontological insecurity.123 As with Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, who is regarded as a classic prototype of a role-playing figure,124 the tragic potential 120  Colombi and Fusillo, “Artaud, Barney,” p. 5. 121  Silvia Capodivacca, Sul Tragico. Tra Nietzsche e Freud (On The Tragic. Between Nietzsche and Freud), University of Padua 2010, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Padua, p. 57. 122  Quah, Gao Xingjian, p. 130. 123  Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception, Lewisburg, Pa.; London c1986: Bucknell University Press, p. 81. 124  Ibid., p. 81.

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of Gao’s performance mode resides in the contradiction between having multiple identities and having none. Ibsen uses the gesture performed by Peer of peeling an onion as a metaphor of searching for the core of his Self, which lies under the several layers of his previous identities. Still, he finds out that there is no kernel at all. Similarly, I will show that Gao’s characters delve deeply into their Self, searching every corner of it, but end up being consumed by it, swallowed up in a tunnel of darkness, possibly with more tragic implications than Peer’s or Oedipus’. 6

Bonds and Boundaries: the Gaoian Self as a Tragic Field

Patrice Pavis has defined dramatic space as a fictional realm—as opposed to the visible physical space of the stage—whose “construction depends as much on indications given by the playwright as on our own imagination.”125 He further notes that, from the perspective of the audience, the crisscrossing of the dramatic space and the scenic space is the spark that ignites that particular phenomenon called “theatrical illusion” or willing suspension of disbelief, whereby a play’s spectator will suppose the reality and the authenticity of the staged events and of the spatial dimension in which they occur. This idea that a collaborative relationship between actors and audience— and between text and performance—informs the production of the dramatic space tallies with the principle of the suppositionality of theatre ( juchang jiadingxing), which is a crucial element of Gao Xingjian’s (mainly post-exile) dramaturgical system. Throughout his long artistic career, Gao has systematically documented the cornerstones of his theatrical vision in the form of authored essays, interviews, and suggestions for staging each individual play. In particular, he has effectively supported and expanded on the notion of “total actor” and “omnipotent theatre,” whereby a performer should be well-trained in a number of fields of artistic expression in order to uphold the multiple potentialities of the theatrical medium. These notions originated from his rediscovery of the traditional and folk theatre customs of his homeland, for in pre-modern China the theatre was considered as a kaleidoscopic mixture of artistic practices and skills, coexisting and cooperating within the same space. The concept of omnipotent theatre links directly to the notion of suppositionality, which Gao maintains is also of Chinese descent126 while also being 125  Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis, trans. by Christine Schantz, Toronto and Buffalo 1998: Toronto University Press, p. 118. 126  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theatre, p. 95.

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in dialogue with similar experimentalist dramaturgies in twentieth-century Western theatre—particularly the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, which Gao admired and appropriated. Suppositionality, or jiadingxing in Gao’s original vocabulary, indicates the creative potential of the dramatic space, which, thanks to a non-mimetic style of performance and a minimal mise-en-scène, can foster the audience’s imagination to an extent that such space can acquire different, suppositional, identities. As Gao has explained, suppositionality (or hypotheticality, as per Henry Zhao’s earlier translation of the term) infuses the dramatic space with a dimension of boundlessness to which the audience themselves are an active contributor. In Chinese theatre, this is typically achieved through the usage of a bare stage with a very limited amount of stage props. The actors’ words and gestures work towards conveying the atmosphere of the story as they carry the audience into their fictional world. In Gao’s phrasing, this would be the result of the encounter of “somatics” and “language,” which would generate a “psychological field.”127 Most of Gao’s post-exile dramaturgy, starting from the pre-exile play The Other Shore, enacts the transformation of the physical stage space into a vibrating field of energies. However, I argue that instead of stemming from the interaction between actors and audience—as in Chinese theatre—the dramatic space is a direct reflection of the dramatis personae’s internal clash of individualities in what seems an excruciating psychic fight. The audience seems excluded from this ongoing, self-referential (battle-)field, which is circumscribed to the private world of the actor-characters.128 It is the dyad that I call “the Other-within-the-Self”—i.e. the coexistence of Self and Other within a single psychic entity of the character—who mentally generates, negotiates, and re-shapes the dramatic space. Nevertheless, such a subjective spatiality, though “mobile” in a sense, does not function as a signifier of infinity or of omnipotence from the character’s perspective.129 On the contrary, it is 127  Ibid., p. 96. 128  As this study is concerned with the original Gaoian texts rather than with performance productions, I am obviously not in a position to chart audience’s responses to Gao’s performance mode. Still, as I anticipated in the introduction, I maintain that what Gao states theoretically about his performance ideal does not necessarily reflect the dynamisms that are observable in the actual play-texts. 129  In this sense, I do not agree with Coulter who sees Gao’s actor as a “tiered actor” and argues that “Gao’s dissection of the individual ultimately creates a sense of freedom and liberation for the artist because he/she enters a dialogue with him/herself free from linguistic and cultural constrictions”. (Transcultural Aesthetics, pp. 14; 67). In my opinion, the subjectivity subsumed by Gao’s performance mode is a shattered one, portraying modern man’s predicament, i.e. a Self in ruins.

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associated with copious images of restriction and confinement that visually translates the characters’ sense of their own finitude and existential angst. My reconfiguration of Gao’s dramaturgy of shifting pronouns through a tragic framework of reference based on the dyad Dionysus-Pentheus in The Bacchae, enables us to view the relationship Self-Other as a sort of hypothetical thirdspace defined by a dialectical interchange of opposite energies. Trapped within such a space, which actually resembles a battleground, the character tries hard to “comprehend” him/self, thereby following an ancestral impulse, which is encapsulated in the ancient Greek proverb Gnoti sauton (“know thyself”). “To comprehend” literally means “to seize” or “to embrace,” and the fulfilment of such an aspiration is unfortunately bound to stumble against a reality wherein the Self is an entity that we “host” yet we do not “own.” Under this rubric, the Self as the object of a quest can, too, be understood in spatial terms, as a microcosm defined by specific spatial coordinates. It becomes a locus, a center of inner concentration. In theorizing his concept of “human space” or “contemporary space,” Georges Matoré reviews the thoughts of several intellectuals and critics and maintains that the center is a “polarizing element, … a principle of existence,”130 a psychic space that identifies with the source of all things, and more specifically with the soul. In Gao’s case, I would argue, the soul is the host-site in which the Self, as center, is rooted. Matoré then goes on to note that “in the circle or psychic sphere, the attention can concentrate either on a single point (the centre), or on two points diametrically opposed that … more often than not, act on each other, thereby introducing among themselves  … a dialectical game of contradiction or complementarity.”131 Here, the center mutates into a field (champ), a notion which inheres in quantum physics and that Matoré characterizes as “contemporary space,”132 no longer passive but active; no longer merely decorative but dynamic, and capable of disclosing a network of magnetic forces, which is “independent from the source.”133 By positing the Gaoian Self as an entity that is simultaneously an I and an Other, something that at the same time is the individual yet also transcends him/her, there are reasons for re-envisioning it as a magnetic field of opposite polarities, in which context the individual ceases to be the master of his own house and becomes a subordinate. As a field, the Gaoian Self

130  Georges Matoré, L’espace human (The Human Space), Paris 1962: La Colombe, p. 98. 131  Ibid., p. 100. 132  Ibid., p. 101. 133  Ibid.

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qualifies as a “portion of space,”134 and, most importantly, as an area “neatly and deliberately delimited, within which an action can develop.”135 The spatial metaphor is not limited to the Self per se but also encompasses Gao’s definition of it as predicament. In the original Chinese phrase, Gao uses the word kunjing, which has a much more spatialized meaning than its (French-based) English counterpart. While the latter derives from the Latin translation of the ancient Greek for “category,” the former consists of two syllables, the first (kun) meaning “to surround,” and the second ( jing) meaning “border” or “territory.” Visually, the logogram for kun represents a tree in a small enclosure and can serve as primary component of terms indicating difficulty, challenge, or complication. It is essential to note that kunjing emphasizes the fall into the abyss of the self and the experience of the limit, and it is therefore substantially different from the notion of kujing, which highlights the element of grief and is considered to be the aesthetic focus of traditional Chinese beiju.136 Bearing this differentiation in mind, it is therefore inevitable, I argue, to associate the Gaoian notion of Self-as-kunjing with Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of consciousness as a series of choices taken against “a resistant world.”137 In a dramatic context, this translates into Sartre’s well-known proposal for a theatre of situation, where “situation” serves as a dramatic device, a way of spatializing the experience of the Self. On a further note, in the second part of this study we shall see how in Gao’s plays what appears initially as a situation will gradually develop into a condition. The difference, still according to Matoré, is that a situation “expresses a choice that happens within a physical space,” whereas condition is “an originally non-spatial notion which postulates a determinism.”138 In other words, a situation still be solved but a condition is pre-determined and therefore unalterable, no matter what. Still, I slightly differ from Matoré’s position because I maintain that the notion of “condition” can be much more relatable to a tragic space than the notion of “situation,” as the ensuing case-by-case analysis will demonstrate. 134  Albert Burloud, quoted in ibid., p. 102. 135  Ibid., p. 102. Emphasis added. 136  The notion of kujing has been discussed at length in Yang Jiangwen’s study Zhongguo gudian beiju shi (History of Chinese Classical Tragedy), Wuhuan 1994: Wuhan chubanshe. The author defines it as “an artistic-dramatic situation burdened by a heavy bei( ju)-like aesthetic sentiment/atmosphere, born from the fusion of dismal scenes (jingqu canliang), pathetic songs (changnian qichu), heart-rending arias (quci ai’shang) and sorrowful narratives (shi ku shi bei)” (205). 137  Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Sartre: Literature and Theory, Cambridge 1984: Cambridge University Press, p. 113. 138  Matoré, L’Espace humain, pp. 138–139.

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Before developing my definition of the Gaoian Self as a field of opposite forces—a notion that I borrow from William Storm’s own terminology—which ties in well with his mention of the dramatic space as a “psychological field,” it is essential to briefly explain how the concept of kunjing expresses the tragic. In my opinion, the tragic quality of kunjing should be ascribed not so much to its unpleasantness but rather to its being based on a series of limits that, as paradoxical as it may sound, generate a revelatory experience for the characters involved. Walls that open secret inner doors, thresholds whose crossing entails gaining exposure to the fundamental structures of being, even if it amounts to a negative kind of knowledge, one that will make the individual all the more conscious of the unattainability of the Self. Thanks to the intensification of the limit as a spatial coordinate of the magnetic field of the Self, the Gaoian characters will learn that the Self can also be treacherous, unsafe, and two-faced. On a more practical level, Gao’s plays will exemplify “an irreducible contradiction”139 still to be described in spatial terms, as “an irreducible distance between the limit that constitutes the finitude of humanity … and … the passion for the infinite.”140 Once again, we return to the notion of field, as the distance between two different gravitation centers—finitude and infinity, Self and Other—engenders a tension, a potency that is continuously nurtured by the attractive-repulsive relationship between opposite polarities. The Gaoian characters experience such a field as the center of their existence, one that swings between the two extremes of self-affirmation and self-annihilation, where the Self is omnipresent yet impossible to grasp entirely. The Gaoian psychic field is therefore boldly Ego-centric, for there is no other aspiration than to transcend the limits of one’s physical body in an attempt to become like God. Occurring within the “four walls” of the characters’ disturbed psyche, the predicament that Gao Xingjian associates with the modern condition and with dramatic tragedy coincides with a constrictive yet chameleonic space, whose rapid changes are not so much to be ascribed to the principle of suppositionality but to the changing nature of the (devilish) Self, whose ambiguous nature makes it prone to transform from safe haven to a place of detention, from a womb (of possible rebirth) to a tomb. In Between Life and Death, for example, Woman’s desperate attempt at self-analysis through a voluntary immersion in the world of her past memories, where she hopes to re-join her own true Self, generates a situation of inescapable captivity: the dramatic space grows into a locked room populated with images of restriction and terror and which, in turn, continues to evolve acquiring further spatial connotations of uncanny nature. 139  Ibid., p. 2. 140  Ibid. First emphasis added. Second and third emphasis in the text.

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These, as we shall better see in Chapter Three, extinguish the main character’s individuality by accentuating her gender-based conflicts and sense of internal divisiveness. The overwhelming presence of “She,” which possesses the bodymind of Woman like a daimon—the primitive force sprouting from the depths of interiority—determines not only her complete disintegration into a series of scattered fragments but also her psychophysical annihilation as she is reduced to a bunch of abandoned clothes. To mention one further example, in The Death Collector, This Man’s casual search for a temporary shelter turns into a sort of death-hunt, performed upon the impulse of a mysterious doppelgänger. The latter, too, acts as a kind of daimonic consciousness in that he leads the protagonist simultaneously towards self-discovery and selfdestruction. Interestingly, in this play self-discovery relates to an altered perception of the surrounding space, which signifies That Man’s individual predicament, from beginning to end. What changes is That Man’s perception of himself as trapped in that space: first he envisions himself as becoming part of the museum collection—himself a victim of the degeneration of art—whereas subsequently, he views the museum as a reflection of his own personal decadence and mortal condition. This fluctuating relationship of cohesion with the environment engenders a deep division within the Self that paves the way for his subsequent splitting, thereby generating a tragic field. To conclude, the Gaoian tragic field of the Self can be said to be a combination of what György Lukács indicates as the tragic and the mystic modes. In The Metaphysics of Tragedy (1981), he writes: … the mystical and the tragic modes of experiencing life touch and supplement one another and mutually exclude one another. Both mysteriously combine life and death, autonomous selfhood and the total dissolving of the self in a higher being. Surrender is the mystic’s way, struggle the tragic man’s; the one, at the end of his road, is absorbed into the All, the other shattered against the All.141 If we link Lukács’ observations with William Storm’s,142 we can see that the tragic mechanism, due to its Dionysian, dualistic quality, oscillates between the opposite poles of annihilation (in the All) and fight (against the All), which 141  György Lukács, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy”, in Corrigan (ed.), Tragedy: Vision and Form, p. 82. 142  Although Storm mentions Lukács’ essay on the tragic in his book, it should be noted that he limits himself to quote Lukács’ idea that “the essence of tragedy is selfhood.” Hence, he does not use his theory of the opposition between the mystic and the tragic as a support to his argument.

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equal Storm’s concepts of cohesion (of the character with its daimon) and division (of the character from its own Self). The result, at any rate, consists in the disintegration of the subject’s own sense of identity, a metaphorical downfall into a pit of darkness. This is why I think that the Gaoian tragic Self is fairly incompatible with the Daoist notion of hundun, for the latter refers to “the ideal state of oneness with the Dao”143—or, in this case, with the so-called “Originary Self,”144 which in Zen Buddhism designates “human existence in the primordial state,”145 namely “the state before language itself.”146 I would rather characterize the latter as “Hegemonic Self,” in relation to Bert O. State’s notion of a super-character inhabiting the interstices of a play’s cosmos.147 Like Dionysus, the god of drama, it pulls the individual’s Self from within, controlling it and pushing it to self-exhaustion, to a condition of post- rather than pre-. I therefore concur with Fong who argues that “while Daoism and Buddhism aspire for understanding the Dao, Gao Xingjian insists on knowing and studying the self and its inner secrets in all its complexities; while the former represents inner peace, Gao Xingjian finds only pain and suffering, and unfortunately, there appears to be no salvation.”148 In other words, what the Gaoian tragic performance mode ultimately achieves is not fulfillment but sparagmos. In the next chapter, I will further delve into the notion of the tragic field as a performative device, and in so doing I will explain in more detail how I reworked and adapted to Gao’s dramaturgy a concept originally developed by William Storm in After Dionysus. 143  Livia Kohn, Sitting in Oblivion: The Heart of Taoist Meditation, Dunedin, FL 2010: Three Pines Press, p. 25. 144  For a thorough discussion of the originary self in Gao Xingjian’s play Between Life and Death, see Mary Mazzilli, “Gender in Gao Xingjian’s Between Life and Death: The Notion of the Originary Self and the Use of Tripartition,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2015, no. 3, vol. 9., pp. 369–394. 145  Terry Siu Han Yip and Kwok-kan Tam, “Gender and Self in Gao Xingjian’s Three Post-Exile Plays,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 217. 146  Mazzilli associates the originary self with Lacan’s idea of the subject before the mirror stage. See Mazzilli, Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, p. 57. 147  See n. 50 in the Introduction. 148  Gilbert Fong, “Gao Xingjian and the Idea of the Theatre,” in Soul of Chaos, pp. 154–155.

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Chapter 2

Toward a Theatre of the Tragic: The Bus Stop, The Other Shore, and the Transition from Absurdity to Tragedy 1

Introduction: Gao Xingjian’s (Tragic) Modernism: from the Homeland to Existence

Gao Xingjian’s dramatic œuvre has been categorized in many ways— experimentalist, absurdist, existentialist, transcultural, transnational, and more recently, postdramatic.1 Through the nearly forty years that Gao has been active as a playwright-cum-director, both in China and abroad, his repertoire has undoubtedly undergone various stages of maturation and has reached a high degree of individualization. A leading figure of the Chinese experimentalist theatre movement of the early 1980s,2 Gao soon oriented his work towards 1  Mary Mazzilli, who has redefined Gao’s post-exile plays as postdramatic, concludes her study by arguing, in a more nuanced way, that Gao’s theatre sits at the crossroads of the dramatic and the postdramatic for “transcendence does not mean leaving the dramatic behind.” In Gao Xingjian’s Post-Exile Plays, p. 226. 2  The Chinese experimentalist theatre (shiyan xiju), also known as theatre of exploration (tansuo xiju) or, in a more Westernized manner, as avant-garde theatre (xianfeng xiju), emerged during the last two decades of the twentieth century, following a period of relative political and intellectual relaxation that coincided with the consolidation of a reform and opening-up program spearheaded by PRC president Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Generally regarded as a sort of cultural renaissance after the artistic repression and state-imposed uniformity that characterized the years of the Maoist dictatorship, such movement was triggered by the playwrights’ desire to rethink the essence of theatre with particular attention to questions of form, style, and mise-en-scène. In an attempt to establish new and non-conventional aesthetics, the various theatrical experiments of the 1980s combined Western-style nonmimetic modes of dramatic presentation (epic, existentialist, absurdist, postmodern) with traditional styles of Chinese and Asian performance, thereby displaying a simultaneously extracultural and intracultural dynamism. As with the Western avant-garde, they aimed to explore uncharted aspects of reality and to cast thought-provoking messages within the framework of innovative aesthetic modes that would encourage the audience’s intellectual participation in the theatrical event. One further seminal aspect thereof was the close collaboration between playwrights and directors, which greatly steered modern spoken Chinese drama away from the predominance of the literary text and towards the rediscovery of an allembracing, skill-based, and extremely diverse theatrical language that had been buried for decades. For more information on Gao Xingjian’s role in the emergence of the Chinese theatrical avant-garde of the 1980s, see: Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre; Quah, Gao Xingjian

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_004

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the eradication of Western dramatic realism, which had played a major role in China in the emergence of modern spoken drama (huaju) at the turn of the twentieth century and had been the only accepted model during the Maoist age. The latter was grounded on Henrik Ibsen’s naturalistic playwriting and on Konstantin Stanislavski’s acting system, which endorsed psychological realism and subconscious character creation. The Gaoian theatrical experiments at home, which were the fruit of a joint collaboration with director Lin Zhaohua, were issued in three coproductions3 which, though criticized for their ideological subversiveness and aesthetic nonconformity, earned him the appellation of “father of the new wave.”4 Determined to re-theatricalize the medium of drama by enhancing its performative aspects, Gao introduced new techniques of theatrical presentation, which were aimed at breaking the illusion of reality, thereby erasing the boundary between the world of the stage and that of the audience. Particularly noteworthy were his attempts at adapting composite musical patterns into new forms of stage dialogue (polyphony [ fudiao] and multivocality [duoshengbu]). These were aimed at offering a multifaceted angle on reality, as the latter was no longer construed as absolute, unilateral, and unvarying but rather as plural and questionable. Through the technique of shifting pronouns, discussed above, he intended to unveil the characters’ psychological complexity and give the actors the opportunity to assess and comment on the actions and behaviors of their assigned roles. In short, the alternative dramaturgy that Gao helped forge in the 1980s in China was intrinsically multi-layered, multidisciplinary, and self-referential. As such, he not only represented a radical break with the past but also laid the foundation for an emerging intellectual counter discourse. As Rossella Ferrari notes, the Chinese avant-garde (including Gao) incorporated “three different discourses: the native cultural system rooted in Chinese tradition; new conceptual strategies assimilated from the West; and the Party-State’s institutional hegemony.”5 After his self-exile, Gao further developed his own aesthetic search, which continued to follow a transnational trajectory in an attempt to transcend discrete cultural categories and to explore more in depth the psychological and emotional processes that make us human.

and Transcultural Chinese Theatre; Yeung, Ink Dances in Limbo; Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, and, most notably, Ferrari, Pop goes the Avant-Garde. 3  These are Alarm Signal, Bus Stop, and Wild Man. For more information on them, see n. 7–9. 4  Wu Wenguang, cited in Ferrari, Pop Goes the Avant-Garde, pp. 26–27. 5  Ibid., p. 35.

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The variety of Gao’s sources of inspiration, which include modern Western paradigms (Brecht’s epic theatre, Grotowski’s poor theatre, Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, and the French Theatre of the Absurd), Western classical traditions (ancient Greek theatre, Shakespearean drama) and classical Chinese drama (xiqu), prompted scholars such as Henry Zhao to subdivide the development of Gao’s chameleonic dramaturgical system into a series of well-defined compartments. Zhao’s periodization is not limited to Gao’s dramatic repertoire but comprehends the whole of his pre- and post-exile works up to 1997. He groups Gao’s plays into three stages as follows: “Explorative/Socially Committed” (Alarm Signal 1982, The Bus Stop 1983, Six Short Plays 1984, Wild Man 1985 and Escape 1990); “Mythological/Ritual” (The Other Shore 1986, Necropolis 1988, Tales of Mountain and Seas 1989) and “Zen/Xieyi” (Between Life and Death 1991, Dialogue and Rebuttal 1993, The Sleepwalker 1994 and Snow in August 1997). Since Zhao’s framework does not include more recent works, and since its underlying criteria are not always easy to discern, I shall put forward an alternative scheme, which will be of use for my re-definition of Gao’s (particularly post-exile) dramaturgy as a form of tragedy. The main criterion I adopt coincides with the pursuit of modernity, which has been one of the major concerns of Gao’s artistic itinerary since the beginning of his career as a theatre-practitioner. In effect, the adjective “modern” (xiandai) is a recurrent element in the majority of Gao’s theoretical essays on literature and drama. In Techniques of modern fiction (Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan 1981), a collection of essays exploring the characteristics of the modernist novel, Gao introduces and discusses a variety of literary devices in Western modernist literature, which include the stream of consciousness (yishi liu), and the defamiliarisation effect (juli gan). To these, he adds his own theory of the shifting pronouns (rencheng de zhuanhuan), which I have reinterpreted as the Gaoian “tragic mode.” In Towards a Modern Drama (Dui yi zhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu 1987), a collection of self-reflexive writings on dramaturgy and performance theory, Gao illustrates the different concepts underlying his work as a dramatist, paying particular attention to how Western modernist and avant-garde theatres influenced his rediscovery of traditional Chinese theatre practices. Although it refers to his early pre-exile work, this book is important because it documents Gao’s endeavor to achieve a synthesis of Chinese and foreign cultural elements, which is central to his early project of creating a “modern Eastern drama” (xiandai dongfang xiju). In “Another Kind of Drama” (“Ling yi zhong de xiju,” 1995), Gao seems to go one step further by declaring the absolute originality of his work. Despite having been variously associated with several European avant-garde theatrical schools, as well as Chinese indigenous literary

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trends such as the so-called “root-seeking literature” (xungen wenxue),6 Gao does not identify with any school and prefers to call his work as a series of attempts at establishing “another kind of drama”—something inherently personal and able to hold an independent role in the history of both Chinese and world theatre. Unsurprisingly, “Indépendence totale” (total independence) has always been one of his favorite catchphrases.7 Taking the search for modernity as a guiding principle for documenting Gao’s dramatic experiments, one can theorize two major phases, which coincide chronologically with the pre- and post-exile plays, with some overlapping. In the first phase, which encompasses the early plays Alarm Signal,8 The Bus Stop,9 and Wild Man,10 the pursuit of modernity is tied to the realities 6  This was a literary trend that emerged in the mid-1980s dealing with the issue of cultural reconstruction in Chinese fiction. For more on this, see Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. by Michael M. Day, Leiden 2007: Brill, pp. 366–372. 7  Gilbert Fong, “Introduction: Marginality and Zen in Omnipotent Theatre,” in Gao Xingjian, Snow in August, trans. by Gilbert Fong, Hong Kong 2003: The Chinese University Press, p. ix. 8  Gao’s first play, Alarm Signal, which Zhao describes as an “apprentice work” (Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 69), is based on a newspaper article on railway workers that Gao had read and bears the mark of state-imposed ideological realism. To write the play, Gao spent some time among freight train workers to draw his characters from real life. The play focuses on an attempted train robbery which is eventually foiled by the youngest member of the gang (Blackie), who happens to be a good friend of the apprentice train guard (Trumpet). Blackie solves his inner conflict and decides to fight against his ex-boss (the leader of the gang), thus choosing to become an honest person. The play’s content clearly conveys a pedagogic message and has a didactic purpose. In this connection, Zhao even compares its story to that of the return of the prodigal son (p. 68). 9  The Bus Stop, which I shall deal with in more detail below, focuses on a group of people of different ages and backgrounds waiting for a bus that never comes but at one point is heard running past them without stopping. The characters complain with one another about how they are stuck at the bus stop without any possibility of changing their situation, and among their comments are several remarks on contemporaneous problems in Chinese society, including a few straightforward references to negative consequences of the open door policy. It is evident that the content of the play mainly revolves around the way in which their individual expectations end in a sort of collective disappointment (with the exception of one character, The Silent Man), so it easy to discern Gao’s pessimistic view of the social changes characterizing the early stage of the post-Mao era. 10  Gao’s third play, Wild Man, focuses on various issues related to the preservation of the natural environment in the PRC. The play is set in southern China in the area of the Yangzi River. The protagonist is an ecologist who has come to a forested area from the city to assess the ecological impact of deforestation and other environmental evils. His work is hampered by local cadres, who are absorbed by the story of the Wild Man, and they are persuaded that the ecologist has come to look for this strange creature. Another theme that is central to this play and is closely connected to environmental disaster is the gradual disappearance of the folk culture of Southern China, which had been deliberately

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of post-socialist Chinese society. These plays present real problems faced by the Chinese people in an era of transition. These plays share a preoccupation with what I would call “the predicament of the modern Chinese person.” From a dramaturgical perspective, in this first phase, modernity coincides with the adoption of a symbolic, antinaturalistic theatrical style, resulting from a mixture of native and Western elements, and by transforming the written script of each play into a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk. In the second phase, Gao’s search for modernity is mainly intended as a means of depicting the crisis of the universal modern man11—a task that he achieved by enhancing his notion of psychological field. As previously noted, this crisis has to do with the fragmentation of the Self, a topic which has found a competent conceptualization and thematization—among others—in the writings of the Italian novelist, dramatist, and Nobelist Luigi Pirandello (1867– 1936). For Pirandello, the fragmentation of the Self coincides with the idea that the individual Self as a unitary entity does not exist but has to bear the burden of multiple identities imposed on him/her by society. To survive in modern society, the individual has to metaphorically wear a mask, because he has to behave according to the way in which other people see him/her. The social mask is directly related to the concept of the theatrical mask. That is why in Pirandello’s plays the boundary between reality and fiction, drama and life is not always clear, due to the presence of metadramatic elements. Therefore, we can say that the fragmentation of the Self is not merely a narrative pattern but a mode of being which affects each person’s manner of inhabiting this world and interacting with his counterparts. The Pirandellian mode is in full dialogue with the Gaoian tragic mode essentially for two reasons. First, because for the Italian playwright, such a mode is an indelible obstacle in man’s search for authenticity and freedom of “being”; and second, because the coexistence of a multiplicity of Selves in each of his dramatic characters (and not only in theatre), is not a mere theatrical device but a means of debunking the myth of the separation between theatre and life, and between reality and fiction. In other suppressed by the Chinese government, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. The play abounds in performances of folk rituals, dances, and songs, as well as examples of epic story-telling. As Zhao remarks: “It is possible to say that this could be a piece of theatre total [sic] as dreamed of by Artaud, as it contains ballad-singing, mask-dance, Luo opera, wedding and funeral ritual, as well as modern dancing that simulates earth, forests, floods, crowds of people, and emotions.” In Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, pp. 82–83. 11  I omit from this new periodization the post-exile plays Necropolis, Tale of Mountains and Seas and Snow in August, because they represent exceptions among the post-exile repertoire. Their content is, in fact, based either on a dramatization of ancient Chinese literary works (Necropolis and Mountains) and/or the life of Chinese historical characters (Snow).

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words, the theatrical masks are not there to “hide” the crude reality but to lay it bare. That is why he calls them “naked masks.” As Maurizio Grande explains, “Pirandello’s metatheatre does not expose the theatrical fiction of the theatre; rather, it shows the theatrical fiction that exists in life.”12 Likewise, Gao’s tragic mode, which consists in assigning his post-exile characters with a schismatic identity, simultaneously an I and an Other, is to be seen as a mode of presentation of the human psyche as it really is—an entity in continuous search for individuation and mental stability—and not as a mere theatrical device aimed at facilitating introspection or self-control. I argue that the terms of Gao’s tragic turn, which begins with The Other Shore and develops towards the formulation of the tragic mode in his postexile production, are contained in his 1990 definition of tragedy. By shifting the focus from “politics and the will of others”—which could be easily related to the Communist dictatorial regime back home—to the tyranny of the Self as the main site of tragic disruption, Gao has expressed the paradigm shift of his dramaturgy in tragic terms and through the language of tragedy. This is not to say that tragedy cannot dramatize the political struggle of the Chinese society under and after Mao, nor do I mean that the impediment of the individual’s freedom by the state is not a suitable topic for tragedy. My point here is to show that Gao’s tragic turn coincided with his decision to delve into the human psyche regardless of national and historical specificities, and with a more or less systematic usage of forms of metatheatre, which enabled him to go beyond the idea of theatre-as-fiction and thereby uphold his view of life as a condensed theatre of the tragic. As a result, I argue that Gao’s tragic turn, like Pirandello’s, aims at debunking the myth of the formidable, indestructible Self, which is exemplified in the apparently enigmatic character of the Silent Man in The Bus Stop. This character, the prototype of the “action man” who compensates his uncommunicativeness with a marked ability to take choices and move on from a situation that does not benefit him, is a fleeting presence in Gao’s repertoire and is not to be seen again in the subsequent “non-Chinese” plays. He demonstrates mental solidity and absolute freedom of action that no one can destroy or undermine; nevertheless, we have no access to his mind. Not only is he vocally absent but his thoughts and psychic world are also off-limits. Unlike his fellow-passengers he has no personal story to tell, no aspirations to cultivate and no frustrations to vent; he is nothing more than a shadow, someone who in the end does not 12   Maurizio Grande, “Pirandello and the Theatre-within-the-Theatre: Thresholds and Frames in Ciascuno a suo modo,” in Gian-Paolo Biasin and Manuela Gieri (eds.), Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto 1999: University of Toronto Press, p. 56.

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leave behind a sufficiently deep trace of himself, apart from the musical motif played several times after his departure, to counteract the other characters’ ridiculous inertia. In my opinion, the Silent Man’s disappearance from the theatrical arena in The Bus Stop represents the demise from Gao’s drama of a certain idea of the Self and of the individual. If, within the framework of this particular play, the Silent Man serves to show the contrast between what could be possibly done and what is not done—between the ideal and the real—and to demarcate the fact that the dramatic field is not in the least closed off, and if we read it in the context of the tragic turn I am theorizing, it becomes evident that this character epitomizes the dawn of dramatic absurdity and prepares the ground for the rise of dramatic tragedy. In other words, the Silent Man emphasizes the absurdity of the situation (the characters can find a solution to their predicament but do not take the opportunity to do so), yet his persona appears more fictional than real, thereby doubling the sense of absurdity. As this chapter will show, the alternative to the Silent Man, which variously recurs in all the post-exile plays of Self from The Other Shore onwards, is what William Storm has defined “the reconceived tragic man,” frantically striving to attain the privilege of individuation which is firmly denied to him. On a further note, I argue that another fundamental trait that distinguishes Gao’s tragic turn is the adoption of what seems to me an “archetypical modality,” namely, the tendency to further reduce the dramatis personae to “original, or founding images or figures,”13 which convey the allure of a mythical atmosphere. Although not offering adaptations or rewritings of recognizable original myths (as in Sartre and Camus), Gao’s post-exile plays of Self do enact a distinctive mythical narrative, which has similarities with Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of the myth as “the impulse towards sacred meaning,”14 as we shall see partly here and more in detail in the next chapter. Since abundant research has been done on Gao’s approach to the absurd in his dramas, relevant details thereof will be provided in the discussion below on The Bus Stop and The Other Shore. Through textual analysis of these two works, this chapter aims to reconstruct the transition from absurdity to tragedy, which affects the latter play and is anticipated in the former. I argue that The Bus Stop contains a few pre-tragic elements that deserve to be highlighted and further investigated. The rest of this chapter is divided into four sections. The first scrutinizes Gao’s treatment of the absurd and, more specifically, of the Beckettian source, and the relationship between The Bus Stop, Waiting for Godot, and the notion of absurdity. The analysis below seeks to understand 13  Laurence Coupe, Myth, London 1997: Routledge, p. 131. 14  Ibid.

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what kind of absurdity Gao produced, and whether or not The Bus Stop can be described as an absurdist play. In this regard, I aim to show that The Bus Stop does contain elements of absurdist drama, which helped pave the way for Gao’s later tragic turn. The second section discusses in further detail the concept of the tragic field as a performative device, thereby providing a model to be used for the analysis of The Other Shore in the third section. The concluding section aims to show how the transition from absurdity to a different kind of drama has been portrayed in scholarly criticism on Gao Xingjian’s works. These critical contributions will be examined to further support my re-reading of Gao’s theatre as a form of tragedy. 2

The Bus Stop: Absurd or Pre-tragic?

The majority of academic studies dealing with Gao’s most famous pre-exile play, The Bus Stop, seem to agree on the fact that, despite his repeated attempts at emphasising the originality of his work, Gao must have drawn much inspiration from Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot; it is frequently considered an absurdist play. In an interview with Ma Shoupeng, Gao acknowledges his indebtedness to Beckett but also points out his rejection of anti-theatre, which Beckett uses extensively in his dramaturgy. In particular, Gao explains that Waiting for Godot is not theatre in the conventional sense mainly because it lacks action, and because the starting point of Beckett’s dramatic quest coincides with the absurd as a conceptual and philosophical category, which he transplants into the characters’ lines.15 Gao maintains that he instead aims to portray the absurdity that can be found in real, everyday life. He does not focus on absurdity as a cosmic reality, detached from real life and apprehended through philosophical reasoning. For Gao, absurdity does not seem to coincide with a certain kind of pessimistic fatalism but with a factual irregularity that disturbs the social order. To further distance himself from Beckett, Gao declares that whereas Beckett’s characters just sit and wait, not really intending to move on and wasting all their time in cracking linguistic jokes, the people in The Bus Stop are willing to act but are impeded to so do by adverse factual circumstances. Ultimately, Gao envisions his play as a tragicomedy. In response to Ma Shoupeng, who argues that there is something tragic about the absurdist 15  Gao Xingjian and Ma Shoupeng, “Jinghua yetan” (Evening Talks in Beijing) in Dui yi zhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu (In Search of Modern Drama), Beijing 1987: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, pp. 167–68.

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consciousness, Gao mentions that the tragedy of modern man has a selfmocking tone which would fit the contemporary age as the age of tragicomedy. The comic nature of the “absurdist” devices featuring in this play has been previously noted by William Tay, who brings attention to “the aspects of inarticulation, incomprehensibility, and non sequitur,”16 and by Kwok-kan Tam, who argues that the contradiction between the characters’ frequently reiterated plans to go to town and their factual inertia is both comic and absurd.17 This idea is also reflected in the play’s subtitle—a “lyrical comedy of daily life” (shenghuo shuqing xiju)—which Izabella Łabędzka’s interprets as way of “suggest[ing] that although human existence can be perceived as tragic it can also be familiarized through understanding, a forgiving smile, and a good dose of poetry.”18 Below I will argue that while The Bus Stop neither minimally engages the tragic nor endorses a tragic worldview of human existence, it is also a pre-tragic play in Gao’s repertoire in the sense that it contains early traces of Gao’s subsequent tragic turn in The Other Shore. The Bus Stop vs. Godot: Social Absurdity, Existentialist Parody, and a Touch of Metadrama As its title suggests, The Bus Stop features a group of people waiting at a bus stop on the outskirts of an unnamed city for a bus to take them into town. The bus stop is situated somewhere along a country road, and the contrast between the countryside and the city already hints at the contradictions in Chinese society at that time. The exodus from the countryside to the city symbolizes the pursuit of a better future and the hope in the success of the economic reforms, which all the characters nurture at the beginning of the play. They are a Mother, a Young Girl, a Student (Glasses), a Manager (Director Ma), a Young Boy (Hothead), a Carpenter, and an Old Man. Gradually, they all become involved in an animated conversation that reveals not only their expectations for the upcoming journey to the city but also their subsequent disillusionment with the status quo. In one corner, estranged from the others, there is another character that does not mingle with the crowd but reads all the time: it is the anonymous Silent Man, previously introduced. It is not clear whether his silence is due to a clinical condition or whether it is a sign of his unwillingness to identify with the collective, preferring to remain at the margins of society.

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16  William Tay, “Avant-Garde Theatre in Post-Mao China,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 69. 17  Tam, “Drama of Paradox: Waiting as a Form and Motif in The Bus-Stop and Waiting for Godot,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 46. 18  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 131.

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What is certain is that the Silent Man is depicted as an outsider, as will become evident as the play unfolds. Although The Bus Stop seems to be almost a Chinese “duplicate” of the Beckettian model in many respects, it is possible to discern some elements of originality that also contribute to distinguish this play from any other type of European-style absurdist drama. The first significant difference with Beckett’s play is that unlike Godot, who never arrives, the bus is heard passing by several times although it does not physically appear.19 After the first bus passes by, the people argue over Hothead’s behavior and rebuke him as ill-bred for his attempt at jumping the queue. They mention different ways of getting on the bus and wonder whether this is actually “to serve the passengers.”20 Another significant difference, already hinted at by Gao, is that whilst waiting, the characters show a strong willingness to act. Glasses, for example, says, “I can’t just stand here waiting for the bus and wasting my time.”21 His assertion is nevertheless contradicted by Director Ma who points out the incongruence between words and actions: “We say one thing and do another.”22 Moreover, he hints at the problems faced by the citizens of the PRC at the time, hence suggesting that absurdity in this case does not lie in the divorce between man and the universe, as theorized by Albert Camus—the chief proponent of the philosophical absurd—but in the fact that what the Chinese authorities say in the public media does not match the reality of things. Particularly, he mentions concrete socio-political phenomena such as the one-child policy, the growing population rates in China, and the rise of foreign investments, while also talking about the contradiction between supply and demand, and asks how these issues could be solved. Nevertheless, the focus of the play is not on the crowd but on the solitary character of the Silent Man, who at some point decides to walk away without any notice, hence displaying a firm willingness to distinguish himself from the mass. What is more, his exit is matched with a suitable musical accompaniment and made into a musical leitmotif that is played several times throughout the play as a means of indicating the Silent Man as an example of a courageous and valiant attitude vis-à-vis the challenges of everyday life, and which 19  Gao Xingjian, “Gao Xingjian, The Bus Stop,” in Shiao-Ling S. Yu (ed.), Chinese Drama after the Cultural Revolution, 1979–1989. An Anthology, Lewiston 1997: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 237, 244, 249. 20  Gao Xingjian, “Gao Xingjian, The Bus Stop,” p. 246. This is a rewriting of the well-known political slogan “serve the people” (wei renmin fuwu) which originated from Mao Zedong’s 1944 eponymous speech. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., p. 247.

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everyone should imitate. Moreover, the melody of the silent man creates a dissonance between the people’s intermittent and prolonged inactivity and the resolute assertiveness of the solitary character. After the disappearance of the Silent Man, the crowd realizes that an entire year has gone by. Glasses, who is studying English in order to take the college entrance examination, says that if the bus does not come soon, he will miss his last chance to take the test and get admitted to the university. Next, he points out that he has wasted his youth in waiting.23 His pessimism is counterpointed by Hothead who declares he is going “no matter what.” Upon realizing that the Silent Man has definitely left, they wonder whether he got on the bus or simply walked away. Apparently, the girl is the only one who has seen him going “to town on his own.”24 What ensues is a rather chaotic exchange of opinions between the people in the crowd. Glasses tries to encourage the others to take action. Director Ma argues with the carpenter and with Old Man who discloses a fundamental point of their predicament, namely their being stuck in a limbo where they feel unable to make a move toward the future but are simultaneously incapable of going back to the past: Ma: If the bus doesn’t come, are you going to wait here for the rest of your life like a fool? Carpenter: Why don’t you go back then? Old Man: I’d like to go. But going back is even harder.25 Finally, Hothead takes the initiative and attempts to convince Glasses to leave with him (“Don’t waste any more time with them. Let’s the two of us get going.”26) However, Glasses, who appears to be the intellectual of the group, is engaged in an existential dilemma that sounds like a parody of Hamlet’s existential doubt: Glasses: Go or wait? Wait or go? That is the question of our existence. Perhaps fate has decreed that we should wait here for the rest of our lives, until we grow old, until we die. Why don’t people take their future in their own hands instead of submitting to the dictates of fate?27

23  Ibid., p. 254. 24  Ibid., p. 255. 25  Ibid., p. 260. 26  Ibid. 27  Ibid.

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This is the first existentialist reflection in The Bus Stop, yet it does not have anything in common with the classical notion of the absurd. The Camusian notion of the absurd coincides with the consciousness of the indifference of the universe vis-à-vis the suffering of the individual, who feels not only deeply alone and abandoned to his destiny but also betrayed in his desire for immortality. Glasses sees fate as something that can deliberately decide to impose its will on the individual, thereby limiting his actions; it recalls that of a cruel entity, a negative energy that seems to anticipate the breakout of the Dionysian tragic power in The Other Shore and the post-exile plays. In The Bus Stop, this is not clearly defined yet; moreover, Glasses’ phrase is intended mainly as an element of farce, as a comic interlude. Nevertheless, the tragic overtones of this thought should not be underestimated. Glasses goes on reading out loud some interrogative sentences from his English textbook. These sentences, which contain the verb “to be” as a copular verb, require a short answer, either “Yes, I am,” or, “No, I’m not.” In Glasses’ words, these questions become a pretext for converting a language exercise into a parody of the existential quest. He reads: “Are you teachers? No. Are you a pig?28 No.” And subsequently declares: “I’m none of these. I am I. I am who I am.”29 In Glasses’ auto-response we can discern a glimpse of the question of the Self that will inform a significant part of the post-exile repertoire. In particular, when Glasses asks “What is fate?,”30 he seems to anticipate the existential question about the ontological reality of the Self, which is expressed by the female protagonist of Between Life and Death, one of Gao’s French plays, who similarly asks, “What is the self?”31 Constantly deferring action, the people in the crowd keep wandering to and fro on the stage like a bunch of lost souls who keep asking, “Who is going to leave? Who wants to go?”32 Shortly afterwards, Hothead proposes another kind of action, namely to blow the bus’s tire, so that no one will get the chance to go to town anymore. This is a destructive action that aims at settling the question in a way that equals a kind of spiritual suicide, which Camus would have deemed as consenting to the absurd. Director Ma expresses the idea that those who have placed the bus stop in that particular location have deliberately done so in order to deceive the poor bystanders: “This is … this is just too much. They’re playing tricks on us! If they don’t want to stop here, then they shouldn’t put up a stop sign here!”33 28  In English in the original text. 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid., p. 261. 31  Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid., p. 263.

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Although it is not clear to whom Director Ma is referring, he seems to depict those people who are responsible for public infrastructure almost as malevolent, hidden deities that rejoice in watching the passengers torture themselves whilst waiting for a bus that never appears. This situation recalls the image of Dionysus as the vindictive god that relishes in playing all sorts of tricks to those who fall under his evil influx. Old Man seems to reiterate the evil nature of those people and for the first time he characterizes the situation as absurd: “This is outrageous; making passengers stand around and wait till their hair turns grey. Absurd … really absurd.”34 The Mother, who tries to console Young Girl, represents a voice outside of the chorus. She connects their predicament to their gender and ascribes to it a kind of natural guilt that recalls Beckett’s definition of tragedy as expounded in an early critical work, Proust (1931): Tragedy is not concerned with human justice. Tragedy is the statement of expiation, but not the miserable expiation of a codified breach of a local arrangement, organized by the knaves for the fools. The tragic figure represents the expiation of original sin, of the original and eternal sin of him and all his ‘soci malorum,’ the sin of having been born.35 In the case of the Mother in The Bus Stop, the existential crime is not shared all of humankind but is a prerogative of women only. In particular, she asserts, “It’s all because we were born women. We’re doomed by our fate to endless waiting. First we wait for the right man to come along, and then we wait to get married. Then we wait for a child, after which we wait till the child grows up. By then we’ve already grown old …”36 Meanwhile, Glasses indulges in another of his existential reflections. This second observation seems to be quite distanced from the initial one. Here, he complains that “We’ve been cast aside by life and forgotten by the world. Life is flowing away right past you.”37 It would seem that the idea of a cruel, almost personified destiny has now been replaced by the idea of universe as indifferent towards the human misfortunes. In this reflection, man is thrown into the world and simultaneously confined in a corner, whereas life does not seem to be aware of his presence. Subsequently, Hothead tries again to animate the situation by proposing to the other to join him in a game with cards: 34  Ibid., p. 265. 35  Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, London 1965, p. 49. 36  Gao, “The Bus Stop”, p. 265. 37  Ibid., p. 266.

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Hothead: Who wants to play? I’ll bet these five bucks against any of you … If you pick the right card, then luck is with you; if you lose, well, what’s a few bucks to a big shot like you? If they sell drinks here, I’ll buy everyone a drink.38 This image foreshadows the character of the Card Player in The Other Shore, although the two compare to each other only on the surface. In fact, Hothead proposes such a game merely as a means of killing time, whereas the Card Player serves as an evil presence that possesses the Self of the individual like a Dionysian-like malevolent force. After that, a new invitation to take action and imitate the daring gesture of the Silent Man comes from Glasses, who has finally given up his philosophical musings, “Let’s start walking, like that man. While we were wasting our time at this bus stop, he’s already got into town and got something done. There’s nothing for us to wait for anymore.”39 The response of his companions seems to be fairly positive: Old Man: But we stayed here waiting and getting more and more bent with age. Let’s go … (staggers forward.) Carpenter: I am going. They all split up and pace up and down the stage. Some of them start to move; some remain motionless; still others collide with each other. All: “Don’t block my way!” “Go on, then!” “What chaos!” “Ah, life …” “You call this leaving?” “Let’s go.” “No.” “Come on.” It’s raining and several voices are heard simultaneously. Director Ma, who had attempted to walk away, has unexpectedly returned and expresses his idea of going to the city and complaining with the bus company: “I must go to the city to lodge a complaint with the bus company. I’ll find their manager and ask him whom their buses are for—for their own convenience or to serve the passengers? I’m going to bring a law suit against them and ask them to pay for our lost years and health.”40 However, Glasses does not agree with him. In his opinion, they are the ones to be blamed because in reality no one has obliged them to wait. They could have simply walked away after realizing that the bus would not stop: “Whose fault is it that we didn’t look carefully? Who told us to wait and wait? Let’s go. There’s nothing to wait for anymore.”41 38  Ibid., pp. 268–269. 39  Ibid., p. 278. 40  Ibid., p. 279. 41  Ibid., p. 281.

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Whereas Beckett’s play ends with an umpteenth confirmation of the characters’ inability to take action vis-à-vis their proposal to move on, The Bus Stop terminates with a meta-dramatic coup de theatre and stage trick. The actors metaphorically slip out of their dramatis personae, thereby taking an ideal distance from them. Whilst acting as mere onlookers, they also comment on the characters’ behavior speaking in fragmented lines, until they all decide to walk away. Still, it should be noted that by speaking about the characters, the actors are performing a kind of Brechtian estrangement, which consists in reversing the perspective, and therefore serves to break the dramatic illusion and stimulate the audience’s intellectual response. It is not in the least a manifestation of performance in the tragic mode, as I have theorized in the previous chapter. Creative Appropriation and Re-functioning: The Bus Stop in-between Parabolic Drama and Pre-tragedy As explained above, The Bus Stop features both existentialist and absurdist elements, which, I argue, pave the way for Gao’s subsequent tragic turn in The Other Shore. But what exactly are these elements? These are the senselessness of waiting, the question about the nature of fate,42 the dilemma between going or waiting, and the usage of dramatic situation in lieu of plot. The fact that the bus is heard passing by, even though it is not physically seen, can be used to decode the different nature of Gao’s own brand of absurdity with respect to Beckett. According to Zhang Ning, Gao’s can be defined as a kind of social absurdity, whereas the Beckettian one seems more engaged with the absurd as a cosmic and existential phenomenon.43 Six critics, including Katherine H. Burkman44 and Mary A. Doll,45 have associated Beckett’s absurdist plays with the ritual re-enactment of old myths, including the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus and the Biblical prophecy of the Messiah. This mythical dimension, I argue, does not apply to The Bus Stop, not only because the characters are deeply rooted in real life, retaining their own individuality, but also because the chosen dramatic situation, though somehow surreal, does 2.2

42  This actually seems to be an idle question, for the character who asks it, Glasses, does not really seem to be desperate for an answer. 43  Zhang Ning, L’appropriation par la Chine des théâtres occidentales (China’s appropriation of Western theatres), Paris 1998: L’Harmattan. Some critics, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, have variously interpreted Godot as an avatar of the absent God in the post-atomic age, as death, as silence, as nothingness, or even as life. See Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 27–29.  atherine H. Burman, Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett, Rutherford 1987: 44  K Fairleigh Dickerson University Press. 45  M  ary A. Doll, Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach, Syracuse 1988: Syracuse University Press.

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not harmonize with a mythical/archetypical interpretation. The characters, including the Silent Man, are rather flat as they do not significantly evolve throughout the play, and, when everything comes to an end, there is a clear demarcation between their variously insecure attitudes and the performers’ more cogent opinion on the way in which the problem of being or not being is handled (or not handled) within the realm of dramatic mimesis. Similarly, the play’s setting, though symbolic in a way, is not depicted as an inescapable Hell or a space of entrapment. It is not encircled nor does it have depth. The Silent Man, however valiant he may seem in abandoning the bus stop, is not a hero but is simply doing something, whereas his companions, in not moving away from that center of inactivity, are unable to transform it into an opportunity for self-development and self-knowledge. An important characteristic of The Bus Stop is that there is definitely a mismatch between what the Chinese authorities say and what actually happens. Nevertheless, the characters want to act and could act, despite the bus’s failure to materialize. The Silent Man provides evidence of the possibility of escaping, because he decides to act well in advance of his companions, though he never speaks. The other characters only argue against each other and comment on the absurdity of the circumstances. However, toward the end of the play they decide, like the Silent Man, to act, although this is a choice that is made collectively, whereas the former has made his decision on his own. In her study of the development of avant-garde theatre aesthetics in contemporary China, Rossella Ferrari interprets this kind of enigmatic character as a “literary descendant” of the eponymous protagonist of Lu Xun’s playlet The Passerby (Guoke 1925), which was employed as a prelude to The Bus Stop in 1983. She further argues that the Silent Man, “hold[ing] up the spiritual legacy of those who escaped ‘the iron house’,” may be a model for those “outsiders” and “loners” who appeared in several dramas and films in the 1990s.”46 Besides Lu Xun’s prototype, Camus’ version of the Greek semi-god Sisyphus may be used as a comparison for discerning traces of the tragic temperament in the Gaoian character. Like the Silent Man, Sisyphus decides to act despite having to perform a quotidian fight against a pre-ordained destiny imposed on him by the gods. Moreover, the Silent Man shares some aspects of the Camusian Outsider Meursault, a modern day Sisyphus, who affirms his willingness to be estranged from the games of society while performing a sort of tacit revolt against the indifference of the universe. For Camus, the Outsider is the tragic character par excellence, because his silent yet passionate revolt is sufficient to restore the dignity of all humankind. Similarly, the Silent Man’s independent 46  Ferrari, Pop goes the Avant-Garde, p. 30.

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choice to walk away and go to town on his own is sufficient to show the others that there is indeed a way to continue pursuing their hopes and dreams for a better future, which have been disregarded by a hypocritical government. But there is nothing really tragic about the Silent Man, since there is no internal unmendable conflict in him. The integrity of his Self is not threatened, and his relationship with the other characters is untroubled. The charisma of his own gesture is so powerful that the author makes it into a musical leitmotif, and his presence can be felt even if he is not physically onstage. Also, his charisma attracts all the other characters who feel the need to imitate him, even though the dramatic irony of the play might reside in the fact that his choice is actually impossible to fulfil because he merely represents an ideal. Furthermore, in The Bus Stop there is no emphasis on the Self as an issue. The characters are not preoccupied about their identities, nor are they haunted by questions of (in)authenticity. They just want to go to town to lead their lives and/or profit from the opportunities that the government has promised. The Bus Stop seems therefore to respond to the new reinterpretation of the Theatre of the Absurd by Michael Bennett, who argues that this kind of drama actually encourages the people to act and overcome the absurd. Bennett has re-defined absurdist plays as “parabolic dramas” and has identified seven major characteristics to describe it. 1) Parabolic drama is created through metaphor. 2) Parabolic drama is also performative in that it has an agenda of transformation, to play off Bert O. States’ idea. 3) Gestural and lingual metonymic paradoxes are used frequently. 4) There is a move toward disorder that results in a hanging dilemma that needs to be interpreted by an audience. 5) The plot first orients the audience and then disorients it. 6) The world of parabolic drama is heterotopic. 7) Parabolic drama is not contradictory, but contemplates contradictions.47 Aside from thematic absurdity, what kind of dramatic absurdity can be discerned within The Bus Stop? Apart from the dramatic situation (static human circumstances rather than events), dissonance (a strong contrast between words that point toward dramatic inaction and dramatic action) and polyphonic dialogue (later developed into the double soliloquy, also found in Dialogue and Rebuttal and The Death Collector), the passages in which the characters’ statements become entangled, confusing, and illogical do not convey any sense of effective absurdity except for the social incongruences mentioned 47  Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd, p. 20.

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above. Moreover, there is no sense of real tragedy (as defined in this study), which is present, instead, in the post-exile plays. In this respect, I argue that Gao here uses some of the devices that he will reuse in his post-exile plays of Self (polyphony, situation, confrontation between people, which resembles some kind of agon, double soliloquy, actors separated from characters) but in a different way, namely in what can be called “the comic mode.” As Gao himself has said, “Whereas Beckett envisions the theme of waiting as the tragedy of mankind, I see it primarily as a source of comedy.”48 To conclude, I would say that The Bus Stop is a “pre-tragic” play in the comic mode, rather than a conventionally “absurd” one (it is, however, a parabolic one). It is “pre-tragic” due to the presence of certain dramatic devices and motifs that are shared by the post-exile plays of Self, and it is “in the comic mode” because it shows that these characters actually have a chance to change their situation, if only they take courage and do not wallow in useless complaining. This means that The Bus Stop is not a tragic play. In fact, the metadramatic element is only briefly hinted at in the end of the play, and the usage of the tragic mode as an aesthetic device is virtually absent. There is no conflict between the individual and the crowd as there is, as detailed below, in The Other Shore, and no-one is prevented from asserting his own will. Moreover, the existentialist reflections do not have a dominant role in the play; instead, they are used to enhance its general comic mode. Finally, the actor-character relationship also differs from that found in the post-exile plays because the two entities are separated. When the actors temporarily relinquish their dramatic roles, they look at the characters from the outside, not from the inside. Ultimately, the dramatic situation is not a limiting situation because, as demonstrated by the Silent Man, who takes the initiative to leave on his own, there is always the possibility of stepping out of that imaginary prison. Therefore, my conclusion is that, at the dramatic level, The Bus Stop is characterized by a process of creative appropriation and re-purposing of originally absurdist and existentialist dramatic structures, which will be further developed in the post-exile plays. 3

Beyond Absurdist Drama: the Tragic Field as a Performative Device

My analysis of The Bus Stop has shown that the meaning and value of this particular play is best determined by not classifying it as absurdist drama; it has 48  Gao Xingjian, “‘Chezhan’ yi wenxi benxu,” (Preface to the Italian Translation of Bus Stop) in Dui yi zhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu, p. 127.

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also helped to clarify that there indeed exists a major difference between the absurd and the tragic. In brief, while an absurdist play dramatizes the meaninglessness of human existence, the sense of being estranged in the human society (e.g., The Outsider), and the feeling of living in a world that could not care less of whether we are dead or alive, a tragic play dramatizes the mechanism that leads the individual to experience his own Self as wounded, ripped, torn apart as a result of an inner conflict. This idea of tragedy as a site of fracture in which the Self is simultaneously itself and an Other does not need the element of transcendence such as an evil god or a cruel fate but benefits from the mechanisms that are inherent to drama. In this sense, the Dionysian archetype, which I have presented in the previous chapter, partakes of Dionysus as a symbol of the dramatic mask, of the dramatic conflict of Selves, and, most importantly, as an avatar of the most secret and obscure mechanisms of the human psyche. Dionysus, therefore, embodies a kind of psychic energy that creates disorder. This idea is confirmed by Gerard Else, who points out that “Dionysus is not a god but a potency,”49 and by Jean-Pierre Vernant. As Else further notes: In its most consistent form, Vernant’s concept of the Other thus separates us from Dionysus as a personally conceived god. Vernant’s Dionysus quickly ceases to be the divine embodiment of the Other and becomes a mere mediator between the self and ‘the multiple configurations of the Other,’ a conductor of psychic energies who ‘opens for us the path of escape toward a disorienting strangeness.’50 As detailed above, none of these disruptive mechanisms occur in The Bus Stop, and it is impossible to discern a true dramatic conflict affecting the characters’ minds. Nevertheless, the situation changes dramatically in The Other Shore. As I shall attempt to demonstrate in the next section, this play is centered on the construction of a theatrical and psychical field based on conflicting energies and therefore bent to tragedy. It seems to me that The Other Shore constitutes the dramatic incarnation of William Storm’s theory of “the tragic field,” the background and theoretical implications of which shall be further detailed below. Storm devises his theory of the “tragic field” drawing principally on Katherine Hayles’ application of the field concept in the arena of literary studies and on the so-called “dramatistic model” as theorized by Kenneth Burke. 49  G  erard F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, New York 1965: W. W. Norton, p. 52. 50  Ibid., p. 35.

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Before I enumerate the main features of the tragic field according to Storm, it is fundamental to touch upon the concept of field with particular attention to the latter’s disciplinary transfer from quantum physics to literature. In the introduction to The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984), Katherine Hayles introduces the concept of field as the main product of what she calls “a Copernican revolution” occurring in the twentieth century and affecting mainly the approach to the exact sciences. Yet, she contends, this revolution also produced a new and different worldview, in that it would reverberate through philosophy, sociology and literature. As for “field” in science, the main revolution consisted in the replacement of the classic mechanistic model with a holistic one. In contrast to the old scientific method, which was derived from Newtonian physics and based on the application of a unidirectional and rigidly fixed cause-and-effect model, the new observational method approached reality as a system of interconnected and mutually influencing particles. From this perspective, reality is no longer seen as the sum of a number of discrete and independent parts but, to borrow from Ferdinand de Saussure’s phrasing, as “a system in which everything holds together.”51 The main consequence of this holistic view of reality is that, since the particles are inseparable from each other, their movements within the system will affect the entire system itself. In other words, the system must be envisioned not as a set of particles but as the result of the interchanges between the particles. The system, then, can be construed as a field of energies. Those energies determine the nature of the field and not vice versa. Hayles explains the nature of the field concept as that of a “cosmic web”: “web” because it is based on a network of constantly shifting relationships and “cosmic” because it refers to the dynamic, all-inclusive energetic space that permeates the interstices between the particles. Needless to say, the field concept does not designate an objective reality but is to be understood as an observational pattern. Hence, from now on I shall refer to it as the field model. Moreover, Hayles points out that the main implications of the field model are, respectively, the fact that the whole does not simply equal the sum of all parts, and that the observer is included as part of the field. In this sense, the reality that is reflected through the filter offered by the field model does not exist as such but as a tendency to exist or, in other words, as a potentiality: it varies also depending on the perspective adopted by the observer. Another important aspect of the field model is that, like the system that holds them together,

51  P  eter H. Matthews, A Short History of Structural Linguistics, Cambridge 2001: Cambridge University Press, p. 6.

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the particles themselves do not exist as tangible objects but as “energy knots” or “quanta of energy.” William Storm uses Hayles’ theorization of the field model to describe the functioning of the tragic as an artistic process. His personal re-elaboration of the field model is grounded on the idea that, in the realm of art, the tragic condition manifests itself in the form of a metaphorical sparagmos. The Dionysian principle of a character’s dismemberment constitutes therefore the key-factor of the tragic process. Nevertheless, it would seem that the rendering process represents only one side of the overall tragic field, or, better still, a sort of ongoing and never-ending product of the clash between two opposite forces: the one, which is inherently divisive, and the other, which is, instead, cohesive. These forces are engaged in a perpetual fight. To substantiate his argument, Storm takes the Shakespearean character of Macbeth as a starting point. Particularly, he suggests that the spiritual disintegration undergone by Macbeth is actually the result of a latent and complex system of relations between the characters in the eponymous tragedy, rather than being only a matter of the character’s individual response to the external events. The nature of these relations reveals to us that the characters are mutually influenced by each other, or even mutually contaminated by each other. A good example can be found in the relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Instead of simply analysing the relationship between the two characters, Storm asks whether it would be more interesting to bring out “the dynamic whole”52 that they create by means of their interactions in a dramatic context. With these premises, Storm further suggests that this dynamic whole can be identified with “what may exist in the interstices between characters or, in more figurative terms, in the air that surrounds them.”53 In other words, his approach is not based on classic character analysis but points toward the investigation of what he calls “a kinetic space around the characters,”54 or, simply put, a potential field of conflicting energies. Furthermore, Storm introduces two different structural frameworks that can be used to adapt the concept of the tragic field to the realm of dramatic analysis. These frameworks are, respectively, what he calls “the choric model” and the “dramatistic model” theorized by Kenneth Burke55 and later expanded 52  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 96. 53  Ibid. Emphasis added. 54  Ibid. Storm’s emphasis. 55  Kenneth Burke, “Dramatistic Method,” in Joseph R. Gusfield (ed.), On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph R. Gusfield, Chicago 1989: University of Chicago Press. See also his A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley 1969: University of California Press.

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by Bert O. States.56 The “choric model” refers to the usage of the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, particularly to the ancient dithyrambic chorus, which seems to have originated dramatic tragedy. In that context, the chorus designated a kind of collective actor, or, better still, a generative source of actor-characters. Originally, when tragedy consisted of a dialogue between an individual actor and a chorus, the latter provided the source from which all characters were taken and to which they all returned. In this sense, the chorus represents both a composite entity and a model for the dramatic field. The “dramatistic model” takes into account the connections among characters, action, and dramatic construction. Burke considers five elements of the drama, namely act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, and envisions them not as single, discrete entities but as an interactive and interconnected whole. Bert O. States further develops Burke’s model by focusing on the correlations between characters in dramatic tragedy and with particular reference to Hamlet. Based on Burke’s analytical framework, his investigation leads him to conclude that there exist no single, self-determining character but that “characters are made of each other.”57 Additionally, to reinforce the idea that the notion of field is not the same as a background or context, Storm appropriates Julia Kristeva’s theory of the relationship between genotext and phenotext, where the former resembles the notion of field.58 In conclusion, Storm retains the notion of the interstitial spaces between the characters, which form the connective texture that defines the tragic field, and he gives it a Dionysian coloring. In his opinion, the Dionysian (or tragic) principle entails both a connective and a divisive power. In other words, Dionysus acts as both a binding force and a dismantling energy. The result is that the Self is irremediably shattered and ultimately crushed. As Storm puts it: “… like the Burkean ‘psychosis’, the tragic field is a system that organizes and at the very same time creates disjuncture.”59 He also complements this statement with Charles Segal’s idea that dramatic tragedy is characterized by an unreducible tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces.60

56  States, Hamlet and the Concept of Character. 57  Ibid., pp. xix–xx. 58  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 110. Julia Kristeva defines phenotext as “the language that serves to communicate” and genotext as “the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic … and melodic devices, … in the way semantic and categorical fields are set out in syntactic and logical features or in the economics of mimesis …” In Revolution in Poetic Language, New York 1984: Columbia University Press, pp. 86–87. 59  Ibid., p. 116. 60  See Charles Segal, Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides’ Bacchae, Princeton 1982: Princeton University Press. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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By applying this perspective, one can redefine tragedy as the product of the reconstruction of a network of disruptive relations between characters and other elements of the drama. This means that the tragic process engenders a dynamic field, or network of relations that, in its turn, engenders tragedy. In this way, tragedy comes to be no longer a fully-fledged, fixed dramatic model but represents the dramatic text’s response to the applied methodology of analysis. This would be analogous to Werner Heisenberg’s statement about the field method that “what we observe is not nature in itself (i.e. tragedy in itself) but the nature exposed to our method of questioning.”61 As a performative device, the tragic field closely intersects with the performance of the agon, where the characters’ mutual clashes—both verbal and physical—create the pre-conditions for a gruelling interchange of conflicting energies. This agon, as I will demonstrate throughout the next chapter, can and will also involve different parts of a character’s personality, thereby benefitting from the input of what I have called “the tragic mode” of performance. Fluctuating between dramatic cohesion and dramatic division, the tragic field qualifies as a receptacle of osmotic processes and riven subjectivities, a concentration of mental suffering in which the presence of Dionysus is totalizing and perpetual, for the boundaries between “the upper and lower realms of the world and the individual psyche”62 are forcibly compressed. The tragic field facilitates the enactment of the Aristotelian anagnorisis, a form of “selfconfrontation”63 which Storm indicates as the kernel of the agonistic act on which tragedy is grounded. 4

Performing the Tragic Field: The Other Shore

Originally conceived to serve as an acting exercise, to help student-actors become “modern” actors in the sense of “omnipotent performers,”64 The Other Shore65 (1986) was written in Beijing yet never allowed to be staged (officially) 61  Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, London 1963: Allen & Unwin, p. 58. 62  Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 10. 63  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 51. 64  Gao says that by “omnipotent performers” he means actors able to perform Shakespeare’s plays and traditional Chinese theatre, Pirandello and Guo Moruo, Brecht and Aristophanes equally well and even to act in a pantomime. In Gao Xingjan, “‘Bi’an’ yanchu de shuoming yu jianyi,” (Explanations and Suggestions for performing The Other Shore) in Dui yi zhong xiandai xiju de zhuiqiu, p. 144. 65  In Buddhism, the term “other shore” refers to a realm of spiritual enlightenment, characterized by the cessation of worldly suffering. As Gao’s play unfolds, worldly suffering is also negated. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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in Mainland China. As other scholars before me have observed, this play marks a watershed in Gao’s aesthetics due to its mythical and universalistic content, its abstractness and loose episodic structure. For my part, I argue that this play also inaugurates a new theatrical discourse oriented towards the tragic, since the tragic trope of the other-within-the-self is explored through the construction of a (meta-)dramatic space, which is itself imbued with “otherness” and Dionysian traits; this will resurface prominently in Gao’s subsequent works as a fully-fledged dramatic trope. In effect, as will be shown below, the genesis of what I have re-defined above as the Gaoian “tragic mode” may be traced back to this play, which ends with the doubling of the character of Man who eventually leaves the stage in a peaceful state of mind, accompanied by the personification of his own consciousness,66 embodied by the newly born character of Shadow. Although (as we have seen) the first experiments with the device of the neutral actor had previously occurred in Bus Stop, in that case it was introduced rather abruptly as a coup de théâtre and as a means of shocking the audience and stimulating a critical response towards the characters’ behavior on stage. In The Other Shore, however, the final sparagmos of the protagonist’s identity is presented as the outcome of a lengthy and rocky dramatic process aimed at achieving self-knowledge. Less theatrical than dramatic, this strikingly resonates with both the ancient Greek aphorism of “know thyself” (gnoti seauton) and the tragic slogan of pathei mathos, or “learning through suffering,” which will be further developed throughout the post-exile repertoire. Dramaturgically innovative, owing to its use of the principle of hypotheticality ( jiadingxing), its metadramatic aspects, and its references to Zen meditation practices, The Other Shore was conceived as an experimental pièce composed of a complex network of characters, actions, and scenes. It represents a whole greater than the sum of its parts, that is at once cohesive and divisive, compact and loose, and whose distinguishing feature seems to be a discontinuous lack of focus. As will become apparent, this does not exactly mean that the play is loosely (i.e., poorly) arranged but rather that it is not structured around an absolute organizing principle. The episodic structure of the play, the indeterminacy of the setting, and the atmosphere of general disruptiveness render the drama inherently “rhizomatic,” thereby allowing for a range of interpretive hypotheses. 66  The character in question (Shadow) asserts to be Man’s Heart (xin). However, in Chinese there is no ontological difference between the heart and the mind, which are regarded as one and the same. It can therefore be surmised that Shadow embodies Man’s consciousness.

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Scholars such as Jo Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer, Sy Ren Quah, and Henry Zhao, among others, have variously interpreted the play’s highly abstract content as an existentialist allegory of the absurdity of the human condition, as a fictionalized account of the horrors perpetrated during the Cultural Revolution, or as a criticism of language and the collective.67 Without questioning the soundness of these interpretations, I am nevertheless persuaded that the actual scope of this play’s enigmatic structure can be further elucidated by scrutinizing its metadramatic imprint. In my opinion, The Other Shore fully epitomizes the characteristics of the Stormian tragic field. One could go even further and argue that The Other Shore could be re-titled The Tragic Field. In fact, the play opens with a group of actors playing a game with ropes under the supervision of a leading actor who explains the symbolic meaning of the game. This symbolizes the various ways in which interpersonal relationships are established in society, that is, people are bound together as if they were holding the two ends of the same rope. As the leading actor observes, these relationships are fundamentally ambivalent, as denoted by the interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces on which they are grounded, which reproduces the interchange of cohesive and divisive forces underlying the tragic field. 4.1 A Play of Relations: Rehearsing the Tragic Broadly speaking, The Other Shore is a play of relations; specifically, it is a metadramatic play featuring a plethora of different dramatis personae and centered on the construction of the dramatic field. This field can be envisioned as a system of relations, depending on the characters’ mutual interactions, within a fictional space, and it is up to the actors themselves to build up that space in their own imagination. The focus of the dramatic action is neither on this or that character, nor on the relationship between them, but on the whole system of relations involved in the play. Particularly at stake in this work are not the single components but the “connective fabric,”68 which permeates the interstitial spaces in-between those apparently discrete components. This network, Storm’s connective fabric, should not be associated with a physical space that “contains” the characters and provides a platform for them to 67   See Jo Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer, “The Myth of Gao Xingjian,” in Soul of Chaos, pp. 111–132; Sy Ren Quah, “Historical Reality, Fictional Narrative: China in the Frame of Gao Xingjian’s Theatre,” in China Perspectives [Online] 2010/2, online since 01 June 2013, http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/5267 (accessed 28 November 2013); Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, pp. 130–138. 68  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 113.

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act, but should rather be envisioned as an archetypal universe, in the sense of a primordial chaos that is still far from becoming an ordered cosmos. It is worth noting that the play features a constant movement, which seems circular, rather than linear. The abovementioned interstitial spaces are comparable to energetic passages—energy generated by the “traffic” of particles and by their mutual interchanges. To borrow from scientific language, the frequent interactions between the character-particles contribute to create a solid and measurable energy field. Most interestingly, the characters of this play (i.e. the particles in question) are not fully-fledged, individualized dramatis personae, but rather “archetypal figures” which, apart from a few other individuals, are merely defined by gender and age range. The fact that the characters are there in the shape of almost evanescent archetypes seems to corroborate my reading of the play as a kinetic field of energies. As Katherine Hayles explains, in modern quantum physics, particles are not intended as “discrete entities localized in space but as ‘probability waves,’ the probability expressing the particles’ ‘tendency to exist’ at a given point.”69 Similarly, the characters in The Other Shore do not have an identity in the traditional sense of the term. Their role consists in the energy knots that they help to create with others while searching for an individuality that is difficult to achieve. These energy knots are produced by the particles’ lives and mutual influences within the field. As I will set out to demonstrate, the play’s ultimate scope may be described as pushing the energy field to its extreme consequences, namely toward the transformation from chaos to cosmos. The premises for the play’s progressive development into a well-defined tragic field of opposite forces are announced from the outset. As the Leading Actor suggests, human society is made up of an inescapable network of relations. Like the actors playing a game of ropes under his supervision, people in real life are constantly pulling and being pulled, thus having an impact on the whole system which is consequently and constantly in motion and subject to change. The essence of these relations is at the same time one of cohesion and division. It is therefore potentially tragic. The characteristics of this “tragic field of oppositional forces” are encapsulated in the following statement: Leading Actor: Let’s try running in opposite directions. See, now you’re pulling me, but then again I’m also holding you back, like two locusts tied to the same string, neither of us can get away from each other. The 69  K  atherine N. Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca and London 1984: Cornell University Press, p. 50.

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stronger one pulls and the weaker is being pulled. It becomes a tug-ofwar, a competition of strength, and there’ll be a winner and a loser, a victory and defeat.70 Subsequently, the tragic quality of the field is concisely defined by the leading Actor as the interplay of a series of opposite polarities. The inner workings of the tragic field revolve around the two poles of “congregation” and “fragmentation.” 4.2 Sparagmos and Daimons: The Other Shore as a Dionysian Realm As soon as they reach the so-called “other shore,” a sort of fictional “underworld,” and a dramatic “womb,” the actors undergo a symbolic metamorphosis into characters. The other shore can be interpreted as a dramatic space that pre-figures a state of mind in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred. In this liminal dimension—as ambiguous as the Self—which can be likened to the home of maenads and ghosts, an “existential twilight zone where vital energies ebbed and flowed in reciprocal rhythms and where the boundaries of life and death converged,”71 and which the ancient Greeks regarded as the realm of Dionysus par excellence, they lose their exclusive identity both as real people and as individual actors, and undergo a traumatic process of rebirth into a chaotic, Dionysian condition of primordial oneness. On the other shore, individual selfhood is annihilated and replaced with the collective Self of an anonymous Crowd. Most notably, they lose the ability to think and consequently to speak human language. Such a loss is rendered even more traumatic by the fact that it coincides with the loss of selfhood. This experience plunges them into a dimension of darkness and forgetfulness, akin to a return to primordial life. The boundaries of physical reality appear muddled and all around is chaos. A Woman’s attempt to instruct them by teaching them how to speak and think fails as the crowd becomes exaggeratingly excited and eventually kills her in an act of collective murder. By virtue of its compactness and indistinctiveness, The Crowd acquires Dionysian qualities. The people in the crowd are frenzied, irrational, and capable of driving others mad. They seem to be possessed by some kind of invisible daimon, but at the same time 70  Gao Xingjian, “The Other Shore”, in Gilbert Fong (ed. and trans.), The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, Hong Kong 1999: The Chinese University Press, p. 3. 71   Renate Schlesier, “Maenads as Tragic Models”, in Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Faraone (eds.), Masks of Dionysus, Ithaca; London 1993: Cornell University Press, p. 90.

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they are looking for somebody to guide them. The Crowd represents the collective actor from which individuated characters are generated and to which they return. The tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces has its premises in the Crowd’s capability to function as a generative source world, one that is both unifying and conflict-ridden, orderly and disorderly. To say it with Storm’s words, it is “a total entity that contains in itself all the potentials necessary for individuation and reassimilation.”72 This is exactly how the tragic process works. Still, as mentioned above, the tragic field is announced in the opening scene in the words of the leading actor. The Woman is the first victim of the Crowd’s Dionysian folly. She is a mother figure who instructs the new-born neutral actors about how to become fullyfledged characters. Therefore, she teaches them verbal language and body language. Despite her patient attempts at bringing out the individuality of each member of the crowd (she points at one person among the crowd and says, “You”), they continue to feel and act as a collective entity. The only individual who is willing to affirm his own identity as an independent character is Man, a male archetype that has emerged as a distinct character from the generative Crowd and is now constantly haunted by it. The Crowd chases Man in order to make him its leader, whereas his only aspiration is to reclaim his own Self, which he seems to have lost somewhere on the other shore. Once again, the Crowd embodies a dismembering force, capable to tear apart Man’s self, in the sense that it strives to possess his individuality but at the same time Man strenuously refuses to join the group, and his reaction is significantly important for the development of the tragic field. Man invokes a particular form of sparagmos, which is the opposite of the sparagmos pursued by the Crowd with regard to its victim. Therefore, while the Crowd attempts to deconstruct Man’s identity by severing him from his dream to be free and most importantly to understand who he is, Man suggests that he and the Crowd go their separate ways in order to save themselves and get out of that ghastly other shore. This suggestion and the Crowd’s subsequent insistence on following him prompts Man to escape and undertake a bizarre journey across the other shore, where he bumps into a lot of different people/human archetypes—some of which are hostile to him—and re-experiences episodes from his past life, which further contribute to complicating his journey towards individuation. 4.3 Disrupting the Self: the Kinetic Field of Cohesive and Divisive Forces The game/fight between cohesion and division, longing and belonging can be elucidated by examining Man’s relationship with his Others, which identify 72  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 104.

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with the source of conflicting energies targeting Man’s self. The first of these conflicting energies is triggered by the Crowd. The people in the crowd want Man as their leader, and attempt to stop him even though he keeps repeating that he wants to be left alone—he has his own desires and dreams to fulfill. Man is not in the least interested in becoming a leader, and the reason why he shuns the Crowd is also tied to Woman’s accidental death at their hands. This means that Man has understood the power of the Crowd, their ability to change their plans abruptly and without apparent logic, and their tendency to be manipulated from without and from within. The Crowd may represent that Other which is capable of “sucking” Man’s self in like a black hole. Another conflicting energy is represented by Man’s own Mother. The old lady has her own expectations of her son. She wants him to get married, whereas he tells her that he wants to make something of himself. Man is torn between the crowd and all other figures that he encounters on his way to self-fulfilment. After bumping into his mother, he meets a young girl, coming out of nowhere, who blocks his way. She is actually a shadow from the past, the remembrance of a girl with whom Man had fallen in love in his boyhood. She disappears and then reappears but never speaks. Man follows her but she becomes more and more illusory and eventually vanishes, thus showing the inconsistency of the world which hosts the “other shore,” as if the latter were a modern Hades. The desire to have a female partner is an integral part of Man’s strenuous efforts to fulfil his selfhood, to construct his own identity. Unsurprisingly, he declares, “I, too, have a right to be in love, to love a woman and to possess a woman, and to be loved and possessed by her. I am human just like you are, so full of desires and ambitions, I am what you may call a career-minded man.”73 The Young Girl can be said to represent the scars of unrequited love, since Man’s recollection of her keeps haunting his mind. Another encounter that contributes to enhancing the play’s tragic tension is the one with the Card Player. Card Player is a daimonic figure par excellence (Man says “you are a devil”74). By inviting others to drink wine from his cup, he lures people into playing a game of cards with him, and he eventually cheats them. He also summons Man to play with him, but he refuses because he has nothing to bet on. The Card Player says that each member of the crowd who loses will stick a piece of paper on Man’s face. This is a clear allusion to the loss of Self. The Crowd has been manipulated, and all of them claim that Card Player’s card is a spade, which means that he is not cheating. The crowd gets drunk and wants to assault Man. An obedient Girl encourages him to take hold 73  Gao Xingjian, “The Other Shore,” p. 16. 74  Ibid., p. 21.

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of himself75 but her words are powerless vis-à-vis the cunning tricks of the Card Player, who represents the victory of Dionysian possession and dissolution of the Self. In fact, Card Player manages to manipulate Man’s mind and eventually makes him say what he wants. Man stammers: “it … seemed … like a … sp … Sp … Spa … It’s spades …”76 which symbolizes the fragmentation of his own self. It is done. The Dionysian sparagmos has been effected and Man has lost his own individuality, thereby becoming totally selfless like the Crowd. Incidentally, this episode has a striking resemblance to the scene in part three of Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. There, the protagonist— the everyman Winston Smith—undergoes an electroshock torture session in which a Thought Police officer sways him into accepting what is imposed on him, thereby reducing him to a veritable human wreck no longer capable of independent thinking. The next episode, in which Man asks every person from the Crowd what (s)he is searching for, contributes to enhancing the tragic field. Man is at a loss, as there seems to be no clear reference point in his self-seeking journey and, in fact, he does not know where he is going. This is the result of having been pushed hither and thither in multiple directions and trajectories while escaping from the Crowd. The Crowd cannot stop running after Man and doing all sorts of tricks in order to get him obey them: “Everybody: Shall we let him? Crowd: No! Absolutely not! He can’t go.”77 The next significant encounter within this episode is with the Stable Keeper, who mentions Man’s willingness to decide for himself despite everyone’s attempt at channelling him in the opposite direction. He declares, “We’re all looking here, but you insist on going there.”78 After bumping into the Stable Keeper, Man finds a key. He opens a door and walks inside. In the room, where he is alone, he finds some mannequins and starts manipulating them. This, for him, equals the re-appropriation of his own authority over himself as well as the acquisition of a certain power that gives him the illusion of being like God. As he arranges the mannequins into a welldefined pattern, he becomes extremely excited and loses control of himself. The mannequins become animated and engage in a whirling dance in which he gets involved despite himself. He crawls busily back and forth among 75  Ibid., p. 23. 76  Ibid. 77  Ibid., p. 34. 78  Ibid.

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the mannequins, giving them orders but to no avail. We can say that he has created another Dionysian crowd, but this can also be interpreted as his own self, now a powerful, infernal ego appearing in the form of “a gigantic, collective pattern.”79 The flow of energies is well depicted in the following description of the action: Man runs around in a hurry, jumping, moving, and rolling among his own creations. […] But gradually the objects no longer obey his commands and the sounds they make begin to overwhelm his shouts. As he is totally drawn in among them he gradually becomes weaker, and it becomes difficult for him to get out. After a long while he manages to crawl out like a worm, utterly exhausted. His creations roaringly gyrate past him and slowly disappear.80 As the process is a sustained and intense consumption of willpower and strength, towards the end of the play, Man is found walking wearily through a dark wood where the trees get animated and move slowly towards him like monsters. They gradually come to be recognized as the Crowd, who addresses Man as if from beyond the grave: “We have been looking all over for you. (They laugh coldly and sinisterly. Some start to pull at him and grapple with him.).”81 Eventually a Shadow appears, declaring that he is Man’s drooping, blind, and deaf heart. Having introduced himself, he grabs Man’s hand and drags him away from the madding crowd, hence putting an end to that chaotic and disruptive exchange of energies that is inherent in the other shore. 4.4 From Selflessness to Self-consciousness: a Beneficial Sparagmos The encounter between Man and his Shadow reveals that Man had gradually become self-centered. As Shadow remarks: “You seemed to feel that you were Jesus Christ, that you were the loneliest person, the only person who was suffering in this world. You felt that you were pervaded by the spirit of selfsacrifice, even though you were not sure for whom you would be sacrificing yourself.”82 Eventually, when the Crowd comes back, they seem to be aware of Man’s fragility as a normal human being and that he is not the absolute leader they saw in him at the beginning of the play:

79  Ibid., p. 37. 80  Ibid., pp. 37–38. Italics in the original. 81  Ibid., p. 39. 82  Ibid., p. 38.

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Crowd: We admire you but we don’t want to idolize you. You’re no more than a crook, only we don’t have your tricks.83 At the same time, they are still flattering him (“You went through the forest alone, a forest even the devil fears to tread, you’re number one”84), and have ambivalent ideas about him (“It’s not that you are more talented than the others … You’re the tops!”85). When Shadow comes back and presents itself as Man’s heart, the crowd immediately runs away, scared: “Here he comes! Talk of the devil. Make way.”86 The Crowd’s precipitous retreat at the sight of Shadow might be interpreted as evidence that Man is now self-conscious, and that it is no longer easy to manipulate his consciousness. Shadow is Man’s alter-ego, a beneficial presence that rescues him from his predicament. When Man reappears accompanied by his shadow, he has just finished undertaking a meditation session with a Zen master. During the meditation he has tried to sever himself from his past recollections in an attempt to reclaim his subjectivity. In a sense, the Zen Master is the opposite of Card Player because the scope of Sutra chanting and meditation is to enable Man to overcome the tragic, attain the Nirvana and achieve a mystic cohesion with the Self. In this play, Zen is probably the opposite of the Dionysian condition and contributes to the nurturing of the tragic field. This is symbolized by Young Man’s unsuccessful attempts at finding a way to overcome the wall of people blocking his way toward self-fulfilment.87 The final sparagmos is a beneficial one because it proves that Man’s previous loss of Self was not an end in itself. In reality, his Self was torn into two halves: he, thinking that he had lost his Self, and the shadow, his heart having been severed from him. He has become selfconscious, as we can infer from his encounter with the Shadow, an incarnation of his heart but also of his own consciousness, who saves him from his own psychic tribulations. Therefore, Man and Shadow symbolize the two halves of the same individual. This can be easily inferred from the fact that the two actors do not look at each other but talk only to themselves. As a kind of sparagmos, this can be said to function as an anticipation of the tragic mode, as we can infer from their dialogue-double soliloquy: “Who is the person speaking to me? It is your shadow, your thoughts spoken out loud. You’re always following me—when you have lost your own self.”88 83  Ibid., p. 39. 84  Ibid. 85  Ibid. 86  Ibid. p. 40. 87  Ibid. p. 27. 88  Ibid. p. 31.

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From the Other Shore to the Tragic Field: “The Other Shore” from Individual Play to Dramatic Trope It is now clear that the tragedy of Man, which takes place “on the other shore,” namely in the depths of his own Self, is the result of the workings of a fractural energy that is capable of transmitting itself from a character to another and within a single character. The dynamics of this fractural energy, which expresses the mechanism of the tragic, can only be detected by reconstructing the network of disruptive relations it creates. In fact, the Dionysian divisiveness, which is exerted upon a single dramatis persona, is sustained and kept alive by the character’s binding relation to the theatrical cosmos. In this play, the character of Man toils between division and cohesion, or, better still, experiences divisiveness (from himself) as a means of attaining cohesion with his own Self. In this respect, I concur with Jo Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer, who comment that Man “struggles with the sense of ‘belonging’ which is so impressed upon him by the Crowd. From first clinging to and then learning from the Crowd, he does finally stand apart from them, and establish his own sense of Self.”89 To conclude my reinterpretation of The Other Shore as the epitome of the tragic field, I shall briefly redefine Gao’s notion of the other shore as a dimension of indeterminacy, darkness, and primordial chaos, and, to quote the character of Man, as “a world of the dead.”90 During their journey to the other shore, the actors experience a sort of malaise, a sense of uneasiness that foreshadows their traumatic death and rebirth as demonic creatures possessed by a hidden, wicked force. The other shore is the realm of indistinctiveness and obscurity, a kind of Tartarus, a world of shadows which are hungry for the Self of others. But the other shore is also a kind of extended projection of the Self’s mind, the Self that creates another world in which he wants to take refuge but that proves a breeding-ground for his own inner ghosts to become alive and grow mad at him. Instead of enlightenment, the other shore provides a dark abyss of spiritual death. 4.5

Crowd: No one can see the other shore—I am getting dizzy—How come I can’t see it?—Where is the other shore? Sometimes it’s dark, sometimes it’s bright (opposition)—Why do we want to go to the other shore? The other shore is the other shore, you’ll never reach it—I can’t see anything—no oasis, no light—in total darkness—to make a long-time

89  Riley and Gissenwehrer, “The Myth of Gao Xingjian”, p. 128. 90  Gao, “The Other Shore”, p. 20.

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wish come true, the other shore, the other shore—this is a ditch of dead water—there is only oblivion.91 The other shore is therefore not a real, physical place, but is the epitome of the tragic field, an energetic field. Sy Ren Quah comes close to confirming the legitimacy of associating The Other Shore with the tragic field when he compares Gao’s notion of the “psychological field” (xinli chang) to “a gravitational field or magnetic field … defined by the force exerted within a region, with the actors as initiators of this energy.”92 To further strengthen his point, he also quotes Gao’s definition of psychological field: “The theatrical space is physically fixed while the psychological field created by performance is strong. The establishment of dramatic space relies primarily on the latter. In this way, a dead space becomes alive.”93 Moreover, in his dramaturgical notes for staging The Other Shore, Gao observes that albeit abstract, this play is not philosophical because it does not aim at representing a simple idea or concept. It rather aims at dramatizing a perceptive/intuitive abstraction, not a philosophical conceptualization. The stage props, such as the rope, do not have a decorative function but contribute to the enhancement of the psychological field of opposite energies and suggest the hypothetical channels through which those energies flow.94 Gao also explains that one of the main aims of this metadramatic play is to put the actors in the condition of “verifying the existence of their own Selves through the discovery of the Other as an opponent.”95 Paving the way for Gao’s technique of the tripartite actor, this idea is particularly suited to describe the tragic process as an ambivalent mechanism, serving both as a principium individuationis96 (principle of individuation) and as its annihilation in a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites). In other words, in the context of the tragic field (and, by extension, in a dramatic context) the individual is simultaneously himself and an Other. Finally, this play contains a meta-tragic reference to the sparagmos mechanism by which the tragic can be likened to what I provisionally call a “psycho-scenographic rift,” a concept that I will elucidate in the next chapter, akin to the Hölderlinian tragic caesura and which I envision as a fundamental 91  Ibid., p. 6. 92  Sy Ren Quah, “Space and Suppositionality in Gao Xingjian’s Theatre,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 166. 93  Gao Xingjian, Mei you zhuyi, p. 246. 94  Gao, “‘Bi’an’ yanchu de shuoming yu jianyi,” p. 145. 95  Ibid., p. 146. 96  This principle, first theorized by Arthur Schopenhauer, was critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche in connection with his notion of the Dionysian.

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laceration involving the whole universe. This is embodied by the character of the Plaster Seller, who plays a marginal role in the economy of the play but whose figure carries an important symbolic meaning. By claiming that he has “remedies for every sort of wound,”97 he is indirectly hinting at the tragic (i.e. disruptive) wounds of the past affecting Man’s heart. These psychological wounds, together with the pressure exerted on Man’s psyche by the Crowd and the other individuated characters mentioned above, determine the final split of Man into himself and his Other, the Shadow. Nevertheless, whereas the other characters have tormented him to exhaustion, thereby causing him to lose his own sense of Self, the Shadow rescues him by restoring his own psychic integrity and instructing him on the dangers of becoming too self-centered. With this, Gao seems to suggest that egotism is as terrible as depersonalisation, and it is precisely the ambiguity of the relationship between these two opposite conditions of the Self that engenders the tragic field. Moreover, this is another confirmation that the most important feature of the tragic is not the accompanying suffering but the consequent attainment of a higher degree of self-knowledge, which represents a positive side-effect of the Dionysian sparagmos. 5

From a Theatre of the Absurd to a Theatre of the Tragic

The title of this concluding section can be interpreted in two different but interrelated ways. First, it refers to a shift in scholarly criticism that I am endeavoring to justify in this book. What has been generally indicated as “absurdist” in Gao’s dramaturgy, based on the European—existentialist—notion of the absurd, should now be redefined as a theatre of the tragic. This new categorization aims to draw attention to the tragic potential with which Gao’s early plays (particularly The Other Shore) are arguably imbued, and which begins embryonically to emerge in the superficially existentialist elements of The Bus Stop, and which anticipate the style of the subsequent post-exile dramas. These can help us trace the development of Gao’s drama from (unconventionally) absurd to tragic. On this point, I concur with Kwok-kan Tam, who points out that “There is nothing absurdist or Existentialist in the act of waiting itself, but once the act of waiting is turned into a metaphor of life and the question of the meaning of life is asked but not answered, then the act of waiting is no longer simply a matter of waiting for the bus, for it has become life itself, in 97  Gao, “The Other Shore,” p. 28.

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which there is hope which is never realized but always promised.”98 Liu Zaifu, too, states that the play contains an inquiry on the absurdity of the human existence, in terms of how people decide to live.99 Nevertheless, my argument is more in line with Sy Ren Quah, who argues, more correctly, that, in contrast with Godot, in Gao’s play there is no sense of any existential angst.100 In fact, in describing the sketchily brief existentialist reflections in Gao’s play as pre-tragic, I am not referring to their actual intent, which sounds more comic than tragic, but to the fact that Gao re-uses them in his later works and with a different purpose, namely as a means of creating that sort of tragic field that I have described through my analysis of The Other Shore and which is not present in The Bus Stop due to the absence of a Dionysian network of conflicting energies specifically targeted at the destruction of the self. As we have seen, the Silent Man is completely free to pursue his own objectives and leave the stage without having to struggle with a maddening crowd and its devastating folly. Similarly, the other characters in the group do not try to harm each other but limit themselves to voice their own complaints almost as a means of killing time and deferring action. Moreover, I have tried to re-define Gao’s brand of “absurdity” in The Bus Stop and reached the conclusion that even though some of the dramatic techniques used by Gao here can be related to Western absurdist drama, they perform a different function. Whereas Du Gao had described this play as “nothing but an imitation of the Western Theatre of the Absurd in content and form, following in the footsteps of the decadent literature and art of the West,” Ma Sen challenged that interpretation, saying, “Gao only borrowed certain techniques of the Theatre of the Absurd, such as the confusion of time. The characters in his plays talk logically and their characterization is realistic.”101 In fact, instead of depicting some kind of cosmic irrationality that cannot be overcome in any way but can only accepted as it is and either laughed about or cried about, Gao presents a situation that, albeit surreal in some respects (the characters wait for ten years which go by in a flash), is based on real facts and, what is more, has a way out, as suggested by the disassociation of the Silent Man as a symbol of individual initiative, hope, and possibly optimism. In this regard, I concur with Riley and Gissenwehrer who are adamant in asserting that 98  Tam, “Drama of Paradox: Waiting as a Form and Motif in The Bus-Stop and Waiting for Godot,” p. 57. 99  Zaifu Liu, “‘Chezhan’ yu cunzai yiyi de kouwen,” (Bus Stop and the Existentialist Inquiry) in Gao Xingjian lun, p. 77. 100  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, p. 64. 101  Ma Sen, “The Theatre of the Absurd in China: Gao Xingjian’s The Bus-Stop,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 84.

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the play “is not the tragedy of paralysis or inaction, nor the tragedy of any social mismanagement within China, nor a questioning of man’s individual relationship to life. The play has a strong message to convey the energy of forward movement. The play encourages its characters to ‘move on.’”102 Moreover, they note that “The contradiction between the forward energy of the music and the static, helpless state of the characters provides the play with intense dramatic power.”103 I argue that this is also a very important point, not only because it shows how Gao has endowed what was originally an absurdist technique with an opposite meaning, but also because it confirms that the dramatic tension it creates is not antagonistic and confrontational (as in The Other Shore), but positive and uplifting. Furthermore, this time with reference to Alarm Signal, they claim that Gao’s profound interest in the linguistic aspects of his theatrical research and in the potentialities offered by the Chinese language, “reveals the total trust Gao places in the spoken word, which links him very firmly to his Chinese forerunners and distances him from modern European dramatists and their mistrust and destruction of language.”104 As we have seen, this emphasis on action rather than stasis and dramatic inertia encourages us to reframe The Bus Stop within Michael Bennett’s concept and theory of parabolic drama, based on his reinterpretation of the European theatre of the absurd. With the support of Ma Sen, who argues that Gao “does not have the pessimistic ideology of Ionesco or Beckett which completely negates the meaning of life,”105 and of Riley, who associates Gao’s play with “a learning play or Lehrstück, an intellectual discourse on the philosophy of ‘movement’ and the ‘change’ (or lack of change) implied with it,”106 it can be argued that absurdity, if any, is not the end of the drama but a medium for conveying a message of creativity and resourcefulness. In other words, rather than “absurdity for absurdity’s sake,” what we have here is a kind of “functional absurdity.” This brings us back to the title of this conclusive section, “From a Theatre of the Absurd to a Theatre of the Tragic,” and to its second meaning, whereby this title describes Gao’s transition from the absurdist mode to the tragic mode, which starts taking place with The Other Shore. In a 1987 essay, therefore subsequent to The Other Shore, Liu Zaifu argues that in order to situate Gao’s drama outside the theatre of the absurd, one should take into account that 102  Riley and Gissenwehrer, “The Myth of Gao Xingjian,” p. 117. 103  Ibid., p. 121. 104  Ibid., p. 115. 105  Ma, “The Theatre of the Absurd in China,” p. 80. 106  Riley and Gissenwehrer, “The Myth of Gao Xingjian,” p. 130.

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rather than subverting the original structures of theatre by producing antitheatre as absurdist drama does, Gao has performed a return to the origins of theatre,107 thereby restoring action as a fundamental component of the dramatic text. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the key element to consider in order to better understand how this transition works is the combination of action and metadrama. Łabędzka, I believe, misses this when she briefly mentions the metadramatic elements employed by Gao in his pre- and post-exile works and argues that in The Bus Stop, those elements are “the interjections which destroy the illusion of stage.”108 Regarding The Other Shore, she mentions “the framework structure, which is to remind the audience that they are just sitting in the theatre.”109 This, she asserts, “clearly marks the moment when actors are entering their parts and departing from them at the beginning and the end of the play.”110 But I would rather argue that the usage of metadrama in Gao’s theatre can be reinterpreted as a means of enhancing the tragic as a dramatic mechanism. This reconfiguration of metadrama can be justified by shifting the attention from the audience to the relationship between actor and character. As previously noted, Gao started to explore the potentialities of metadrama since his very first play, Alarm Signal. As Quah points out, “the only nonrealistic dramatic device that can be detected in this play is the externalization of the characters’ subjectivities. When the characters talk about their own inner worlds, they basically step out of the realistic setting in order to show the separation between real space and symbolic space. This effect is mainly achieved through an ad hoc usage of stage lightning (symbolic mode of representation).”111 The metadramatic elements direct the dramatic action to the dissolution of the character’s self. In The Other Shore, the transformation of the performers into neutral actors first and subsequently into individuated characters is not presented as a smooth process but rather enacted as a series of traumatic losses. To become a full-fledged character, Man is obliged to go through a sort of martyrdom of his own self, first haunted, then possessed and brainwashed; he is eventually split into two, as himself and his consciousness, the Shadow, who acts as an Other and a guide. In this sense, it can be argued that The Other Shore inaugurates a new season in Gao’s drama also because it presents the “other shore” of the play as a particular articulation of what Rachel Falconer 107  Zaifu Liu, “Gao Xingjian yu shiyan xiju,” (Gao Xingjian and Experimental Theatre), in Gao Xingjian lun, p. 77. 108  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 87. 109  Ibid. 110  Ibid. 111  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, p. 61.

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has called the “katabatic imagination,” namely, “a world-view which conceives of selfhood as the narrative construct of an infernal journey and return,”112 and which we will re-encounter in the post-exile plays, as will be documented in Chapter Three. In fact, as we have seen, Man’s repeated collisions with shadowy and more or less sinister creatures on the other shore are not an end in themselves but punctuate what is actually a “journey from ego to self … involving descent into the darkness of shadow and ascent towards the light of self”113 (which is here curiously embodied by a Shadow-Heart). The other shore is therefore not a specific Euclidean place but a kind of Hell, “a transformative passage,” where the self is demolished as a result of the encounter with “the absolute Other”114 and subsequently distilled and recreated anew. Life on the other shore is not quiet and static, as it would be in an ordinary meditation session, but a tumultuous and restless journey full of twists and turns during which the ego-self is bounced back and forth to test and probe its resilience. Somehow, Man can be seen as a Dante Alighieri—a katabatic figure par excellence—whose “‘I’ is both singular and archetypal, and who is at once an individual character and a figure for ‘our life’.”115 Although Dante is always accompanied by a guide (first Virgil, then Beatrice), while Gao’s Man meets his guide at the end of the infernal journey, both figures go through a purification process that involves confronting a good number of others, including demonic characters, in order to finally reach a similar goal: an awareness of one’s subjectivity. Nevertheless, as I will argue in the next chapter, the attainment of individuation will become problematic in the post-1986 works, as the Dionysian trope of the other shore will be made increasingly “Dionysian” and all the characters will undergo the effects of what Storm calls “a signature process in tragic drama: a rending action in which character is fragmented, dismantled, and alienated from any possible sense of unification—with the god, with others, or most typically, with the self.”116 Returning now to the transition from absurdity to tragedy from The Bus Stop to The Other Shore, we can conclude that if metadrama is not accompanied by the dramatic process of sparagmos, the play cannot be said to show any tragic potential. As a matter of fact, in The Other Shore, the final splitting of the character of Man into two is indicative of a tragic (i.e., divisive) potency operating within the dramatic cosmos and embodied by a diverse array of haunting 112  Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 2. 113  Coupe, Myth, p. 131. 114  Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 2. 115  Ibid. 116  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 18.

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presences who progressively cripple the character’s initial self-centeredness. Furthermore, Man and Shadow are both dramatic figures that represent two halves of the same role and are therefore intimately close to each other. The relationship between Man and his fellow-characters fulfills the requirements of the simultaneously cohesive and divisive tragic field. In The Bus Stop, however, the otherization of the characters that one witnesses towards the end of the play is not comparable to a tragic sparagmos. Each character temporarily disappears behind the persona of the performer, who speaks in the third person, not to portray a condition of insurmountable divisiveness within the Self but to offer an alternative perspective on the situation being staged. This is the perspective of the Silent Man, which contrasts profoundly with that of the rest of the community waiting at the titular bus stop. The performers’ commentaries have the power to completely reverse the initial impression that the characters have no responsibility in aggravating their plight. Moreover, by totally distancing themselves from their roles, the actors in The Bus Stop curtail the potential for the development of a tragic field as the two entities (actors and characters) do not exist concurrently and/or on the same plane of reality. Finally, in disagreement with Łabędzka’s categorisation of Gao’s early theatrical experiments as a transition from “didactic drama” to “Theatre of Imagination,”117 I would rather connect my theoretical proposition to Gilbert Fong’s idea of the transformation of Gao’s drama into a sort of inner drama (or psychodrama, or psychological theatre; neixin xiju), which better suits the adoption of the tragic (psychological) field as the leading element of my theory.118 In the next chapter I will follow up on Henry Zhao’s idea that Gao’s later plays, which he categorizes as “Zen,” “have walked very far from any possible shadows of the Theatre of the Absurd,”119 yet substituting the paradigm of Zen Drama with that of a (modern) theatre of the tragic, characterized— among other things—by the re-enactment of the narrative archetype of the descensus ad inferos that, in the case of the post-exile plays, is without appeal and, most importantly, without return. 117  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 93. 118  Gao and Fang, Lun xiju, p. 20. 119  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 75.

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Chapter 3

Between Cohesion and Division: the Tragic Field and Mode in Gao Xingjian’s Post-1990 Plays of Self 1

Introduction: Like “a Rip in the Paper Sky,” a Universe on the Edge of Chaos

In the previous chapter, we have seen that the Dionysian tragic re-reading of The Other Shore enables us to reconstruct the complex network of disruptive relationships initiated through the game of ropes performed by the actorscharacters, and ending in the reshaping of the protagonist’s initial ego-centric impulse towards self-determination. The mechanism of sparagmos, furthermore, acts as a litmus test for verifying the transition from absurdity to tragedy in Gao’s dramaturgy. Nevertheless, despite its fully-fledged tragic potential, which is tied to a dynamic tragic field of cohesion and division, in The Other Shore the sparagmos mechanism—this principle of “divisiveness” working at the level of the Self—does not generate a metadramatic tension involving the actor-character relationship. For the Man in The Other Shore, the process of psychic fragmentation does not coincide with an ongoing metadramatic condition affecting the character’s mind, but is the result of an external dramatic action, of a series of multiple barricades set against him collectively by the oppressive Crowd, the daimonic Card-player, and the shadows of his own past. In this sense, it is symptomatic that Man addresses himself always as “I.” Although his psyche is seriously challenged, his own sense of identity is never completely shattered or questioned, since the purpose of traversing the other shore is to probe one’s psychical resilience vis-à-vis the adversities of existence. In this sense, the formation of an alter-ego, the Shadow, aims not to further disrupt his psychic equilibrium but serves instead to balance it by counteracting his longing for self-fulfilment. While Man’s self-rending experience is indeed a form of Dionysian sparagmos, it is not yet a mature version of the tragic mode as theorized in Chapter One, simply because the arrival of Shadow “rescues” him from the shock of tragic recognition that would inevitably follow the act of looking into the abyss of being. Shadow resembles a sort of good daimon, one that can indicate to Man the way out of the hellish other shore, of healing his wounds, and making peace with his own Self. Therefore, the doubling of Man puts an end to the character’s aimless quest for individuation, thereby echoing the “resurrection” of Dionysus as a self-conscious being. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_005

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Whereas in The Other Shore the construction of the tragic field is an essential condition for the sparagmos mechanism to develop and tear up its “victims,” we shall see how in the post-exile plays written after 1990 (thus excluding Escape), sparagmos is already constitutive of the actorial psyche, thus manifesting itself as a true tragic mode and gradually establishing an internal tragic field of opposite forces that does not issue into a conciliation of selfhood and otherness but actually exasperates the sense of laceration haunting the dramatis personae. To better clarify this point, I shall argue that this “tragic mode,” an internal, spiralling dismembering mechanism, gradually works as a caesura by carving out a thirdspace within the Self, characterized by a concentration gravitational forces that drag the character down into a state of hell, a concept which does not merely have the old theological connotation of a place where damned souls are punished, but also describes the modern condition, “the invisible texture of existence”1 and “the space in which the self is unmade.”2 As Hans Küng has noted, the English word “hell” derives from the old Norse hehlen, which means “to conceal”;3 taking her cue from this etymology, Rachel Falconer points out that hell actually resides “concealed within an individual body and psyche,” thereby associating the infernal descent with consigning oneself to “the forces that … dismantle the subject at source.”4 In this chapter, I shall attempt to show that Gao’s post-1990 characters suffer from the effects of what can be called a “psycho-scenographic rift,” a fundamental traumatic condition that determines their ontological insecurity and steers them towards an attitude of psychological hybris, namely the urge to look “beyond.” I borrow the notion of psycho-scenographic rift from a wellknown passage in Pirandello’s novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il Fu Mattia Pascal, 1904). In the excerpt below, the protagonist Mattia receives a visit from Anselmo Paleari, who invites him to go to the theatre that night to see a performance of the Sophoclean version of the tragedy of Orestes, which will be staged using marionettes in lieu of real actors: Consider for a moment this curious idea. Suppose that at the climactic moment, just as the marionette playing Orestes is about to avenge the death of his father on Aegisthus and his mother, the paper sky of the little theatre develops a tear. What would happen? What do you think? 1  Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 30. 2  Ibid., p. 18. 3  Hans Küng as quoted in Falconer, Hell, pp. 18–19. 4  Ibid.

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– I wouldn’t know, I responded, shrugging my shoulders. – But it’s very simple, Signor Meis! Orestes would be terrifically disconcerted by that hole in the sky. – And why? – Let me go on. Orestes would still feel the drive to revenge, would still be wildly passionate about carrying it out, but his eyes, at that instant, would go there, to that tear, through which, now, all sorts of cosmic wrongs would invade the scene, and he would feel his arms drop. Orestes, that is to say, would become a Hamlet. The whole difference, Signor Meis, between ancient and modern tragedy consists in this, believe me: a hole in the paper sky.5 There are several interpretations of this passage and of the meaning of the rip in the paper sky. With reference to Gao, I would argue that it may signify the reality of the tragic that lays itself bare without any particular poetic filters, that exists independently from the subject, and is therefore in sheer opposition to the idea of the tragic as an interpretation of reality. If we substitute the Orestes marionette with the average post-1990 Gaoian character, we will obtain what I call “a universe on the edge of chaos.” The lacerated sky would still indicate a cosmic instability, but instead of revealing that there is no transcendence to infuse meaning into our actions, no Olympian gods, or no God at all, or that our actions are indeed determined by someone or something else, i.e., some sort of cosmic puppet master, the tear would induce what Charles Taylor has termed “the inward turn of modern identity.”6 This is the idea that “our modern notion of the self is related to (or) constituted by a certain sense … of inwardness…. The unconscious is for us within, and we think of the depths of the unsaid, the unsayable … as inner.”7 The transformation of Orestes into Hamlet not only epitomizes the transition from ancient to modern tragedy but also exemplifies the modern (tragic) identity, which intersects with the concept of katabasis as “a quest for selfhood.”8 Under this light, we shall see how the Gaoian characters confront this quintessential laceration of their being by turning their gaze inward, trying to look into what is concealed yet partially revealed by the rip. I argue that beyond the rip is what the Greeks called khaos 5  Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, trans. by William Weaver, New York 1964: Doubleday, p. 139. 6  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge 1989: Cambridge University Press, p. 27. 7  Ibid., p. 111. 8  Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 27.

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(chaos), whose original meaning was not that of “disorder” or “disarray,” which is used nowadays in colloquial language, but actually denoted a “gaping void” or “chiasmus” or “abyss,” quite similar to the scientific concept of black hole: “a hole with a gravitational force so strong that even light is caught and held in its grip.”9 The universe “on the edge of chaos” is to be identified with the other shore, or, better yet, with its various developments and transpositions as a dramatic trope within the post-1990 repertoire. Below, I will provide a thorough analysis of four of Gao’s post-1990 plays of Self (Between Life and Death, The Sleepwalker, Dialogue and Rebuttal, and The Death Collector), with a view of exploring two main areas: (1) the dramatic dynamics—the interplay of tragic mode and field, and (2) the motif of the infernal thirdspace into which the characters are all inescapably dragged. 2

Between Life and Death: the Spatialization of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of the Feminine Self

Between Life and Death (Shengsijie) was completed in 1991 and first appeared in French.10 The Chinese version subsequently appeared in the second issue of the literary journal Jintian (Today), published in Stockholm.11 The play, featuring a combination of storytelling, psychodrama, and dramatic action, is structured around a long and painful monologue performed mostly in the third person by a nameless Woman narrating the troubles of an invisible “She.” The thematic focus of the monologue ranges from She’s relationship with her partner, her memories, and her current existential insecurities. The dramatic identity of the Woman is to a certain extent unclear. She might qualify as a neutral actress caught in the process of rehearsing a dramatic speech inbetween a monologue and a soliloquy, yet from an estranged viewpoint. In that case, Woman can be categorized as a theatrical character, or acting Self, while “She,” who is the object of her speech, could be the dramatic character or performed Self. Nevertheless, Woman does not seem to be aware of the presence of an audience. Furthermore, she seems fully immersed in the internal world of her narrated counterpart, not only in terms of emotions but also in 9  Kip Thorne, as cited by Falconer, Hell, p. 23. 10  The original French version is entitled Au bord de la vie (On the Edge of Life). Hereinafter the English title will be abbreviated BLD. 11  The Chinese version was later included in Gao Xingjian xiju liuzhong (Six Plays by Gao Xingjian), Vol. 5, Taipei 1995: Dijiao chubanshe; see also Terry Siu-han Yip, “A Chronology of Gao Xingjian,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 326.

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terms of reactions, sensations, and visions. Woman might equally be categorized as a dramatic character experiencing several personality disorders. This fundamental ambiguity, which is also accentuated by the neutrality of the setting and the lack of any geographical background or time frame,12 allows for the adoption of a tragic perspective based on the Dionysian framework and its associated concepts of sparagmos and field. Below, I shall explain further how the tragic potential of this particular play rises from the psychodramatic rift affecting the protagonist’s double personality. Like an interstitial channel, this rift reveals a sort of psychical thirdspace where the boundaries between Self and Other are violently erased. The split subject precipitates into what Liu Zaifu has called “an inner abyss of misery” (neixin de lianyu)—a psychological counterpart of Dante’s imagined purgatory.13 The existence of an interstitial subjectivity has already been pointed out in much of the scholarship on Gao Xingjian. Henry Zhao, for example, has spoken of a subjectivity jammed “in an unbridgeable gap between the speaker [Woman] and the person being spoken about [She].”14 Sy Ren Quah, focusing more on the dramatic exchange, has called attention to “a seemingly irresolvable tension in the performance of the neutral actor.”15 Furthermore, Zhao and Izabella Łabędzka have variously emphasized how in this play what takes center stage is the ever-ongoing divisiveness of the Self, the inability to exist as a cohesive whole. Their observations evoke the workings of the Dionysian sparagmos mechanism, from “the tearing-apart of the self”16 as a dramatic process to the final anagnorisis, the painful discovery that “there is no whole, no completeness or unity; man and the surrounding world are a mosaic of particles, bits and pieces.”17 The following analysis aims to shed further light on the mechanism that brings about the physical and ontological disintegration of the self-disputing dyad of “Woman-She.” The final goal is to disclose its meta-dramatic characteristics and, ultimately, to frame it within the Dionysian scheme of cohesion and division within the Self that encapsulates the tragic as a dramatic mode and potential. 12  Liu Zaifu, “Neixin lianyu de wutai chengxian—‘Shengsijie’ yu Gao Xingjian de neixin xiju” (Staging an Inner Purgatory—“Between Life and Death” and Gao Xingjian’s Inner Theatre), in Gao Xingjian lun, p. 109. 13  Ibid., p. 112. 14  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 145. Emphasis added. 15  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, p. 138. Emphasis added. 16  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 145. 17  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 163.

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The Two Layers of the Tragic Field: Schismatic Performance and Psychodrama An exploration of the tragic structures of this play should start from unveiling the basic dynamics of the performative Self. This task also enables us to identify the scope of those dynamics and to refashion it as a vehicle of tragic tension(s). This work lends itself to be decoded either as an acting exercise for character development aimed specifically at female performers (as in The Other Shore), or as a play dramatizing a case of dissociative identity disorder. By synthesizing the two perspectives, BLD could be understood as an experimental pièce that employs the potentialities of metadrama as a means of exploring the inner workings and mechanisms of the female psyche. The final aim would be to extract the innermost nucleus of the female subjectivity, in an attempt to overcome the obstacle of the Self as an ethereal entity perennially hidden and confined within the impermeable materiality of the physical body. As the following few examples show, the protagonist of this play (Woman) narrates in the third person singular the vicissitudes and the feelings of an unknown She. However, rather than a distanced perspective, she acts out She’s visions and gestures and cannot help but interiorize She’s plight. 2.1

Woman: (Somewhat irritated.) She says this is exactly what she can’t put up with, the cynism, the quizzical attitude! … Woman: (Shouts.) She doesn’t want to hear it! She doesn’t want to hear the lies! … Woman: (Startled, she puts a hand on the floor to support herself and draws back.) This is impossible! This is not real! (Stooping down to inspect.) How could this possibly be her? …18 Arguably, behind the appearance of a lonely woman talking to herself as an Other with whom she shares a deep emotional predicament, one can read the limit-situation of an actress struggling to achieve a balance between selfaffirmation and self-annihilation with respect to her role. The actress knows that in order to give an excellent performance, she is required to perform a juggling game of identities, which can lead to dramatic exhaustion and ultimately to the devastation of her own psychic equilibrium. In the Gaoian view, she is required to transcend her own individual Self so that the character’s Self can take over. At the same time, however, she has to remain constantly 18  Gao Xingjian, “Between Life and Death,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, pp. 48–56.

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vigilant by monitoring the character’s behavior inside herself, to prevent the latter from growing disproportionately and eventually suffocating her. In fact, during a performance there is still the danger that the actress, having interiorized too much the vicissitudes of the role, might gradually allow herself to become emotionally “possessed” by the character and experience what might be called a sort of dramatic psychosis. As previously noted, Gao’s technique of the neutral actor is precisely aimed at preventing such a phenomenon to happen. Nevertheless, rather than keeping herself engaged in “quiet observation” and possibly comment on the character’s personal story from her own viewpoint, the individuality of the actress in BLD appears to be progressively swallowed up by the character’s rapacious subjectivity. Unable to really take distance from the character, the actress is therefore bound to fall victim to the obscure presence slowly taking roots within her psyche. By transferring the burden of the character’s psychotic visions onto the actress, this can be said to act like a Dionysian potency, exerting its own dissociative powers through a mechanism of conflicting yet coalescing forces. These are the two distinct Selves of the actress and the character, which are brought together under the aegis of an overarching and neutral gendered entity (Woman), although distinct and both incapable of existing independently of each other. The result of this tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces is that the actress’ and the character’s two Selves are both driven to death, metaphorically speaking, by effect of the Dionysian thrust that the character’s subjectivity exerts on the actress’ identity. The character, which embodies a pre-determined individuality, and needs to insert herself parasitically into the actress’ living body to be brought to life, has the power to haul that body and soul down into her own deadly abyss. As an avatar of Dionysus, the fictional character invades the subjectivity of the actress without completely revealing or manifesting herself as a physical body. Instead, “She” remains hidden, stuck within the depths of the actress’ soul, which coincide with the depths of the feminine Self underlying the coalescing yet also schismatic double identity of Woman. This is possibly the only point of contact between the two Selves of the same reality, namely a shared archetype which could be envisioned as the negative version of the “eternal feminine” (Ewigweibliche) theorized by Goethe (and Dante before him)—something that does not “attract us upwards”19 but, conversely, makes us sink down into the darkness of Woman’s personal netherworld. The same happens to Man, her lover, whom she inadvertently kills. 19  G  erald E. P. Gillespie, Echoland: Readings from Humanism to Postmodernism, Bruxelles and New York 2006: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, p. 60.

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In light of the above, I would argue that under scrutiny in this play is the theatricalization of the relationship between she-performer and she-character, between the reality of performance and the reality of life, and between different realms of subjectivity, such as the imagined Self and the lived Self. This combined, binary logic can be said to metaphorically indicate the relationship between art and dramatic creation/abstraction vs life/experiential reality, and between artificiality and authenticity with respect to the human (in this case, specifically female) Self. The performance of the Self, or, better still, of the fractional Selves within the overarching Self, is therefore aimed at understanding and possibly verifying the existence of this quintessential feminine through the lens of tragic dramatic processes that I call schismatic performance and psychodrama. As further detailed below, these two acting modalities are made possible through the usage of the tragic mode, under the unifying guise of tripartite acting. Moreover, they represent the two dramatic layers of the tragic field in this particular play. In the next few sections I shall attempt to elucidate the tragic dynamism of this play through the concepts of tragic field and mode (sparagmos). My general hypothesis is that the tragic field is defined mainly through spatial references, whereas the tragic mode concerns the sparagmos of the pure feminine Self. Between Memory and Psychosis: the Tragic Field of the Self in-between Life and Death The exploration of the tragic field underlying this play should entail a brief discussion of the tragic latency subsumed under its title. This designates a liminal space in-between the two edges of “Life” (sheng) and “Death” (si). I would argue that, herein, “life” and “death” indicate two distinct and opposite orientations of the (feminine) Self, as created by the She-character’s life experiences and mental activity, which are transferred upon and acted out by the actress. The Self acts as a keystone, instigating these two forces to coalesce within and against Woman’s mind, which is dominated by She, the invisible character. “Life” and “Death” are bound to disintegrate each other against the actual inscrutability of the Self as quintessential entity. The Self, therefore, is a constitutive element of the tragic field of opposite forces, because it represents the limit beyond which every attempt at self-knowledge sinks into the abyss of non-existence. “Life” and “Death,” here, define distinct psychodramatic categories. “Life” corresponds with the conscious elaboration of perceptions and vicissitudes, while “Death” corresponds with the ways in which those conscious remembrances are filtered by consciousness in the attempt to re-construct 2.2

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one’s mislaid sense of identity, and in the final hope of retrieving the core of one’s own Self. The play seems to show that insofar as it is free to roam within the realm of pre-consciousness, the Self is unrestrained and alive. Conversely, when consciousness rises above the Self though reflection, with the aim of grasping its core, it is unable to frame the Self as a unified reality but can only chop it up and send it back as a series of simulacra. These are signifiers without a meaning, objects/items that do not hide any reality whatsoever but pretend to be a reality themselves, as theorized by Jean Baudrillard.20 With regard to the Self, consciousness acts as a broken looking glass, trying to reflect the true essence of the Self, yet the image we get of it is that of a splintered frame. The title of this play thus seems to tell us that between life and death lies the Self—a combination of mental structures and mechanisms that the subject perceives as fragmentary bits and pieces, i.e., as existing in the tragic mode. Earlier, I have decoded Gao’s concept of the tragic Self through the archetype of the daimon, specifying that the original meaning of this term implies the concept of divisiveness. As I will show below, this latent Dionysian-like Other-within-the-self is not to be identified with the illogical side of subjectivity or with the Freudian subconscious (Es). Rather, the daimon represents the mind’s tendency to duplicate itself in an effort to comprehend its origins. Dionysus is an independent creature, yet he needs to possess others in order to prove his own divinity, as a means of self-assertion and of identity construction. By means of his hallucinatory tricks, Dionysus lives on. Similarly, by creating an Other, the mind reproduces itself as self-reflective consciousness in an attempt to comprehend itself. In this sense, we could paraphrase Luigi Pirandello’s definition of humoristic reflection as a “little demon” that enjoys disassembling the gear of reality to debunk its fundamental incongruences, and therefore make sense of consciousness as daimonic and as a tragic device.21 Consciousness employs the categories of analytical thinking in order to dismantle the outer shell of the Self and figure out what its inner workings are. As I shall explain with reference to specific examples from the text, the interplay of memories and simulacra activates the kinetic field of opposite forces theorized by William Storm. Below, I shall attempt to demonstrate that by fragmenting memory into disconnected simulacra of the character’s consciousness, the Self progressively apprehends itself as nothingness. This process will culminate with the 20  Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations, trans. by Sheila F. Glaser, Ann Arbor 1994: University of Michigan Press. 21  Walter Starkie, Luigi Pirandello, 1867–1936, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1967: University of California Press, p. 90.

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disorientation of Woman’s sense of (both dramatic and nondramatic) identity, which is signified by the pulverization of the physical body. I will try to elucidate the protagonist’s struggle between her “need to verify her own self” and her inability to sever her bond to She, who now haunts her mind, drives her body, and dictates her perceptions. In other words, the character is like a Dionysian presence. Evidence thereof can be found in the initial scene featuring Woman’s accusations towards her lover.22 Woman, though speaking in the third person, addresses Man directly as if she shared the character’s opinion of him. She never judges the character but internalizes her thoughts and feelings. She is aware of Man’s presence and interacts physically with him, although it is not clear whether he is really there or merely inhabiting her mind (“She approaches him, and leans against him. Finally, she grabs his shoulders and turns him around.”23). Woman’s schismatic performance does not lead to a better knowledge of the character’s personality but does enhance the tragic tension. It shows the duplicity of the Self functioning as a potentially boundless black hole, which projects its shadow out of itself and ensnares the individual’s mind within a set of asphyxiating barricades. The tragic field of “Life” and “Death,” experience and simulacra, is triggered off when Woman expresses She’s need to “search her memory”24 in order to understand whether she is real or not. The actress starts telling the story of the character’s childhood and girlhood, simultaneously participating in the latter’s life-long plight, totally immersing herself in the character’s own feelings, passions, and traumas, to the point that she comes across fragments of the woman’s personal memories. These emerge as concrete hallucinations both visible and aural. Stemming from the recesses of the Self, they transform into simulacra—images without substance—that populate and alternate before her mind, which has now become a sort of mental theatre. As Giuseppe Genna notes, hallucinations fall within the purview of the sparagmos experience: “This state of mind, which I define as ‘hallucinatory’ … is, after all, the amplification of one’s sense of Self … [This] is a compelling kind of hallucination, whereby it is impossible to know whether what is happening is real or illusory.”25 Examples of simulacra are various mysterious female figures, a masked man who blocks her way, a tall man on stilts with a painted staring eye on his palm, 22  Gao Xingjian, “Between Life and Death,” pp. 46–57. 23  Ibid., pp. 52–54. 24  Ibid., p. 59. 25  Giuseppe Genna, “Everyman di Philip Roth: Il Tragico nel Romanzo e l’Impossibilità del Romanzo tragico” (Everyman by Philip Roth: The Tragic in the Novel and the Impossibility of the Tragic Novel), http://www.giugenna.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/everyman1 .pdf (Accessed July 14 2015), p. 10.

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probably symbolizing the male gaze. The terror that ensues is fully interiorized by Woman who screams several times, tries to escape until she kneels on the ground with her face down, exhausted and mentally crushed, unable to speak logically: “She says she does not want what she says she wants, she says when she says no she doesn’t mean yes she says she is not saying no! She’s not saying yes either …”26 The last simulacrum is a headless female figure, whom Woman addresses directly, as if she were one with the character, and who might embody her selfless condition. The actress’ irreversible psychosis is signified by two events. First, because she sees herself twice in the character’s alter-ego (headless woman), who also serves as a self-reflecting mirror in which she can see herself. Second, because the monster presents her with parts of her own dismembered body, again, an epitome of the shattered psyche. This fusion of identities is so powerful that the actress is scared to death and frantically asks the character’s alter-ego to stop haunting her: “Go away! Trample it to pieces! Wipe it all out!”27 The final cry: “Finished … who finished whom?” is indicative of the ontological uncertainty developed by the actress. The question for her is whether she has gotten rid of the character’s possession or whether the character has passed her own inner ghosts onto the actress, hence being responsible for her madness. The last question, “What is the self? Besides these words, these empty, hollow words about nothing, what else is left?”28 signifies Woman’s final ontological disintegration, accentuated also by her persistent role-playing. In the words of John H. Lutterbie, this ending awareness may be expressed, “I recognize the impossibility of a coherent identity and sense my nonexistence in ever-fragmenting articulations of subjectivity. But caught in the vertigo of despair, I realize I am only disappearing in words, in a semiotic of subjectivity.”29 The Tragic Abyss and the Spatialization of the Tragic Field: Performing a Journey into the Self In the absence of a pool of dramatis personae, the construction of the tragic field in this play is grounded on the psychodramatic interaction between Woman and She with respect to the performative Self. Below, I shall show that the interplay of coalescing, opposite forces aimed at the disintegration of the dyadic identity of the Woman manifests itself also through the creation of 2.3

26  Gao, “Between Life and Death,” p. 74. 27  Ibid., p. 76. 28  Ibid., p. 78. 29  John H. Lutterbie, Hearing Voices: Modern Drama and the Problem of Subjectivity, Ann Arbor 1997: University of Michigan Press, p. 112.

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a psychophysical space coming from the Self yet also rising against it, in an attempt to imprison the performer’s (i.e. Woman) mind. From this perspective, there rises one further interpretation of this play as a journey into the Self, which is, once again, the generative source of the tragic field. In BLD the spatialization of the tragic field proceeds from and coincides with the spatialization of the Self. Woman-She maintains that she must experience death in order to prove that she is still alive. By generically invoking death, she somehow forestalls her subsequent descent into a sort of “underworld” of the Self that recalls the “other shore.” This descent configures itself as a process whereby the character’s uncertain identity is progressively overwhelmed by the surrounding space, which is actually a mirrored-image of the character’s ego. Space is an alter-ego of Woman’s Self, and functions as the objectification of the obscure side of her personality, which she does not know and which she cannot control. The character’s repeated attempts at absconding from what appears to be her prison-cell are counteracted by the space’s attempts at impeding her escape. Initially, no indication of a well-defined physical space is given. The instructions only mention “an empty and dimly lit stage.”30 The darkness and absence of stage props help the audience figure out that the dramatic space is an open psychic field that generates a physical space of the mind. When Woman realizes she is actually locked in her own room, from which she lacked “the courage to step out,”31 she crawls all over the room in a circle around the bits and pieces of her dismembered mind (a pile of men’s clothing and a jewelry box) and body (the detached arm and leg). The room symbolizes her own self-imprisonment. The fact that she has tried to extrapolate the core of her own Self through selfanalysis, leading to her own self-dismemberment, prefigures her subsequent self-sinking into the deepest shores of her own being.32 First, the surrounding space changes from a “warm and comfortable little nest” into a “horrifying abyss” from which she “has got to get out.”33 The transformation of her room into some sort of existential prison triggers off mixed feelings. She recollects her native home as a gloomy place where she could not have the tiniest bit of privacy, and yet she felt deeply isolated. The locked room signals both She’s inability to free herself from the stranglehold of her own gendered Self (“When her mother was alive she always said that it was difficult

30  Gao, “Between Life and Death,” p. 47. 31  Ibid., p. 55. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid., p. 57.

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being a woman,”34 and, “It’s in her destiny”35) and Woman’s inability to escape the grip of the character’s troubled subjectivity and terrifying memories, which she not only narrates but also experiences at the level of emotions. Later, the space becomes enshrouded in dark fog, thereby impeding her to see where she is heading to.36 A big mass of blackness37 makes her feel on the brink of slipping into “the deep dark water of death,” which will not free her from what she is (“the old grudges, the jealousy, the greed, the worries, and the anxieties”). Finally, she sees “the door of a dark and secret valley,” behind which a mammoth eye keeps staring at her, thereby blocking her attempts at freeing herself from her inner ghosts. The last spatial reference is contained in her witnessing her own body “floating in the netherworld,”38 “pushed up … by surge after surge of black waves she couldn’t touch or feel … from an unfathomable depth,” until those mysterious forces plunge it into a deeper alley of darkness, where she loses any sense of herself as a unitary whole. Thus, one can argue that in BLD the tragic field is engendered by the interplay of oppositional forces that takes place within and without the Self of the lonely Woman. These forces are, again, cohesive and divisive. Cohesion imprisons the character within her own self, whilst division concerns the space’s potential for deconstructing Woman’s identity. In fact, during the character’s journey into the Self, she contemplates numerous loci of tension that present themselves as fractures, rips, and borders: the wall, for instance, hinders her escape, but the door drops her into the underworld/netherworld, a place of death, which entails the final loss of Self. This experience boosts the tragic field’s cohesive and divisive workings, because losing the Self implies the opposite and complementary actions of wiping out the character’s individuated identity and fragmenting the character’s self-perception. The Self becomes therefore an Other. It is the duplicity of this experience that allows us to call it tragic.

34  Ibid., p. 64. 35  Ibid., p. 69. 36  Ibid., p. 70. 37  Interestingly, this passage reminds one of Oedipus’ words, uttered in sheer horror at the discovery of the bestiality of his own true self: “I walk in a cloud of darkness. An evil wind blows through it.” Sophocles, Oedipus. https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/ oedipus-trans-mcguinness-iid-19550/do-9780571284993-div-00000008. This spatial metaphor conveys the sense of utter disorientation at navigating the obscure shores of the self, echoing Woman’s predicament in BLD. 38  Ibid., p. 75.

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2.4 From Sparagmos to Tragic Nonentity: the Human Self as Stage Prop BLD brims with rending experiences. These are moments and episodes in which the Self of the protagonist is torn apart. The result of these selfdismembering processes is the rediscovery of the human Self as a “tragic nonentity,”39 a crumbling outer shell revealing a substantial vacuum. Below, I shall discuss five kinds of sparagmos, all endured by Woman. The first type, or interpersonal, concerns Woman’s relationship with Man as depicted in the initial scene. Between moments of total hatred and violent criticism of Man’s supposed insensitivity and cowardice, alternating with flashes of excessive attachment to him, Woman shows signs of a schizophrenic personality that is probably also related to her gender. The duplicity of her behavior has a destructive power toward Man. He is metaphorically “killed” and reduced to nothing more than a stage prop, “a piece of clothing on the rack.”40 Man’s Self is first marginalized, deprived of any agency and vilified. Next it is disintegrated under the blows of Woman’s egotistic subjectivity. She embodies the characteristics of the maenad, the tragic female character par excellence and herself an avatar of tragedy, as described in the words of Vyacheslav Ivanov: Tragedy is a maenad … The maenad loves and kills. From the depth of sex, from the dark, primeval past of the battles of the sexes arises this splitting and bifurcating of the female soul, wherein woman first finds the wholeness and primal integrity of her feminine consciousness. So tragedy is born of the female essence’s assertion of itself as a dyad.41 Like the maenads in The Bacchae, who kill Pentheus after mistaking him for a puppet lion, Woman carries out Man’s dismemberment almost inadvertently, as if in a dream. We see her gathering bits and pieces of his personal belongings, and we hear her acknowledging her own incredulity and regret at having actually killed “her man, her darling, her treasure, … her life and destiny,”42 like Agave after realizing she has actually killed her own son.

39  I borrow this expression from Storm, who uses it in his analysis of Chekov’s play The Seagull. 40  Ibid., p. 54. 41  Vyacheslav Ivanov, “The Essence of Tragedy,” in Laurence Senelick (ed.), Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology, ed. Laurence Senelick, Austin 1981: University of Texas Press, pp. 218–219. 42  Gao, “Between Life and Death,” p. 56.

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The next occurrence is a kind of intrapersonal sparagmos, leading to the disintegration of Woman’s gendered subjectivity. Having “cut off all her ties with the outside world,”43 the psychodramatic tension between opposite aspects of her femininity is pushed beyond the tragic threshold. She no longer recognizes herself in her own body which she sees as withering and decontextualized. She then bursts out her self-contempt at her gender by throwing away her jewelry, which she discards as “superfluous,” saying that “she detests herself, detests being a woman …”44 Her own self-repulsiveness prefigures the next, scenographical kind of sparagmos. She beholds the physical dismemberment of her own body occurring right before her eyes. Her leg and arm, which come out from below her own clothes mark the gradual transformation of Woman’s body into a series of stage props. Still talking in the third person, Woman wonders whether her own existence is comparable to a mirage. In this self-directed yet otherized question we can discern a glimpse of the actress-character’s ontological insecurity about herself. Is Woman a real person, or simply an evanescent character, living thanks to another’s body? Or is she wondering whether she exists independently from She, whether she has agency instead of passively acting as a stage prop herself? There seems to be no answer to this question. The only way to check whether she is real or not is to continue dissecting herself (“butchering,” she says) in an attempt to grasp her own true Self: Woman: She still keeps on analyzing herself in desperate pursuit of her true self, to find out for sure if she’s real or just a body without a soul.45 This idea is allegorically replicated by the sight of a Buddhist nun, “cutting her belly and extracting her guts.”46 This image further exacerbates Woman’s frenzy of self-analysis, her will to extrapolate her Self from the trap of the physical body and to purify it from its gendered idiosyncrasies. The Nun’s gesture might signify Woman’s attitude of sparagmos as a mode of being. Finally, Woman covers her face with both her hands and immediately lets herself sink into the character’s soul, going through a metaphysical kind of sparagmos. As a double of herself, in the darkness she sees “countless heads swimming in a

43  Ibid., p. 55. 44  Ibid. 45  Ibid., p. 57. 46  Ibid., pp. 71–72.

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sea of bitterness.”47 The result is the total dismembering of her identity into a multiplicity of beings, which actually conceal a latent tragic nonentity. Woman: She has no thoughts … She also has no more feelings … Every­ thing is enshrouded in the big Chaos, only a glimmer of secret light still exists in her heart, sometimes it’s bright and sometimes it’s dark, and if she can’t even prevent it from disappearing, then all will return to Nothingness.48 She has discovered that without that body, that gendered identity, there is nothing behind the Self, which is merely a mental construction. The play closes with Woman “bending to lie face down on the floor, she no longer saying anything and looking like a pile of abandoned clothing in the faint light.”49 In this way, any remaining glimpse of Woman’s identity as either/both actress and character is eventually negated. Woman does definitely not exist as an independent subject but rather as a stage prop, with neither voice nor agency of her own, like Man before her. Throughout the play, Woman’s struggle for self-affirmation against a myriad scenographic objects and people50 trying to push her back into the meanderings of her own personal tragic abyss, seems to embody Jiří Veltruský’s idea that in the theatre, “… the sphere of the live human being and that of the lifeless object are interpenetrated, and no exact limit can be drawn between them.”51 There is, therefore, a further internal tragic field of opposite forces with respect to Woman’s tragic nonentity as an actress-character bound to lose her identity and become part of the scenography. She hence gives extra life and agency to those tools that initially seemed to be stage props yet exerted a destructive influence on her quest for selfhood. For Veltruský, the function of a given theatrical object, including the actor, “is determined by the antinomy of two opposing forces contained within it: the dynamic forces of action and the static forces of characterization.”52 With respect to the relationship that binds the female protagonist to the theatrical space and its components, the multiple encounters between Woman 47  Ibid., p. 73. 48  Ibid., pp. 76–77. 49  Ibid., p. 78. 50  I call it “scenographic” because they do not speak. 51  Jiří Veltruský, “Man and Object in the Theatre,” in Paul L. Garvin (ed. and trans.), A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, Washington, DC 1964: Georgetown University Press, p. 86. 52  Ibid., p. 89.

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and the haunting presences to which she is forcibly exposed can be framed within Leonid Andreev’s concept of “panpsychism,”53 which is also mentioned by William Storm. Panpsychism is the process through which the inanimate objects, which are part of the mis-en-scène within a given play, are employed to serve as objective correlatives of the inner life of the human character(s). They qualify as material fragments invested with a certain dose of psychic energy coming directly from the character’s mind, who projects them out of herself, in this case as psychotic visions. In Storm’s view, Andreev’s “panpsychism” is an important component of the tragic field because it concerns a figurative field of dramatic energies that extends from the dramatis personae to the theatrical objects and vice versa, hence contributing to delineate that “connective fabric”54 permeating the tragic subtext of a given play. BLD seems to perfectly fit the notion of panpsychism associated with the tragic field, because Woman’s progressive metadramatic delirium infuses life into her own inner ghosts. These become “living” stage props revolting against her and posing a threat to her search for authenticity. Whereas Woman is bound to lose her personal energy in order to become a lifeless component of the scenery, they acquire an independent life as a result of this tragic interchange of identities. Therefore, the only thing that Woman can do, eventually, is to acknowledge that she is no more than an empty and selfless body being looked at by herself, who watches herself living/acting in a helpless state of “being-toward-death”: “the me you all see is not me, not her, it’s only that so-called Self looking at her, looking at me, what more can you or I say?”55 To conclude, with BLD Gao has carried out an exploration of the darkest sides of the feminine nature by placing it within a tragic context, namely in the middle of a tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces aimed at de-structuring the quintessential myth of the eternal feminine. Furthermore, my proposal to reinterpret this play as a journey into the Self further supports my reconfiguration of this play as inherently tragic. Woman’s descent into the underworld of the human psyche aptly mirrors Louise Cowan’s definition of the tragic protagonist as someone who “has to descend into the deepest crevices of the universe—into Tartarus itself.”56 This component, as further detailed below, characterizes Gao’s other post-exile plays as well. 53  Leonid Andreev, “Letters on Theatre,” in Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, pp. 239–241. 54  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 113. 55  Gao, “Between Life and Death,” p. 78. 56  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 13.

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The Sleepwalker: the Psychologization of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of the Masculine Self

The Sleepwalker (Yeyoushen) is a play in three acts which was completed in 1993 in Paris and commissioned by the Beaumardrais Foundation of France.57 The main storyline revolves around a dream experienced by an anonymous Traveller, which soon turns into a terrifying nightmare. After boarding his train and falling asleep in his compartment while reading a book, the protagonist gradually sinks into a surrealistic dimension, which has the contours of a mysterious ghost-city shrouded in quiet, nocturnal darkness. Unlike BLD, which opens in a neutral setting later disseminated with a myriad of spatial references, in this play the space is clearly defined from the very beginning—first the train carriage and then the city. More specifically, one can detect an inverted progression in the treatment and significance of the dramatic space. Whereas in BLD there is a progression from psyche to space—in other words, a spatialization of the psychological field—in TS the opposite process occurs. The concrete space of the play is progressively reshaped through the main character’s oneiric imagination. In other words, space is psychologized. In terms of dramatic structures, despite the presence of a single protagonist, we do not see a replication of Woman’s situation as portrayed in BLD. Instead of splitting the subject, TS features the initial total severing of the Self of Traveller from his body through the creation of an alter-ego, hence erasing any possible psychodramatic conflict between an acting self and a performed self. However, the absence of an intra-subjective conflict is actually an illusion, which acquires fully Dionysian connotations in the style of the previous play, though with different premises and implications. Another distinguishing feature of this play concerns its multiple thematic focus. Apart from a few recurrent Gaoian leitmotifs, such as gender conflicts, interpersonal relationships, the issue of language, and the workings of selfconsciousness, TS specifically addresses the theme of moral corruption and the theme of the darkness of the human heart or, in Gao’s own words, “the relationship between God and Satan” and between “good and evil,” which he regards as “traditional themes.”58 However, in this play God and Satan are not associated with a particular religious character but embody the everlasting 57  The French version of the play (hereinafter abbreviation TS) is entitled Le Somnambule; see also Yip, “Chronology,” p. 329. 58  Gao Xingjian, “Some Suggestions on Producing Nocturnal Wanderer” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, p. 189. Izabella Łabędzka has also pointed out the novelty of those themes with respect to Gao’s other plays (167).

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fight of good and evil, virtue and sin within an individual’s soul. Therefore, under scrutiny in this play is the progressive transformation of an ordinary quiet man into a consummate criminal. The play’s thematic content warns us against the dangers of an exacerbated individualism that evolves irreversibly into egotism. From a performative viewpoint, this is achieved through a type of self-centered performance, whose subtle workings and implications I shall explore in the analysis below. The progression of this play’s subject matter relative to the others has been noted by other scholars. While drawing a comparison with Gao’s early play Alarm Signal, which is also set on a train, Henry Zhao writes, “Absolute Signal sings a song of praise to the young man who redeems his past mistakes by striking down the gangster. In this play, however, running rampant on the stage is the irresistible seduction of evil, which turns the suave and pensive Sleepwalker into a killer who is more violent than all the gangsters.”59 Furthermore, Izabella Łabędzka draws attention to the correspondence between the liminal spaces of the play, i.e., the boundaries between night and day—dream and reality, good and evil, and Gao’s concern with exploring the interstitial realities that those boundaries contribute to create. She writes: The interest in borderline states arises from a suspicion that they hide the key to the riddle of the “self” and provide a chance to separate truth from falsehood and confabulation from facts…. Reality and illusion keep permeating themselves incessantly, transgressing their spaces, disrupting them and adopting them under their own terms and conditions.60 Łabędzka likewise stresses the existence of various thresholds (the threshold is another liminal space). The element of the threshold provides us with the basis for applying the tragic archetype of Dionysus as an internal daimon. He is not only the god of duplicity and of the ridden subjectivity but also the god who merges the different layers of reality to create a third blurred whole, thereby introducing reversals of roles as well as wreaking havoc to the psychic equilibrium of the individual. The two faces of the same reality constitute opposing polarities engendering a tragic field revolving around a constant interplay of cohesion and division, which I shall further delineate below.

59  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 153. 60  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 171.

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Self-centered Performance and the Mind as a Theatre: toward an Interiorized Sparagmos In this play, the metatheatrical element plays a major role in shaping the tragic field. I argue that Traveller, the character who falls asleep on the train, may be seen as an allegory of a selfless and anonymous actor aspiring to free himself from his life-long condition of not possessing an identity of his own. Having always been nothing more than an undistinguished individual “in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city,”61 and having always been “squeezed and squashed among the crowd,”62 he feels the need to assert himself as a completely self-determined human being. Traveller can therefore be compared to an actor who is tired of playing a role that has been imposed on him by his director and therefore dreams of becoming another Self, which he can create independently, and that he can perform according to his own taste and in the way he finds best suited to his personality. The “director” he longs to get rid of is society with its moral and behavioral codes, its conventionalities, and its hypocrisies. This is amply expressed in the words uttered by an off-stage Voice, which governs Traveller’s passage from the public theatre of society to the private theatre of the mind, and aptly symbolizes his tacitly bolstering up the growth of a parallel Self within his consciousness. The freedom characterizing this new theatre of the mind is expresses with the statement, “There is no need to see anybody, no need to say hello to everybody, no need to be polite, and no need to utter any meaningless words.”63 Real-life society imposes its viewpoint on the individual, marks his consciousness like an imprint, makes its way into the mind of the individual, and haunts him silently. It molds the individual and lures him into believing that by following society’s dictates he will fulfill his own need to assert himself. As the outcome of this play clearly shows, and true to Gao’s idea that the tragic downfall of the individual is generated by the interplay of distinct forces both external and internal to himself, consciousness (or a bad usage of it) can also prove as detrimental and limiting as society is. As reflected in the mental structure of Sleepwalker, consciousness freed from any external constraints creates this other Self, which presents itself as inherently dyadic. In keeping with the theatrical metaphor, the reason this other Self configures itself as a double is that this other Self is simultaneously like the playwright-director and the actor-character. The playwright-director guides the actor-character in his metaphoric journey about the stage. Therefore, in this play, the newborn 3.1

61  Gao Xingjian, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, p. 142. 62  Ibid. 63  Ibid., p. 142.

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character of Sleepwalker acts as the director-playwright of his own play. Zhao has hinted at this metatheatrical metaphor when mentioning Lacan’s definition of dream-walking as “a ‘self-performance.’”64 He also discusses Susan Melrose’s theorization of dreaming: “… actually the nature of drama, because this kind of unconscious subject, similar to Sleepwalker’s, can most likely be found among the audience in the theatre, or in the cinema ‘to account for some still unspeakable pleasures.’”65 However, since Traveller seems to be extremely lucid and self-conscious, at least initially, I do not think that Voice can be interpreted as a personification of Traveller’s subconscious. Rather, the subconscious as a dimension of the dramatic space of the mind can be linked with the network of secondary characters Sleepwalker is exposed to throughout the play. Still clinging to the theatrical metaphor, Traveller arguably aims to get rid of a certain kind of audience. This audience would be the crowd of anonymous people that he used to rub elbows with in his everyday life. Although they did not really care about him, they, as representatives of that society, would still somehow control and determine his behavior simply with their presence on the stage of life. The new audience is now himself, or, better still, this other Self, which, in turn, gradually weaves a web of what Daniel Dennett calls “self-protective narrative sequences.”66 I would thus argue that in TS these correspond to addressing the Self as “you.” Building on Livio Bottani’s own commentary on Dennett’s theory of the mind as a theatre, it can be said that this “you,” who self-produces itself as a part of consciousness, is like the shell of a snail or turtle: they seem to protect the mind but can also strangle it. When Sleepwalker says to himself that he can “go wherever you want to go … Walk where your heart leads you, there are no restrictions and no burdens,”67 he is letting this “you” or self-protective and self-protected shell to expand. Initially, Sleepwalker seems to be of the opinion that since “everybody wants to control you, everybody wants to be God.”68 If he can flee the other people’s net, then he will be “free of all responsibilities, free of all troubles,”69 and, most importantly, be free of any mental torture, and possibly happy.70 64  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 155. 65  Ibid. 66  Quoted in Livio Bottani, Identità e Narrazione del Sé (Identity and Self-narration), Milano 2011: Franco Angeli, p. 43. 67  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 143. 68  Ibid., p. 145. 69  Ibid. 70  He says, “People turn anxieties over and over in their minds, they worry themselves to death, and they torment themselves mentally and physically” (Gao, p. 142).

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Through the psychological generation of Sleepwalker, Traveller unleashes the Dionysian latency that naturally inhabits his mind, and which can be equated with the Voice setting the boundaries between reality and dream, Self and Other. In other words, the Voice represents the shadow-like, incorporeal yet inherently divisive (because it uses the “you” form) Dionysian presence in this play, the true playwright-director stemming from the mind of and controlling Sleepwalker from within, providing him with the illusion of absolute freedom. Thus, having gained total liberty, Dionysus pervades the dramatic space of the dreamed reality created by Traveller; this space is coextensive with his desire to experience total freedom of movements, feelings, actions, and thoughts. As the play opens, Traveller as an actor and Traveller as a character is one and the same person. Unlike BLD, where the meta-dramatic gap between the dramatic and theatrical identities of Woman is made explicit from the very beginning of the play, the protagonist of TS is presented straightforwardly as a dramatic whole. There is, in fact, no visible disparity between the performer as a physical body, and the character as an evanescent entity. Even after Traveller’s self-transformation into Sleepwalker, there is no sense of a schismatic relationship between actor and character like the one portrayed in BLD. Since Sleepwalker admits that he is simply talking to himself, using the second person singular, there seems to be no schismatic performance at work. Judging by the way he deals with the different layers of his own consciousness, I would slightly amend Zhao’s Lacanian reference to “self-performance” and advance the idea of a “self-centered performance” aimed at exploring the workings of the mind as an allegory of the dramatic space. The Sleepwalker that we can all see as a physical presence on stage is neither an actor nor a character and not even a schismatic entity like Woman in BLD. First, he is rather a self-centered thought constantly mulling over himself, thereby engendering a tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces within his own mind.71 It can be argued that Sleepwalker represents an allegory of Gao’s depiction of the Self’s desire and potential to become like God, which is described (by Aristotle, for example) as a “pure thought.” The more he thinks about himself, the more he creates an Other-within-the-self, thereby effecting an internal dissociation of the Self. This “Other” will materialize as an independent character at the end of the play as a Masked Man, who looks exactly like Sleepwalker and represents a double that he can see concretely before himself. Rather than acting in a play, Sleepwalker autonomously creates a theatre for himself, where he can play with role-playing. Rather than become a victim 71  This will be further elucidated in the next section.

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of Dionysus in the form of a character imposed upon him from someone else, he decides to become himself the director of his own personal play and develop a character that he thinks he can control. Nevertheless, this does not mean that Dionysus is driven out of this self-created dramatic space—quite the contrary. Here, Dionysus is a multi-layered omnipresence, because he is potentially everywhere. By creating another reality and by orchestrating it as a personal theatre in which he is the sole director, Sleepwalker becomes an alter-ego of the god of drama. The “you” he refers to coincides with his real Self, Traveller, who is left asleep in the train carriage and re-appears from time to time as an evanescent image. Through his transformation from Traveller to Sleepwalker—an alter-ego of Dionysus—he intends to bestow on this Other a freedom never experienced before. But, contrary to his expectations, the “you” he has created eventually revolts against him. He gains autonomous existence outside the cage of his own mind, and acts as yet another Dionysus, a dark shadow that becomes fully visible at the level of drama, but then disappears, regaining its disincarnate mask of nothingness within the dimension of real life. In fact, there is a return to the initial scene of the train carriage, where Traveller is eventually seen as a bunch of clothes without a body. His end, then, is the same as Woman’s: his identity eventually disintegrates to the level of a lifeless stage prop. As previously anticipated, Sleepwalker addresses his own Self as if it were someone residing stably within his mind. With reference to Dennett, we can say that Sleepwalker is simulating another, fictitious identity that he enacts as an actor would do with his character. However, consciousness does not knit the webs of that identity; rather, these webs, these mental shells contribute to shape consciousness. From this point I shall attempt to extrapolate the dynamics of the tragic field created internally and inside Traveller’s mind through the interplay of the Dionysian presence and its product, Sleepwalker. This kind of “self-centered performance” presupposes a flight into his own Self, in the attempt to catch it. As Sleepwalker says, “You’ll only immerse yourself in your world; you won’t make friends with anybody!”72 Then he says, more precisely, “You’re all by yourself, you’re talking to yourself.”73 As Paul Valéry remarks, talking to one’s self is a “strange activity” because it touches the root of the “comedy” (i.e., theatre) of consciousness, namely the illusion that by distancing the Self, one can embrace it from without and control it. Building on this metaphor, Fabrizio Desideri explains the impossible relationship between Echo and Narcissus by describing consciousness as: 72  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 149. 73  Ibid., p. 150.

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… the “painfully” metaphorical space that separates Echo from Narcissus. The Self that occupies this space thus manifests itself as the necessary correlative of a type of consciousness made up of a discontinuous exchange between the inside and the outside…. The “flight within one’s self” is the paradoxical expression linking return and rebuttal.74 This mirrors the internal tragic field occurring in-between Traveller and Sleepwalker’s specular yet dyadic minds. Assuming that the Dionysian forces presiding over Traveller’s Self are then contained within Sleepwalker’s, it can be argued that, before acting through the secondary characters, Dionysus seizes the protagonist’s mind from within, as it resonates in the following words: “You contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.”75 Supreme freedom is precisely Dionysus’ trick to lure Traveller into his final trap. As the mediator between reality and dream, and between the two personalities of Sleepwalker and Traveller, Dionysus personally orchestrates Traveller’s transition from an anonymous, insignificant, and quite submissive self-within-the-crowd to a dominant and self-assertive new Self: Sleepwalker. More precisely, Traveller’s identity is transplanted within Sleepwalker, who is like a zombie, one of the living dead, a sort of protective womb for Traveller’s Self to nestle in, grow, and expand, as this is the meaning of the freedom he aspires to. Therefore, Traveller can be said to manipulate Sleepwalker’s body from within, like the character metaphorically guides the actor’s steps during a performance. The Voice who says “you,” then, does not belong directly to Sleepwalker but represents a third element, the Dionysian presence allowing Traveller’s self to gain a new and increasing freedom. This freedom, however, is merely apparent because it is controlled by Dionysus himself and can be said to be a kind of captive freedom, occurring within the captivity of the mind. Dionysus here is like Satan, who does not coincide with the evil side of the human Self but induces the individual to nurture that innate darkness thereby leading him to sin against his will. In light of the above, one can characterize the Sleepwalker of the play’s title as a tripartite entity. We have the voice, the body-mind and the Self. Before expanding out of itself, this private space of the mind becomes the theatre of an internal tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces. The cohesion within the mind is achieved by Traveller, who aims to reclaim his own self, cling to it, and 74  Fabrizio Desideri, L’Ascolto della Coscienza: una Ricerca filosofica (The Listening of Consciousness: a Philosophical Research), Milano 1998: Feltrinelli, p. 210. 75  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 150.

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increase its power. Through the Sleepwalker, who helpfully lends him its bodymind, Traveller can immerse himself in his own mind. By actively ruminating about his own Self, under the hidden forces of Dionysus, and in a delirium of omnipotence, he becomes pure thought—a thought that continuously thinks itself. Simultaneously though, these self-driven cohesive energies coalesce against Traveller’s own Self. His alter-ego escapes his control and becomes an independent character: the Masked Man. That is why, in the end, on the train, Traveller is no longer to be seen. The Masked Man can be interpreted as a mirror-image of Dionysus, who eventually reveals himself as an Other. These are the conditions under which Traveller is led to experience a kind of interiorized sparagmos, which happens within the dramatic space of the mind. Below, I shall reconstruct the way in which the dynamics of the riven Self, combined with the disruptions of the Self as for-other,76 contribute to engender a more complex tragic field. Nowhere Yet Everywhere: Pan-Dionysianism and the Tragic Field of Subjectivity and Alterity Throughout the second and third act of this play, Sleepwalker bumps into a series of Dionysian-like characters from Traveller’s oneiric imagination. These people, who are reflections of a group of fellow passengers in Traveller’s train carriage, can be described as echoes or fragments of a pan-Dionysian presence within the suppositional space in which the play unfolds. That none of these fellow passengers has a valid ticket indicates a fundamental ambiguity, as well as a tendency to subvert social norms and laws. Two in particular—Old Man and Young Man—show a closeness of character to Dionysus. Old Man has a passport that does not show his address, while Young Man makes up an excuse about having been robbed of his ticket, and then tells Traveller “that you’ve gotta be tough and know how to play with them.”77 In Chapter One, I have presented Dionysus as a metamorphic character, a god with no permanent residence, who expresses his ambiguous nature through deception, seduction, and the manipulation of consciousness. He is also a subversive god whose acts not only challenge the social order and its established laws, but also undermine established power. In this play, I shall argue, with reference again to Burke’s dramatistic model, which establishes a network of connections among the most disparate characters within a play, that the protagonist’s transformation from the submissive Traveller into the fierce Sleepwalker suggests the notion of a pan-Dionysian realm that

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76  “For-other” is Sartre’s term to designate Others as mirrors of the Self. 77  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 141.

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encompasses both the train carriage and the nightmarish city. In other words, due to his elusiveness and ubiquity, Dionysius represents the “collective fabric” that links together all those characters (Traveller-Sleepwalker included). The fact that, as Vernant notes, Dionysus “is never to be found where he is but always here, there, and nowhere at the same time,”78 can be applied to decode the relationship between Traveller-Sleepwalker and his Others, and of the tragic field of subjectivity and alterity. Sleepwalker’s path to “supreme freedom”79 is incessantly hindered by a series of encounters echoing those in The Other Shore. As oneiric projections of the real people surrounding Traveller on the train, the Tramp, Ruffian, Prostitute, and Thug are all parts of the Dionysian plan to exploit the workings of the protagonist’s imagination and make him fall into the trap of the egotistic Self after nurturing the illusion of freedom. Terry Siu-Han Yip and Kwok-Kan Tam maintain that “the Sleepwalker is placed in a wider web of social relations for an examination of his own self.”80 I would argue that instead of examining his own Self through a confrontation with the Other, Sleepwalker actually becomes more and more prey to his growing self-consciousness, so that he eventually becomes unable to restrain its dismembering power. The Masked Man who surfaces at the end, whom Sleepwalker addresses as ni, rather than nin,81 as he does when talking to the other characters, suggests a non-hierarchical relationship, a specular Other that coincides with Sleepwalker, who also addresses himself as “you.” Therefore, rather than self-examination, Sleepwalker goes through a double self-dismemberment, namely within and without his mind, as testified by his last words before disappearing in the clutches of Dionysus: “Who are you? [the Masked Man] What do you want? You want to step aside and let you pass! You ask what in the world do you want? You want you—to let you—pass.”82 The ambiguity of this additional (external) tragic field affecting Sleepwalker’s encounters can be encapsulated in his perception of Prostitute as a multidirectional figure, who is simultaneously consuming and being consumed. As he comments, “You can’t understand the relationship between you and her, whether she sells and other people buy, whether people consume her or she consumes people, whether she consumes herself, or whether people consume 78   Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The God of Tragic Fiction,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre VidalNaquet (eds.), in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, New York 1988: Zone Books, p. 187. 79  Gao, “Nocturnal Wander,” p. 149. 80  Terry Siu-han Yip and Kwok-Kan Tam, “Gender and Self in Gao Xingjian’s Three Post-Exile Plays,” p. 223. Emphasis added. 81  Ni translates the second person singular pronoun (you), of which Nin is the polite form, used for addressing elderly people and/or superiors. 82  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 188.

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her and consume themselves.”83 Similarly, while Sleepwalker is manipulating those underground characters as projections of his dream, he is controlled by them, but he also causes them to perish one by one later in the play. Just as Prostitute mirrors herself in her customers, Sleepwalker can see himself in every Other whom he encounters. Ruffian imitates his steps, Tramp is criticized for being heartless towards Prostitute, Thug spies on him and gives him orders. Sleepwalker’s idea is that “everybody wants to control you, everybody wants to be God,”84 but it is not until the third act that he realizes that he is also on the way to behaving like them. Thus Sleepwalker, driven from within through Traveller’s oneiric imagination and hindered from without by his fellow-characters, is brought closer and closer to Prostitute: “At this moment you have nothing…. Except your life, which is also in other people’s hands.”85 She replies: “It’s the same with you, you’re in the same boat. Apart from the fact that you haven’t been raped, you’re not that much better.”86 Among all the characters, Thug is the most Dionysian-like figure because he treats Sleepwalker as a puppet: “Pose for me! Keep dancing like you were! … Take one step forward … Change your pose….” And then, “I had my eyes on you for more than an hour!” And again, “Switch, change to a different pose!”87 As a result of these manipulations, Sleepwalker is made to look like a suffering Jesus Christ, an emblem of a dying God, the image of the scapegoat, which is Dionysus himself. Moreover, Thug reveals another Dionysian feature, by speaking in the third person (just as Dionysus in The Bacchae does when still concealing his identity): Thug: He says you are his slave … He says you’re a steer driven by other people … He says you’re his dog … He says your fate is still in his hands.88 Therefore, we can say that Traveller undergoes the internal and external sparagmos processes affecting Sleepwalker’s psyche, first through self-centered performance and next through the confrontation with his multiple alter-egos. A good analogy for it is the Frankenstein myth as described by Tzvetan Todorov. In this myth, Todorov writes, the “source of metamorphosis or strangeness is entirely within the self,”89 and, “Danger is seen to originate from the subject, 83  Ibid., p. 179. 84  Ibid., p. 145. 85  Ibid., p. 152. 86  Ibid., p. 153. 87  Ibid., p. 150. 88  Ibid., p. 181. 89  Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London 1981: Methuen, p. 58.

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through excessive knowledge, or rationality, or the misapplication of the human will.”90 Unveiling the Abyss of Evil: The Sleepwalker as a Play of Tragic De-formation Through the process by which Sleepwalker becomes a devilish murderer, one can discern the same archetypal motif of the journey into the Self that underlies BLD. The protagonists of both plays go through an ego-shattering journey of initiation to the mysteries of human nature, yet with a different outcome. Whereas in BLD the Woman is faced with the tragic abyss of nothingness and the related terror, in TS Sleepwalker confronts the abyss of darkness and is engulfed by it, prey to his own Self as a Dionysian Other. Whereas Woman is shocked at the recognition that the Self as a single and tangible unit does not exist, Sleepwalker is equally shocked at the discovery of how evil a human heart can be. Traveller’s metamorphosis is reminiscent of what happens to Mr. Kurtz, the ivory trader and alter-ego of the protagonist-narrator of Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. Depicted as “a prodigy, an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, … a special being,” as well as “a universal genius,”91 Kurtz has been hailed by the natives as a demigod, and since his arrival in the Belgian river station of an unnamed village at the heart of Africa, he has come to enjoy being worshipped and exploits his newly-acquired authority by progressively turning into a despotic king and barbaric killer. Without going into the details of Conrad’s novel, there are valid reasons to compare Sleepwalker’s wandering through a pan-Dionysian urban realm with Kurtz’s immersion into the darkness of the African “wilderness,” in terms of the effects that these two environments have on the two characters’ transformations. Charles Marlow, the British sailor who becomes obsessed with Kurtz’s story and sails up the Congo River to search for him, aptly describes the seductive, Dionysian-like power of the African wilderness and its destructive workings on Kurtz’s psyche: 3.3

The wilderness … had caressed him … it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation.92 90  Ibid. Schismatic performance, instead, can be reinterpreted as the theatricalization of the “Dracula myth”, according to Todorov, in which the source of metamorphosis is external to the self. The self is invaded from without and transformed into an Other. 91  Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, trans. by Luciana Piré, Firenze-Milano 2010: Giunti Editore S.p.A., p. 48. 92  Ibid., p. 83.

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In the third act, Sleepwalker relates quite self-consciously the influence of the darkness surrounding him and how it pervades his originally inoffensive personality in a way strikingly reminiscent of the above excerpt from Conrad’s novel: Sleepwalker: You were innocent all right, but you can’t say for sure if you’re totally innocent. At any rate, evil is all around you, and the more you struggle to be free, the deeper you’re trapped, and you can’t get away from it. Watchful eyes, they’re here, there and everywhere. You’ve become a prey waiting to be preyed upon. You’re besieged by all kind of traps, there’s no way out.93 Below, I shall reconstruct the dynamics of Sleepwalker’s descent into the abyss of evil, which will enable me to interpret this work as a play of tragic de-formation. By tragic de-formation, I refer to the devolution of Sleepwalker’s dual nature into schizophrenic behavior, in which primitive drives prevail over rationality and transparency, and finally to his moral corruption, after he surrenders to the viciousness of the Other, as embodied by different underground figures. Sleepwalker’s confrontation with fragments of the subconscious tendencies toward evil poses a limit to his moral freedom because in one way or another, all of his alter-egos force him to unleash the devil that dwells dormant inside his mind. As in the case of Prostitute, the maliciousness he recognizes in her is actually a mirror-image of his own: Sleepwalker: You say she covets the devil! Prostitute: And you’re so far from being a devil, right? Sleepwalker: You say there is a devil in everyone’s mind. The question is whether or not you set it free.94 Moreover, Sleepwalker seems aware of the banality of evil as such. He realizes that evil does not equal outstanding criminal acts such as “murder, rape, arson, fraud or extortion,” but rather in the inclination to sin, a sort of ancestral wound within human nature that can be never mended. As he says, “… you’re not completely free from sin … The feeling of sin is actually quite tempting to you.”95

93  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 169. 94  Ibid., p. 154. 95  Ibid.

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The first act closes with the killing of Prostitute, whose circumstances are unclear. She could not resist the temptation of peeping into a mysterious door and was accidentally shot. Sleepwalker does not seem to be involved in the murder, although he realizes he did not do anything to stop her from looking beyond the door. Prostitute’s gesture looks like that of an overreacher, who crosses borders following her insatiable thirst for knowledge. In a sense, she anticipates Sleepwalker’s final crossing of the border between Self and Other, when he sees his own double confronting him with the same violence he has meted to others. In the second act, Sleepwalker is heavily brainwashed by Thug in a Dionysian-like manner, which makes him resemble the manipulative character of Card-Player in The Other Shore. Thug is the likely killer of Prostitute, but he persuades Sleepwalker that he is in fact responsible for that act, and that there is evidence—the abandoned woman’s shoe left on stage as a fragment of Prostitute’s identity. Not only does Thug control Sleepwalker’s mind but he also lures him into believing that he can help him get away in one piece. Sleepwalker: You say you didn’t do anything with her! Thug: Are you sure? Think again! … And now my friend, who besides the whore can prove if you’re guilty or not guilty? Sleepwalker: You say it’s obvious you’re the killer! Not you! Thug: How can you prove that?96 Next, Sleepwalker finds himself inadvertently in the midst of a scuffle between Thug and Ruffian. Thug is shot, and Sleepwalker is forced by Ruffian to drag the body away. Still, Sleepwalker manages to steal Ruffian’s gun and finish him off, thus accomplishing his first self-acknowledged murder. The fact that, as he confesses, he “didn’t mean to kill anybody, but under the circumstances you were forced to do it, you had no choice,”97 suggests that his viciousness is a consequence of his close contact with the killers. As he comments, “It’s amazing, face to face with that vicious brute, you were equally as vicious.”98 In the third act, Sleepwalker undergoes a physical sparagmos, which consists of encountering his own head as a fragment of his body-mind. Contrary to Zhao, who reads this episode as the representation of Sleepwalker’s fear of “possessing a thinking subjectivity,”99 in my opinion, the head that rolls out 96  Ibid., p. 165. 97  Ibid., p. 169. 98  Ibid., p. 183. 99  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 154.

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of the suitcase along with Prostitute’s signifies Sleepwalker’s definite severance from his original, conscious personality. This prefigures the materialization of the feeling of evil that has grown in his heart through the persona of the Masked Man, acting as a simulacrum of Sleepwalker’s daimonic self. The Masked Man can be construed as a manifestation of the Freudian uncanny,100 because his presence is simultaneously disquieting and familiar: he is entirely specular visà-vis Sleepwalker even though his face is obscured. Before this happens, Tramp comes back and the two have a drink together. Sleepwalker’s personality dissociation, which is further exasperated by his intoxication, becomes more and more evident even to him, who is not sure “whether it’s you or your head that’s drinking the stuff.”101 The casual get-together ends with Tramp laughing sardonically at Sleepwalker, thus stirring once again a Dionysian fervor within his multiply divided psyche, as well as an extreme reaction from him. Sleepwalker grips Tramp’s neck and strangles him for the sake of proving that he really exists. His behavior is maenad-like, because after finishing Tramp off in a burst of unspeakable violence, he cannot believe he has really killed the old man, who, unlike his colleagues, had treated him with care, acting as a father figure for both him and Prostitute. Before he is definitely kidnapped by his double, he reiterates the feeling of being caught in a no-exit situation, where he is “constantly being spied upon.”102 He thinks the contradiction between being surrounded by evil and harbouring evil in his heart is a result of a tragic field of opposite forces. Hence, the tragic de-formation of Traveller through the evil deeds of his oneiric alter-ego is made quite evident. Through Sleepwalker he becomes a sort of monster that can kill “without turning a hair” and finds “evil more exciting than good.”103 He goes through a process of mental deformation, which is essentially tragic because it reveals the constitutive duplicity of his Self. Rising above the crowd, Traveller nourishes the egotistic part of himself and finds his own spiritual death through his very own disproportionate Self. Moreover, the idiosyncrasies of Traveller-Sleepwalker’s gendered Self are completely dissected and his integrity is metaphorically fragmented by the ghost of Prostitute, who accuses him of having killed her in his imagination. Finally, all the Dionysian figures serve the purpose of placing Traveller face to face with who he truly is, someone whom he had not been aware of. 100  More on this will follow in the analysis of The Death Collector. 101  Gao, “Nocturnal Wanderer,” p. 184. 102  Ibid., p. 187. 103  Ibid., p. 182.

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Dialogue and Rebuttal: the Gendering of the Tragic Field and the Sparagmos of Language

Dialogue and Rebuttal (Duihua yu fanjie), a two-part play, was commissioned by the Maison des Auteurs de Théâtre Etrangers, Saint-Herblain and completed in 1992.104 Like all of Gao’s post-exile plays of Self, it was initially composed in French, under the title Dialoguer-Interloquer, and subsequently rewritten into Chinese. Yip and Tam have analyzed this play as part of what they have called a post-exile “trilogy”105 including BLD and TS and encompassing a set of shared themes, particularly issues of gender and the long-standing investigation of the workings of the human Self. In this play, the habitual Gaoian pattern with a single protagonist, such as Woman or Traveller-Sleepwalker, is replaced by two main characters of different gender, a middle-aged man and a young woman (called, somewhat misleadingly, “Girl”), both nameless. The couple never leave the stage, but a third character, a quiet Buddhist Monk, also appears and disappears on the stage at various times, trying, with many gestures and movements, to make a stick stand on an egg. The play thus consists of two parallel performances, which disclose two different levels of reality that relate to each other in a way oscillating between the opposite poles of cohesion and division. The couple and the Monk neither interact with each other as they perform, nor do they seem aware of each other’s presence (the pole of division), but at the same time an invisible thread seems to link them and bind them together (the pole of cohesion), because some of the couple’s most salient verbal exchanges are counterpointed by Monk’s correspondingly noticeable actions. These are already elements of the tragic field that I shall attempt to reconstruct below through an analysis of the dramatic structures of the play and how they work toward the achievement of its tragic potential. Although virtually plotless, D&R expresses the difficulties of communicating with the Other as a gendered subject. It is clear from the outset that Man and Girl are occasional lovers who have just had physical intercourse yet fail to establish a channel of communication based on long-term intellectual and emotional intimacy. While their one-night encounter brought them very close to each other in terms of physical intimacy, their hunger for possessing each other’s bodies actually seems to forestall a subtler desire to attain the mystery of each other’s interiority. To depict this tragic field of opposite identities longing for intellectual unity with the Other, the focus of this play is no longer on the individual Selves per se

104  To be abbreviated D&R hereinafter; Yip, “A Chronology of Gao Xingjian,” p. 327. 105  Yip and Tam, “Gender and Self,” p. 232.

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but on their mutual and highly disruptive relationship, which also includes the third element of Monk. Other researchers who have studied this play have dealt mostly with the issue of the inadequacy of verbal language as a vehicle for human interaction and mutual understanding between individuals. Izabella Łabędzka, for example, who decodes the couple’s agonizing linguistic exchanges and the progressive fragmentation of language against Gao’s self-acknowledged inclination toward Zen Buddhism and its criticism of words, argues that Gao’s approach to language in this play is based on Zen-style deconstruction, based on his use of gong’an style dialogues. In my opinion, however, the question of language constitutes only one aspect of the tragic potential underlying D&R. In my analysis, I shall attempt to demonstrate that at stake in this play is not primarily the failure to communicate verbally but rather the couple’s strenuous attempts at appropriating the core traits of each other’s subjectivity. Compared with the plays discussed previously, it can be argued that D&R follows in BLD’s footprints in that part of its tragic potential can be directly inferred from looking at the title. The English translation of the title, fortunately, is an accurate reflection of the Chinese-language version. Duihua means precisely “dialogue,” whereas fanjie stands for “rebuttal,” in the sense of “countering as a question.” According to Gilbert Fong, “dialogue” would designate the couple’s intermittent and unbalanced conversation, while “rebuttal” would refer to Monk’s parallel and apparently disconnected performance.106 From this perspective, the Chinese and English titles seem to emphasize the otherwise not-so-evident connection between the two layers of the performance. By serving as a “rebuttal,” Monk’s role consists of proving that what the couple says or does is false and subject to criticism. The French title, Dialoguer-Interloquer, meanwhile, suggests a different but fresh perspective, because of the verb “interloquer,” from the Latin word “interloqui”—literally, “interrupt,” “cut a conversation,” “talk in-between” (from loqui, “to speak”). The “rebuttal,” in this case, is not merely about counterpoint (or counteraction) but about interrupting and causing disconcert, even shock. Another meaning of the French “interloquer” is “to take aback,” “to unsettle.” I would therefore argue that the pair “dialogue” and “rebuttal” might encapsulate the fight between Man and Girl, their inclination to interfere with each other’s psychic equilibria by repeatedly interrupting each other and intermingling with each other’s thoughts and gendered Selves. Therefore, rather than an intermission from Monk, I would interpret the “interloquer” as the two characters’ deliberate tendency to shock each other as a means of retaining the secret of their own subjectivities. 106  Fong, “Introduction to The Other Shore,” p. xxxv.

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In the discussion below, I aim to describe the tragic field underlying this play as a clash of opposite genders. To do so, I will employ the Dionysian archetype once again to highlight the metadramatic quality of this play, resorting to Dionysus not only as the patron of drama but also as the god of conscious role-playing and crossing-identities. In so doing, I intend to develop Zhao’s argument, according to which “Gao’s theory of split-person triplication is now employed in a more complicated manner.”107 I shall also attempt to substantiate his snappy categorization of this play as “the most profound one”108 (excluding The Death Collector, which was published after Zhao’s study). I understand “profound” here in terms of the play’s in-depth exploration not merely of the Self, the human psyche, and human relationships, but also of the Self’s propensity to trespass on the Other, not just to subjugate it but also to assimilate it within one’s identity. Ultimately, I shall attempt to show that the play does not end in enlightenment or redemption, as Yip and Tam, as well as Łabędzka contend, but in the dawning awareness of the fundamental tragic rift and its unmendable condition, which is mainly signified by the falling apart of verbal language. 4.1 A Play of Appearances: Role-playing and the Theatricalized Self D&R can be described as a play of appearances that dramatizes the reality vs. falsity duality in the ways people more or less consciously use “role-playing” techniques to protect themselves from the intrusion of the Other. This “roleplaying” aspect, which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been raised in the critical literature on this play, constitutes an important aspect of the tragic texture underlying D&R. As illustrated in more detail below, Man’s and Girl’s respective willingness to get to know the Other, yet without disclosing their own true personalities, generates a game of ambiguities, riven identities, and border-crossings between Self and Other. By her continuous role-playing, especially in the first half of the play, Girl aims to convince her occasional partner—a representative of the masculine personality—to reveal what she maintains is a typically male tendency to pretend and use lies as a means of maintaining the relationship. In a subtler and more cunning way, Man urges Girl to talk about herself, yet he remains wary about opening himself up to her. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Girl is the main role-player in both Parts I and II. This can be inferred from the very beginning, when Girl denies that she is smiling, thus making Man stare helplessly at her in an attempt to figure out her true feelings and thoughts.

107  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 148. 108  Ibid. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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(Girl smiles slightly.) Man: What are you smiling at? Girl: Nothing. Man: Why are you still smiling? Girl: I am not smiling. (Helpless, Man stares at her. Girl avoids his stare and looks away.)109 The first double soliloquy involving Man and Girl contains another example of role-playing performed by the Girl and counterpointed by Man, who already seems aware of her inauthentic behavior. Like Woman in BLD, Girl speaks in the third person, expressing her concerns about the reasons why she had a one-night stand with a man she had never met before. Still, Girl’s usage of the third person pronoun for herself, which I have earlier described as “schismatic,” turns out to differ slightly from the usual pattern. Schismatic performance here does not aim at expressing a conflict between actress and character but rather at portraying Girl as a conscious role-player, someone who carries out a voluntary sparagmos, who adroitly splits her personality as a means of self-defence, of avoiding being controlled by others, of maintaining herself in a position of control, of avoiding being brainwashed. The way she accuses Man of being like all the others clearly expresses her determination to provoke his reaction and tyrannize him, thus exerting her power on him. In fact, there seems to be no conflict within her subjectivity like that of Woman in BLD, and no dramatic tension between the actress and the role. Instead, Girl tries to create an-other self that she can manage from within and at her own will, in order to pursue her goals. Toward the end of the play, though, Girl finds it increasingly difficult to handle her own multiple identities, to the extent that the dramatic tension of incessant role-playing (also performed in the first person) overwhelms her; it brings her to dramatic exhaustion. Consumed by the Other she has purposefully created in order to defend herself from the attacks of the outside world, she ends up doing precisely what she sought to avoid, namely exposing her own deepest anxieties and past traumas. Consequently, not only will Man be able to take over her but also, as a result, she will go through a horrifying transformation into a contorted body, which represents the physical visualization of the tragic as incarnated in a body. Examples of Girl’s role-playing and Man’s refined ability to play back with her can be found at various points within the text. In the first double soliloquy, Girl plays initially the part of the innocent, naïve, and inexperienced young woman who does not know why she follows “such a man.”110 Man, as if talking to himself, is actually aware that 109  Gao Xingjian, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, p. 83. 110  Ibid., p. 85. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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“she understands everything, she knew it very well …” Next, Girl admits that she had a purpose: “She … wanted to know if that could happen,”111 and describes him as a cynical person who is used to cheating and pretending: “He may look eager and willing, but she knows very well that he’s faking it.”112 Man’s final remark is indicative of Girl’s conscious duplicity: “Why put on an act?”113 he asks, pointing out that both are actually trying to hide their own nature: “You and I are not different, that’s the way it is.”114 Both want the other to disclose one’s Self, yet Girl continues to be self-defensive, while also pressing Man to “stop acting,” in a preventive manner, so that he might feel the pressure to acknowledge his simulations. The next episode serves as a cornerstone in this game of appearances and conscious role-playing, as it brings to light the main reasons for the ambiguousness of Girl’s personality. When Man offers her a drink, she makes him promise that he will not put any drugs in it. In fact, if she were drunk or intoxicated she could not continue to defend herself, nor could she keep hiding her own true nature.115 Urged by Man, she tells about her past trip to India, where she was probably abused by a guy who had drugged her drink. She experienced a state of semi-conscious dissociation from her body during which she “gave him all he wanted without holding anything back, … until [she] became a total void …”116 It is clear that Girl’s role-playing is meant not to let her own Self be sucked up by the male Other, in which case she would begin to act like a Dionysian daimon. Further allusions to role-playing as a means of blurring identities occur when Man asks Girl about her name, which she does not want to reveal. In doing so, she multiplies her identities by making up two fake names and asking Man to choose: Girl: Maria or Anna, which one do you prefer? Man: The question is which one is your real name? Girl: If I told you it’s Maria, then would I surely be Maria? Man: That’s a real problem. But if I called you Anna, you’d still be you and not someone called Anna, therefore, you really shouldn’t worry too much about it. Girl: I don’t want to be a stand-in for somebody else!117 111  Ibid. 112  Ibid. 113  Ibid. 114  Ibid. 115  Ibid., p. 89. 116  Ibid. 117  Ibid., p. 95.

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Further on, Man criticizes politicians’ behavior, which involves lying, cheating, and playing “with public opinion as if it were a card game.”118 “And … they’ll only let out a little bit of truth in their memoirs after they’ve been kicked out.”119 The following exchange is particularly illuminating for understanding the tragic subtext of this play. Man, who is keen on getting to know Girl more deeply, asks her to talk about herself without mentioning her Indian experience again. Still, Girl hints at the fact that she might have not told the truth. The two have an argument, which reaches the conclusion that cheating is a vital necessity for both sexes. Girl, in particular, is adamant that if women lie, “It’s only because they’ve learned the tricks from men first.”120 This particular point is loaded with tragic potential for two reasons. First, it prefigures Man and Girl’s subsequent attempts at dominating each other, acquiring each other’s characteristics, transgressing each other psychic borders. Second, it shows that, despite the divisions between them, their attempts at preserving each other’s Selves, their personae, are deeply related and fundamentally cohesive. The following image, which is a dream evoked and narrated by Man, contains a metaphor of the Self as a prison: Man: One day, I dreamt that I was sinking into the ground, my whole body was trapped deep inside, there were two extremely high walls on either side of me, or should I say huge crags, no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t climb over them and get out …121 This could be related to the image of theatre as a claustrophobic environment where the Self is confined behind a mask, a false identity that one cannot dispense with if (s)he wants to survive in the theatre of life. Last but not least, shortly before the end of Part I, one can discern an increasing progression toward the tragic climax of this game of appearances and role-playing that sets the premises for the tragic field of opposite energies permeating Part II. Man is exhausted of Girl’s playing around with him and confesses that he cannot possibly figure out her real Self and intentions. His initial impression of Girl has proven inadequate for making sense of the complexities and paradoxes surrounding her still undisclosed identity. In return, Girl keeps repeating she is exactly as he thought initially. Worn out, Man can only ask the final, outspoken question: “What is it that you really want? Tell 118  Compare with Card Player’s behavior in The Other Shore. 119  Gao, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” p. 101. 120  Ibid., p. 102. 121  Ibid., p. 103.

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me!” Girl’s shocking answer is “I want your head,”122 meaning that she aims to conquer Man’s interiority and subjectivity, to objectify it in order to turn Man in the position of being her own plaything, thus reverting the usual dynamics of the gender relationship. This almost masculine fantasy of possession, which Girl nurtures so strongly, is what activates the tragic field in this play, as I shall demonstrate below. 4.2 Till Death Do Us Unite: the Tragic Field of Genders The main instances of conscious role-playing in the first half of D&R contribute toward the creation in the second half of a tragic field of cohesive and divisive forces affecting the conflict of the genders. In fact, two of these “fields” or networks of coalescing and conflicting dynamics can be discerned throughout the play. In the first part, after a moment of cohesion through physical intercourse, the two characters seem to construct an uneven relationship alternating between moments of cohesion, moments of division, and moments of in-betweenness, where both extremities are present. Girl, for example, oscillates between absolute distance from Man, when she clearly states that she does not want to be treated as a property by him, and sudden flashes of attachment, which she deems “very dangerous.”123 A proper tragic field is established when the two people start giving orders to each other in a frenzy of domination. They enact a sort of dance based on mutual actions and reactions, which is accompanied by the stringent rhythmic sound of a cymbal played by Monk, which increases the tragic tension while highlighting the internal consistency of the field. Yet, in this first part the true catalyst of the tragic field is still Girl, who strenuously refuses to submit to Man’s authority as he tries to impose on her a different self (“You are a bird … Spread your arms for me”124). The following statement, uttered by Man, clearly encapsulates the basic dynamics of this tragic field in which the female Self plays a dominant position: “After you’ve got people interested [pole of cohesion], you turn around and say you don’t want to play anymore [pole of division].”125 In a sudden exchange of roles, Girl takes on the leadership and strives hard to transform Man in her satellite, to the point that he calls her “a she-devil.”126 By examining how she tyrannizes Man, not letting go of him yet also keeping him at a safe distance, one can actually see that by assuming a leading role, Girl is 122  Ibid., p. 118. 123  Gao, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” p. 93. 124  Ibid., p. 105. 125  Ibid., p. 106. 126  Ibid., p. 107.

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also acquiring masculine traits. She intends to drive Man to exhaustion (“let’s fool around together, you and I, until we both can’t take it anymore!”127). Girl’s invitation to “fool around together” sets up a situation dominated by cohesive forces, which will eventually lead to the final physical sparagmos through the severance of each other’s heads. However, before such point is reached, Man and Girl are stuck in a deadlock during which they perform a double soliloquy, whose sentences crisscross and intertwine frenziedly. This ends with the two pointing at each other’s faults: Man: That’s why you’re trying desperately to seize every moment? Girl: Aren’t you doing the same thing? Whenever you see an opportunity, you never let it go.128 The psychological breakdown preceding the physical sparagmos is well described by Man who points out that “we are all used up before we die.”129 Before this happens, the two come together for a brief, passing moment, until Girl pushes Man away from herself, stating that there cannot be equality of roles in their relationship, but that “either you’re playing with me or I’m playing with you.”130 This remark recalls what the Leading Actor points out at the beginning of The Other Shore, namely that modern society can be compared to a rope game, in which we are either pulling or being pulled. In the second part of the play, Man and Girl have gotten rid of their heads through an act of mutual sparagmos. However, by beheading each other they have merely put off their respective masks, their self-constructed false identities, which are now scattered on stage, as if staring at them. Having walked out of the prison of the mask, they are now imprisoned in the deepest crevices of the Self, “left in oblivion, stuck in a forgotten corner, … an enclosed black box.”131 Concerning the relationship between body, Self, and gender, I do not agree with Yip and Tam, for whom “with their bodies being cut off, the Man and the Woman have successfully unsexed themselves and become ungendered.”132 In my opinion, both characters still retain their gendered subjectivities even after the beheading. In fact, the rest of the play is structured around another double soliloquy, in which Man and Girl continue to feel the burden of their masculine/feminine psyche. Man talks obsessively to himself in the hope of 127  Ibid., p. 108. 128  Ibid., p. 115. 129  Ibid. 130  Ibid., p. 118. 131  Ibid., p. 122. 132  Yip and Tam, “Gender and Self,” p. 229.

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getting “a little comfort,”133 thus pushing his masculine self-centeredness to an utmost limit. Girl, meanwhile, talks about herself in an estranged manner, thus further exasperating her femininity to the point that she gets overwhelmed by the power of her memories turning into traumatic reminiscences. Simultaneously, though apparently estranged from each other, they are deeply united, possibly more than before the beheading. The sparagmos-like process, preceded and aided by the tragic game of pulling and being pulled, might have separated them from their bodies but has enabled them to perform a crossover of subjectivities. As Man peremptorily asserts, they have become each other’s shadows, because “you and I are on the same boat, nobody can leave anybody. It makes no difference if you’re my shadow or if I’m your shadow.”134 This profound unity of Selves, though still gendered, makes Man and Girl to no longer appear like independent individuals but like two halves of the same dramatis persona, embodying the masculine and the feminine aspects of humanity; their perspectives intersect in a way that makes me think of a contamination of genders within a universal Self. In fact, throughout this last and extremely agonizing double soliloquy, they share their numerous troubles, neuroses, insecurities, and concerns, yet they fail to come to terms with their gendered Selves. Below is one such example of crossing-over dialogue with an emphasis on cohesionwithin-division, the tragic state par excellence. The two are visualizing the same nightmare yet from different perspectives: Girl: Her head is swooning and she’s unsteady on her feet, she has no idea where she is … Man: You’re groping around, you’re trying hard to find a way out, you’re afraid that you might bump into something … Girl: A wall, it is collapsing in silence, right in front of her eyes … Man: Finally you manage to find a door, it must be a door, it is tightly shut … ….

133  Ibid., p. 124. As for Man’s struggle against his egotistic tendencies, the following lines encapsulate his predicament: Man: “The you that you’re referring to only means you, which is no more than your Self, you mean you, that self of yourself, keep on troubling you.” (Ibid.) He also shows the impossibility of actually getting rid of the Self: “You say it’s not that you don’t want to get away from your Self but you’re always talking to yourself, in that way the self will never go away and it’ll never stop haunting you.” (125). This is because his head is still there close to him and haunting him with its presence. 134  Ibid., p. 122.

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Man: You carefully walk into a dark ad shady long corridor … it’s curved and bent … there is no end … Girl: A big patch of misty grey sky, it’s dark and light at the same time, like it’s neither morning nor evening …135 As the double soliloquy progresses, what becomes more and more visible is Man’s egotism—he picks a hat that cannot but be his own because, he says, it fits him so well—and Girl’s gender-based pains and traumas—she recalls a rape. Near the end, it would seem that this tragic field might be eased and even completely dissolved by opening the door that Man has visualized in his dream and by crossing it. As Yip and Tam observe, the door might symbolize “an entrance to the land of nothingness, where there is no self, no memory, no fantasy, no dream, absolutely nothing,”136 a pure realm of indistinction and oblivion. Still, Girl does not seem to be aware of such a “door.” For her, there is no way out at all, since she sees nothing but a wall. Therefore, while Man is obsessed with searching for “his” door, which has disappeared and feels all the more trapped, Girl complains about her own “sins” which she also perceives as ensnaring. Below, I shall demonstrate that, contrary to Yip and Tam’s idea that the couple eventually reaches some sort of nirvana, this contrast actually complicates the dynamics of the tragic field even further, leading to the sparagmos of language and impeding any possible enlightenment for either character. Behind Words is a “Crack”: the Posthuman Condition and the Tearing Apart of Language In this play, what I call the sparagmos of language does not occur abruptly at the end but is a gradual process starting out as a cross-gender battle and terminating in a kind of linguistic agon (confrontation), accompanied by some sort of a negative anagnorisis (discovery). Below, I shall examine how the couple’s frenetic usage of language in the final stages of this play eventually leads them to realize how language actually works, what the reality behind it is, and how it links up with the issue of the Self. I aim to challenge existing scholarly assumptions that the play is presenting language as a negative filter that hinders our comprehension of the true essence of reality. Izabella Łabędzka, for example, argues that, as it emerges from this play, language “by no means can … lead to cognition of the sense of existence.”137 Referring to BLD, Sy Ren Quah likewise states that “without the burden of words one can rid oneself of subjectivity and 4.3

135  Ibid., pp. 125–126. 136  Yip and Tam, “Gender and Self”, p. 230. 137  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 136.

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attain a state of freedom.”138 However, the couple in D&R do not eventually experience any such “liberation” nor the “joy” that is attributed to the mystical realization that language and especially dualistic thinking have limits.139 Furthermore, it is incorrect to assume that Daoism and Zen Buddhism are totally anti-language.140 Youru Wang, based on his analysis of Zhuangzi and Zen masters’ linguistic strategies, shows that what these thinkers condemn is not language per se but “certain dominant uses of language,”141 namely argumentative, bellicose language. That type of verbal expression, I believe, aptly describes Man’s and Girl’s usage of words throughout the play, especially in the second part. Yet, such expression is not “wrong” because of something intrinsic within itself but because it reflects the capricious, daimonic nature of the Hegemonic Self, which determines the overall Dionysian atmosphere of D&R as well as the couple’s aggressive, even predatory behavior towards each other. In my opinion, it is possible to provide an alternative reading of Gao’s tearing apart of verbal language in this play, by employing the transcultural framework of the tragic in place of the culturally-embedded prisms of Zen Buddhism and Daoism, “which hold up the importance of awakening and non-reasoning.”142 Moreover, rather than a gong’an style dialogue, which merges the boundaries between speech and silence in order to achieve a final state of forgetfulness (of both),143 it is useful to envision Man’s and Girl’s dialogue and rebuttal as a form of agon. Structurally, it is characterized by the intermingling of conflicting sentences. Emotionally, it conveys a sense of mutual hostility and, later on, of psychological distress, as the employed lexis becomes increasingly dismal or even brutal.144 As we shall see, under this new light, language becomes a vehicle of the tragic consciousness. I have previously mentioned Man and Girl’s double soliloquies, yet without an in-depth exploration of their structure and dramatic value. A good example is found on pages 111–112 of the English translation. After another face-to-face confrontation, during which Girl has repeatedly pushed Man away, forbidding him to touch her, the two characters seem estranged from each other. They 138  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, p. 157. 139  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 139. 140  Henry Zhao, for example, claims that “language [tout court] was declared the most dangerous enemy of Zen.” In Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 199. 141  Wang Youru, Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking, London 2003: Routledge, p. 92. 142  Yip and Tam., “Gender and Self,” p. 231. 143  Wang, Linguistic Strategies, pp. 102–103. 144  See the first chapter of Michael A. Lloyd, The Agon in Euripides, Oxford 1992: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–18.

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mumble and whisper as if talking to themselves. Yet, their broken sentences dovetail perfectly with each other’s, following a linear, logical train of thought, and constructing a discourse on the predicament of being human, male or female. Girl: It’s unbearable Man: Just because it’s unbearable Girl: Just because it’s unbearable to be a woman Man: Just because to be a man is unbearable Girl: Just because not only being a woman but also being human Man: A living human being, a body of flesh and blood … Next, even though their sentences continue to crisscross, the couple shows divergences of views and of sensuous perceptions. These, however, underpin a shared difficult situation and only represent different responses to/elaborations of the same quandary, expressed in a snappy yet impressionistic way: Girl: A sound, sharp and piercing … Man: A greenish grey sun, gyrating in the dark … Girl: Dead at knife-point, dead in space … Man: Motor cars howling ferociously Girl: And the fingers are very cruel! … Even in their linguistic exchanges, and especially in the way these are constructed, Man and Girl show cohesive and divisive forces emanating from their words, boosting the tragic tension to higher levels. In the second part of the play, this linguistic tension reaches its utmost limit. When fantasizing about the door, which might signify a way out of their predicament, and which only Man “sees” in his mind, Girl ends her involvement sharply and abruptly by saying simply that she “can’t say”145 and leaving Man puzzled and speechless in his own turn. I interpret this passage as a sign of Girl’s intellectual resignation. She is unable to figure out a possible solution to their problems both as a couple and as individual gendered beings, so she realistically puts a stop to Man’s floating imagination. The door does not exist, nor can they be liberated from the pains of the human condition. Possibly, by cutting off their heads, becoming nothing more than each other’s shadows, they have made their predicament even worse, as I shall demonstrate below. After a brief pause, the two characters resume their double soliloquy, in a divisive way. 145  Yip and Tam, “Gender and Self,” p. 130.

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Man cannot believe that the “door” he had seen is no longer there, whereas Girl talks about herself in a way that prefigures her tragic enlightenment—very different from Buddhist nirvana—by turning her reasoning into a sequence of tangled sentences, reversing them, reusing and repeating words, restructuring sentences, thus producing a contorted discourse full of twists and turns,146 which Man continues in turn: Girl: She’s afraid of this and afraid of that, afraid of this, afraid of that, afraid, afraid, afraid, but she’s not afraid of her, not afraid of herself. But what happens if she’s also afraid of herself? Then, wouldn’t she be not afraid? Man: What if you were to stop looking? Then you’re not trapped, and you aren’t not trapped? Either you’re trapped or you’re not trapped, or look at it another way, you’re looking just to prove that you’re trapped? Either you’re trapped or you’re not trapped, either you’re not trapped or you aren’t not trapped, isn’t it all your own doing?147 Still failing to come to terms with the idea of being trapped in a liminal state of blurred identities, Man asks, in a self-reflexive way, “But if you weren’t you, then who are you?”148 This question, which is a leitmotif of this post-exile trilogy, elicits Girl’s quick response. She characterizes herself first as “a silkworm,” and then as a list of other things. Man follows up on this, and the double soliloquy then becomes progressively more cohesive and the rhythm more stringent until the final turn. Girl goes on uttering random sequences of words, broken sentences with no meaning at all, with the result that Man gets even angrier and more frustrated, so that he too mixes fragments of sentences and juxtaposes them without any apparent logic. As the dialoguer-interloquer goes on, Girl starts turning words into pieces, tearing language apart and dragging Man into an inevitable descent into the depths of language, in what I interpret as an attempt to catch the reality behind words. Earlier, Man had declared, “You can’t understand the meaning 146  In my opinion, this twisting of words and sentences is not equivalent to the “linguistic twisting and detouring” enacted by Zen masters in order to bypass the limits posed by an excessive attachment to either speech or silence (see Wang, Linguistic Strategies, p. 121). In fact, the couple cling desperately to language because they cannot totally eliminate their own subjectivity. Still, such an attachment, far from being meaningless or futile, will eventually enhance the couple’s consciousness of reality and of the self as intrinsically tragic (i.e., divisive). 147  Yip and Tam., “Gender and Self,” p. 131. 148  Ibid.

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of your own words”, thereby calling himself “the slave of language, … not free to move, being trapped in the web of language of your own making.”149 A similar consideration had already been made by Girl, who had compared herself to a silkworm “which gets enmeshed in its own cocoon.”150 Wondering why one cannot “put down this you [Self] of yours,” Girl’s reply is that one would be “left with only the remnants of a broken wish.”151 In other words, getting rid of one’s Self by dissecting it would not grant them any liberation from subjectivity, but would make them aware of subjectivity as a set of fragments unable to be put back together into a whole, which is even worse than the initial situation. The subject wishes to control the Self, yet this desire is doomed to crumble into pieces as it reflects the Self’s failed ambition to grasp itself in its entirety. The same holds true for language as an expression/mirror of the Self. Echoing Girl’s words, behind the Self as a self-constructed entity, there are merely “the remnants of a broken wish.” Similarly, what is there behind words? Man urges Girl to speak on, in what looks like a desperate request for meaning, namely the meaning behind words, the reality that they conceal: Man (trying to connect Girl’s disconnected words): Teapot makes winter? … Girl: It is … Man: It is what? Speak! Girl: It is not … Man: It is, it is not? … Speak, speak, speak, go on!152 Finally, after an excruciating linguistic agon, which has resulted in language being frantically dissected, dismembered, and reduced to meaningless, dead fragments, Girl bitterly proclaims the truth about language, which also offers the key to understanding their predicament. Both language and the Self are human constructs, which are designed to superimpose a semblance of unity and meaning to a reality that is already, naturally faulty, and essentially cracked. In fact, Girl’s last word, which she reiterates endless times until Man joins her and two voices eventually merge together in the last feeble proclamation, is precisely “crack.”153 The inner core of reality is nothing else but “a crack line,” the sign of a divisive mechanism, which tragedy seeks to reproduce artistically through specific dramatic structures proceeding from the 149  Ibid., p. 132. 150  Ibid., p. 131. 151  Ibid. 152  Ibid., 133. 153  Ibid., pp. 133–134.

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Dionysian archetype. In this framework, language can be perceived as functioning differently from the way it is construed in Daoism and Buddhism. In her discussion of the critique of language as reflected in Zhuangzi, one of the canonical texts of Daoism, Florentina Vişan notes that “when Zhuangzi speaks about language, his main theme is the inability of language to express not only the hidden reality, the negative presence … wu ming … but also the reality of the phenomenal world which is characterized by unity and fluid dynamism.”154 She further argues that “language (yan) is a discourse of difference and endangers ‘the equality of things’ … The subject needs only to free himself from the trap of adhering to only one point of view and to open himself to alternatives, to the multitude of perspectives.”155 While this is indeed true for Zhuangzi, I would argue that it does not apply to the characters in this play. The human world here is not governed by a perpetual and placid flowing of things, or by a total fusion of perspectives and harmony. Rather, after the couple remove the filter of subjectivity (like a burden that they need to be rid of), the world appears as a network of cracks, rifts, thresholds, and borders. The Self, at its core, is cracked, and likewise language itself. Hence, the conclusion of this play indicates that language can indeed express what lies beyond sensory phenomena. Furthermore, Man and Girl’s final anagnorisis is all the more tragic because it expresses what René Habachi calls “the fundamental intuition from which all analyses of the tragic have proceeded,” namely, “the intuition of something broken/riven.”156 Commenting on the meaning of the term “crack,” Henry Zhao claims that “language progresses into pre-language,” which he describes as “a helpless compromise after mutual annihilation.”157 I concur with him insofar that no enlightenment is promised for the couple aside from a tragic recognition of their predicament as unmendable (like a crack line). However, I argue that rather than a “return” to “pre-language,” a primordial condition prior to words, what we have here is a radicalization of language verging on paroxysm. Language explodes into myriad pieces, as a result of the multiple strains forced up and over it by the language users, and becomes what I would rather call a kind of “post-language.” This is not a return to the source of language but its collapse under the blows of the tragic energies. As a matter of fact, Girl’s utterance of the word “crack” coincides with the couple’s turning into contorted 154  Florentina Vişan, “Zhuangzi’s Point of View about Language,” The Romanian Journal of Chinese Studies, 2001, no. 1, vol. 1. http://chinesestudies.tripod.com/visan2.html (accessed 21 February 2015). 155  Ibid. 156  Habachi, Il momento dell’uomo, p. 9. 157  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 151.

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bodies, “like two strange crawling reptiles,”158 and does not lead to a condition of harmonious transcendence,159 namely the conciliation and mending of all divisions. This metamorphosis into dehumanized creatures follows their previous transformations into shadows, and proves even more tragic and horrifying. According to Colin McGinn, “A shadow is the closest thing to nothingness a person can be, without losing being altogether. A shadow is an absence of light, a mere blank trace, having no bulk or substance … To be a shadow of one’s former self is to be a nothing where once one was something.”160 As shadows, Man and Girl are still male and female, and, most importantly, still human. This ghost-like liminal state creates the conditions for the couple’s subsequent downfall into the realm of the “posthuman.” As I have mentioned in Chapter One, Yan Haiping is the only scholar who has discussed (even briefly) Gao Xingjian’s drama in terms of “posthumanism,” as an attitude of “quiet observation” of the human Self and society—a perspective informed by his fascination with Zen. In other words, the posthuman quality of Gao’s drama would be a combination of humanistic impulses and spiritual detachment. Still, Yan’s usage of the term seems quite estranged from the usual contemporary concept of “posthuman”—a recent neologism— used to refer to the overcoming of the limits of human nature through the manipulation of nature itself and the subversion of its laws. The category of the posthuman often relates to the advent of the human machine, intelligent machine, or robot, or to the transformation of the individual into a machine, the mechanization of life, and the commercialization of the human being. Gao’s presentation of the posthuman condition in this play rather concerns the dismemberment of the human body, the loss of human dignity and, with particular reference to Girl, the reification of the female body, as suggested by her evocation of the rape scene, in which her body was being butchered, dissected, and even discussed by a group of people. All of these seem to suggest a dismal perspective (also noted by Zhao161) on the fate of humankind, for whom the explosion of language proves to be even worse than being hampered by it. Going even further, one could compare this linguistic “explosion”

158  Gao, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” p. 133. 159  Wang, Linguistic Strategies, p. 100. 160  Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays, New York 2007: Harper Perennial, p. 114. It is worth mentioning here that Nothingness, in this play, does not equal the condition of hundun, or “originary self,” but the revelation of the Dionysian hegemonic Self, the dismantling energy that causes irreconcilable divisiveness, signified by the word “crack.” 161  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 151.

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to the blasting of an atomic bomb, leaving behind merely the relics of a once glorious humankind. 4.4 On Yet Another Shore: the Monk as the (Tragic) Fool? The last element of D&R’s tragic potential is the enigmatic Buddhist Monk. Unlike Man and Girl, stuck on the stage trying to figure out who they are, he is free to come and go at his own will. During his brief appearances on stage he performs a series of typical monk’s activities, such as chanting from sutras while beating a wooden fish, sprinkling water into an alms bowl, and doing kungfu-style gestures and acrobatics. Apart from chanting, he never really speaks. For this reason, he has been likened to the Silent Man in The Bus Stop for, as Łabedzka contends, they have both been “constructed as a certain contrast which emphasizes sterile talkativeness of the other party.”162 However, I would be extremely cautious about comparing these two figures, despite their apparent linkages. The Silent Man shares the same predicament of his fellow characters, but once he leaves the stage, he does not reappear.163 By contrast, the Monk lives in his own dimension, which has little or nothing to do with what happens to the couple performing on the same stage. Still, he has to face his own little difficulties, too. All the actions he performs are essentially exercises for achieving a certain kind of balance, which is metaphorically signified by his attempts at making an egg stand on a stick. It can be argued that his work aims to bring some order in the messy relationship between Man and Girl. Unsurprisingly, one can discern a subtle analogy between his final decision to crack this egg, as this is the only way to succeed, and the “crack” mentioned by Man and Girl. This analogy would provide the link between the two “shores” on which the parallel performances take place. In this sense, Monk inhabits a proper Buddhist “other shore,” detached and aloof, yet also deeply connected to the theatrical other shore—this theatrum mundi that “is all gone crazy”164—to which he serves as a tragic counterpoint.165 In line with Gao’s claim that the play “has no intention of promoting Buddhism,”166 and aiming toward a transcultural analysis within the tragic 162  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 140. 163  The musical motif that accompanied his departure from stage is nevertheless being played from time to time. 164  Gao, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” p. 111. 165  The fact that both the Monk and the couple eventually reach the same conclusion with regard to the true nature of reality, invalidates Łabędzka’s claim that the former “can see more and in greater detail” than the latter. In Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 140. 166  Gao Xingjian, “Some Suggestions on Producing Dialogue and Rebuttal,” in The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, p. 136.

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framework, I suggest comparing the Monk with the Shakespearean fool, the kind of character that appears in both tragedies and comedies and acts as a mirror for the truth. Monk retains some of the fool’s characteristics. Much of the behavior and dramatic function of Lear’s Fool, for example, resembles Monk’s in D&R. William Martin observes that the Fool “comments on action, but does not directly contribute to the action himself.”167 The Fool understands what happens but remains detached. He therefore embodies cohesion and division, and in the case of Monk, this intensifies the tragic field in which Man and Girl are entangled. Monk counterpoints the couple’s deadlocks but remains external to their predicament. Moreover, the Fool “expresses what the king’s consciousness has not yet grasped,”168 and it is worth noting that in order to make Lear aware of his folly, he breaks an egg, which he compares to Lear’s divided kingdom. V. K. Janik describes this as an example of “physical humour” typically used by many Shakespearean Fools.169 Similarly, the Monk cracks the egg well in advance of the couple’s linguistic anagnorisis occurs, in order to highlight the two characters’ foolishness at not recognizing or accepting the natural disunity of the mundane world. The Monk, like the Fool, is not a simpleton but instead shows practicality and wisdom, and his presence is vital to ensure the creation of a dynamic contrast between the two dimensions of the play. The monk represents ingenuity, purity—foolishness by the world’s standards—detachment, and serenity. He is the prototype of an ideal humanity and also of an ideal kind of drama, made up of actions rather than words. Man and Girl, meanwhile, embody earthly suffering pushed to its utmost limits. In this regard, Enid Welsford’s observations on the contrast between the serious (i.e. tragic) hero and the Fool are extremely helpful for us in making sense of the tragic tension between the world-as-a-stage and the Buddhist other shore: “… the serious hero [the couple] focuses on events, forces issues [particularly language], and causes catastrophes [the explosion of language]; but the Fool [the Monk] by his mere presence dissolves events, evades issues, and throws doubts on the finality of the fact.”170 This is what Monk does, in the end, sweeping the stage with a broomstick while the couple are agonizing with the fragments of language, as if he wants to sweep away any traces of the theatrical other shore. It is clear, then, that the Monk’s dimension is the ideal “other shore,” yet precisely 167  W  illiam F. Martin, The Indissoluble Knot: King Lear as Ironic Drama, Lanham, MD 1987: University Press of America, p. 22. 168  Ibid., p. 23. 169  V  . K. Janik, Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art and History: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport 1998: Greenwood, p. 18. 170  Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, Gloucester 1966: P. Smith, p. 324.

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because it is ideal, it does not exist for real and remains virtually unattainable, as he seems to suggest at the end of the play, when he stands with his back to the audience.171 One might hypothesize further that just as Shakespeare uses the Fool to convey his personal perspective on the predicament of his tragic characters, Gao too employs the Monk to cast an unbiased yet sympathetic eye on the tangled dynamics of modern humanity. In doing so, he draws on the tradition of what Beatrice Otto calls “the holy fools of Buddhism and Daoism … who could display a joyously cavalier approach to the sanctity of their teachings, embodying a jester-like ‘anarchism which laughs at all that is systematic and unpoetical.’”172 5

The Death Collector: Dionysian Frenzy and the Apotheosis of the Tragic Potential

Originally written in French as Le Quêteur de la Mort, this work was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture in 2000, and the Chinese-language version, entitled Kouwen Siwang (which can also be roughly translated as “inquiring about death”173), was finished three years later. It was subsequently translated into English as The Man Who Questions Death by Gilbert Fong and published in 2007 together with Escape. In her introduction to the English translation of these plays, Mabel Lee underscores the “unambiguously autobiographical”174 quality of The Death Collector,175 which was written at a particular time in Gao’s lifetime both as an individual and an artist. One year before conceiving this work, Gao was hospitalized due to a serious stomach illness, and he was given little chance of survival. Meanwhile, he had just finished writing One Man’s Bible, which had led him to mentally re-experience his personal trauma of the Cultural Revolution, thus leaving him on the brink 171  Gao, “Dialogue and Rebuttal,” p. 135. This, incidentally, would confirm the idea that for both Zhuangzi and the Zen masters, total silence would also deviate from reality and therefore not be entirely preferable to logocentric speech. 172  B  eatrice K. Otto, Fools are Everywhere: Court Jesters Around the World, Chicago 2011: University of Chicago Press, p. 170. 173  Although Gilbert Fong translated the play’s Chinese title Kouwen Siwang as The Man Who Questions Death, I prefer to use Mary Mazzilli’s alternative English translation, The Death Collector. I believe it more aptly conveys the protagonist’s active pursuit of death, as indicated in the original French title (quêteur means “searcher” or even “beggar”). 174  Lee, “Introduction to Escape and The Man Who Questions Death,” in Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, p. xii. 175  T DC hereafter.

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of a nervous breakdown. Therefore, it would seem that the genesis of TDC was strongly tied to Gao’s confrontation with the ultimate realities of life, particularly aging and death. In fact, as we will see later on, not only does the death-theme play a crucial role in the economy of this dramatic piece, but, most importantly, it also gives a major contribution to the play’s high potential for tragedy. Liu Zaifu devoted an entire chapter of his study of Gao Xingjian’s work to TDC, which he categorized as a “black big joke” (heise de da wanju), or better yet, a “black farce with no exit” (zhaobudao chulu de heise xiju).176 He compares it to Beckett’s “tragic” pièce Waiting for Godot and argues that, unlike the latter, TDC is far from being a tragedy but should rather be called “dark absurdity” (heise de huangdan). In his opinion, it is precisely the apparent absence of the so-called “waiting-motif” that would account for the non-tragic quality of Gao’s work. Moreover, following from the Aristotelian theory of tragedy in the Poetics, Liu points out that since TDC does not seem to arouse any noble feelings of pity and fear, but rather highlights and ridicules the wretchedness of the human condition, this play “conscientiously endeavors to get rid of the connotations and aesthetic form of classical tragedy, thus discarding the chimera of the hero striving to save the world.”177 As previously discussed, the fact that this play does not match the Aristotelian pattern for tragedy is not a good reason for deeming it non-tragic. None of the Gaoian post-exile plays I have analyzed so far could be said to embrace Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. Still, by applying the Dionysian tragic framework and my conceptualization of the tragic mode as a re-elaboration of that, I was able to re-categorize those works as plays with a prominent tragic potential. In the following discussion, I aim to present TDC as the most tragic among Gao’s post-exile plays of Self. In particular, I shall attempt to show that the tragic potential of this play is generated by a combination of the same elements that contributed to shaping the tragic texture of the previous works to different degrees: space, the divided Self (gender is not at issue), and a particular usage of language. In TDC these three elements are simultaneously present and actively engaged towards the completion of the tragic mechanism, which will lead to the tragic finale. I shall also discuss and further develop one way in which TDC relates to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a connection first mentioned in passing by Huang Meixu in his criticism of Liu Zaifu’s perspectives on the

176  Liu Zaifu, “Heise naoju he pushixing xiezuo (Black Farce and Universal Writing),” in Gao Xingjian lun, p. 28. 177  Ibid., p. 29.

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play.178 One of Huang’s criticisms is that when Liu describes TDC essentially as “philosophical dramatization” (zhexue de juhua), he is neglecting to look at its stage presentation and dramatic structures—a criticism that I concur with—and consequently comes up with faulty ideas on its philosophical content and background. I shall therefore focus on the specific elements of the play that go into the construction of the tragic as a dramatic mode and field, and highlight the interconnections among them. 5.1 “Every Situation Is a Trap”: the Tragic Space The play, which has a very rudimentary plot, begins in medias res. An old, neurotic man (called simply zhezhu, translated as This Man), having just missed his train and having to wait more than one hour for the next one to arrive, enters a contemporary art museum and suddenly finds himself inexplicably locked inside. Attempting to attract the attention of security, he hangs around, uttering a plethora of angry complaints reflecting his rejection of the museum as such, which he views as a kind of “cultural prison” “impeding” his “personal freedom.”179 However, since he appears to be the only visitor at the moment, he soon realizes that nobody will come to rescue him. Therefore, to kill time he decides to “take a look around” and investigate the reasons for what he perceives as the degradation of modern and contemporary art. While confronting every sort of bizarre exhibit, he notices that the museum collection, though huge, seems to lack a live exhibit, i.e., a living human being turned ad hoc into an artwork. The idea of himself as the first living human objet d’art ever seen, with his name soon to be recorded in art history books, makes him feel particularly excited. As a result, he launches into an “endless proclamation” about the artistic revolution and its horrors, in which he asserts the death of art, following the death of God. Such a “manifesto,” of course, recalls the kind that were produced in many other historical contexts, such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the pre-war European dictatorships and modern art movements that sought to express the spiritual degradation of man and the contemporary society. It is precisely at this point that a second character enters the stage. He is referred to as nazhu (That Man), which immediately suggests that he stands 178  The reference to Macbeth was first raised in passing by Huang Meixu, when he expresses disagreement with Liu Zaifu’s arguments. Huang points out that the waiting element is definitely present in the play. See Huang Meixu, “Kouwen Gao Xingjian de ‘Kouwen siwang’: wo de ganjue yu lianxiang (Questioning Gao Xingjian’s ‘The Man Who Questions Death’: My Feelings and Thoughts),” Hong Kong Drama Review, 2009, Vol. 8, p. 300. I shall explore this issue further below. 179  Gao Xingjian, Kouwen siwang, 78 (online version at http://fliiby.com/download-start/ 47563/jtd5jr4grx/ [accessed 29 November 2011]).

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in relation and in opposition to This Man. That Man abruptly addresses This Man by forcing him to confront the harsh realities of his mortal destiny as a wretched human being: That Man: “Are you through with your endless proclamation? … You’re just a passerby … No matter your pose, no matter your fancy steps, which you consider so interesting, they will ultimately fall into the Big Void, ending up in nothingness.”180 Hence, the theme of the precariousness of the human being sharply supplants This Man’s initial concern with issues relating to the artistic revolution and becomes the main focus of the play. It continues through the two characters’ frantic, philosophical double soliloquy, which ends by That Man inexorably leading This Man to hang himself and thus anticipating his own destiny. Gao’s treatment of spatiality in this play through the use of a claustrophobic setting creates a kind of oppressive and dismal situation, the tragic latency of which can be decoded with Marc Szuszkin’s notion of the tragic space. In his study of Jean Racine’s neoclassical tragedies, Szuszkin makes a compelling case that, in a dramatic context, the definition of the tragic is inevitably associated with the concept of the limit. This correlation, Szuszkin argues, is typically expressed through the usage of enclosed spaces, whose impenetrability not only functions as a concrete impediment to the characters’ freedom but also epitomizes the perception of the human condition as a no-exit route towards extinction. “The tragic sense of life,” he points out, “is born out of this idea of finitude, of a mortal condition with which humankind is bound to confront.”181 Before I delve more deeply into the implications of Szuszkin’s theory, a clarification of my position with respect to the latter is in order. As I have said earlier, this study does not aim to extrapolate Gao Xingjian’s tragic philosophy or tragic sense of life (if any), but seeks to examine how certain dramatic structures or elements that he uses in his plays coalesce to act as dismembering forces against the psychic integrity of the protagonist(s). One such element is how the dramatic space is constructed and how it dialectically interacts with the psyche of the dramatis personae. When examining the tragic potential of BLD, I advanced the idea of a tragic field defined through precise spatial connotations; I observed how the space surrounding the main character mirrors the process of her mental disturbances and personal disintegration, even as it hinders her attempts to find a way out of her predicament and pushes her back 180  Ibid., pp. 87–88. 181  Szuszkin, L’éspace tragique, p. 37.

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into the dark tunnel of the encumbering Self. TDC, however, presents a different dramatic situation. Here, space is not shaped a posteriori by the character’s neuroses and hallucinations but exists already as an independent character, fitting in the idea of tragic space elaborated by Szuszkin, in the way I shall show below. It is therefore my intention first of all to conceptualize the role and appearance of the dramatic space in this play and, next, to scrutinize the dialectical relation between the character’s Self and the spatial dimension. Returning to Szuszkin’s essay, the most interesting part of his theoretical proposition concerns the (tragic) dynamics associated with the tragic space. He refers to Paul Valéry and Jean-Paul Vernant, who both link tragedy with the experience of a threshold that cannot be crossed, or a wall that symbolizes the struggle for survival—the demanding yet futile confrontation with a subjugating higher force. The tragic theatre is “based on the impossibility to walk out of the situations,”182 as Valéry rightfully argues, so this also resonates in the language the characters use to express their intimate reflections. As Vernant says, “The words exchanged on stage serve less to establish a communication among the characters than to mark the blocks, the barriers, the impermeability of the spirits, and to outline the points of conflict.”183 Another aspect of the tragic space besides captivity, according to Szuszkin, is isolation. He argues that by being alone with himself, confined in a walled-in space, the hero is forced to revert his gaze toward himself and to “gain awareness of his weaknesses and radical condition of isolation. The tragic space—he reiterates—represents the ineluctable solitude of the hero.”184 Finally, the third quality of the tragic space is liminality. How does this come to have a dismembering effect on the character’s mind? Szuszkin does not seem to push his argument so far as to include this outcome, but I will build on his final observations as a basis for further analysis. One of the core aspects of Szuskin’s argument is that this triadic combination of captivity, isolation, and liminality is what makes the tragic space “participate as an actor in the development of the tragic mechanism.”185 The tragic space, then, is not a dead space or a neutral space but stands alive vis-à-vis the tragic protagonist: “it is involved in the drama.”186 Through the perception of being trapped alone in a desolated enclosure, the character is prone to consider his “prison” not only with a renewed gaze, or consciousness, but also as an avatar or reverberation of 182  Paul Valéry, quoted in Szuszkin, Ibid. 183   Jean-Paul Vernant, quoted in Szuszkin, Ibid., p. 40. 184  Ibid., p. 40. 185  Ibid., p. 40. 186  Ibid., p. 40.

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an invisible psychic space, which I would connect with the notion of the tragic field. “Thanks to the notion of space,” Szuszkin concludes, “we come to see beyond what is available to the naked eye.”187 The interpretation of this kind of prison-like settings as vehicles for tragedy, is supported by a few other scholars, though in a less incisive way. Among them, Victor Brombert, Mary A. Witt, and Carol Rosen ground their studies on Jean Paul Sartre’s theory of a “theatre of situation.” In his calling for “a dramaturgy of situation,” Sartre was indeed inspired by the notion of tragedy as a kind of drama revolving around issues of fate and human freedom. Since he regarded tragic fate as the other side of freedom, placing characters in a given situation forces them to reveal themselves as “entrapped freedoms” always seeking an exit. In Situations II Sartre writes, “Each situation is a trap, there are walls everywhere.” And again, “In order for the decision to bring the whole man into play, we have to stage limit situations, that is, situations which present alternatives, one of which leads to death. Thus freedom is revealed in its highest degree, since it agrees to lose itself in order to be able to affirm itself.”188 In this respect, Sartre’s theory of a “theater of situation” helps explain what Mary A. Witt refers to as “literary prisons,” namely the depiction of the experience of captivity in modern and post-modern literature, with particular attention to the “existentialist” generation (Kafka, Camus, Malraux and Genet among others).189 Another scholar, Carol Rosen, employs the Sartrian paradigm of dramatic situation to introduce her analysis of a range of contemporary plays (such as Beckett’s 1957 Endgame), “depicting characters cornered, subjugated to the will of an overwhelming social setting.”190 In TDC, the solitary protagonist is plunged into a limit situation that seems to fit both Szuszkin’s and Sartre’s models. This Man’s enigmatic situation of captivity in a museum of “dead art” condemns him to choose death in order to affirm his own freedom and overcome the constraints of an absurd fate. In other words, in this play the image of physical confinement (the locked museum) can be said to be a major source of tragedy in that it metaphorically signifies the main character’s struggle to surmount the existential impasse connected to aging and ultimately death, from which he vainly yearns to escape. 187  Ibid. 188   Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater: Documents Assembled, Edited, Introduced, and Annotated by Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. by Frank Jellinek, London 1976: Quartet Books, p. 5. 189   Mary Ann Frese Witt, Existential Prisons: Captivity in Mid-twentieth-century French Literature, Durham 1985: Duke University Press, p. 215. 190  Carol Rosen, Plays of Impasse: Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions, Princeton 1983: Princeton University Press, p. 6.

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In fact, the play’s script is packed with words and expressions that convey an atmosphere of inexorable captivity: verbs such as guan (to lock up), and wangluo (to capture) are some of the most recurrent linguistic features of this text. Also, This Man frequently speaks of himself as either a prisoner ( fanren), or a hostage (renzhi), or even as “a fly caught inside a glass window case” (guan zai boli chuang li de cangying). Despite the apparent absence of staff and visitors, This Man’s soliloquy articulates the eerie sensation of being spied upon by invisible presences. This feeling is not only due to the security cameras recording every word and movement of the protagonist but also to the idea that, since the museum lacks a living human exhibit, This Man’s accidental entrapment would have actually been planned in advance by Mr Curator and his collaborators, so as to add the missing piece to their collection. As This Man proclaims: “They’d hidden themselves in the ticket counter to watch you. They let you in without a ticket, then, just like that, they were able to lock you up.”191 Such a claim bestows Dionysian characteristics to the setting, thus foreshadowing the arrival of That Man, himself a Dionysian figure, who will manipulate This Man’s fragile psyche, transforming the latter’s perception of space and of himself through an artful fusion of personalities. Before this happens, the core of the relationship between This Man and the surrounding environment revolves around his obsessive fantasies of extreme self-reification and self-torture. He addresses his fears directly to Mr Curator, but since there is no-one around, he ends up talking to himself, emphasizing his condition of detainee awaiting his execution: “You’ll become a sample piece of dehydrated art, and your skeleton will be put in good use, to fill the gap in their exhibition.”192 However, what is most noteworthy about his remark is that he is scared not of death per se, but of death-as-sparagmos, which is the tragic event par excellence. The fear of reification goes hand in hand with the fear of dissection, which he tries to exorcise by thinking that this will enable him to fulfil his craving for immortality. Like Woman’s vision of the self-butchering Nun in BLD and Girl’s evocation of a female body being cruelly dissected in D&R, This Man sees himself as “a work praised and appraised, analysed, deconstructed layer by layer, and heaped on with hitherto unprecedented kudos …”193

191  Gao Xingjian, “The Man Who Questions Death,” in Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, p. 81. 192  Ibid. 193  Ibid., p. 82.

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Eventually, these obsessive thoughts reveal a deeper insecurity about his identity, which is a common trait of Gao’s post-exile characters. Furthermore, he raises a point, which is central to the tragic mechanism associated with walled-in spaces, namely that these spaces are able to trigger a violent reaction from those who are confined within their boundaries, and even lead them to suicide. He says he is “like a rat scurrying around because it can’t find a hole to sneak into, or a cat locked in a cage, desperately screeching, trying to claw its way out. Even animals would react when they’re in a fix like that, and poor humans, who are wilful, neurotic, greedy and vain, of course they’d scream and make a scene, they’d have to do themselves in.”194 In his eyes, the museum has turned from a ghost town to a graveyard. This metaphor suggests what This Man’s destiny will be, since the museum will eventually become his own grave. At this juncture, we are already able to catch a glimpse of that mental space theorized by Szuszkin, which would certainly not emerge if the “real” scenic space were merely a static decorative backdrop to the action. In other words, if the space did not provoke the protagonist’s psychological response through its oppressive barricades, there would be no psychological transformation, no dialectical impact and, consequently, no tragic potential. Commenting on Sartre’s plays of entrapment, Victor Brombert highlights “the self-torturing potential of the mind and the self-pushing workings of the intellect”195 as distinguishing features of Sartre’s dramaturgy. This is replicated by Gao in TDC, since the space exacerbates the character’s pre-existing neurosis and fear of annihilation by activating strange fantasies and latent insecurities. Like Sartre’s characters, whose thoughts “are reflected and infinitely multiplied in a lookingglass that turns into an instrument of self-torture,”196 This Man’s manias are re-shaped by the experience of the limit and get reflected dialectically within his Self, which creates an uncanny alter-ego, in the guise of a Dionysian hallucination. From material space to the psychic space of the self, the Dionysian Other, i.e. That Man, who brusquely cuts across This Man’s hysterical soliloquy and gradually colonizes his personality, serves as a bridge between those two dimensions (tragic space and tragic field) and, acting as a terrorizer of the psyche, makes the protagonist into a victim of that loathed space.

194  Ibid., 86. 195  Victor Brombert, “Sartre and the Drama of Ensnarement,” in Ideas in the Drama, ed. John Gassner, New York and London 1964: Columbia University Press, p. 164. 196  Ibid.

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5.2 Voices from the Other Shore (of the Self ): the Return of Dionysus In his dramaturgical notes, Gao introduces This Man and That Man as “one and the same character.”197 They wear the same dark clothes and act in the same minimalist style. The only essential difference between them is that That Man is portrayed as “older and weaker” than his counterpart, as well as “cold and unemotional.”198 These few details should not be overlooked since they can tell us what kind of role is assigned to That Man from the time he enters the stage. First of all, although he is performed by another actor, That Man is not properly a character. He is rather the personification of a voice which resonates within This Man’s disturbed mind, as a result of his being trapped in a prison-like setting. As it will become apparent particularly in the next section, this voice is not dissimilar from the Voice in TS, that Dionysian-like presence providing a bridge between the real world and the oneiric realm, as well as favouring the transformation of Traveller into an Other, aka Sleepwalker. Moreover, That Man could not appear on stage if This Man had not gone through a sparagmoslike mechanism, brought about by the dialectical confrontation with the limit, and with his only true antagonist, the tragic space. The effect of this sparagmos, with its apparent division of This Man’s individuality into two, clearly resembles Man’s final encounter with Shadow in The Other Shore. Shadow, like That Man, is described as old, droopy, and deaf, and it does not have a personal identity of its own because it merely embodies Man’s own thoughts spoken out loud. However, it also introduces itself as Man’s heart, and its appearance enables him to put an end to his troubles which were partly due—as Shadow points out—to his self-centeredness. That Man, though similar in some respects, goes one step beyond and plays with This Man’s insecurities in order to deviously brainwash him and crush him even further. He does not offer any escape route nor salvation or healing but brings This Man to a higher level of self-consciousness, which will eventually annihilate rather than sustain him. In short, That Man epitomizes Dionysus as the psychic Other, and as a selfdestructive potency sprouting out of the Self. I would argue that he can be construed as a combination of previously mentioned Dionysian figures such as Card-player in The Other Shore, the invisible She in BLD, the Masked Man in TS, and Girl in D&R. Still, he retains his uniqueness, expressed mainly by his subtle powers of persuasion, which he exerts with great elusiveness. That Man brings in a new and different viewpoint on This Man’s current situation, and in this regard, he significantly positions himself between the audience and This Man, who shows his back to him. This Man is trying to exorcize the thought 197  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” p. 76. 198  Ibid.

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that he might become the new piece of a collection he considers extremely ugly. He does so by repeatedly shouting his contempt at Mr Curator for his bad taste, for his disrespect towards the visitors, and for his denigration of real artists, now turned into “the butchers of art.”199 He has nothing on his mind but the “death of art” in the contemporary age. That Man, instead, shifts the viewpoint from the death of art to death as such. He is completely aware that “Man is destined to die; you can’t do anything about it,”200 and that, consequently, there is no point in shouting so much in order “to prove that you really exist.”201 He views human existence in a cynical and even misanthropic way, emphasizing death as the absolute ending and dismissing life as a meaningless journey towards a “bottomless black hole.” His arguments revolve around death as the only certainty in one’s life, a truth that everyone can grasp. The opposite of death is not life but the self, which he compares to a piece of straw that “can’t save your life when you’re drowning, no matter how desperately you cling to it.” Life is all the more worthless because it is like “a piece of paper blowing in the wind,”202 which is bound to fall down. Furthermore, he addresses This Man as “too old” and discourages him from glorifying life by making a new start. Finally, while watching This Man dancing with a rubber doll, That Man mocks him for his loneliness, his unsatisfied carnal desires, and his lack of a true love in life. In this sense, That Man can also represent the return of the repressed, as Freud theorizes in his essay on the notion of the Uncanny, which also includes the creation of a doppelgänger. The Uncanny, or Unheimlich in the original, designates an ambivalent concept, a coincidence of opposites strikingly akin to the notion of the tragic. Freud defines the Uncanny as something that “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”203 At any rate, That Man is simultaneously a Dionysian figure, a doppelgänger, and a manifestation of the uncanny. All these characteristics do not simply coexist within this character but reflect each other. The situation recalls that of The Bacchae, which presents the return of Dionysus as a double of Pentheus, who manages to bring to the fore his repressed scopophilia. Although That Man does not declare a Dionysian-like “I am back,” he brings back This Man’s suicidal instincts, which the latter had mentioned earlier when comparing himself to a caged animal. While pointing out the insufficiency of the term uncanny as a translation of Unheimlich, Michael Klein further characterizes 199  Ibid., p. 87. 200  Ibid., p. 89. 201  Ibid., p. 88. 202  Ibid., p. 91. 203  Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in James Strachey (ed.), Writings on Art and Literature, Stanford 1997: Stanford University Press, p. 200.

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the German word as carrying Dionysian features. And, what is more, his explanation can be applied to make sense of That Man’s role with respect to the protagonist. In the German context—he argues—we imagine der Doppelgänger pursuing us with the threat of a death foretold…. Descriptions of the uncanny in music resort to many of the same signs that Freud uses. We see references to—for example—absence, otherworldly, death, Dionysian, Other…. In order to develop the idea of the double in German culture, Richard Kurth’s discussion of that Ur-text for the uncanny in music, Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” brings in Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian. We learn that the Dionysian is “the nightmarish encounter, sublime in its desolate solitude … the dark double of bright Apollonian apparitions of the divine with a power to induce self-forgetfulness, intoxication, and the destruction of the individual” (Kurth, 9–10). Again we see how the uncanny threatens the ego … though awe and terror remain with the uncanny in the nineteenth century, there is a sense from Freud’s analysis that the object of that fright, indeed of the supernatural itself, is not some outside force, like a god, but an inner force that splits the ego.204 Hence, That Man’s action is intended to generate a further rift within This Man’s Self. Walter F. Otto’s assertion that Dionysus carries a “universal truth,” namely the “primordial phenomenon of duplicity,” “the fraternal encounter between life and death,”205 may also aptly be applied to That Man’s role in TDC. That Man’s perspectives and his dramatic significance, combined with the oppressive space presented on stage, is what brings the tragic quality of this play to its utmost potential. We can also apply Piero Boitani’s analysis of the Old Man in Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” to further strengthen That Man’s tragic dynamism: Chaucer’s episode of the Old Man explores, in an extreme, veiled form, not death, but our relation to death. Have we not always wished to kill death? … He is there to remind us that dying is painful, inescapable, 204  M  ichael L. Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, Bloomington 2005: Indiana University Press, pp. 79–80. Emphasis added. 205  W  alter F. Klein, quoted in Carlo Gentili, “‘Tis pros Dionyson?’ Un itinerario esteticoermeneutico alle origini della tragedia” (Why Dionysus? An aesthetic-hermeneutic itinerary investigating the origins of tragedy), in La Filosofia come genere letterario (Philosophy as a Literary Genre), Bologna 2003: Pendragon, p. 123.

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desirable, mysterious, familiar, uncanny—an-other and the same thing as living. The Old Man incarnates the unbearable contrast we feel between on the one hand our notion of death as the opposite of life and on the other their equivalence. He represents the borderland, the limen or threshold where division is oneness, and his uncanniness is therefore supremely, ‘sublimely’ tragic.206 As an incarnation of the tragic divisiveness, and the Dionysian imagination, That Man operates in the dark, imitating This Man’s steps and clinging to him as his shadow: This Man: That guy is waiting for you to go over there. You go forward, he goes back. You take one step forward, he takes one step back, no more, no less, just to lure you into his trap one step at a time.207 As a manifestation of the uncanny, even though This Man is not supposed to actually “see” him, he is somehow aware of his presence (“This old man, you know him only too well”), and, like Pentheus, cannot resist his seductiveness (“but you let him208 push you around and manipulate you …”209). What This Man “sees,” probably with his third eye,210 is himself as Dionysus. This idea aptly dovetails with Giuseppe Genna’s observation that the possessed by Dionysus (This Man) “sees Dionysus himself, who is his ecstatic subject, but he does not see him as an external figure: the initiated person is Dionysus, hence he sees his own self.”211 Thus, as anticipated, That Man’s individuality 206  Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, Cambridge 2010: Cambridge University Press, p. 19. 207  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” p. 93. 208  Huang Meixu, in his article “Kouwen Gao Xingjian de ‘Kouwen siwang,’” has some interesting remarks about Gao’s usage of personal pronouns in this play: “Here, these parts of the speech are being used in a more natural, flexible, and clear way than in the previous plays. Initially, upon his appearance on stage, This Man refers to himself very naturally as ‘I.’ Later on, though, he uses the ‘you’ form still to signify himself. Next, this ‘intangible’ (wuxing) ‘you’ magically changes into a ‘visible, tangible’ (youxing) ‘you,’ which indicates That Man. Therefore, there are actually two distinct ‘you’(s) because each character calls each other ‘you’” (279). However, I do not agree with his claim that “These two ‘you’(s) from time to time become a ‘he,’ because the object of reference is extended from This Man and That Man to ‘man’ in the sense of the human being at large” (Ibid.). I think that by “he,” the character is clearly referring to That Man. 209  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” p. 93. 210  Earlier, That Man declared that This Man can only resort to self-observation as a means of controlling death, which is, I argue, disguised as That Man. 211  Genna, “Everyman di Philip Roth,” p. 10.

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as an independent character is merely a theatrical device, as he exists within This Man’s soul. In the next and last section, I shall explain how This Man, once initiated by his alter-ego, eventually also acquire Dionysian characteristics. I will also show how the relationship between the two is in some ways an extension of the one between Man and Girl in D&R, though with some slight differences. Unpacking the Tragic Mechanism of Intermingling Subjectivities: the Agon of the Divided Self Huang Meixu’s essay at one point quotes from Act V, scene v of Macbeth. Here, Macbeth bitterly reflects on the fugacity and aimlessness of human life, by comparing it to “a walking shadow,” and the human being to “a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”212 Huang uses this passage to emphasize This Man’s definition of himself as “an actor,”213 yet without providing any further elaboration. While I do not notice any metadramatic intent behind This Man’s declaration,214 I nevertheless consider it useful to refer to Macbeth to frame the relationship of This Man and That Man as they engage in a frenzied dialogue (and rebuttal), which binds them together while showing their internal divisions. Prior to his study on the Uncanny and its relation to the doppelgänger theme, Freud had dealt with similar concepts in a foundational study on characterization and psychoanalysis.215 He focused particularly on unpacking the dramatic relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Of interest here is the flow of dramatic exchanges between the two figures. Freud sheds light on how they mirror or even embody each other’s feelings and emotional reactions to certain events. In particular, he points out how the implications of certain experiences transfer back and forth from Macbeth’s psyche to Lady Macbeth’s, so that the two characters may be said to complement each other. It is a dramatic technique wherein an overarching character is created, and from which two half-units can be extracted. The outcome, I argue, is a replica of the tragic field of cohesion and division that I have been using in my analyses.

5.3

212  Huang, “Kouwen Gao Xingjian de ‘Kouwen siwang,’” p. 297. 213  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” p. 99. 214  He says this in reply to That Man’s verbal attacks and merely to justify his tendency to “show off a bit, offering your comments in a somewhat nonchalant manner.” 215  Sigmund Freud, Some Character-types Met With in Psycho-analytical Work (1916), http:// web.singnet.com.sg/~yisheng/notes/shakespeare/mbeth_f.htm (accessed 26 January 2015).

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Freud concludes his analysis, significantly I believe: “Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are copied from the same prototype.”216 To paraphrase Freud, This Man and That Man can be said to exhaust the possibilities of reaction to captivity within the same individual. On a higher level, they represent life and death impulses fighting against each other and simultaneously clinging to each other. They are like two sides of a coin, or the two poles of the tragic field. They finally merge as life-within-death (This Man), and death-within-life (That Man), following the trajectory described below. Breaking through This Man’s monologue on the compelling necessity of following That Man, the latter urges him to get rid of his regrets since “It’s getting too late!”217 This Man seems to agree with That Man’s viewpoint (cohesion), that it is impossible as well as pointless to go back. Still, That Man’s destructive drives have not affected him yet, so he takes this new awareness as an opportunity to seize the day and live the remainder of his life to the full (division). The following excerpt clearly showcases what I call the agon of the divided Self. Agon is an ancient Greek term which generally designates a public debate or poetic contest. The tragic agon is a dramatic device of ritual origin, which is based on sharp, symmetrical, and often intersecting speeches (rheseis) spoken by two antagonistic characters in their defensive arguments.218 What goes on between This Man and That Man is an agon-like debate about the relationship between life and death. This Man: No, you don’t want to search your memories, to commit a slow suicide in this way … You live for today, just doing what you have to do and what you can do! That Man: But what can you do at your age? … This Man: True, it’s too late. That Man: C’est la vie! This Man: But you can always have a new start … That Man: A new start for what? To live your life again, and again let it go to waste?219

216  Ibid. 217  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” 94.  . Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge and New York 2002: 218  H Cambridge University Press, p. 55. 219  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” p. 96.

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Due to This Man’s equally powerful resistance, That Man’s Dionysian frenzy to push him into the abyss of existential anguish swings between moments of success and moments of failure. He uses all of his tricks to persuade his Pentheus about the meaninglessness of life and the inescapability of death. This Man, however, alternates between alert wariness and passivity vis-à-vis his Dionysian alter-ego. He understands precisely that That Man’s smile “means that he can’t control you yet,”220 and that he aims at tempting him into his trap. Another example of linguistic agon and the clash of individualities is the following passage, in which That Man attempts to dismiss himself as a mere reflection of This Man’s fears. This Man: The steps are so light and so silent, like a wolf’s, or as if a vicious dog is about to jump up and tear at your throat. That Man: It’s only your heart pounding. You’re afraid of yourself. This happens to all the people all the time. This Man: No, someone’s watching you, spying on you, and playing hide and seek with you …221 What can be said for sure is that That Man exploits those fears to drive This Man towards suicide, and that they exchange parts of their own selves as if they were in a house of mirrors, or undergoing an intermittent osmotic process. Responding to That Man’s accusations of cowardice, This Man justifies himself by declaring that “everybody is scared in the face of death” and admitting that he is “anxious and worried,” having “fallen into an abyss.”222 By this time, is it any longer necessary to point out that this abyss is the tragic abyss, and that the descent into Tartarus has been common to all characters in Gao’s post-exile plays analyzed so far? Here, the tragic abyss emerges in This Man’s internal confrontation with his Dionysian doppelgänger, which does not stop reminding him that “you’ve been trapped, fallen into a quagmire,”223 and that it is useless to cry for help, as no one can hear him. The last attempt to resist those obsessive counter-thoughts ends in failure when This Man finally acknowledges that “Man is such a fragile and insignificant creature,”224 and resolves to commit suicide. His initial resolution not to surrender to his past memories but to enjoy the present suddenly becomes a way to affirm life by anticipating 220  Ibid., p. 98. 221  Ibid., p. 97. 222  Ibid., p. 99. 223  Ibid., p. 100. 224  Ibid., p. 101.

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death (“Don’t wait until you’ve lost your senses and control over your body. Put a speedy end to your misery while there’s still time!”225). Through this act, he temporarily shows a fusion of ideas with That Man (“Since there is no salvation, death is the only solution”226), which is, once again, followed by a further division. By viewing this kind of suicide as a smarter option than ending up like “a fly dying from suffocation inside a glass window case,” he feels happy about “holding death in his own hands,”227 thinking that Dionysus can be conquered and defeated. Nevertheless, it is still Dionysus/That Man who holds This Man tightly in his clutches. He accuses him of making “something out of nothing, a tiny bit of meaning out of meaninglessness,”228 and disappears nonchalantly away in the dark, waiting to come out at the right moment to proclaim his victory. It is he who pushes away the garbage can, so that This Man is hung. And by hearing him declaring “It’s done at last …” “They’ll be coming soon,”229 while the sound of sirens is clearly heard from offstage, one suddenly understands that This Man has become a victim of his Dionysian drives, tragic obsessions, and schizophrenic personality, and that he has followed the wrong way out. In light of the above, it is possible to identify a kind of progression (signifying This Man’s spiritual awakening) from ignorance to recognition and from absurdity to tragic awareness, revolt, and ultimately “tragic happiness.” This progression is associated with an increasing tension brought about not only by the oppressive dominance of a prison-like setting but also by the threatening presence of a mysterious Other, capable of eliciting from the neurotic protagonist an equally lucid tragic response to death and existential angst. As That Man starts to remind him that “it’s all in your destiny … If it happens, it happens, even though sometimes it happens by chance. You can’t escape even if you want to,”230 This Man comes to realize that his condition of a poor visitor accidentally locked up in a closed museum of decaying art actually signifies man’s inescapable destiny as a prisoner awaiting death in a world that is already spiritually disintegrating. Their hectic dialogue, actually a double soliloquy, like the one in D&R, reflects This Man’s spiritual awakening which culminates in his choice to kill himself, thus reaching the utmost peak of tragic consciousness. In fact, as he points out, this act of finishing himself off is imbued with (tragic) happiness, instead of hopelessness and despair: “This isn’t suicide, because you finish him off yourself. When someone commits 225  Ibid., p. 102. 226  Ibid., p. 103. 227  Ibid., p. 104. 228  Ibid., p. 105. 229  Ibid., p. 107. 230  Ibid., p. 87.

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suicide, he’s hopeless and he gives himself up for lost; when someone finishes himself off, he is very much aware—he holds death in his own hand, he is in peace, and he’s happy, as he puts an end to his own life.”231 This leads us back to Camus and his interpretation of the tragic hero (he referred specifically to Oedipus and Sisyphus) as ultimately happy. As Mary Witt notes, “Tragedy has tended to represent its hero as trapped victim partly through unity of place. Yet the tragic awareness that there is no way out brings about no despair, but knowledge, exhilaration, the ‘all is well’ that Camus attributes to Sophocles’ Oedipus.”232 Shortly before This Man hangs himself with the help of his mysterious alter-ego, the connection between the death of art and the spiritual degradation of mankind is finally accomplished: This Man: In the face of this increasingly vulgar world, a world as degenerate as art and in the name of a loser, someone who has wasted his entire useless life away, you proclaim the death of this weak and helpless person!233 To conclude, I argue that in this play the tragic field is established through the interplay between an oppressive, no-exit space and a doppelgänger. The space contributes to the creation of the tragic field by exerting a combination of cohesive and divisive forces on the character’s self. It acts as a cohesive force in that it compels the character to sacrifice his freedom and to look for death; he thus becomes one with the place in which he is entrapped—a museum of decaying art where every single exhibit exudes a pervasive sense of deterioration and ugliness that match the character’s present condition and future destiny. It acts as a divisive force on the character’s identity, in that it favours the latter’s dismemberment into two entities: a Self and an Other. With Freud, we can say that this relation is: accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another—by what we should call telepathy—, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous 231  Ibid., p. 97. 232  Witt, Existential Prisons, p. 86. Compare this definition of “tragic awareness” as a combination of happiness and suffering to This Man describing himself as “happy yet in pain” (105). 233  Gao, “The Man Who Questions Death,” pp. 106–107.

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self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the Self.234 In this sense, the tragic potential in TDC stems out of a complex trialectics of spatiality and split identity of Self and Other, developing from and going beyond the earlier post-exile plays discussed above. 6

Mysterium Tremendum: Tragic Acting, Katabasis and the Religion of the Self

Based on the analyses above, it seems to me that the four post-1990 plays of Self may have three salient aspects in common. Firstly, all the characters perform in the tragic mode, which is not limited to their speaking in the second or third person but also comprises their progressive physical and/or mental dismemberment (BLD), their gradual splitting and doubling (TS and TDC), their assuming false identities to hide their true self and their functioning, sometimes, as the two halves of the same unit (D&R). Second, all the limit-situations in which these characters are variously embroiled take shape in some sort of ensnaring “other shore” not so dissimilar from the one encountered in the eponymous pre-exile play. In fact, the three plays which feature one individual protagonist (BLD, TS, and TDC) are characterized by the opposition between the latter and a pool of shadows, hallucinations, enigmatic figures and/or animated objects/fragments of reality, whose presence enhances the psychological crisis and further complicates his/ her perception of existence as a tragic path (i.e., leading towards self-annihilation and pulverization rather than self-fulfillment). D&R, which features two protagonists who are at the same level (i.e., both driven by Dionysian impulses and determined to crush the partner of the opposite sex but also enduring the same tragic destiny and making the same discovery at the end), also takes place “on the other shore” although here it is the two characters that (mostly) torment each other, and the stage too is split into two realms to better highlight the hiatus between the real and the ideal “other shore.” Indeed, the element of divisiveness, which is the key feature of the tragic mode, dominates in all the works surveyed in this chapter. Divisiveness does not only manifest itself through the tragic mode of performance but also in the tragic field to which that performance contributes. It is part and parcel of the architecture of the other shore. Furthermore, the other shore is once again portrayed as a 234  Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” p. 210. Emphasis added.

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mythic absolute in the guise of an infernal context where the mortal Self is literally slaughtered and then subdued beneath the all-conquering, almighty, overarching (Dionysian) Other-within-the-Self, signified respectively in the plays by Woman’s past memories and problematic femininity, Traveler’s imagined night city, Man-and-Girl’s intricate relationship, and This Man’s loathed contemporary art museum (which ultimately becomes his own grave). In all of these plays, the characters find themselves “on the other shore”, as a result of what looks like a journey of descent—the katabasis. Third, it is worth noticing that all the characters are strongly ego-centric, that is, they either weigh and gauge reality through the lenses of their own subjectivity, or they are unable to form healthy relations with their respective others because of that subjectivity, or both. Woman must probe her own Self; Sleepwalker wants to unleash his own Self and feel omnipotent; Man and Girl are determined to control the other without donating a single piece of their own Self for the other’s sake; and This Man considers himself the center of everyone’s undivided attention, thereby developing a persecution complex. Such ego-centrism implies that all the dramatic energies converge towards a fundamental focus, which is the Self as an object of religious worship, an epitome of the sacred. How do these three common aspects of the four post-exile plays relate to one another, and how do they issue into a religious—yet tragic—perception of the Self? Moreover, how does this “religion of the Self” further connect with tragedy? As we have seen, the characters are not alienated or estranged, as Sy Ren Quah and others have argued—nor are they really “individuals.” Not only do they feel “incomplete” and lacking something, but they are also possessed by a splitting internal potency, which drives their latent craving for selfhood with a promise of attaining unity with the Self, sometimes through the mediation of the Other. They pursue the Self as they would pursue “an object outside the[ir own] Self,”235 and in doing so they display a view of the Self akin to what Rudolf Otto has once named the numinous; they make the holy not necessarily good but a meaningful surplus. The kind of Self that the Gaoian tragic characters thirst for, as in Otto’s concept of the numinous, is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, in its “wild and demonic forms.”236 It is a mysterium because it 235  Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor of the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. by John W. Harwey, London 1950: Oxford University Press, p. 10. 236  Ibid., p. 13.

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is concealed and beyond rational comprehension; and it is tremendum and fascinans because it inspires a sense of awe, or primitive (and immature) “religious dread,” which Otto identifies with the “daemonic dread” or “panic terror” of the Greeks,237 and which is not dissimilar from the Freudian Uncanny. The initial desire of union with the Self, which has a mystical quality, compels the characters to perform a vertical descent into the underground Dionysian other shore, where they aim to grasp this meaningful surplus. In accordance with what Falconer has noted about classical katabatic narratives, for Gao’s dramatis personae “the descent to Dis or Hades is about coming to know the self, regaining something … lost, or acquiring superhuman powers or knowledge.”238 But, most interestingly, like the katabatic heroes of mythology, this descent has terrifying consequences and does not always correspond to the characters’ initial expectations. The descent, as we have seen, culminates “in the collapse or dissolution of the hero’s sense of selfhood.”239 Still, it is essential to remark that “in the midst of this dissolution comes the infernal revelation,”240 in the sense that the object of the numinous consciousness turns out to be the opposite of a comfortable shelter made for the repose of the soul, thereby generating panic fear and a feeling of the Self as a “wholly other” enemy. They feel even more the divide between their idea of the Self and the real Self, which they can never grasp except in fragments, and that they can never be united with it in their idealized and idolized way. On the infernal other shore, there is no rest or gratification or nirvana. What awaits the (Gaoian) katabatic descenders is the encounter with the chaos, the gaping void and receptacle of turbulent energies, which consume the self rather than empowering it. This gaping void or abyss has been vividly encapsulated in Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the “there is” (il y a)—a “mute, absolutely indeterminate menace”241—which also bears some similarities with the Dionysian tragic field: It is like a density of the void, like a murmur of silence. There is nothing, but there is being, like a field of forces. Darkness is the very play of existence which would play itself out even if there were nothing.242 237  Ibid., p. 14. 238  Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 3. 239  Ibid. 240  Ibid. 241  Levinas, in Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 30. 242  Ibid.

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The idea of a portentous energy is part of Otto’s mysterium tremendum— “energy in the sense of a force that knows not stint nor stay, which is urgent, active, compelling, and alive”—which Otto likens to the Fichtean Absolute and Schopenhauer’s daemonic Will.243 Furthermore, he argues that there is a Dionysiac element to the numinous, a “human uncanny” whose artistic portrayal is a key element of Greek tragedy, namely “the numinous in its aspects of mystery, awefulness, majesty, augustness, and ‘energy’.”244 The Gaoian characters are entirely prey of such a daemonic Will: they submit to it for the good that it promises but in so doing they end up caught in its inescapable clutches, and when they realize that the other shore is a succession of infernal worlds and experiences that they themselves contribute to perpetuating, they can only but acknowledge their “creatural feeling” vis-à-vis the uncontrollable power of the psyche in its Dionysian traits. Furthermore, while their internal Dionysus plays around with their anxiety for self-knowledge, orchestrating for them the illusion of being “in control” through otherization and self-observation and leading to an exasperation of their maddening subjectivities, they experience a temporary distortion of reality. They are temporary, because those hallucinatory states are only intermediate steps toward the unveiling of the tragic abyss of the Self, which is apprehended through a negative anagnorisis. In summary, my re-reading of Gao’s post-1990 plays of Self through the conceptual framework of the tragic mode and field, with its metadramatic basis and katabatic dynamic, has enabled us, in interpreting these plays, to go beyond vague notions of alienation and to point out that these post-exile plays address not merely “the predicament of humanity in the modern age”245 but also the expressive potential of character acting, in which the character acts as a vehicle of the tragic Self and of its configuration as a mysterium tremendum with a religious nature. In fact, as Richard Hornby argues: Character acting resembles involuntarily, inwardly controlled, compulsive role playing…. In character acting the actor’s ego boundary is temporarily let slip, as the actor, under the influence of powerful unconscious forces, is transformed into another identity. He is not detached from the character; nor does he remain himself, exploring his own identity introspectively. Instead, he becomes a new self, is possessed and driven by it.246 243  Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 24. 244  Ibid., p. 40. 245  Quah, Gao Xingjian and Transcultural Chinese Theater, p. 145. 246  Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception, p. 85. Hornby’s emphasis.

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Therefore, rather than human alienation as form and motif, I would shift the focus towards dramatic divisiveness as form and motif, whereby “specific traits of personality (the subjective filters of vision) are de-emphasized in favour of the more concrete, and universalized, structure of separations that intrude within the riven individual and between such a figure and the universe.”247 To conclude, hyper-divisiveness being their main mode of existence (and performance), Gao’s post-exile characters exemplify what Storm calls the reconceived “tragic man,” which would I equate with “modern man,” in reference to Gao’s description of modern man’s predicament as tragic. Their tragic status is not merely the product of a certain tragic Weltanschauung but “is defined by the range of potential divisions that such a condition invariably implies.”248

247  Storm, After Dionysus, p. 90. 248  Ibid.

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Chapter 4

Escape and Modern Tragedy 1

Introduction: Gao Xingjian, Escape, and Cross-cultural Tragic Modernities

In Chapter One I have mentioned that Gao Xingjian does not regard his post-exile plays of Self as tragedies or as plays expressing a kind of tragic consciousness in any way. However, the present research so far has shown that by applying William Storm’s Dionysian-based reconceptualization of tragedy and by reinterpreting Gao’s dramatic technique of the split subject as a form of sparagmos or tragic mode, there are valid reasons for arguing that these works reveal an intrinsic tragic field created by the characters themselves as they interact with each other or with their own alter-egos/shadows. It is therefore still possible to re-categorize these plays as tragedies, because rather than passively accepting Gao’s succinct statements on the tragic, we reach our own conclusions, based on what is on the stage, and how the characters actively engender a tragic (i.e. dismembering) mechanism by the power of their own riven minds. Based on these observations, it would almost seem that there can be no tragedy, or tragic field, without the tragic mode. In other words, if the characters are not psychologically disturbed or internally fragmented, there can be no real tragedy. But is that really the case? Can there not be a tragic field without a proper tragic mode? My re-reading of Gao’s first tragic play The Other Shore, shows that the tragic mode as a form of schismatic performance is not an absolutely necessary pre-condition for the tragic field to be activated. Instead, it can emerge as a consequence of the character(s) being caught in a turmoil of cohesion and division with respect to other independent dramatis personae. This is what happens to the male protagonist, who is haunted both by the Dionysian Crowd and by a plethora of other characters, some of which are shadows of his past and therefore self-created by the subject, whereas others are pre-existing, external figures. In other cases, such as in D&R, the two characters experience the tragic mode as a result of seeking to possess and overwhelm one another. In TDC, the protagonist, who is initially a single character, generates a double of himself as a result of enduring a claustrophobic situation. Therefore, I argue that the tragic mode as a dramatic mechanism and principle of divisiveness is not limited to the description of a character that is already divided and fighting a psychical battle between two or more areas of his/her own Self; it also

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_006

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includes other types of divisiveness, as a consequence, rather than as a source, of the tragic field of tensions and conflicts. This chapter sets out to analyze the 1990 play Escape (Taowang), which, apart from being Gao’s only play written by design as a tragedy, is also the only post-exile play of Self that does not feature any schismatic performance, given that the characters never refer to themselves in the third or second person. Thus in the analysis below, besides examining its tragic potential and reconstructing the dynamics of the tragic field involved in its subtext, a further goal will be to determine how Escape might position itself within the critical scenario of post-World War II Euro-American and pre-World War II Chinese intellectual discourse on the role of tragedy in the modern and contemporary age. The fact that Gao wrote this tragedy with a precise aesthetics and philosophical message in mind and turned a major China-related political incident—the Tiananmen Square events of 1989—into an occasion for reflecting on the tragedy of modern humanity in an allegorical manner, raises questions beyond the ones we have investigated in the previous chapters. Besides asking whether a tragic field can be discerned in Escape, it is equally important to examine whether Escape can qualify as a modern tragedy. To do so, we need to investigate Gao’s idea of modernity with reference to tragedy. Moreover, as I will further explain below, Gao’s entire dramatic repertoire has been referred to as an example of the democratization of the tragic subject and subsumed under the conceptual category of “infra-tragedy,”1 which is an attempt to define the result of tragedy’s transition into modernity. This explains why the analysis of this play requires a separate chapter, and also justifies my choice of dealing with this work in the last instance. This chapter consists of an introductory discussion followed by an analytical section entirely focused on scrutinizing Escape, its textual and subtextual structure, as well as its aesthetics and dramatic composition. The introductory part is divided into two sub-sections. In the first, I focus on the relationship between tragedy and modernity in post-war Euro-American critical debate around the supposed death of tragedy against a hypothetical return of the tragic in the New (French) Theatre. The second sub-section deals with the scholarly ideas that emerged with the early twentieth-century New Culture and May Fourth Movements2 in China, and what scholars during this time had 1  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, pp. 173–177. 2  The New Culture and May Fourth Movements were parts of an intellectual and sociopolitical revolution that occurred in China during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. The New Culture Movement was inspired by the line of thought promoted by the monthly magazine New Youth (Xin qingnian), edited by the revolutionary intellectual and founder of the Chinese Communist Party Chen Duxiu. The aim of the movement was

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to say on tragedy as an aspect of modernity, thereby engendering what has been called in Chinese scholarship as the “modern tragedy complex (xiandai beiju qingjie).” Why did I choose two distinct periods for China and Europe, so far apart from each other and from Escape’s year of publication? I believe that, despite the temporal and geographical gaps, these discourses can still be said to be in tacit dialogue with each other, since they both crystallize around the two poles of tragedy (as a genre) and modernity (as a structure of feeling). In both contexts, the key question is less on defining tragedy than on assessing its relevance in the modern and contemporary age. The rationale for comparing these views lies in how the two terms of the relationship were critically weighed and negotiated. The Euro-American debate on modern tragedy, whose early origins can be traced back to Joseph Wood Krutch’s book The Modern Temper (1929) and Arthur Miller’s later essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949) can be said to prioritize modernity over tragedy. By asking whether modern tragedy is an anachronism or not and by seeking to conceptualize the (possible) afterlives of tragedy in the contemporary age, this discussion mainly investigated tragedy’s (in)ability to adapt to the needs and sensibilities of a changing society. Conversely, in China, the introduction of (Western) tragedies coincided with the country’s program of cultural and national modernization. While emphasizing what they regarded as tragedy’s main merits, the writers of the Republican era seemed to construct their idea of modernity based (among other things) on their understanding of tragedy and its (supposed) metaphysical significance, cultural value, and pedagogic mission. Therefore, I believe that a cross-comparison of the most representative aspects of these two approaches can highlight yet another angle on how tragedy can itself reflect and even actively anticipate rather than be passively remolded by modernity. These different views of tragic modernity, as distanced from each other as can be, can be combined to form a circular structure whose ends can ultimately meet. As Terry Eagleton argues, not only we can say that “what happens to tragedy in the twentieth century is not that it dies, but that it mutates into

to foster a broad program of modernization and liberalization of the country by introducing Western science and literature to subvert the values of the old Confucian society. The May Fourth Movement took its name from a major political incident which took place on 4 May 1919. A massive student demonstration was held in Beijing against the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference to legitimate Japan’s appropriation of the former German concessions in the Shandong province. Subsequently, these two movements came to designate the great wave of modernization aimed at rescuing China from her alleged cultural, social, and political “backwardness” with respect to the Western model.

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modernism”3 but also that “if modernism lends the tragic impulse a new lease of life, it is not least because of the return to mythology.”4 Therefore, is tragedy intrinsically modern, does it become modern, or does it recycle the novelty of the ancient? While the death-of-tragedy myth argues against the revival of Hellenic tragic tropes in modern times, and the returnof-the-tragic scholars dismiss rewritings of ancient tragedies as nontragic, Greek tragic paradigms were an important source of inspiration for a Chinese playwright of the caliber of Cao Yu. Moreover, another famous writer, Ouyang Yuqian, compared his 1928 play Pan Jinlian, which was based on his rewriting of a seventeenth-century Chinese novel to the modern reinterpretation of ancient tragic tragedies (e.g. Oedipus Rex and Hamlet).5 I think that addressing those specific periods can provide a heterogeneous platform in which Gao Xingjian’s cross-cultural project with Escape can be assessed. This cross-cultural contextual comparison is also relevant to Gao on the one hand because of his deep knowledge of the nouveau théâtre, having translated several French plays of this period, and because of the association of his dramaturgy with “infra-tragedy.” On the other hand, it is relevant to Gao because his own rationale for choosing the tragic form for Escape impressively resonates with the May Fourth writers’ unprecedented preoccupation with tragedy, which can be encapsulated in Jiang Guanyun’s early description of (Western) tragedy (1905) as “the preferred and more effective dramatic form for modern times.”6 Therefore, it is undoubtedly interesting to examine whether or not Escape fits the model of European “infra-tragedies” or “new tragedies,” and whether or not Gao’s statements in support of tragedy as intrinsically apt to express modern predicaments might have anything in common with China’s early fascination with Western tragedies. Furthermore, since Escape, unlike the subsequent post-exile plays, was conceived in Europe yet based on a China-related political catastrophe, the idea of tragic modernity underlying it deserves a cross-cultural evaluation.

3  Eagleton, Sweet Violence, p. 206. 4  Ibid. 5  Yomi Braester, Witness against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in TwentiethCentury China, Stanford, California 2003: Stanford University Press, p. 68. 6  Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, Durham [N.C.] 2002: Duke University Press, p. 27.

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Tragedy and Modernity: the Death of Tragedy vs. the Return of the Tragic in Postwar Euro-American Intellectual Discourse The development of modern tragic drama in the Euro-American world can be divided into two main phases. The tragic genre flourished anew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Modern Tragedy (1966), Raymond Williams lists several authors of “modern tragedies,” including Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Miller, August Strindberg, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. Moreover, in the second half of the twentieth century (post-1960), a rich critical literature emerged on the concept of “modern tragedy,” arguing either for or against the persistence of tragedy in the modern and contemporary age. Albert Camus laid the foundations of such debate in his lecture “On the Future of Tragedy” (which I have mentioned in Chapter One). Therein, he asks whether modern tragedy is possible and argues that the post-World War II period is a “tragic age,” comparable to fifth century Athens and the Elizabethan age.7 Most crucially, even though he does not mention any specific names or titles, he emphasizes the role of the Theatre(s) of the Absurd and the New Theatre (Nouveau Théâtre) in paving the way for the rise of modern tragedy.8 Finally, he argues that modern tragedy will come into being only through a revival of the spirit of Greek tragedy, which he identifies in Oedipus’ final cry that “All is well.”9 The subsequent discussions about whether tragedy is compatible with modernity developed along two main diverging trajectories, with detractors on the one hand and supporters on the other. Proclaiming the “death” of tragedy following the decadence of the Hellenic civilization, George Steiner’s seminal work, The Death of Tragedy (1961) argues that a twentieth-century restoration of tragedy would be impossible, due mainly to the impact of scientific progress on man’s perception of life’s realities, the subsequent triumph of materiality and rationality over transcendence, the Nietzschean proclamation of the death of God, and the demise of idols. In his opinion, all these elements are responsible for the emergence of an anti-tragic consciousness, which prevents the “other” outside and within the self to act as an oppositional force underlying the tragic hero’s inner and 1.1

7  Albert Camus, “On the Future of Tragedy”, in Philip Thody (ed.), Selected Essays and Notebooks, Harmondsworth, Middlesex 1970: Penguin Books, p. 192. 8  Ibid., p. 195. 9  Ibid., p. 200.

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outer conflict. Additionally, Steiner denies the universal quality of tragedy as a form of drama, stating that “nearly till the moment of their decline the tragic forms are Hellenic.”10 As for the opposite camp, given the broadness and complexity of the debate, I will focus specifically on the concept of infra-tragedy as theorized by Jean-Marie Domenach. In Le retour du tragique (The Return of the Tragic, 1967), which was written in response to Steiner’s book and calls for a revival and democratization of the tragic in modern times, Domenach argues that a new form of drama—which he calls “infra-tragedy,” “anti-tragedy,” or “antetragedy”—emerged in France in the post-war period and was best exemplified by the works of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. Domenach describes these as “impossible tragedies,” or better, as plays in which the tragic consciousness reveals itself outside the traditional frame of tragedy as such. Before conceptualizing the notion of infra-tragedy and its cognate terms, Domenach points out that the tragic as a consciousness and structure of feeling, which was so meaningfully expressed by Camus and Sartre in their novels and philosophical essays, did not give birth to any tragedies at all.11 He explains instead that if the tragic “becomes a tonality of daily life, more or less perceived and more or less repressed, in its most trivial application,” then “it drops its mythological back-up, all the communal consistency, the distanciation and the elevation, which are essential to its crystallization into a theatrical performance.”12 He concludes that the tragic returns to the fore disguised as the feeling of absurdity. This is because, “what now appears to be the new source of tragedy is actually the most frivolous version of the comic mode: that is farce and parody.”13 Therefore, Domenach coined the terms “infra-tragedy,” “anti-tragedy,” and “ante-tragedy” to encapsulate the essence of modern tragedy and particularly to describe absurdist drama. Each of these three terms designates one particular aspect of tragedy’s transformation as it entered modernity: while “anti-tragedy” and “ante-tragedy” have to do, respectively, with form and plot, “infra-tragedy” applies to content.

10  Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, p. 3. Other traditionalist critics, sharing similar views as Steiner’s, include Joseph Wood Krutch (The Modern Temper 1956), François Mauriac (“Bloc Notes”, Figaro littéraire, 7 Nov, 1963), and John von Szeliski (Tragedy and Fear: Why Modern Drama Fails 1962), to name but a few. 11  Domenach, Le retour du tragique, p. 258. 12  Ibid., p. 221. 13  Ibid., p. 260.

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More specifically, while traditionalist critics frequently use “anti-tragedy” to distinguish modern “tragic” drama from its classical counterparts, Domenach does not. For the former, “anti-tragic” was essentially synonymous with “nontragedy,” thus implying that twentieth-century playwrights’ “failed” to carry on the legacy of the classic tragedians. However, in Domenach’s view these plays are “anti-tragic” in that they enact “the collapse of the foundational elements of ancient tragedy.”14 In other words, rather than passively contradicting the old structures of the tragic, they re-interpret them by actively promoting a new tragic formula based on the principle of negation. “Infra-tragedy” and “ante-tragedy” express similar ideas. Specifically, while “infra-tragedy” refers to the fact that the new setting of tragedy is no longer the lofty world of kings and heroes but “the trivialities of everyday life,”15 which are generally associated with the comic genre (the prefix infra being the Latin word for “beneath, below”), “ante-tragedy” translates the idea of a drama devoid of action, or better still, a drama in which man is portrayed before he can even think of taking action (in Latin ante means “before,” “in front of”). Domenach’s theory of infra-tragedy echoes Arthur Miller’s views on modern tragedy as expressed in his 1949 essay “Tragedy and the Common Man.”16 Therein, he argues that the dynamics and psychic patterns of action and reaction underlying tragic drama are valid for both high- and low-ranking people. He further contends that there is in fact no significant difference between the common man and the kings populating the ancient and pre-modern stages, and he motivates this assertion by resorting through the (then) recent discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. “These”, he writes, “based their analysis upon classic formulations, such as the Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instance, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.”17 To summarize, Domenach’s theory of the return of the tragic claims that modern tragedy exists and coincides with forms of anti-theatre such as the Theatre(s) of the Absurd and American post-war theatre. In general, it claims that modern tragedy derives its modernity from featuring the common man as its main focus, thus arguing for a process of democratization of tragedy in modern times. In this context, modern tragedy is defined, thematically, as the tragedy of the common man and, structurally, as the tragedy that subverts all the structures and forms of ancient tragedy. 14  Ibid., p. 265. 15  Ibid., p. 275. 16  Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” in Tragedy: Vision and Form, pp. 168–70. 17  Ibid., p. 168.

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Modernity and Tragedy: the Modern Tragedy Complex and the Search for (Modern) Tragedy in Early Republican China The concept of tragedy (beiju) is not indigenous to China but was imported from Europe in the early years of the twentieth century (late-Qing period). With the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic (1912), a new political order came into being, which made it necessary to create a correspondingly new cultural order. The transition to modern China involved the revolutionizing of several aspects of Chinese culture and society, including the so-called literary revolution and the adoption of Western values, which were considered the global cultural standard as well as the main medicine for curing China’s alleged backwardness in the global world. This led a group of anti-traditionalist and mostly Western educated Chinese scholars to launch what is known as the New Culture Movement (Xin wenhua yundong), which proclaimed, among other things, the rejection of Confucianism and the fostering of vernacular literature.18 Their fascination with Western culture and particularly with its democratic and positivistic spirit, led these intellectuals to regard the West (i.e. Europe and North America) as synonymous of modernity in all its forms. The concept of tragedy, too, was held as a necessary aspect of the modernization programme. As Xiaobing Tang reports:

1.2

Tragedy became part of the reformist agenda, and as serious drama it purportedly a more effective forum than popular entertainment for nation-building through didacticism. The promotion of tragedy, from a historian’s viewpoint, constituted a crucial aspect of the modernizing of literary discourse during the late Qing, interjecting significant shifts in literary and aesthetic conceptions.19 The introduction of tragedy in modern Chinese literary thought was part of the cultural task aimed at substituting traditional Chinese drama (xiqu)— now also called jiuxi (old theatre)—with a new kind of theatre, based on Western-style dramatic realism, which was named huaju, or “spoken drama,” to distinguish it from the former, which is a form of musical theatre.20 The rationale for introducing modern European tragedy was based on the 18  The main actors of the Chinese New Culture Movement were Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), Hu Shi (1891–1962), Lu Xun (1881–1936), Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), and Li Dazhao (1888–1927). 19  Tang, Chinese Modern, p. 27. 20  Xiaoli Shi, “20 shiji zhongguo beiju lilun de lishi zouxiang (Historical trends of twentieth century Chinese tragic theory),” Xibei daixue xuebao (zhexue shehui kexue ban), Nov. 2008, 38.6, p. 95.

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Chinese intellectuals’ general assumption that China had failed to produce any tragedies due to the serene pragmatism, long-standing secularism, and happy-go-lucky attitude which were said to characterize the Chinese people’s approach to life and death. This opinion, which was initially put forward by Wang Guowei in his 1904 essay “Honglou meng pinglun (On the Dream of the Red Chamber)” and Jiang Guangyun in his 1905 Zhongguo zhi yanju jie (On the Chinese Theatre), was later taken up and endorsed by Hu Shi, Zhu Guangqian, and Lu Xun, among others. These intellectuals tended to invoke Western tragic theory to point out China’s lack of tragic sensibility and absence of tragedy as a dramatic genre. Furthermore, they advocated the creation of modern tragedies that would express the spirit of those difficult times and the sufferings of the Chinese people. This obsession with tragedy as reflected in those debates marks the beginning of the so-called China’s “modern tragedy complex.” Two main reasons were advanced to critique China’s inaptitude for tragedy: the so-called “great reunion-ism” (da tuanyuan zhuyi), namely the preference for a happy ending connected to moral justice and the principle of karmic retribution, and the absence in Chinese culture of the notion of transcendence in the guise of an unfair and inevitable fate.21 As Zhu Guangqian noted in 1933,22 tragedy aims to reflect on human existence. Still, unlike religion and philosophy, it raises persistent questions which remain unanswered, and that is why tragedy did not emerge in a culture grounded on moral philosophy as China’s. Earlier in 1918, Hu Shi had expressed a similar concern. Deviating from Wang Guowei’s metaphysical view of tragedy, which Wang borrowed from the theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Hu Shi regarded tragedy as a real phenomenon with social implications. In particular, he asserted that the introduction of tragedy to a Chinese audience “can awaken popular consciousness, serving as a powerful treatment to cure the Chinese people’s tendency to lie and indulge in superficial thoughts.”23 The transformation of China’s tragedy complex from the realm of aesthetics to the domain of psychology and national character was propelled by Lu Xun, for whom tragedy represented a particular attitude towards life, namely the courage to face life’s difficulties proactively. In a 1925 essay, Lu Xun argued that 21  Wang Deyan, “‘Zhongguo beiju’ wenti de qitu yu xiwang (Perplexities and Prospects of ‘Chinese Tragedy’),” Beifang gongye daxue xuebao, Dec. 2001, 13.4, p. 69. 22  Zhu Guangqian, Beiju xinli xue (The Psychology of Chinese Tragedy), Hefei 1989: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, pp. 283–284. 23  Hu Shi, “Wenxue jinhua guannian yu xiju gailiang (The Concept of Literary Evolution and Theatre Reform),” in Hushi wencun, Vol. 1, Taipei 1961: Yuandong tushu gongsi, p. 152.

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tragedy as a genre “displays the destruction of what is meaningful in human life.”24 Nearly a decade later, Zong Baihua, in his 1934 article “Beiju yu youmo de rensheng taidu (Tragedy and the humoristic attitude),” stated that the tragic attitude “consists in affirming and defeating contradiction, [and] search[ing] for the meaning of one’s destiny in the void of destruction.”25 By combining these views, what emerges is the idea that tragedy is the platform where people can be encouraged to confront reality and its injustices and obstacles and possibly change the status quo. One of the reasons why tragedy was highly praised in the 1920s and 1930s consisted in its insightfulness and expressive solemnity.26 Inspired by Schopenhauer’s thoughts on tragedy, Wang Guowei regarded tragedy as the highest form of lyrical poetry. Zhu Guangqian, in his doctoral thesis written in France in 1933 and titled The Psychology of Tragedy (Beiju de xinlixue), assigned to tragedy a significant role in shaping moral character and existential awareness: Tragedy, more than any other dramatic genre, easily awakens one’s common sense and individual sentiment, because it is the most serious and solemn of all arts. In the face of terrible events, people often become more serious, thoughtful, and able to make deep philosophical reflection about the link between life and death, good and evil, humankind and destiny, as well as other issues.27 He further notes that “tragedy should represent the most obscure aspects of human life.”28 Both Wang and Zhu, who belonged to the so-called “rational school” (xueli pai), argued that tragedy should represent the noumenon, thereby emphasizing the metaphysical value of this dramatic genre. However, unlike Wang, whose notion of tragedy verged on the melancholic, Zhu held an optimistic view of the tragic spirit. For him, tragedy not only gives pleasure but also elevates the individual’s spirit to the level of transcendence: “In tragedy we are faced with the misery of failure, yet we experience a feeling of victory. From beginning to end, tragedy is permeated with a deep sense of destiny…. It exalts

24  Lu Xun, “Lun Leifeng ta de daodiao (On the Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda),” in Lu Xun quanji, Vol. 1, Beijing 1981: Renmin chubanshe, pp. 171–173. 25  Zong Baihua, Yi jing (The Realm of Art), Beijing 1997: Beijing daxue chubanshe, pp. 81–82. 26  Li Yuehong, “Zhongguo xiandai ‘beiju qingjie’ ji neizai suqiu (China’s modern ‘tragedy complex’ and its intrinsic appeal),” Hebei xuekan, Sept. 2009, 25.5, p. 162. 27  Zhu Guangqian, Beiju xinlixue, p. 282. 28  Ibid.

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herculean toil and heroic resistance. While describing mankind’s frailty, it also represents its great value.”29 Besides the rational school, the realist school (xianshi pai), of which Lu Xun was the chief representative, tended to highlight tragedy’s task of accompanying the changes in Chinese society and revolutionizing old ways of thinking, as well as purifying the nation from its long-standing inclination to social harmony and conciliation. Other prominent writers such as Xu Zhimo, Xiong Foxi, Bing Xin, Ouyang Yuqian, Tian Han, Lao She, and Guo Moruo all shared the idea that tragedy’s excellence lies in its portrayal of conflicts and contradictions (chongtu he maodun), which thus boosts people’s willpower and impulse to self-determination. This would set tragedy against the classical aesthetic principle of neutralization/justice and peace (zhonghe) in Chinese literature.30 Specifically, Xu Zhimo argued that pure tragedy gives an artistic rendering of dualities such as body vs soul, ideal vs reality, innate feeling vs acquired responsibility, will vs destiny, and presents them as the essence of human fate.31 Similarly, Xiong Foxi defined tragedy as a clash of wills (yizhi de chongtu), and that tragedy arises when people are not allowed to freely decide what to make of their existence.32 Bing Xin describes tragedy as “a powerful force generated by the inner conflict of the tragic protagonist.” Moreover, she argues that “self-knowledge is the source of every tragedy.”33 Ouyang Yuqian wrote that modern tragedy focuses on the fight between human will and the social environment.34 Furthermore, in the late 1950s, both Tian Han35 and Lao She36 would come to ascribe to tragedy an important pedagogic force, thereby underscoring China’s need to produce tragedies, particularly with a historical content. Guo Moruo, who authored of a number of historical tragedies, most efficiently carried out the 29  Ibid. 30  Wang Benchao, “Zhongguo xiandai beiju guanniande fasheng yu zhuanxiang (The Rise and Transition of the Modern Concept of Tragedy in China),” Yishu baijia, 2010, 116.5, p. 73. 31  Xu Zhimo, quoted In Wen Rumin, Zhongguo xiandai wenxue piping shi (History of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism), Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, p. 1993. 32  Xiong Foxi, Foxi lun ju (Foxi on Drama), Beiping 1928: Bushe, p. 35. 33  Bing Xin, “Zhongxi xiju zhi bijiao (Comparing Chinese and Western Theatres),” Chenbao fujuan (1926), p. 18. 34  Ouyang Yuqian, “Xiju gaige zhi lilun yu shiji (Theory and Reality of Drama Reform),” in Su Guanxin (ed.), Ouyang Yuqian yanjiu ziliao, Beijing 1989: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, p. 189. 35  Li Zhiyan, “Tian Han zatan guancha shenghuo he ju jiqiao (Tian Han’s rambling thoughts and observations about life and theatre technique),” Tianhan chuangzuo zeji, Chengdu 1994: Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, pp. 220–225. 36  Lao She, “Lun beiju (On Tragedy),” in Lao She wenji, Vol. 16, Beijing 1989: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, pp. 446–449.

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social mission assigned to tragedy by the realist school.37 During the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937–1945), Guo specifically engaged tragedy to promote the patriotic spirit of resistance against the foreign invaders. Guo thought that tragedy can be used to promote social development and historical progress, and that its “highest merit does not consist in saddening the audience but in stimulating them concretely, as pain and indignation must become strength.”38 Guo’s idea of tragedy was heavily influenced by Marxist historical materialism, and his tragedies, which are set in various periods of China’s historical past, seek to highlight the historical roots and the social origins of the tragic genre. All in all, it is evident that in early Republican China, the debate on the value of tragedy was mostly focused on praising and reiterating the modernity of this genre, rather than questioning tragedy’s ability to survive the transition into modernity. Thus, in the views of the various Chinese scholars I have mentioned, tragedy can stand the test of time because it depicts the eternal struggle of the individual against the limitations of fate, history, and society. The playwright who most fully explored the aesthetics of the modern (Chinese) tragedy was certainly Cao Yu. Since a full investigation of Cao Yu’s tragic aesthetics would fall outside of the scope of this chapter, I will limit myself to briefly highlighting a few general aspects of his individual approach to modern tragedy as a means of expressing the traumatic changes that occurred in early modern Chinese culture and society. Two of the works in his tragic trilogy, namely Thunderstorm (Leiyu 1934) and The Wilderness (Yuanye 1937), adapted key motifs of famous Western tragedies—respectively, Euripides’ Hippolytus and Racine’s Phaedra, and Aeschylus’ revenge tragedy Oresteia. Moreover, in Thunderstorm, the construction of the plot, the distribution of the characters, and the motif of the “haunted house” indicate the influence of Ibsen’s bourgeois tragedy Ghosts (1881). While both plays feature an Aristotelian structure, they focus on the issues and conflicts in the Chinese society of their time. Cao Yu’s conformity to Aristotelian rules and his evident fascination not only with specific tragedies of the past but also with their subsumed archaic mythological narratives might indicate that the tragic form for him, while dealing with realistic, contemporary, and geographically well-localized conflicts, would also bestow upon his works a universal quality; this, in turn, would make the artistic depiction of those conflicts eternally valid and intrinsically modern. Moreover, Cao’s engagement with Western classical tragic structures and patterns suggests that he thought that, even in its modern form, tragedy could never be 37  The most famous one is the five-act play Qu Yuan (1942). 38  Tang Zhengxu, Wenyixue jichu lilun (Basic Theory of Literature and Art), Chengdu 1994: Sichuan daxue chubanshe.

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totally severed from its ancient non-Chinese origins. Interestingly, Cao Yu’s adaptation of mythical narratives mainly pertaining to Greek tragedy not only puts him in dialogue with modern Western tragedians such as Anouilh, Sartre, and Camus but also anticipates the latter’s idea that the rise of new tragedies is subject to the revival of the spirit of Greek tragedy in contemporary culture. Finally, Cao’s dramatic aestheticization of the Western-style “Prometheanism”39 that spread through Chinese society of the 20s and 30s and fostered the rise of tragic thought40 and tragic drama, would also tally with Camus’ claim that “… the tragic age always seems to coincide with an evolution in which man, consciously or not, frees himself from an older form of civilization and finds that he has broken away from it without having found a new form which satisfies him.”41 As we shall see below, there are valid reasons for selecting Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm as representative not only of his individual engagement with (modern) tragedy but also of China’s modern tragedy complex at large. In writing his first tragedy, Cao Yu was primarily concerned with unearthing tragedy’s profound metaphysical significance and conflict-based dramatic texture. In fact, although Thunderstorm dates back to a historical period which marked the transition from the “Literary Revolution” to the leftist “Revolutionary Literature,”42 in this work the political aspect of class struggle plays a secondary role. Given the play’s combination of ancient Greek tragic elements with a focus on modern and contemporary social issues, and the playwright’s inclination to ground modern conflicts on a series of non-Chinese mythical archetypes, Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm provides a useful point of comparison for gauging Gao’s potential affinities with post-May-Fourth-style tragic thought and dramaturgy. Moreover, since Escape was inspired by the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 4 June 1989, comparing it with Thunderstorm is all the more justified by the connection that scholars have drawn between the postMay Fourth and June Fourth cultural discourses.43 39  Marian Gálik, “Ts’ao Yü’s Thunderstorm: Creative Confrontation with Euripides, Racine, Ibsen and Galsworthy,” in Marian Gálik Milestones in Sino-Western Literary Confrontation (1898–1979), Wiesbaden 1986: Harrassowitz, p. 114. 40  For a study of Lu Xun’s tragic consciousness, see Alexa Alice Joubin, “Tropes of Solitude and Lu Xun’s Tragic Characters,” Neohelicon, 2010, 37, pp. 349–357. 41  Camus, “On the Future of Tragedy,” p. 194. 42  This transition forms the title of Cheng Fangwu’s essay which, as Kirk Denton explains, “encapsulated the need to escape the mantle of the May Fourth and steer literary development away from the May Fourth’s elite bourgeois idealism toward a new proletarian direction.” See Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893– 1945, Stanford 1996: Stanford University Press, p. 48. 43  See Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang (eds.), From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, Cambridge, Mass 1993: Harvard University Press. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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In the following discussion I shall examine the dramatic texture of Escape to ask whether this play can be called a tragedy, and whether it fits the general definition of (modern) infra-tragedy introduced above. As for whether Escape is a tragedy, I shall explore how Gao’s ideas on the nature of the human Self as expressed through (the words of) his dramatis personae justify the usage of a specific dramatic architecture, which can be deemed as tragic. As for whether it may be an infra-tragedy, I intend to explore how Escape situates itself in the context of 20th-century death-of-tragedy and return-of-the-tragic theories and investigate whether Gao’s notion of modern tragedy follows in the footprints of Republican Chinese intellectuals’ search for modernity in Western-style tragedy. However, before undertaking this analysis, an important clarification is in order. There are undoubtedly various reasons for interpreting Escape merely as a form of political tragedy and, consequently, for exploring the author’s choice of this genre because of the political and social function that can be attached to it.44 This play emerged in response to a crucial political event in Chinese contemporary history, and its original Chinese title, Taowang, which Gao preferred over a number of other possible synonyms, reveals a possible connection with Gao’s personal situation at the time: a voluntary exile who had just left a homeland that did not guarantee him freedom of speech and writing. The term taowang literally means “flight from death,” but can also mean “to run away” or “go into exile.” The three characters in the play are fugitives who attempt to escape a death threat from people working for political authorities. One further evidence of the connection between tragedy and politics in this play is the pervasive usage of the rhetorical (tragic) device of the agon, which I shall explore in detail in the latter section of my analysis. Gao employs this technique to involve two of his three protagonists (the Young Man and the Middle-aged Man) in a heated debate touching on several themes, including the issue of political engagement. Arguably the words of the Middle-aged Man, a writer himself, represent the author’s personal viewpoint on this matter. His haughty attitude towards the student movement and his deep contempt for any form of intellectual service to the state and the people echo Gao’s repeated refusals to 44  D  . M. Carter, for example, indicates that tragedy can be political “in the weaker sense” due to the presence of high-ranking characters such as sovereigns and political advisors; and also “in the stronger sense” for the fact that, as a communitarian experience, it provides an opportunity for political reflection. See his The Politics of Greek Tragedy, Exeter 2007: Bristol, Phoenix Press. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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associate his writing with any kind of “-ism,” to his placing himself at the margins of society as an intellectual whose only responsibility is to himself, a free individual, and to the language(s) he employs in his writing.45 In light of his independent stance, it would be far better to tackle Gao’s choice of tragedy in terms of poetics rather than politics, which also happens to be more in line with the methodological framework (in which tragedy is viewed through the lens of Dionysian art and ritual) that has guided this study. I acknowledge, meanwhile, that this is only one of several possible approaches to this topic. I find this approach all the more valid in the case of Escape not only because it has been hitherto one of the least explored in Gao Xingjian scholarship, but also because by examining Gao’s text through the framework of Dionysian dramatic theory one can further uncover the subtle link between modern man’s predicament—the unifying thread in Gao’s tragic dramaturgy— and the powerful role that tragedy still plays in the contemporary age. 2

Escape: a Modern Tragedy?

Gao wrote the two-act play Escape46 in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989 and called it “a modern tragedy.” It immediately triggered controversy. The play was commissioned by an (unknown) American theatre company, which had manifestly asked for realistic, China-related content, and was completed in October of the same year. Nevertheless, the manuscript did not seem to fulfil the commissioners’ original requests, since it was not a realist play, and Gao had omitted any clear references to the Chinese political incident. Upon request to revise its content and stylistic features, Gao withdrew the submission, and the original version, which he had translated at his own expense, was eventually published in the journal Jintian (Today) in 1990.47 Interestingly enough, Escape not only displeased Gao’s commissioners but also the representatives of the Chinese Democracy Movement, since it 45  On this topic, see particularly Gao Xingjian, “The Case for Literature. Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Prize Lecture,” trans. Mabel Lee, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2000/gao-lecture-e.html (accessed 21 July 2015). 46  There are at least four English translations for Escape: Fugitives (Gregory B. Lee), Escape (Henry Zhao), Exile (Gilbert Fong), and Fleeing/Absconding (Mabel Lee). See Mabel Lee, “Nobel Literature 2000 Gao Xingjian’s Aesthetics of Fleeing,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2003, no. 1, vol. 5, http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1181 (accessed 20 June 2010). 47  Gao Xingjian, “About Escape,” p. 69.

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lacked heroes and portrayed the student movement as immature.48 Moreover, the play was harshly criticized by some of Gao’s writer friends, who deemed Escape as “too political to be pure literature.”49 Then, shortly after the play was published in Jintian, the Chinese Communist Party ostracized Gao, declaring him persona non grata and banning all his works from being published or staged in Mainland China.50 In his own defense, Gao limited himself to reiterate the writer’s right to profess what he calls indépendence totale (total independence) concerning artistic inspiration, and he specified that Escape “is not a socialist-realist play.”51 Furthermore, he explained once again his notion of existential absconding, whereby an individual is supposed to be constantly (and metaphorically) on the move, running away from both himself and the collective in order to preserve his humanity and personal autonomy. Like the other Gaoian post-exile plays we have analyzed thus far, Escape lacks what Aristotle deemed an essential element of tragedy, i.e., a “whole” that “has a beginning, a middle and an end”;52 there is, instead, a fundamental immobility and an open ending. Nevertheless, what I regard as the main message underlying the play is clearly conveyed shortly before the red curtain falls upon the three nameless characters, as we shall see below. While the action is very simple, the play revolves around a complex set of dialectical exchanges mainly in the form of stichomythic dialogues among the three protagonists. These exchanges express what Aristotle called “reasoning,”53 for they serve to expose the principles of Gao’s escapist philosophy. In Escape, three people—a young man, a young woman, and a middle-aged man—bump into one another inside a dark and abandoned warehouse, where they seek refuge from tanks that are besieging an unspecified place they simply call The Square. However, instead of helping and comforting one another during those terrible hours, they end up arguing on a number of topics, particularly politics—they debate on the value of political commitment versus the necessity of protecting one’s freedom and intellectual independence—and 48  Ibid. 49  Ibid., p. 70. 50  Terry Siu-han Yip, “A Chronology of Gao Xingjian,” in Soul of Chaos, p. 323. However, as Henry Zhao remarks, Escape became the only Gaoian play to be published in Mainland China after 1986. The reason why it was reprinted and circulated as widely as possible had to do with the intention of degrading the pro-democracy movement, due to the immoral conduct of the characters depicted as “sex-maniacs” by a Chinese reviewer (95). 51  Gao, “About Escape,” p. 70. 52  Aristotle, Poetics, London 1996: Penguin, p. 13. 53  Ibid., p. 11.

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gender relations, thus revealing serious communication difficulties, especially between Girl and Middle-aged Man. The play ends with the three characters standing motionless, patiently awaiting their mortal destiny as someone outside knocks frenziedly on the warehouse door, probably in an attempt to catch the involuntary prisoners. As Gao himself specifies, not only was this play conceived as a modern tragedy, but he particularly chose the tragic form to address what he regards as modern man’s existential tragedy. As we shall see below, scholars dealing with this work have focused mostly on conceptualizing the meaning of “escape” in Gao’s personal view of the human condition at large rather than analyzing the connection (if any) between the main theme of the play, i.e., fleeing as both an existential necessity and an impossible endeavor, and its intentionally “tragic” structure. In her article on Gao’s aesthetics of fleeing, Mabel Lee focuses particularly on Escape as a text in which the Gaoian ideal of the writer as a bystander and outsider, shying away from politics and responsible only for himself, emerges powerfully through the apparently cynical declarations of Middle-aged Man, himself a writer and a harsh critic of the students’ political idealism.54 While commenting at length on the play’s narrative development, as well as “comparing” Gao’s non-political stance to that of Lu Xun and the writers of the May Fourth generation, Lee explains in passing why Gao chose to stage Escape in the form of a classical tragedy. In her view, the tragic form would enable the audience to remain emotionally distant from the political events evoked in the play, as well as contributing to universalizing the “tragedy” by transferring the focus from a specific political disaster to a widely shareable existential condition. She concludes by indicating Escape as the chief of a series of works devoted to articulating the main tenets of Gao’s philosophy and aesthetics of fleeing. In her recent study of various depictions of the Tiananmen Square incident in contemporary Chinese literature, Belinda Kong devotes an entire chapter to Escape, which she interprets as an attempt to turn the image of the militarized square into an existential allegory. Her thesis resonates with and expands on Lee’s earlier statement about the universalization of the political predicament. However, she also criticizes Gao for leaving the Square in the background and not characterizing it geographically, because once the setting becomes potentially representative of every polis and political tyranny, it also “inadvertently

54  Lee, “Gao Xingjian’s Aesthetics of Fleeing,” p. 4.

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normalizes and legitimates totalitarian power”55 by making it into a “species condition.”56 Henry Zhao draws attention to the controversial character of Escape, which is reflected in the clash between the politically inspired content of the play and the harsh criticism towards blind political activism as expressed by the middle-aged intellectual, which scholars recognize as Gao’s fictional alter-ego.57 Moreover, he argues that central to this work is not the political discourse but rather the “exploration into the primal instincts when the individual person is faced with the prospect of death.”58 Below, I will seek to unearth what Zhao calls “the true message of the play,” which I consider to be inextricable from its tragic structure. Before doing so, I should mention a few points made by two other scholars. The first, Izabella Łabędzka, says Escape is “somehow important”59 because through it Gao expresses his views of totalitarianism. Surprisingly though, Escape is totally omitted in Łabedzka’s otherwise comprehensive study of Gao’s drama, despite the inclusion of a short paragraph on the democratization of the tragic in the twentieth century. As previously noted, Łabędzka briefly deals with tragedy in Gao’s drama, but while mentioning a few of Gao’s plays as arguably “tragic,” she overlooks Gao’s only self-acknowledged tragedy. The second scholar, Sy Ren Quah, in an essay on Gao’s notion of escape, regards the Silent Man in The Bus Stop (see Chapter Two), as a potentially escapist individual owing to his running away from several situations: the play’s plot, social reality, self-expression through language, and secular customs.60 While it is true that the Silent Man is an outsider, Quah seems to overlook the fact that his act of fleeing is definite and not problematic. The character is not faced with an existential dilemma, nor is the escape contested or impeded in any way by the other characters or by external circumstances. In Escape, fleeing is presented as a desperate act, which is ultimately doomed to failure. Therefore, if not placed in a tragic context, the meaning of escape—Escape’s main theme—is likely to be misconstrued, and Gao’s choice of tragedy as the privileged genre for this work will continue to be ignored in scholarly criticism. 55  Belinda Kong, Tiananmen Fictions outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture, Philadelphia 2012: Temple University Press, p. 70. 56  Ibid. 57  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 94. 58  Ibid. 59  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 6. 60  Sy Ren Quah, “Fuite et dé-placement dans les pieces de théatre de Gao Xingjian (Escape and Displacement in Gao Xingjian’s Plays),” in Noël Dutrait L’ecriture romanesque et théatrale de Gao Xingjian, Paris 1996: Seuil, p. 230.

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The discussion below will start by scrutinizing the relationship between Gao’s stage directions for performing Escape and his own understanding of tragic modernity. Next, I will investigate the dynamics of the dialectical exchanges of opposite forces occurring throughout the play and especially through the verbal confrontations among the three characters. This will show how Escape too, albeit differently from the other post-exile plays analyzed previously (but written subsequently), owes most of its tragic potential to its ability to fulfill the Stormian pattern of the tragic field. Lastly, I will explore the treatment of the scenic space with its internal vs external dialectics and its numerous symbolic features. I will therefore re-conceptualize the dramatic space of Escape as a mythic space, which is atemporal, unrelated to the mimetic representation of everyday life, and invested by marked Dionysian features. Ultimately, I will seek to demonstrate that, in line with the other Gaoian postexile plays of Self, the tragic potential of Escape also manifests itself at the level of subtext rather than text, though by means other than the technique of the tripartite actor. From Modern to Postclassical: the Persistence of Dionysus in Our Time While Gao’s escapist philosophy—or “aesthetics of fleeing” as Mabel Lee put it—has attracted considerable scholarly attention, his deliberate engagement with dramatic tragedy has not. Likewise, it is unclear whether Escape might be included in Gao’s (post- and pre-exile) repertoire of what Izabella Łabedzka describes as “infra-tragedies of everyday life.”61 Since “infra-tragedy,” according to Domenach, is another term for “modern tragedy,” an investigation of the suitability of both terms with respect to the style of this play is in order. First of all, is Escape a “modern tragedy” à la Domenach? And what is both “tragic” and “modern” for Gao, as it emerges from his comments to this play and, most importantly, from the play itself? To answer these questions, it is first necessary to analyze Gao’s own suggestions for staging Escape in relation with the play’s observable stylistic features. The first point to note is that, in Gao’s view, “tragic modernity” does not concern the structure of Escape, but rather its content, namely “modern man’s dilemma.”62 I have already discussed Gao’s understanding of this “dilemma” and what makes it applicable to “the modern man.” Gao identifies it with an internal trouble, a dismembering energy originating from the Self and within 2.1

61  Łabędzka, Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre, p. 174. 62  Gao Xingjian, “Notes and Suggestions on Performing Escape,” in Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, p. 67.

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the Self in order to destroy it, thereby revealing its fundamental disunity and inconsistency. This is very much in line with his use of various forms of schismatic performance in the post-exile plays analyzed in the previous chapter, as they aim to showcase the tragic mechanism undermining the integrity of the Self. Correspondingly, in a conversation with Chinese poet Yang Lian, Gao states that “the problem of the Self is the core of the modern,”63 hence excluding it from the realm of ancient literature and, arguably, from ancient tragedy as well. This idea, if applied to his works subsequent to Escape, would make them “modern tragedies” in the Gaoian sense of the term, as they portray the tragic duplicity of the Self in what seems to be a unique, innovative form. Furthermore, these plays seem to match Gao’s definition of “modernity” as “nothing but a renewed description of old fundamental questions that have already been asked”64 and would pose the dramatic device of the Gaoian tragic mode as the incarnation of that “renewed description,” having “the most typical characteristics of our time,”65 namely fragmentation. However, in Chapter One we have also seen that Gao elsewhere66 does not seem to differentiate between ancient and modern tragedy, since for him all tragedies indistinctly show a marked preoccupation with the Self. Based on these considerations, it would seem that for Gao “tragic modernity” does not concern merely the predicament of the Self but a new way of addressing and representing it on stage. In conclusion, if “tragic modernity” is about the form of the play, then Escape, given its manifest classical form, cannot be considered a “modern tragedy.” Moreover, in his Parisian jottings, Gao indicates escape as the only way of self-salvation for both ancient and modern individuals,67 thus confirming the idea underlying his rationale for writing Escape, namely that “since ancient times, human existence has been an endless tragedy.”68 Based on that, I provisionally argue that this is precisely what Escape aims to convey and what differentiates it from the subsequent post-exile tragedies, namely the persistence of tragedy in its Dionysian shape throughout history. While the plays examined in previous chapters focus mainly on the workings of the human Self as a prey and a double of Dionysus, I will try to demonstrate that Escape focuses mainly on the workings of dramatic tragedy as a mirror of 63  Gao Xingjian and Yang Lian, “Liuwang shi women huo de shenme? (What did we gain from exile?),” in Gao Xingjian, Meiyou zhuyi, Hong Kong 1995: Tiandi dushu youxian gongsi, p. 122. 64  Ibid., p. 121. 65  Ibid. 66  Gao, “About Escape,” p. 70. 67  Gao Xingjian, “Bali Suibi”, p. 22. 68  Gao, “Performing Escape,” p. 67.

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Dionysus’s unswerving presence in human life. Therefore, the aim of Escape would be to show that tragedy as a dramatic form has not died with the end of the classical age and with the advent of modernity, as George Steiner argues, but has maximized its potential for standing the test of time. In short, this play demonstrates that there is no need to resort to old myths and narratives to produce tragedy. Similarly, it suggests that there is no need to subvert the structures of classical tragedy to make this genre more compatible with modernity. This is because tragedy has been timelessly concerned with Dionysus, the god who dies, dismembered, and revives every time, thereby signifying the imperishability of the other-within-the-self—that extraneous body which strangles, shatters, and is itself fragmented but never leaves its victims. Since Dionysus’ main mode of manifestation seems to be that of an omnipresent bunch of fragments—which exist simultaneously through cohesion (Dionysus is everywhere) and division (Dionysus takes on several split identities)—those fragments persist in the tragic genre throughout history. Unlike Thunderstorm, which features a linear, Aristotelian dramatic structure centered around the motif of the capital error (hamartia), Escape appears to be composed of a series of fragments, which make up the substance of tragedy as an avatar of Dionysus. By fragments I mean residual features of classical tragedy in modern tragedy, which do not give birth to a classic tragic plot. On the surface, these fragments indeed remind us of classical tragedy in its Aristotelian shape. However, if we analyze how they work together, they bring us back to the Dionysian paradigm. Even though Gao’s tragedy, unlike Cao Yu’s, is virtually plotless, its action happens within a day,69 a characteristic that Aristotle ascribed to tragedy as opposed to epic poetry.70 Moreover, the setting never changes as the three protagonists do not have much choice but to remain “locked” inside the dark warehouse for the sake of protecting their lives. In addition, the raging violence in the unnamed Square is left offstage, and the audience is made aware of what has been happening there only through the protagonists-survivors’ terrifying accounts. This, too, is a typical aspect of classical tragedy, where physical violence is never publicly staged.71 Another fragment can be identified with the tendency to situate the characters within a liminal space, enshrouded in darkness and suspended in-between the real horrors of the Square and the characters’ escape fantasies. It is easy to compare the dark warehouse with what Roland Barthes calls the Racinian 69  The action occurs from late at night to early the next morning. 70  Aristotle, Poetics, p, 9. 71  In The Bacchae, for example, the murdering of Pentheus is narrated retrospectively by a messenger.

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“antechamber”: “the eternal space of all subjections, since it is here that one waits. The Antechamber (the stage proper) is a medium of transmission; it partakes of both interior and exterior, of Power and Event, of the concealed and the exposed.”72 Paraphrasing Barthes, Roland Racevskis explains that this is “a space of static frustration and an arena for agitated motion, a site both connected to and separate from the chamber, or the seat of power.”73 In Escape the “chamber” might be represented by the Square, where the political power controls the destinies of innumerable human beings. Last but not least, there is the fragment of the agon, or verbal confrontation between two characters, which I have described in my analysis of D&R. The action in Escape consists entirely of the reiterated collision of the three characters’ individualities. They fight an endless war, which is subtly orchestrated by an invisible Dionysian force. Once again, the god functions as an allegory of the overarching tyrannical Ego, casting its shadows between the public context (the militarized Square) and the private setting (the inhospitable warehouse). As Zhao notes, Escape is “technically the most conventional of Gao’s plays,”74 due to its conformity to the rule of the three unities. Besides, based on Gao’s stage directions, this play definitely takes Greek tragedy as its model, not merely in dramaturgical terms but also from the perspective of performance.75 Having argued that Escape is not a “modern tragedy” in the Gaoian sense of the term, but that “modernity” may be an intrinsic feature (or even a potency) of tragedy at large, represented by Dionysus, how do we go about defining such “intrinsic modernity”? The answer lies in the ways in which those “fragments” of classical tragedy are drawn together to form the texture of Gao’s play. The fragments of antiquity in this case do not give birth to a rigorously classical narrative involving the pivotal turning point of the capital error (hamartia), which is brought to the surface through the final anagnorisis and apprehended in pain. As I have mentioned earlier, that is the structure of Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, where hamartia coincides with incestuous and semi-incestuous relationships leading to the destruction of two families. We find a similar structure in Sartre’s No Exit as well, where the three characters are pushed by the circumstances to reveal 72  Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. by Richard Howard, Berkeley 1992: University of California Press, p. 4. 73  Roland Racevskis, Tragic Passages: Jean Racine’s Art of the Threshold, Lewisburg 2008: Bucknell University Press, p. 34. 74  Zhao, Towards a Modern Zen Theatre, p. 96. 75  Gao specifically instructs that “The performance should be infused with the solemnity of ritual and adopt the recitative style common in the tragedy of fate in Greek theatre” (in “Performing Escape,” p. 67).

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their past faults, which earned them damnation.76 Moreover, Escape does not qualify as a rewriting of a particular ancient tragedy, as is the case, for example, of Sartre’s play The Flies (1943), which adapts Aeschylus’ The Coefore in light of existentialist philosophy. Instead, in Escape, the fragments of ancient tragedy metaphorically signify the disorders of the present age, the degenerations of human relationships, and the dissolution of the individual. But these fragments do not exist in isolation. Although there is no classical plot to logically connect them, the Dionysian tragic field is the glue that holds these pieces together, by means of a particular mechanism that I shall explore in the next section. To conclude this part, in stylistic terms, Escape could be categorized as “postclassical.”77 As art historian Vincenzo Trione explains, the term indicates “the retrieval of antiquity in contemporary art”:78 [Postclassical] artists rewrite fragments of antiquity, glimpses that barely suggest a totality. They decontextualize and reuse arbitrarily few elements of other eras, projecting themselves towards allegorical outcomes. For these artists, antiquity does not concern merely the past, but affects the present as well, thereby foreshadowing future scenarios. Antiquity is the tendency to relegate the present time to the role of a background noise that you cannot do without. Antiquity is an extraneous yet always surprising moment, whose complexity deserves to be investigated, and which must be reconquered every single day, in order to make it resurface as a wreck or splinter.79 This framework can be used to conceptualize the function of the classical fragments in Gao’s tragedy as well as explaining tragedy’s ability to portray currently relevant issues.

76  For a study of Escape’s debt to Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944), see Letizia Fusini, L’enfer c’est moi-même: An Existentialist Reading of Gao Xingjian’s Escape, Saarbrucken 2012: Lambert Academic. 77  I borrow this term from the title of a major art exhibition entitled “Post-classici (Postclassicals),” which was shown in Rome in the Foro Romano and Foro Palatino between May and September 2013. 78  Vincenzo Trione, ed., Post-classici: La ripresa dell’antico nell’arte contemporanea italiana (Postclassicals: The Retrieval of Antiquity in Contemporary Art), Milano 2013: Electa, p. 20. 79  Ibid.

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As for how modernity is extrapolated from or linked to classical tragedy, Escape presents a slightly different notion of tragic modernity compared to Thunderstorm. Cao Yu’s work is not postclassical in my view because its stylistic features do not suggest an equation between modernity and the resurfacing of antiquity as a wreck. Therein, antiquity is a leading element of the tragic plot and is compactly integrated with the contemporary subject matter so as to form a seamless whole. However, in Thunderstorm the “wreck” manifests itself at thematic level and coincides with the collapse of the Zhou household—the epitome of the family myth—which is ruthlessly and literally dismembered by a cruel fate. This reality inevitably recalls the sparagmos-mechanism, although in Cao Yu’s play this coincides with a tangible event, whereas in Gao’s tragedy it works more as an interpretive category and psychic process. Moreover, all those who revolt (consciously or unconsciously) against the stiff authority of the old pater familias (Zhou Puyuan) meet with a ruinous downfall, whereas the latter’s life is spared as he unyieldingly faces the death of his sons and the mental breakdown of both his second wife (Fanyi) and his former lover (Lu Shiping). Cao Yu’s choice of the tragic form was meant to communicate his “anxiety about death,” his insight into the realm of irrational forces, and his desire for the explosion of a stale society. The classical structure and mythical narratives work together to provide a common ground for making sense of the contemporary chaos. Gao holds a similar view on tragedy’s aptitude for dealing with deep, ancestral, and potentially transhistorical realities (e.g., the Self as a dark hole) that cannot be fled. Curiously enough, Cao Yu also talks about the impossible “escape from the dark hole no matter how hard you are howling.” However, while for Gao this “dark hole” is clearly the Self, Cao Yu deems it, less distinctly, “the intangible complexity and cruelty of the unknown.”80 Finally, in Escape the interplay of antiquity and modernity is not linked to any recognizable narratives of the Western tradition. Thunderstorm, as Marian Gálik observes, is a case of “creative confrontation,” a conscious blend of old and new “threads,” which Cao Yu likens to a carefully crafted “embroidery.” As we have seen, Escape is not a seamless “embroidery” but a realm of “decontextualized and reused fragments.” To sum up, by revisiting fragments of ancient tragedy to stage a seemingly contemporary yet timeless situation, Escape retrieves the tragic archetype of the Dionysian sparagmos, in order to represent the eternal tragedy of human life. In this case, however, the locus of the tragic mechanism and the catalyst of the tragic field is not the “modern” device of the split Self, or tragic mode, 80  Cao Yu, “Leiyu xu,” p. 240.

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but the “classic” device of the agon. Once again, the Dionysian tragic field theorized by Storm becomes relevant. And it is this (potentially) transhistorical subtext that should be investigated in order to prove that, while somehow verging on the post-May-Fourth model, Escape does not fit in any way Domenach’s concept of infra-tragedy. Bound by the Dionysian Subtext: the Agon and the Tragic Community Escape begins in medias res. A young woman and a young man, both university students, break into a dark warehouse to escape a massacre taking place on a nameless square. Girl in particular is deeply shocked from what she has just seen. She talks frantically about some people being slaughtered before her eyes and is hysterically worried about her body being on the verge of disintegrating. Despite her companion’s attempts to console her and assure her that she is still in one piece, she cannot stop asking obsessively about the conditions of her legs and arms. This initial situation is the key to unveiling the Dionysian subtext informing the Gaoian tragedy. The first reference to the sparagmosmechanism can be recognized in Girl’s fear of her body being dismembered from the violence in the Square. Young Man shows her that she is not wounded and that the bloodstains on her body and clothes belong to someone else, probably the young female student she witnessed collapsing onto her knees after being seriously injured. Girl’s compulsive inquiring about her own physical integrity represents the first step towards the creation of what Georges Bataille would describe as a “tragic community,” as well as building a bridge between what I would call the “false tragedy” occurring at the Square (offstage) and the “real tragedy” about to take place within the warehouse (onstage). Why do I distinguish between a “false tragedy” and a “real tragedy”? The mass slaughter, which is carried on by gunmen and tanks on behalf of a totalitarian power, is a “false tragedy” for two reasons. First, when we speak here of “tragedy,” we do not understand it to refer to just any kind of political, social, or human catastrophe involving death—it must be death by sparagmos. As previously noted, the mechanism of tragedy does not focus on any relatively “sad” or “terrifying” event, but rather on revealing the collective Self as a field of opposite forces, which lead to the breaking up of the original unity. Second, in the dynamics of a massacre, there is no alternation of cohesion and division, as in an authentic tragic field in a drama, but only division. The oppressors are always on a higher level than their victims, and there is no exchange of roles between the two groups. By contrast, in The Bacchae, Pentheus persecutes Dionysus as much as the god persecutes him, and this, as we shall see below, is precisely what happens in the warehouse.

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Borrowing from Bataille’s idea of tragedy as a communal existence where anguish is passed onto each member of the group and death is a constant, shared obsession,81 it can be argued that Girl’s anxiety to voice her terror and share her trauma with Young Man and, later, with Middle-aged Man, marks the beginning of this tragic community. Here, death is not conquered or manipulated from above but is equally exchanged at all levels. The French philosopher, in fact, argues that, as opposed to tragedy (i.e., the artistic representation of existence), totalitarian ideologies anticipate death in order to control the world and prevent it from breaking into pieces. Furthermore, I argue that in Gao’s play this tragic community revolves around the mechanism of the agon in the guise stichomythia. We can identify at least two examples of agonistic confrontation between the three characters. The first conflict occurs between Young Man and Middle-aged Man. They cannot be considered real people but allegorical personifications of two opposite standpoints: political idealism and existential escapism/nihilism, respectively. The interesting aspect of this agon does not lie in the accusations that they exchange or in their philosophical views on life and political commitment, but in its structure, which is based on symmetric alternation. By confronting each other, the two men seek desperately to transform the rival into a double of one’s self, thereby engendering a Dionysian tragic field. Specifically, while Young Man cherishes optimistic views of the future success of the democracy movement, Middle-aged Man keeps criticizing him harshly, accusing the latter of recklessness and immaturity. He regards “the people’s struggle for freedom” as mass suicide and, proclaiming himself as an individualist who is responsible only for himself, he solemnly argues that escape is the only way to survive other people’s oppression. However, during the agon, both men seem determined either to discredit each other or to force the other to take their side. In so doing, the tragic community begins to take shape, as it requires the leveling of all discrepancies among its members, gathered under the invisible but overarching Dionysian presence. For example, Middle-aged Man points the finger at Young Man’s gesture of running away from the besieged square. This behavior clashes strongly with the latter’s incessant proclamation of the duty to support the movement to the extent of sacrificing one’s life. Meanwhile, Young Man accuses Middleaged Man of tacitly approving of the massacre and urges him to turn himself in, while Middle-aged Man replies by inviting him to do the same, as shown below. 81  Bataille, “Nietzschean Chronicle,” pp. 208–210.

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Young Man: The people’s struggle for freedom will triumph sooner or later, even if it has to be won with blood! Middle-aged Man: Why did you run away when the tanks rolled in? Young Man: I didn’t want to sacrifice myself mindlessly. Middle-aged Man: You didn’t want to. Fine. But should I have sacrificed myself mindlessly then? … The truth is: both you and I have to run for our lives…. Young Man: Then turn yourself in … Confess, tell them that you support the massacre … Middle-aged Man: Maybe you could turn yourself in too … Young Man: That’s an insult to my integrity! Middle-aged Man: They’ve insulted more than your integrity. They can easily crush your so-called “people” into minced meat, also in the name of “the people”. So don’t talk to me about “the people”, and don’t talk to me about “final victory” either. Escape! Escape is what we have to face now! It’s destiny, yours and mine. (talks to himself ) To live is to escape, to run for your life all the time!82 The usage of the agon as a rhetorical device aimed at intensifying the tragic tension originates in the political debates that occurred in the democratic assemblies of fifth-century Athens, and which characterized public life in the ancient Greek polis. The actors involved in a political agon had to be well-versed in the art of persuasion, which is why rhetorical practice was a fundamental component of the education of young men in ancient Greece. A substantial understanding of how language works and of the subtleties of verbal communication was an important factor in influencing the dynamics of political power. Jennifer Wallace, for example, notes that the agon is a recurring element of Euripides’ tragedies. However, the reason why Euripides makes repeated use of this technique is to demonstrate the uselessness of academic rhetoric vis-à-vis the ongoing consummation of pain and disaster. In so doing, he skilfully draws attention to the contrast between “forensic or rational language” and “the suffering before us.”83 Wallace particularly refers to the agon between Hecuba and Helen in The Trojan Women, in which Menelaus acts as a judge. The debate, during which the two women discuss the legitimacy of Jason’s decision to abandon Medea and their children to marry another woman, takes place at the moment of the sack of Troy, when the city and its inhabitants are facing a calamitous situation. Interestingly, Wallace explains how the agon 82  Gao Xingjian, “Escape” in Escape and The Man Who Questions Death, pp. 13–14. 83  Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy, p. 112.

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gradually transforms into an unbearable agonia because language, instead of providing relief through the expression of one’s suffering, exacerbates it. As clarified below, this connection between agon, logos, and agonia can be observed in Escape, as well. The quarrel between the two male characters, which revolves around key issues in politics and philosophy, is useless, not only because it comes well after the carnage at the Square, but also because it shows that political activism (Young Man) and intellectual escapism (Middle-aged Man) are both problematic and doomed to failure. Both characters, in fact, share the same fatal destiny. On the contrary, as we shall see next, the female figure is there to shift the focus of the agon towards the discovery of a dark and powerful truth, which goes well beyond the superficiality of the masculine debate. Such a discovery, though unable to provide salvation for the occupants of the warehouse, will serve as an eye-opening experience for them. It will in fact reveal to them that the individual’s Self is actually a more powerful source of human misfortune than any external enemy. Another example occurs when Middle-aged Man reiterates the uselessness of the students’ uprising in a patronizing manner, which further irritates Young Man. The latter then takes the chance to accuse him of cowardice, given that he has not seen him acting as a leader. Young Man: Your philosophy isn’t worth a fart. It can’t save anybody. Middle-aged Man: And your rashness? Who can that save? Young Man: Are you saying that we shouldn’t have started the democracy movement? Middle-aged Man: If a massacre is all it leads to, then it’s better not to have any … You’ll just become a sacrificial lamb in this game. You’re really too green to be playing with politics, son. Young Man: I see, you’ve been around, you’ve got foresight. Why haven’t I seen you stand up and be counted and become a leader?84 The verbal confrontation between the young student and the middle-aged writer, in which Girl performs the mediator’s role, results in the collective discovery of the fact that all the three people are united by the same destiny despite their unmendable tensions and divisions. This destiny is tragic not because it involves death but because even though they all seek to run away in different directions, they are ultimately forced by the circumstances to cling to each other and wait for its accomplishment. Girl is the one who makes such discovery: 84  Ibid., p. 26.

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Young Man: Didn’t you hear what he said? He’s not one of us. He’s only passing through! Girl: So what? Aren’t we all running for our lives? Middle-aged Man: That’s right.85 It is interesting to note not only that the situation in the warehouse replicates the structure of the Dionysian tragic field, but also that the whole play itself is structured around a dialectics of cohesion and division between the outside and the inside. In fact, while the warehouse holds three escapees, and the Square is filled up with people willing to sacrifice themselves for an ideal, they are all condemned to die, sooner or later. Besides, further evidence of the formation of a “tragic community” inside the warehouse can be found in Girl’s statement that “everybody is on the run. No one’s the boss here.”86 This links up with Bataille’s idea that “to look for a HEADLESS (acéphale) human community is to look for tragedy.”87 Here, Bataille stresses the religious (from religo: “to bind together”) character of tragedy, particularly referring to Dionysus as the god who induces his worshipers to experience mass trance and collective folly. Young Man too declares that they have all become “the living dead,”88 thus emphasizing the cohesion among the members of this improvised community, which could be conceptualized in the following way: The tragic community consists only in the dynamics of disappearance and decay that its members communicate to each other when gathering together. The tragic community is a community of death, radically antifunctional (its members obsessively reiterate to each other the dynamics with which every existence annihilate itself) and acephalic, headless, not representable by any institution or personal reality.89 The second kind of agonistic confrontation occurs between Middle-aged Man and Girl, at the end of which, each of the two characters qualify as both victim and torturer of the other. This verbal fight is also a source of the tragic field as it alternates moments of physical cohesion and division. At the end of the first act, Girl jumps at Middle-aged Man and forces him to have intercourse with her. However, later during the second act, the two of them keep 85  Ibid., p. 27. Emphasis added. 86  Ibid., p. 59. 87  Bataille, “Nietzschean Chronicle,” p. 210. Capitals in the text. 88  Gao, “Escape”, p. 43. 89  Tommaso Tuppini, “La Comunita’ della Tragedia: Georges Bataille e gli ‘anni 30’ [The Tragic Community: Georges Bataille and the ‘30s’],” Noéma: Ricerche, 2013, 4.2, p. 19.

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arguing due to their inability to understand each other. The focus of this conflict mainly concerns gender differences. Particularly, Girl emphasizes what she thinks are the negative sides of Middle-aged Man’s general attitude and behavior toward herself as a woman, by extending it to the whole of mankind. During the second act and after their intercourse, they accuse each other of being responsible for young man’s alleged death. He had suddenly decided to leave the warehouse and neither of them had managed to block him. Like in the first part of the agon, which resulted in them sleeping together, they end the second part by embracing each other, with Middle-aged Man proclaiming once again the reciprocity of their actual condition: Girl: Don’t talk to me about my soul! I wonder if you’ve got one! … You only love yourself … You killed him … Middle-aged Man: He died because of you. He wanted to prove to my face that I was a coward and that he was a hero. Girl: Are we being silly, both of us? Middle-aged Man: In the face of death we’re not heroes, not cowards, not saints, just fools … complete fools … (They embrace each other).90 When Young Man unexpectedly comes back, he, in a fit of jealousy, throws himself in Girl’s arms. She tries to console him but he takes advantage of the situation and seeks to kiss her. As a result, Girl slaps him in the face and pushes him away. She is disgusted by both men and, regardless of their apologetic attitude, she brings to light all their negative idiosyncrasies, which she holds as representative of masculinity at large. She angrily shouts at them both: “You, men, you don’t deserve any love at all! … Sorry, sorry. Always the same old ‘sorry’. Just this one word is enough for a man to hurt a woman…. Don’t think that just because you pulled me away and saved my life, I should be your woman, and I’ll have to sleep with you.”91 As will become clear below, one of the outcomes of this gender-based agon is the metaphorical dismemberment of the masculine identity, carried out by Girl’s choleric statements against both her interlocutors. Middle-aged Man in particular is the target of those accusations and, after a few failed attempts at defending himself, he is forced to admit that he is “just trying to hide” from himself, thus revealing himself as an Other. The moment of highest intensity in this tragic field of cohesion and division is when Middle-aged Man

90  Gao, “Escape,” pp. 52–54. Emphases added. 91  Ibid., p. 57.

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compares Girl to the devil, while she replies: “You made me.”92 Like Dionysus and Pentheus, the two characters have now become a double of each other, as they can mirror each other in the other’s own dissected Self. Eventually, both Girl and Middle-aged Man reach, in turn, what Bataille calls “a truth that changes the appearance of human things, … the emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life.”93 While Bataille identifies it with death, for Middle-aged Man this is “the despair before dying, when we can’t tolerate one another. It’s this sort of hysteria that’s the most horrifying.” For Girl, this is the Self, as she declares, in line with Gao Xingjian’s thoughts on tragedy, that “Wherever you escape to, you can’t escape from your Self!”94 As the play heads towards its conclusion, it is even clearer that in this newly-established tragic community, both genders are defeated, and all three selves end up being smashed and dismembered under the blows of the agon, or verbal duel. Commenting on René Girard’s definition of stichomythia, Tommaso Tuppini argues that this destruction is precisely the purpose of stichomythia which “accuses punches, tears up, carves, and generates a wound in the unbroken body of meaning.”95 But, more importantly, as we have already mentioned: the differences that seem to separate the antagonists shift ever faster and more abruptly as the crisis grows in intensity. Beyond a certain point the nonreciprocal moments succeed each other with such speed that their actual passage becomes blurred. They seem to overlap, forming a composite image in which all the previous ‘highs’ and ‘lows’, the extremes that had previously stood out in bold relief now seem to intersect and mingle.96 This aspect links up with Bataille’s idea that “what the tragic community brings into play is the apocalypse of the inconnu, the ‘discovery’ of the unknown … The unknown is discovered collectively and communicated in its unfamiliarity.”97 In Taowang, the “unknown” coincides with the workings of the Self, as eventually, all characters are dissected and revealed in their entirety.

92  Ibid., p. 62. 93  Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, London 2010: Verso, p. 244. 94  Gao, “Escape,” p. 64. 95  Tuppini, “Comunita’ della Tragedia,” p. 13. 96  Surya, Georges Bataille, p. 159. 97  Tuppini, “Comunita’ della Tragedia,” p. 18.

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Middle-aged Man proves to be very different from the person he seemed to be in the beginning. Young Man turns from an innocent and kind-hearted guy into a greedy and selfish person, incapable of respecting Girl’s willingness to be left alone. Her final remark that “before death arrives, a woman is already destroyed by the man she loves …”98 is not only the second outcome of the agon but also a counterpoint to her initial fear of physical disintegration and marks her psychological breakdown. Once again, it can be argued that they are all victims of their own Self, or, better still, of the Dionysian side thereof. Each of them has sought to become the leader of the tragic community, but everyone has been somehow destroyed and metaphorically put to death, which is the precondition for the establishment of tragedy.99 In line with this tendency, the play ends with the three characters clinging silently to each other, awaiting death in resignation, while outside, whilst the daylight breaks, others (perhaps soldiers) knock furiously on the door “which sounds like the rapid firing of a machine gun.”100 The “heavy pounding”101 outside the warehouse might symbolize the reverberation of the Dionysian presence, which Girard defines as the “monstrous double,” nothing else but the overarching tyrannical Ego that Gao himself mentions in his writings. In this sense, Escape shares with The Bacchae, that fact that, as Girard maintains, “the monstrous double is everywhere,”102 on the Square and in the warehouse and this coincides with the idea that “In the collective experience of the monstrous double the differences are not eliminated, but muddied and confused. All the doubles are interchangeable, although their basic similarity is never formally acknowledged.”103 Based on the above, Escape can be said to follow on from Thunderstorm in that the latter play is similarly structured around a double plot, namely two parallel narratives that are seemingly apart yet also deeply interwoven. The first plot is linked to the incestuous and semi-incestuous relationships between the master’s son Zhou Ping and, respectively, the young maiden Sifeng and his stepmother Fanyi. Particularly Fanyi, the unhappy wife of the old pater familias, embodies the actual kernel of this narrative, which is regarded as a variation on the Phaedra story. Moreover, Fanyi’s central role is enhanced by her archetypal figure. At the beginning of the play she remains unseen, locked in her room and 98  Gao, “Escape,” p. 65. 99  Surya, Georges Bataille, p. 244. 100  Gao, “Escape,” p. 66. 101  Ibid. 102  René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson, London 2010: Verso, p. 162. 103  Ibid., p. 161.

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refusing to come down and show herself to the other members of the family. Besides, the fact that she knows and guards the secrets of the Zhou household, the ghosts of an unspeakable past, makes her resemble an oracle, whereas the primitive passions she is prey to make her a mythical character that Cao Yu himself indicates as the personification of the thunderstorm that is ravaging outside the villa.104 The second plot involves the Marxist myth of class struggle and involves Zhou Puyuan’s second (estranged and unrecognized) son, Lu Dahai, who leads a proletarian revolt of coal mine workers against his father, the mine’s owner. Although the two plots seem mutually exclusive, they are in fact drawn together by the overarching thunderstorm and by a subtextual “labyrinth” of divisive and cohesive relations, whose devastating power is fully revealed as the play comes to an abrupt end. For example, Sifeng and Zhou Ping’s relationship is reminiscent of her mother and his father’s past love affair, which they were totally unaware of. The electric cable that murders Sifeng and her unborn baby is fueled by the coal that is excavated in Zhou Puyuan’s mines. The thunderstorm, which is the double epitome of an inescapable destiny and a necessary remedy for society and its evils, both kills and purifies. As Marian Gálik rightfully observes, “what was really at work in Cao Yu’s tragedy, was the principle of relation,”105 to the extent that, I would add, it is possible to frame this play’s tragic dynamics against Storm’s theory of the tragic field, also involving the final sparagmos of what can be deemed as the collective family Self. Moreover, as further detailed below, Escape shares with Thunderstorm the predominance of the mythical narrative (respectively the gender-based agon and the family conflict) over the political metaphor, which both playwrights relegate off stage. Not an Infra-tragedy: Space, Darkness, and the Myth 2.3 Quite in line with Gao’s other post-exile plays of Self, Escape portrays an archetypal world characterized by innumerable lacerations, both scenographic and psychological. As illustrated in the previous chapter, what determines the tragic quality of these plays—and Escape makes no exception—is the final realization of the Self as not existing in one piece, and of reality as fundamentally riven. This pattern runs through Gao’s post-exile repertoire as a kind of leitmotif and lends a mythical dimension to these newly reinterpreted tragic plays, thereby casting their earlier categorization as infra-tragedies into question. Even though Escape features seemingly contemporary characters, thereby complying with the (claims to) “democratization” of tragedy in our 104  Cao Yu, “Leiyu xu,” p. 241. 105  Gálik, “T’sao Yü’s Thunderstorm,” p. 118.

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time, it lacks temporal specificity. Moreover, the omission of any specific current historical and political references helps to eternalize and allegorize the three individuals’ struggle against being engulfed by the monstrous double. This aspect finds confirmation in Gao’s production guidelines, in which he emphasizes that Escape “should not be made into a play of socialist realism, which seeks only to mirror contemporary political incidents.”106 Moreover, he mentions that “the actors should avoid representing the reality of the trivialities of everyday living,”107 which is precisely the opposite of what infra-tragedy is supposed to do. But how is this mythical dimension constructed and negotiated in dramaturgical terms throughout the play? I argue that this is achieved by playing with the prison image of the locked-in chamber (i.e., the warehouse), as in TDC, and by engendering a dialectical exchange between the two poles of outside/ inside, internal/external, as a result of the characters’ frenzy and impossibility of absconding. The use of darkness in particular, along with a number of “false exits” and thresholds, transforms the warehouse into a “theatrical womb” à la Bataille,108 where individual selves are dismantled and refashioned. Besides, darkness suggests the presence of what Jean-Pierre Vernant defines as an “invisible/inaccessible elsewhere”109 that can be apprehended only by looking into the dark abyss of one’s self. As we shall see below, Escape too is structured around the abyss that, as Carlo Gentili observes, “is precisely the background as well as the foundation of tragedy, which owes its ideal value to its capacity to recall it whilst also keeping it distanced.”110 He further notes that “this dialectics of presence and absence, this unity of opposites, is Dionysus himself.”111 The warehouse represents the space in which Escape’s “real tragedy” unfolds. Interestingly enough, this space is characterized by a double identity, which further adds to its mythical meaning, and enhances its adherence to the monstrous double of Dionysian descent. Initially, it is presented as a safe place, where it is possible to hide, as Middle-aged Man remarks. Moreover, when Girl is concerned about undressing before the two men in order to get rid of her bloodstained clothes, Young Man reassures her that “no one can see

106  Gao, “Performing Escape,” p. 67. 107  Ibid. 108  Georges Bataille, Œuvres Complètes (Complete Works), Paris 1970: Gallimard, pp. 493–494. 109   Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Le dieu de la fiction tragique (The God of Tragic Fiction),” in JeanPierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (eds.), Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne/ t. 2, Paris 1986: La Découverte, p. 23. 110  Gentili, “Tis pros Dionyson?”, p. 119. 111  Ibid.

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anything in here.”112 However, as the play progresses and the three characters start “dismembering” each other verbally, the warehouse turns into a revealing hell on earth, possibly even worse than the Square. Truly, this dark and engulfing space symbolizes yet another version of the descent into the abyss of being, which characterizes the other plays, too. Symbolically, darkness functions as a dramatic device aimed at disclosing reality rather than concealing it. By obscuring the surface of things, it enables the characters to make profound discoveries about the contradictions of the human psyche, and this aptly fits Louise Cowan’s theory that contrary to comedy, whose view is “external,” “the reference point of tragedy is from the deeps.”113 By destroying her antagonists’ self-assurance, Girl quite literally accomplishes the tragic event, which is defined as “the laceration that eventually allows one to gaze at darkness … heading towards the bottomless human wisdom, … embracing the world and destiny.”114 But the warehouse is also a political space, where an attempt is made to re­create the structure of the original democratic polis, by opening the discussion forum that was brutally crushed at the Square. While some people outside kill and other people die, people of different ages and genders inside have freedom of expression, and all are peers. Nevertheless, the three characters’ “freedom of expression” is merely a lark mirror, as they are virtually prisoners, not only of the space but also of each other, and that is why their “democratic discussion” degenerates into a battlefield for psychological torture. Furthermore, the idea that the warehouse might signify something more than the actual location would suggest is reflected in the fact that it is not characterized in a precise way, as it emerges from the following exchange: Middle-aged Man: Is this a warehouse? Young Man: Who knows what this place is? Middle-aged Man (looks around): Is this a ladder, or a scaffold, or a gallows? Young Man: Just like hell.115 Due to its fundamental ambiguity and indeterminacy, the warehouse could be equated with similar liminal dramatic spaces such as Racine’s antechambers 112  Gao, “Escape”, p. 17. 113  Louise Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss”, p. 16. 114  Franco Rella, L’enigma della bellezza (The Enigma of Beauty), Milano 2006: Feltrinelli, p. 27. 115  Gao, “Escape,” p. 9.

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and Sartre’s cell, which are categorized as tragic spaces because they retain ancient tragedy’s tendency to fill the stage with “images of restriction and confinement.”116 Moreover, this condition of inexorable captivity exacerbates the characters’ inclination to look for imaginary ways of fleeing as a result of being caught at the crossroads of opposite forces, inside and outside. Looking for a temporary escape from what could be called “an interstitial zone of frustration”117 between two versions of the same ancestral and never-ending predicament, each of them seeks to envision an “unattainable world of stage.”118 Girl is the one who initiates what she refers to as “a game before dying.”119 A puddle of muddy water, probably coming from a leak, is turned by Girl’s imagination into a mirror, first, and then into an abyss, perfectly in line with the tragic perspective. She pictures herself as the Goddess of Freedom and pretends to be walking on a bridge whilst staring at the abyss below her feet.120 The puddle can be easily said to reflect the atmosphere of the warehouse, thereby enhancing the awareness of this place as a double of the Dionysian Self. Girl characterizes this abyss as “deep” and “bottomless” and she dreads being “engulfed” by it. Similarly, her subsequent attempt at dancing and imagining herself in a happy and blissful situation is unexpectedly broken up by the interference of images of death and dismemberment, in which Young Man follows on: Girl: Ants are crawling inside my body. They’re eating me … the fish tank is smashed…. The goldfishes are struggling on the floor, they’re struggling for their lives … Young Man: I meant it was my head that was smashed. I had a bad dream. They shot a bullet into my head, and it went bang and was smashed!121 Based on the above, it can be argued that the tragic substance of the warehouse articulates itself along two main directions, namely depth and multiple rifts. From a scenographic perspective, these rifts or lacerations coincide with the door, the leak of muddy water, and the cracks in the roof. Halfway through the first act, heavy knocking on the door is heard and the two men argue whether they should open it or not. The door represents a threshold between offstage and onstage, external and internal, self and other, the 116  Brombert, “Sartre and the Drama of Ensnarement,” p. 158. 117  Racevskis, Tragic Passages, p. 33. 118  Ibid., p. 32. 119  Gao, “Escape,” p. 35. 120  Ibid., p. 36. 121  Ibid., p. 46.

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political and the existential. And by holding it shut, while nurturing an illusion of security, they merely contribute to accentuating the tensions occurring among themselves. Inversely, the leak metaphorically represents a kind of invasion from without. What cannot enter through the door finds a way in through hidden interstices. Finally, the cracks in the roof constitute a passageway through which the daylight can eventually pour in, dyeing the dirty water red so that it looks like blood.122 In fact, everyone—especially Girl—is afraid of daylight because it coincides with the start of the round-up carried out by the police. It is precisely this contrast between darkness and the light of the morning sun—as well as Middle-aged Man’s lighter as the second source of light—that adds a sort of ancestral depth to the warehouse. It transforms the latter into a meta-dramatic symbol of tragedy itself, which “dredges up something from the bottomless pit.”123 In this sense, Escape shares a tendency of French Neoclassical Tragedy, to use night and day “as a pair of mirrors, endlessly reflect[ing] each other and afford[ing] that simple couple a sudden profundity, which envelops in a single movement all of man’s life and his death,” as Foucault writes.124 The mythical dimension is yet another aspect that Gao’s Escape shares with Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm. The dark warehouse is not too dissimilar from Zhou’s haunted household, which is also a prison-like space. Apart from the old master who stays on, none of the remaining characters can leave the place without relinquishing his/her life or going insane. Moreover, as the warehouse is enshrouded in a revealing darkness and besieged by the totalitarian power, the Zhou household is surrounded by the thunderstorm, which signifies an inescapable destiny. As Gálik points out, Cao Yu’s idea of fate does not resonate with either Ibsen’s, Greek, or Racinian tragedies but qualifies as a “cosmic (tian di qian di) cruelty (canren) associated with an immense cold (lengku).”125 In Gao’s view, destiny can be said to represent an extension of the individual’s Self, thereby echoing the ancient Greek proverb that ethos is daimon (character is destiny). Furthermore, whereas Thunderstorm’s mythical modality involves the juxtaposition of mythical narrative patterns (both kinship-related and politics-related) that can be traced back to specific foreign sources (Western tragedies and Marxist economic theories), in Escape the mythical dimension is 122  Ibid., p. 68. 123  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 3. 124  Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. By Richard Howard, London 2001: Routledge, p. 104. 125  Gálik, “T’sao Yü’s Thunderstorm,” p. 117.

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not primarily based on the reworking of a recognizable pre-existing narrative but on other factors, such as the allegorical setting, the agonistic clash of the Selves, and the disturbing universal discovery arising from it. It should be now evident how this play, due to its mythical and allegorical texture, has gone very far from the shores of infra-tragedy. Moreover, Escape makes no attempt at subverting the conventional dramatic structures of classical tragedy. The fact that it does not follow the Aristotelian prescriptions in toto makes it no less tragic, given that what this play dramatizes—by means of thresholds, rifts, and fragments—is “less a simulacrum of human action than a liturgical confrontation of a deep-seated dread.”126 And, further, “not … as Aristotle would have it, structures with a complication and a resolution— with a beginning, middle, and end—but dramatizations of single moments unmasking, accompanied by whatever is necessary to reach that chilling and epiphanic event.”127 To conclude, Escape achieves mythical dimension by situating the characters’ agon inside a walled-in liminal space surrounded by cosmic darkness, which allows them to confront and experience “the origin and end of things.”128 3

Tragedy and Its Double(s): Reassembling the Fragments of Dionysus

The aim of the present chapter has been to investigate the relationship between Gao’s only intentional tragedy and the concept of “tragic modernity.” The cross-cultural framework was based on a comparison between the postWorld War II Euro-American discourse on tragedy and post-May 4th Chinese literary and cultural modernization program, which involved the creation of modern tragedies. Since much has been written to argue for and against the existence of modern tragedy in Euro-American discourse, I decided to limit this discussion to the notion of “infra-tragedy,” a term that the French critic Jean-Marie Domenach coined in 1967, while I interrogated Gao Xingjian’s own idea of “modernity” and “tragic modernity” as it emerges from his critical commentaries. Particularly, my choice to probe Escape’s “modernity” against “infra-tragedy” has been determined not only by the seminal role that this term has played in postwar critical debates about the survival or, conversely, demise of tragedy in the 126  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 2. 127  Ibid. 128  Ibid., p. 17.

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contemporary age, but also by the fact that this concept has been mentioned in relation to Gao Xingjian’s plays, albeit with no apparent reference to this particular work. As for the Chinese counterpart, I selected the post-May 4th debate on modernity and tragedy, which gave rise to the so-called “modern tragedy complex,” mainly for two reasons. First, because the Chinese intellectuals of the Republican period hailed (Western) tragedy as a necessary step toward achieving cultural modernization in China, thereby providing a different perspective on the relationship between tragedy and modernity. Second, because these views generally tally with Gao’s definition of tragedy as the most suitable type of drama for portraying modern man’s predicament. I chose Cao Yu’s tragedy Thunderstorm from the Chinese post-May 4th repertoire as a point of comparison, not only because of its status as a classic but also because of its dramatic texture and its combination of ancient and modern myths. Based on that analysis, some conclusive observations can be made. First, Escape can be reconceived as a meta-tragedy in a post-classical form. By “postclassical,” I do not mean “post-Greek” or “post-Aristotelian,” since Escape does not aim to modernize ancient tragedies or pre-existing tragic dramas, as Thunderstorm does. Conversely, I sought to show that Gao’s tragedy enacts a dramaturgy of recuperation of certain fragments of an archetypal tragedy in order to use them as signifiers of the fragmentary nature of the present age. I categorize those disjointed elements of tragic dramaturgy as “fragments”129 to emphasize the fact that, rather than a linear and recognizable classic narrative (e.g. Oedipus’ unconscious parricide, Phaedra’s conscious incestuous passion), Escape features only fragments of selected dramatic structures from classical tragedy (e.g., the three unities and the agon). In this respect, Escape differs from Thunderstorm because in the latter play the three unities, combined with further Aristotelian elements (e.g. hamartia) and recognizable pre-existing sources, give rise to a conventional and cohesive tragic narrative. Cao Yu’s cohesive tragic model results from an intentional process of “creative confrontation,” based on the seamless integration of “golden threads of the old masters” and his own originally “discolored threads.” In Gao’s tragedy, the way those fragments are combined suggests that the survival of tragedy in our day is not necessarily linked to the democratization of its characters and subject matter nor to the modernization of old dramas, but can be achieved by retrieving the timeless tragic archetypes of the monstrous double and the divided

129  Compare Cao Yu’s usage of the expression “golden threads” to indicate his borrowing of several main tragic narratives in the shape of full-fledged plots; Cao Yu, “Leiyu xu,” p. 237.

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self. Furthermore, I use the term “meta-tragedy” to argue that Escape stages a drama which is about tragedy itself. More specifically, Escape incorporates at least three “tragedies” within its narrative, two of which interest the text of the play, while the other works at the level of the subtext. The first “tragedy,” which I designated as a “false tragedy,” is represented by the carnage at the Square, which is a consequence of the rise of totalitarianism. By destroying the dream of democracy and by killing loads of human lives, this non-artistic, non-dramatic and non-regulated “tragedy” symbolically hints at the end of the polis, in the sense of the human community, thereby marking the triumph of chaos and imposing death from above. The collapse of the polis engenders the fragmentation of tragedy as a formally structured art form, in which death is symbolically experienced by all members of the community. Tragedy ends up dismembered, precisely as its double(s), i.e., Dionysus and the Self. By transferring the main focus from the devastated Square to the unyielding warehouse, tragedy is metaphorically reconstructed; its fragments—the limbs of Dionysus—are reassembled, and the conditions for the activation of a proper tragic field, in which every participant is both a double and a victim of the tragic god, are now established. The third tragedy coincides with the tragic field. This interpretive framework highlights the fundamental tragic mechanism, thereby transforming the regulated artistic tragedy into a double of existence, the acephalic tragic community à la Bataille, where there is no need for heroes given that everyone is simultaneously a victim of the overarching tyrannical Ego. Therefore, what links together the classical fragments is not Dionysus as a transcendent god of destiny, but Dionysus as an immanent divisive mechanism by which, according to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, “an individual, as excellent as he can be, is led to his own defeat …”130 In this sense, Escape seems to fulfil their concept of the transhistoricity of the tragic characters, whose tragic status does not depend on their “high” social condition but on the fact that “in the perspective of tragedy, man and human action do not appear as realities that one could identify and define, or philosophical essences, but as problems which do not have an answer, enigmas whose double meanings remain eternally indecipherable.”131

130  Vernant, “Le sujet tragique: historicité et transhistoricité (The Tragic Subject: Historicity and Transhistoricity),” in Mythe et Tragédie en Grece ancienne/ t. 2, p. 89. 131  Ibid.

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This point reinforces the idea that tragedy, in Gao’s view, is eternally modern and able to regenerate itself across different historical periods. Given the archetypal nature of the three characters in Escape, which sets them apart from infra-tragic figures, one could reverse Arthur Miller’s statement that the common man “is apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”132 and argue that tragedy, as a political and religious experience and the epitome of existence, has focused since its origins on the humanization and problematization of the leader of the community. As a mirror image of Dionysus, which embodies “the interplay of contradictory forces, to which man, and every society, every culture … is subject, and which imply tensions and conflicts,”133 Escape’s model of tragedy shows how the endurance of dramatic tragedy is deeply intertwined with the immortality (both metaphorical and literal) of its patron-god. Having demonstrated the inadequacy of infra-tragedy to define this play, one further set of conclusive observations concerns the relationship between Escape and the post-May 4th Chinese notion of tragedy. From a theoretical perspective, although Escape does not stage any classical myth or drama, Gao’s idea of tragedy as stylistically rooted in Western culture is more than manifest. He seems to share his compatriots’ tendency to view tragedy as the artistic rendering of human conflicts and life predicaments, although his attitude looks less optimistic and with no patent pedagogic mission, thereby echoing Cao Yu’s individual case. Regarding dramatic aesthetics, the comparison with Thunderstorm has shown that for Gao, in a way similar to Cao Yu, the existential and the mythical aspect of tragedy are predominant because the political struggle occurring at the Square is only the starting point of the ensuing agon. In both plays, the political myth is confined offstage. The mythical dimension, which contributes to universalizing the dramatic conflict(s) in both Escape and Thunderstorm, is a key trope for Gao and Cao Yu, who achieve through a combination of primeval forces (Dionysian field and gendered confrontation for Gao plus incestuous love, revenge, and cold fate for Cao Yu) and the construction of an inescapable setting besieged by political or natural calamities (the totalitarian repression outside the warehouse and the thunderstorm outside the Zhou household).

132  Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” p. 168. 133  Vernant, “Le dieu de la fiction tragique,” p. 89.

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Both tragedies end with a final Dionysian-like sparagmos. However, whereas in Thunderstorm this is a factual event related to the tangible dismemberment of the kinship, in Escape this is rather a dramatic mechanism, whereby the Self is metaphorically dissected through the characters’ agon. Moreover, for Cao Yu the dramatic conflict involves the struggle against the old society and its anachronistic values, whereas for Gao it relates to the internal dynamics of the human psyche. To conclude, it is essential to note that for Gao tragedy has never disappeared. It has continued to spread its seeds via different means and directions to the present millennium and possibly beyond, casting a revealing light on the dark depths of the human psyche and aestheticizing its internal dismembering energies.

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Conclusion

Gao Xingjian’s Theatre of the Tragic as Thirdspace: towards a Transcultural Model? This book was written for an essentially twofold purpose. Firstly, I sought to provide an innovative re-reading of plays by Gao Xingjian that deal with the problem of the Self as a source of existential angst. In so doing, I brought into focus aspects of the Gaoian dramaturgy that had not been substantially engaged in previous scholarship. These can be encapsulated in his strong inclination towards tragedy as both an art form and a Weltanschauung. Secondly, by applying a framework of reference mainly based on re-elaborations of Greek and Neoclassical tragic archetypes, I endeavored to prove that Gao Xingjian’s engagement with tragedy as it emerges from Escape and Gao’s brief comments on it can be said to extend beyond this specific work to encompass a broader range of his pre- and post-exile dramatic works. Aside from furthering our understanding of the playwright’s tragic sense of life as reflected in his notion of “modern man’s predicament,” with this book I aimed to generate a new idea of tragedy based on the related principles of potential energy and thirdspace. The end-result is the concept of “thirdspace tragedy,” which I generally define as a site of collision of opposite energies (self and other) operating within a psychological (hence apparently invisible) dramatic space. Below, I will first fully explicate what I think the key elements of Gao Xingjian’s own brand of “thirdspace tragedy” may be, before elaborating more deeply on the question of thirdspace tragedy and whether this model/method of analysis can be said to be suitable for further usage in the field of world drama and as a transcultural paradigm. In my opinion, what makes Gao’s “thirdspace tragedies” unconventionally tragic1 is not a series of ingeniously constructed plots and fabulae2 but a few apparently unrelated key tropes, among which there exists a profound transtextual correlation. I argue that such individual tropes somehow cooperate to create an invisible yet compact network, aimed at revealing a profound 1  By this expression, I mean that the tragic-ness of Gao’s plays lies within an invisible thirdspace that is the critic’s task to bring to light. 2  This refers to the actual meaning of the word “tragic” in Aristotle’s own wording. See Yvon Brès, “La Souffrance et le Tragique (Suffering and the Tragic),” in Dinah Ribard and Alain Viala (eds.), Le Tragique (The Tragic), eds. Dinah Ribard and Alain Viala, Paris 2002: Éditions Gallimard, p. 302.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004423381_007

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truth regarding humankind and the meaning of human existence. By the latter, I mean the fact that reality, including man’s psyche, is the expression of an elementary and ubiquitous tendency to divisiveness, fragmentation, and disintegration. The tropes in question are the theory and practice of the shifting pronouns; the motif of the other shore as a dramatic exemplification of the tragic field theorized by Storm; the architecture of the tragic space with its triadic identity of liminality, captivity, and isolation; the shattering of verbal language and the revelation of the fundamental truth of the tragic hidden behind the protective screen of words. To say it in Jan Kott’s words, these tropes function as tragemes, “the smallest structural units of tragic opposition.”3 What holds them together is a latent energy field, which is part of the plays’ subtext. Such tragemes are the essential kernels around which Gao Xingjian’s newlyredefined theatre of the tragic4 revolves. The result of connecting all these tropes together is the creating of a thirdspace, which coincides with the Gaoian motif of the “other shore,” first introduced in the eponymous play and later developed in the subsequent works, which address the eternal struggle of the individual to reclaim his own individuality by taking shelter within the recesses of one’s Self—a Self that ends up turning from a coveted refuge into a dreaded prison-cell. What characterizes the “other shore” is firstly its psychical nature and secondly its arising from the encounter between the dimension of the Self and that of the Other as a constitutive part of the former. The “other shore” or Gaoian thirdspace is the realm of the “Other-within-the-Self” and the tragic dynamisms that occur within it testify to the workings of the Self as a principle of internal divisiveness. Far from possessing a seamless individuality, Gao’s characters bear the insignia of a disruptive psychic mechanism causing the Self to shatter. As a result of such a mechanism, not only does the individual experience the Self as a fractured and fragmentary entity, but (s)he is also compelled to re-explore it from the deeps in an attempt to reclaim it as a unity.5 Even so, this exploration 3  Jan Kott, The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy, Evanston, Illinois 1987: Northwestern University Press, p. xvii. 4  As readers may remember from Chapter Two, I talk about a theatre of the tragic in order to overcome the long-standing (and indeed problematic) association of Gao’s plays with the theatre of the absurd. Moreover, the phrase theatre of the tragic is intimately tied to thirdspace tragedy because it emphasizes the role of the tragic as a dramatic/theatrical energy rather than an utterly theoretico-philosophical notion. 5  What happens within this tragic (psychological) thirdspace in Gao’s plays is in line with Terry Eagleton’s commentary on tragedy’s mutation into modernism. He notes that “The human subject itself is shattered to fragments since nothing in our experience would intimate the existence of an abiding self. When we finally come … eyeball-to-eyeball with the world, then we find both it and ourselves empty of substance.” In Sweet Violence, p. 223.

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precipitates the individual into a bottomless hell-like abyss, which embodies the other side of that very own Self. Gao’s characters all end up at the mercy of what appears simultaneously as an inescapable tyrant and an ungraspable Other. Overall, I defined such a divisive mechanism as Gao’s dramaturgy of the tragic mode, which I have established as a contemporary revisitation/development of the ancient Greek tragic archetype of the Dionysian sparagmos, according to William Storm’s own theory of the tragic “after Dionysus,” and thereby discarding the possibility of identifying the Gaoian tragic through a classic comparative perspective. Dwelling within the soul of the individual or invading it from without, Otherness, or, as previously specified, Self-asOtherness, frequently surfaces under the guise of hallucinations, psychotic projections, or horrific transfigurations of real objects and/or people. Often, the individual sees his own Self reflected in the Other’s gaze, thereby echoing Pentheus’ fatal encounter with Dionysus in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Like the Theban king, who is gradually yet inexorably lured into the god’s trap through merging his personality with that of his powerful Other, Gao’s triadic dramatis personae are variously engulfed by their internal daimon of Dionysian descent. Under the influx of a daimonic and invisible “She,” the lonely Woman in Between Life and Death rapidly turns into a maenad and brutally kills her lover, as if in a dream. Nevertheless, afterwards she finds her own act inconceivable, and she feels the need to explore her own Self to understand who she actually is, but to no avail. Her mind and body undergo a lengthy process of serialized dismemberments conveyed through a plethora of psychotic hallucinations evoking images of angst and terror and culminating in her transformation into a mere stage prop—a bunch of abandoned clothes signifying the fragments of herself, her mind emptied of any clear sense of identity. Under the influx of a Dionysian-like voice, the mysterious Traveller in Nocturnal Wanderer creates a new identity for himself—that of the Sleepwalker—but due to an unprecedented drive to violence, which turns him into a serial killer, he ends up not recognizing himself any more as the person he thought he was. This dark side of his Soul is eventually symbolized by the figure of the Masked Man, who enters the stage in order to kidnap him. In Dialogue and Rebuttal, the Man and the Girl, who are presumably occasional lovers, attempt desperately to seize each other’s Selves in what looks like a death-dance that they both perform. Nevertheless, they end up confronting the reality of the Self (through the dismemberment of verbal language) as essentially cracked, which leads them to the loss of human identity. Finally, in The Death Collector, under the evil influx of That Man, This Man, an old and neurotic individual, hangs himself after realizing that what stands in front of him is a big black hole, an abyss of darkness and oblivion. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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With the exception of the pre-exile The Other Shore, where the final sparagmos of the protagonist’s Self is functional to his rebirth as a selfconscious being, in the subsequent plays this dismembering process proves to be a devastating experience, which can be described as a shocking anagnorisis. Woman (BLD) ends up with the certainty of the Self as a tragic nonentity, herself becoming nothing but a shapeless heap of abandoned clothes. Traveller (TS) is eaten up by a monstrous double and mysteriously disappears. Man and Girl (D&R), who both personify the ambition to possess and control the Other, mutually interact as if they were two halves of the same human unit. The male principle and the female principle do not exist in harmonious cooperation but torture each other while also seeking to protect themselves. However, the outcome of their verbal confrontation is not different from the previous examples. They end up in a schizophrenic mixture of cohesion and division. Treading different paths, having different visions, they remain deeply interlocked and inseparable from each other. This Man (TDC) is visited by his alter ego, That Man, who orchestrates a Dionysian-like subtle act of persuasion, by taking advantage of the character’s egotistic personality. The loss of Self, which is the common denominator of all the above-mentioned plays and the result of an internal possession by the characters’ internal Dionysus, may have different articulations: from mental exhaustion (The Other Shore and Escape), reification (BLD, TDC) and posthuman metamorphosis (D&R) to the complete disappearance of the human body (TS). From a strictly dramatic angle, I have identified three key terms to conceptualize the three articulations of the Gaoian tragic mode, namely “schismatic performance” (Self as “(s)he”), “self-centered performance” (Self as “you”) and “intermingling subjectivities” (joint usage of the former). The first characterizes BLD and partly D&R, the second can be found in TS and partly in the latter play, whereas the third is a distinguishing feature of TDC. These three variations on the theme of the riven Self not only tie in with several tragic theorists’ idea that tragedy deals with the conflicting nature of subjectivity, but also suggest a possible interpretation of the Gaoian tragic mode as a trauma-mode. The fact that in Gao’s drama the Other can never be disjointed from the Self, thereby inflicting a sort of indelible psychological wound, can be explained through Felicity de Zulueta’s definition of the traumatic flashback as “a foreign body permanently at work in the unconscious.”6 The divisive nature of gender relations and the disintegration of language also play a substantial role in shaping the tragic dynamisms characterizing

6  Felicity de Zulueta, From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness, London 1993: Whurr, p. 100. Letizia Fusini - 978-90-04-42338-1 Downloaded from Brill.com05/05/2020 09:21:06AM via free access

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D&R and Escape. As ancillary ramifications of the tragic mode,7 they contribute to enhancing the tragic awareness generally underlying Gao’s plays. In both works, the conflict between masculinity and femininity exhausts the dramatis personae, who both surrender to the disturbing invasion of the Other by openly declaring their psychic (Escape) or even psycholinguistic (D&R) collapse. Notably, in Escape, the female presence struggles to mediate between the old and the young male characters, who torture each other while also endeavoring to possess and/or objectify her. The accusations she throws at Middle-Aged Man for his cynicism and hypocrisy express her ability to discern the true nature of the tragedy of modern humanity. The latter is not due to divergences in political or ideological credo nor to institutionalized warfare but has its roots in the human heart. Although the three characters are all part of the same cohesive and divisive tragic field, a discovery like this eventually places Girl on a slightly higher plane than the two men. In D&R, however, Man and Girl partake of the same nature. Both are animated by the same predatory instincts towards the opposite sex and both seek to protect themselves while attacking the other. As demonstrated by their post-mortem behavior, they cannot exist without the other and although they do their utmost to estrange themselves from their own subjectivities, they cannot get rid of the hegemonic Self that keeps them bound to each other, overpowering them. Thus, it is by a joint effort that they manage to uncover the tragic reality par excellence. The relationship between male and female in these plays is underpinned by the recourse to agonistic language, which is other than the gong’an style dialogues that previous scholarship has attributed to Gao’s mode of playwriting. Unlike the gong’an, whose function is to evade binary distinctions through a paradoxical use of words, the purpose of the agon is to dramatize conflict and to enhance division. Instead of proving the limitations of words, the agon transforms them into weapons, thereby showing that reality is fundamentally lacerated and so are the relationships between human beings. Finally, instead of as positive enlightenment in the Buddhist sense, the agon generates a negative one. Rather than peacefully casting off language, the latter is brutally turned inside out by the characters, who discover that language does have a subterranean meaning. The theory of the Gaoian tragic mode would be incomplete without acknowledging the supporting role of the tragic space. By adapting Marc 7  In Escape there is no trace of the tragic mode as a manifest dramatic mechanism that splits the Self. The characters, in fact, are not patently torn asunder. Nevertheless, being in an unnatural condition of captivity, which creates tension and devours them, they eventually gain awareness of the Self’s intrinsic fragility. In this particular play, the tragic mode (and its effects) is substituted by the technique of the agon, which itself works as a dismembering mechanism, revealing the characters’ most hidden dual nature.

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Szuszkin’s eponymous concept, which designates the dramatic usage of claustrophobic spaces and no-exit situations, I argued that this Gaoian tendency serves to represent not merely the objective predicament of lack of freedom but particularly the subjective realm of the individual’s psychological agony. The function of the prison-like environment (or kunjing) in Gao’s dramaturgy consists in exposing the captive characters to the abyss of the Self, a further inner space that, again, brings us back to abovementioned the Gaoian “other shore,” which, although originally a Buddhist concept indicating a mental state of absolute freedom from the evils of the secular world, in the Gaoian lexicon becomes associated with the parallel world of drama. As can be inferred from the eponymous play, the other shore resembles a chthonian underworld, where human beings die to themselves, losing their individuality in order to be reborn as neutral, homogenized actors-characters. On the other shore, the individual’s freedom is put on trial, and the Self is incessantly chased up and dissected while various attempts are made at annihilating it, until it breaks up into two units. From this particular dramatization, the other shore emerges as an ambivalent realm, whose main features are liminality, captivity, and isolation. It is a meta-dramatic space where the boundaries between reality and imagination, existence and allegory are blurred and which is impossible to flee. Moreover, despite its numerous human presences, the individual is left alone to fight against his personal ghosts and monsters. In this sense, as I mentioned above in passing, the other shore qualifies as a space of the mind, which ties in with Gao’s frequent allusions to what he calls a “psychological field” (xinli chang) permeating all his plays. The Other Shore inaugurates the device of the other shore as a network of concurrently cohesive and divisive relations linking its inhabitants to what seems to be a kind of magnetic field of opposite energies that revolves around the individual and his own Self. Its guiding principle is sparagmos and the pervasive tension between the individual’s wish for self-affirmation and the numerous obstacles he encounters on his path, makes the Gaoian other shore into an avatar of Storm’s theory of the Dionysian tragic field. In the subsequent plays, the other shore as tragic field acquires an increasing tragic potential owing to the multiplication of the rifts. The characters are either already divided or become so at a later stage so that the tragic field of opposite energies can proceed from the tragic mode or even engenders it. Typically dark and uncanny, the other shore is populated by shadows and fragments, haunting the individual. The dynamics of this space are orchestrated by a hidden Dionysus, who metaphorically embodies the underlying energy field that is activated through the individual’s actions and reactions to his real or imagined dungeon.

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Originally deprived of any precise spatial indications, it subsequently acquires more objective connotations. A locked room (BLD), a dark warehouse (Escape), a vaguely defined house (D&R), a city by night (TS), and even a contemporary art museum (TDC), the other shore takes on various appearances to express a shared message: the equation of tragedy, theatre, and life. This is in line with Gao’s definition of existence as an endless tragedy. Simultaneously familiar and disquieting, heimlich and unheimlich, the other shore is compatible with George Bataille’s concept of “mother-tragedy” (mère-tragédie), whereby theatre “belongs to the realm of the stomach, to the infernal and maternal world of the deep earth, to the black world of Chthonian divinities” and existence “is linked to the tragic insofar as it does not belie the humid soil that begot it and to which it will return.”8 The centrality of the tragic field, which permeates the text of The Other Shore and the subtext of the other plays, along with its distinguishing mechanism of sparagmos-tragic mode, allows for a re-categorization of Gao’s tragic plays in those precise terms. The Other Shore features the sparagmos of dramatic consciousness and the dramatization of the tragic field; BLD stages the sparagmos of the feminine self and spatialization of the tragic field; TS shows the sparagmos of the masculine self and the psychologization of the tragic field, whereas D&R presents the sparagmos of language and the gendering of the tragic field. In TDC the psycho-spatial component of the tragic field is predominant, whereas in Escape the tragic field is defined through a combination of gender and space, alongside a marked mythical element. As this study has sought to show, all of them contain centers of inner concentration of tragic opposition and can be rightfully indicated as the source of the tragic potential of Gao’s dramaturgy. While partaking of many of the abovementioned tragemes, Escape is a unique case study in Gao’s repertoire of thirdspace tragedies, essentially because it is a drama about tragedy itself and one which incorporates at least three tragedies within its narrative. The non-artistic, non-dramatic tragedy of the massacre on the Square, which marks the end of the polis and of tragedy as the dramatic expression of its values, gives way to the artistic dramatic tragedy that takes place within the warehouse and symbolizes the rebirth of Dionysus. Above them towers the tragedy of existence, generated by the hegemonic Self of the resurrected Dionysus, which transforms art into a double of life and presides over the birth of the acephalic tragic community, which has no heroes and where everyone is concurrently a torturer and a victim. 8  Bataille, Œuvres Complètes (Complete Works), pp. 493–494.

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My analysis of Escape’s tragic dramatic texture has allowed us to go beyond a generic categorization of Gao’s escapist philosophy as (allegedly) tragic, in order to uncover his contribution to world tragedy as a playwright. My analysis has also been instrumental in determining Gao’s position towards the long-standing question of the relationship between tragedy and modernity. I have argued that for Gao tragedy is an eternally modern and current cultural product, which may have different forms but whose internal essence has trans­ historical and transcultural relevance. Finally, I believe that the true message of Escape concerns the idea that the prevalent mechanism of existence is a dialectics of cohesion and division, leading to psychological dismemberment, which is possibly worse than death. Knowledge comes out of dissection, as this is the only way to establish human relations in a tragic community. Escape (i.e., fleeing) is an illusion not only because the tragic community is a binding situation but also because the individual has to confront the monstrous double that is everywhere, ubiquitous like Dionysus. In reframing Gao Xingjian’s plays of Self—including Escape—as “thirdspace tragedies,” rather than tragedies tout court, I have departed from Izabella Łabędzka’s earlier attempt to associate these works with the fairly contemporary concept of infra-tragedy, which was advanced by Jean-Marie Domenach in the late sixties. Although I have dealt with this term particularly with reference to Escape, none of the plays under scrutiny in this book fits such definition. Gao’s tragic dramas do not represent the routine tragedies of everyday life, nor do they dramatize human wrecks to suggest the absurd core of life. Rather, as previously argued, by exposing us to the abyss of living, they urge us to confront that threshold which marks both the origin and the end of things. Drawing on Louise Cowan’s argument about tragedy, I maintain that at the core of Gao’s newly-conceptualized thirdspace tragedies, there is “the experience of the abyss, as if one had fallen into a black hole in inner or outer space,”9 a definition which ties in very well with Gao’s idea of the tragic Self as the epitome of uncertainty, ambivalence, and primordial terror, which, however, ends up disclosing rather than concealing. And it is precisely this condition of in-betweenness, this threshold between psychic and real spaces, this emphasis on interstices, cracks, and boundaries that urges us to search for an alternative to infra-tragedy. My usage of the term thirdspace in conjunction with tragedy is therefore guided by the need to substitute the inferiority paradigm (infra) with a reference to liminality and depth. This is still an ambiguous and enigmatic concept, potentially applicable to a variety of critical contexts and cultural phenomena; 9  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 15.

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not only do I draw on Homi Bhabha’s and Edward Soja’s own theories of thirdspace, but I also apply it as way of further developing William Storm’s idea of tragedy as a relational field based on a connective fabric stemming from the characters’ mutual relations, whereby the tragic quality of a dramatic text can be actually ascribed to a subtextual—and therefore “latent”10—network of conflicting energies aimed at causing the sparagmos of the main character’s interiority. Since the sparagmos mechanism qualifies as a two-way process, involving an exchange of psychic material between the I and the Other, “thirdspace tragedy” can only be described as the realm of Dionysus, the god with a hybrid identity, an unclear gender, and a multifaceted personality, who can be both himself and something (or someone) else at the same time and whose power consists in playing with people’s identities and driving them to madness. In this sense, by adapting Edward Soja’s definition of thirdspace as “a creative recombination and extension” of a Firstspace (i.e., real) and a Secondspace (i.e., imagined) perspective, it can be argued that thirdspace tragedy is such because it occurs at the boundary between Selfness and Otherness, to investigate the interplay of identities that leads not to the ratification of one’s initial certainties but to the tragic dismemberment of them. Under this light, even a tragedy like Oedipus the King could be reframed as thirdspace, in that it develops across two distinct planes—his own (mistaken) sense of reality vs Tiresias’ numinous knowledge of the truth—which eventually cross each other and cause the disintegration of the protagonist’s initially granitic beliefs about himself. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre’s one-act play No Exit, which Gao possibly had in mind when composing Escape, could potentially be included in the category of thirdspace, not only because it is set in a liminal milieu (i.e., a modern, nonconventional hell) but also because for each of the three characters the Other is not merely an external presence but serves the purpose of laying bare their innermost Self, thereby opening up the possibility of discerning a tragic field in which Self and Other are mirror-images of each other. This is in line with Soja’s mentioning Henri Lefebvre’s confutation of the “philosophical separation of subject and object, the body and the world.”11 Thirdspace, I argue, following Storm, means that characters are made of each other and that one’s individual tragic downfall is a question of both action and reaction within the dramatic cosmos. This, again, brings us back to Soja who argues that thirdspace is “an all-inclusive simultaneity,”12 “a thirding that invites further expansion and

10  See Storm, After Dionysus, on the concept of “tragic latency.” 11  Edward Soja, Thirdspace, p. 47. 12  Ibid., p. 57.

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extension, beyond not just the binary but the third term as well.”13 In the context of tragedy, thirdspace represents the polyphony of Selves, their doubling and redoubling under the influx of the Dionysian mask, as well as the multiple deviations and return from and towards a center, and the infinite bonds and boundaries that characterize the space of the psyche. Furthermore, my characterization of thirdspace tragedy would be incomplete without taking into account another aspect that can be deduced by combining both Soja’s and Homi Bhabha’s shared idea that thirdspace designates a mainly virtual space, like the Foucauldian mirror (“a placeless place,”14 he says). For Soja, this is a “secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to be completely seen and understood, an ‘unimaginable universe’;”15 similarly, Bhabha characterizes it as a “realm of the beyond,”16 thus echoing Jean-Pierre Vernant’s idea of tragedy as representing an invisible elsewhere (an other shore, in Gaoian terms). In this sense, I maintain that in thirdspace tragedy, this “realm of the beyond” coincides with the subtextual tragic field mentioned above; a realm that most often is up to the critic to discern and bring to the fore. In No Exit, for example, the metaphor of the mirror turns useful as, though there are no mirrors in hell, each character functions as the mirror of the other, the bearer of the truth that is revealed to us only towards the end of the play. Thirdspace is the realm of the so-called anagnorisis, the revelation of an abysmal truth, the achievement of discovery and self-discovery through the forcible encounter with one’s internal daimon. Thirdspace tragedy is, therefore, not a fixed formula but a method of analysis aimed at looking for tragic potential rather than for a pre-ordained tragic structure. Neither high nor low, thirdspace tragedy is both and neither, for what is relevant in determining it is not the tone (i.e., solemn or prosaic) nor the setting and status of characters but the construction of the dramatic cosmos as a field of both coalescing and conflicting psychic energies. It is therefore potentially applicable to innumerable works, whether dramatic or nondramatic, and it is my hope that the reflections contained in this book can be taken further by other scholars of world tragedy. To conclude on thirdspace tragedy with reference to Gao Xingjian, and combining the considerations expounded above, I argue that Gaoian thirdspace tragedy can be defined as a drama that, by working between opposite polarities 13  Ibid., p. 65. 14  Michel Foucault, quoted in Ibid., p. 158. 15  Ibid., p. 56. 16  Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 4.

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(self and other, cohesion and division, reality and imagination, antiquity and modernity), actually occurs within a less visible thirdspace, a dynamic realm of potentialities (and Dionysus is, himself, a potency), which can be fully brought to surface only through an ad hoc methodological exploration. And it is in this precise thirdspace that the Gaoian tragic potential can be revealed and darkness can suddenly turn into a light that channels a profound truth about human beings.

…

Gao Xingjian’s individual contribution to world tragedy through his plays of Self reinforces the criticism against the so-called death-of-tragedy-myth, in that it shows that there can be alternative ways to dramatize tragedy. Furthermore, re-reading Gao as a tragedian allows us to go beyond the association of Gao’s work with either “an ancillary name-tag”17 of this or that (Western or Eastern) playwright, given that this study has refrained from adopting a classical comparative approach. The Dionysian framework that I have applied throughout this book helps us to make sense of Gao’s characters’ variously divisive conditions, ambivalent relationships to the dramatic cosmos, and agonistic confrontations with the Other, which ultimately resembles Dionysus, the archetype of the god who possesses and “dismembers” his worshipers. Gao’s systematic use of this archetype has made possible the unearthing of the metadramatic imprint of his idea of the tragic Self—the fusion of theatre and existence in high tragedy, according to the following remark by George Steiner: It is not only that the tragic agent enacts his or her vulnerability to the inhuman, to forces transcending his or her control and understanding. He internalizes this paradoxical privilege, making it a conceptual, self-divisive process. He or she is simultaneously actor and spectator, a duality spelt out in the conceit, ancient as tragic drama itself, of human existence as theatre.18 In other words, the unique hybridity of the Dionysian archetype, in which Self and Other, reality and illusion, and freedom and captivity coexist in a single unit, adequately reproduces the dramatic scission and sense of ontological insecurity affecting each dramatis persona of the Gaoian “otherworldly” other shore. Moreover, it fulfils Steiner’s idea that “our anguish, our sense, deep as 17  Riley and Gissenwehrer, “The Myth of Gao Xingjian,” p. 112. 18  Steiner, “‘Tragedy’, Reconsidered,” p. 38.

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ever but immanent and psychologized, of a threating ‘otherness’” is not only a distinguishing feature of classical tragedy but also a persistent trait which “will find new expressive forms,”19 one of which may be precisely the Gaoian one. As this book has endeavored to show, Gao’s thirdspace tragedies feature modern re-elaborations of the old Greek proverb that ethos is daimon (character is destiny), which encapsulates modern man’s predicament as seen by Gao. Similarly, Gao’s tragic dramaturgy seems to follow from Vernant, who argues that the tragic man has an extreme relevance in our time in that he is an “enigmatic individual”20 who, standing at the crossroads of life, chooses his own path, which turns to be the opposite of what he thought it was. Gao’s tragic characters, who embody the “modern (tragic) man,” are no less like that. Thinking that they can be safe within the citadel of their own Self, they become aware of the Self as both an Other and an Abyss only after gazing beyond that dreadful threshold. Therefore, if it is true that tragedy “results from … a recognition of the harm done by some primordial event,”21 as Gao’s dramaturgy suggests, an analysis of the Gaoian thirdspace tragedy from the perspective of trauma studies would also be a worthy approach for extending this research toward new critical trajectories. 19  Ibid., p. 44. 20   Jean-Pierre Vernant, in RAI documentary, “Jean-Pierre Vernant e la Tragedia Greca [JeanPierre Vernant and Greek Tragedy],” RAI Scuola, http://www.raiscuola.rai.it/articoli/ jean-pierre-vernant-la-tragedia-greca/5675/default.aspx (accessed 15 June 2015). 21  Cowan, “The Tragic Abyss,” p. 16.

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Index Absurd, absurdism, absurdist, absurdity 3, 9, 12, 14, 59, 65–8, 70, 73–7, 83, 93–7, 99, 149, 163, 175 Aeschylus 18n4, 181, 192 Africa 126 Agon 42, 76, 81, 139–40, 143, 160–62, 183, 191, 194–97, 199–202, 207–8, 210–11, 216 Alarm Signal ( juedui xinhao) 60n3, 61–62, 95–96, 117 Alienation 44–45, 51, 168–69 American post-war theatre 176 Anagnorisis 81, 103, 139, 144, 147, 168, 191, 215, 221 Andreev Leonid 115 Angst 27, 54, 94, 163, 212, 214 Anouilh, Jean 182 Ante-tragedy 175–76 Anti-theatre 39, 66, 176 Anti-tragedy 175–76 Apollonian 158 Aristotle, Aristotelian, Aristotelianism 7, 10, 15–16, 18–19, 21–23, 25–26, 28, 34, 38, 81, 120, 149, 181, 185, 190, 207–8, 212n2 Artaud, Antonin 50–51, 61, 63n10 Athens 174, 196 Ballade Nocturne 5 Barthes, Roland 190–91 Bataille Georges 11, 194–95, 198, 200, 203, 209, 218 Baudrillard, Jean 107 Beckett, Samuel, Beckettian 14, 65–66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 95, 149, 153, 174–75 Beijing 1, 3, 66n, 81, 172n, 179n24–25, 180n31, 180n34, 180n36 Beiju (Chinese Tragedy) 5, 55, 172, 177, 179 Benjamin, Walter 21 Bennett, Michael Y. 12, 75, 95 Between Life and Death (Au bord de la vie, Shengsijie), BLD 4, 14, 56, 58n144, 61, 70, 102, 104–5, 110–12, 115–16, 120, 126, 130–31, 133, 139, 151, 154, 156, 165, 214–15, 218 Bhabha, Homi 12, 220–21 Bing Xin 180 Bottani, Livio 119

Brecht, Bertolt, Brechtian 3, 9, 39, 42–7, 61, 73, 81, 174 Brechtian Estrangement 73 Brombert, Victor 153, 155 Buddhism, Buddhist 58, 81n65, 113, 130–31, 140, 142, 144, 146–48, 216–17 Burke, Kenneth 77, 80 Cai, Yuanpei 177n18 Caligula 25, 35 Camus, Albert, Camusian 4n15, 6–7, 13, 24–5, 35, 65, 68, 70, 74, 153, 164, 174–75, 182 Cao Yu 13, 16, 173, 181–82, 190–91, 193, 202, 206, 208, 210, 211 Chaucer, Goffrey 158 Chekov, Anton 2, 112n39 Chen, Duxiu 171n2, 177n18 China 2–4, 7, 15, 43n96, 52, 59–60, 62n10, 68, 74, 82, 95, 171–73, 177–82, 184–85, 208 Chinese Avant-garde theatre (xianfeng xiju) 59n2, 60 Chinese Communist Party 171n2, 185 Chinese Democracy Movement 184–85n50, 195, 197 Chinese Experimentalist Theatre (shiyan xiju) 59 Chinese literature 180, 186 Choric model 79–80 Chorus 34, 36, 71, 80 Classical tragedy 149, 186, 190–91, 193, 207–8, 223 Coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) 92 Comic mode 76, 175 Confucianism 177 Conrad, Joseph 126–27 Coulter, Todd J. 2, 4, 53n29 Cowan, Louise 38–39, 42, 115, 204, 219 Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) 26, 63n10, 83, 148, 150 da tuanyuan zhuyi (great reunionism) 178 Daimon, daimonic 33–34, 36–38, 46, 51, 57–58, 85, 87, 99, 107, 117, 129, 134, 140, 206, 214, 221, 223 Dante 97, 103, 105

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239

Index Dao 58 Daoism 32n55, 58, 140, 144, 148 De Saussure, Ferdinand 78 De Unamuno, Miguel 22 Death of God 150, 174 Death-of-tragedy myth 173, 222 Deinón 21 Democratization of tragedy/the tragic 6, 171, 175–76, 187, 202, 208 Deng Xiaoping 59n2 Dennett, Daniel 119 Dialectic Drama 45 Dialogue and Rebuttal (Dialoguer-interloquer, Duihua yu fanjie), D&R 5, 14, 17, 61, 75, 102, 130–32, 136, 140, 146–47, 154, 156, 160, 163, 165, 191, 214–16, 218 Didactic Drama 98 Dionysus, Dionysian, (Pan) Dionysianism 10–11, 13–16, 18, 37, 39–42, 47, 49–50, 54, 57–58, 70–72, 77, 79–82, 85–86, 88–94, 97, 99, 103, 105, 107–8, 116–17, 120–26, 128–29, 132, 134, 140, 144–45n160, 148–49, 154–60, 162–63, 165–68, 170, 184, 188–95, 198, 200–1, 203, 205, 207, 209–11, 214–15, 217–23 Domenach, Jean-Marie 5–6, 9, 15, 175–76, 188, 194, 207, 219 Doppelgänger 57, 157–58, 160, 162, 164 Dramatic Estrangement/Defamiliarization Effect 43–45 Dramatistic model 12n51, 77, 79–80, 123 Dramaturgy of the riven Self 37 Dramaturgy/Theory of Shifting Pronouns (rencheng zhuan) 8, 13, 15, 35, 37, 48, 51, 54, 60–61, 213 Eagleton, Terry 20, 172, 213n5 East Asian theatres 50 Echo and Narcissus 121 Elizabethan age 174 Else, Gerard 77 Endgame 153 Entfremdung 44 Epic Theatre 3, 61 Escape (Taowang) 4–6, 13, 15–6, 35, 38, 61, 100, 148, 170–73, 182–94, 197, 201–3, 206–10, 212, 215–16, 218–20 Ethos is daimon (character is destiny) 206, 223 Eurasian Theatre 3

Euripides 10, 37, 181, 196, 214 European avant-garde 61 Ewigweibliche (Eternal Feminine) 105 Existentialism (philosophy) 4, 32, 192 Existentialist dramaturgy/theatre 3, 59, 67, 73, 76, 192n76 Falconer, Rachel 14, 96, 100, 167 Ferrari, Rossella 60, 74 Field model 78–79 Fong, Gilbert C. F. 5, 26, 30, 32, 48, 58, 98, 131, 148 Foucault, Michel 206 Fourth wall 43 French Neoclassical Tragedy 206 Freud, Sigmund, Freudian 107, 129, 157–58, 160–61, 164, 167 Gálik, Marian 193, 202, 206 Gasché, Rodolphe 46 Genet, Jean 153 Genotext 80 German Idealism 18 Gesamtkunstwerk 63 Ghosts 181 Girard, René 200–1 Gissenwehrer, Michael 83, 91, 94 Gnoti Seauton (know thyself) 54, 82 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 105 Gong’an style dialogues 131, 216 Greek Tragedy 33, 80, 168, 174, 182, 191 Grotowski, Jerzy 43n97, 61 Guo, Moruo 81n64, 180 Habachi, René 17, 144 Hades 87, 167 Haiping Yan 49, 145 Hamartia 23, 36, 190–91, 208 Hamlet 101 Hamlet 80, 173 Hathorn, Richmond 33 Hayles, Katherine 77–79, 84 Heart of Darkness 126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Hegelian 18n2, 18n4, 19, 44 Hegemonic self 58, 140, 145n160, 206, 218 Heilman Robert 8 Heisenberg, Werner 81 Heraclitus 34 Hippolytus 181

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240 Historical materialism 181 Hölderlinian caesura 17 Hornby, Richard 51, 168 Hu Shi 177n18, 178 huaju (Modern Spoken Chinese Drama) 60, 177 hundun (primordial oneness) 58, 145n160 Hybris 9, 36, 100 Hypotheticality ( jiadingxing) 53, 82 Ibsen, Henrik 2, 30, 51–52, 60, 174, 181, 182n39, 206 Icarus 9, 19 Il Fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal) 100 Indépendence totale (total independence) 62, 185 Infra-tragedy 6, 9, 15, 171, 173, 175–76, 183, 188, 194, 202–3, 207, 210, 219 Ingarden, Roman 25 Intermingling subjectivies 160, 215 Ionesco, Eugène 95, 174–75 Ivanov, Vyacheslav 112 Japan 172n Jesus Christ 125 Jingju (Beijing Opera) 3, 43 Jintian (Today) 102, 184–85 jiuxi (old theatre) 177 juchang jiadingxing (suppositionality of theatre) 52 juli banfa/Juli fa (distancing techniques) 43, 48 juli gan (feeling of estrangement) 48 Jung, Carl G. 65 Kabuki 43 Kafka, Franz 153 Kant, Immanuel 18n2 Kantor, Tadeusz 43n97 Katabasis, katabatic imagination 14, 97, 101, 165–68 Kierkegaard, Soren 33 Kong, Belinda 186 Kristeva, Julia 80n58 Kujing (sorrowful scene) 55 Küng, Hans 100 Kunjing (Limit-Situation) 8–9, 28, 55–56, 217

Index Łabędzka, Izabella 2, 5, 6, 15, 67, 96, 98, 103, 116n58, 117, 131–32, 139, 146, 187–88, 219 Lacan, Jacques, Lacanian 30, 58n146, 119–20 Lao She 180 Lazzarini-Dossin, Muriel 39 Lee, Mabel 148, 186, 188 Lefebvre, Henry 220 Lehrstück 95 Levinas, Emmanuel 167 Li, Dazhao 177n18 Lin, Zhaohua 60 Literary Revolution 177–182 Liu, Zaifu 94–95, 103, 149 Lu Xun 74, 177n18, 178, 180, 186 Lukács, György 33, 57 Lutterbie, John H. 109 Ma, Sen 94–95 Macbeth 35, 149–50n178, 160 Maenad(s) 40, 42, 49, 85, 112, 129, 214 Maj, Barnaba 21, 32 Malraux, André 153 Mandel, Oscar 24 Matoré, Georges 54–55 Mauriac, François 175n10 May Fourth Movement 171n2, 172n Mazzilli, Mary 2–4, 7, 59n1, 148n173 Melodrama 8, 19 Metatheatre, Metadrama 64, 67, 96–97, 104 Meta-tragedy 208–9 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 53 Miller, Arthur 172, 174, 176, 210 Modern tragedy, tragic modernity 5, 7, 15, 21, 101, 170–72, 172–78, 180–84, 186, 188–91, 193, 207–8 Modernity, modernism 15–16, 20, 49, 61–63, 171–77, 181, 183, 188–91, 193, 207–8, 219, 222 Mother-tragedy (mère-tragédie) 218 Multivocality (duoshengbu) 60 Mystical Mode 57 Naturalistic drama 44 Necropolis (Shencheng) 5, 61, 63n11 neixin de xiju (Theatre of the Mind) 47 Neutral actor (zhongxing yanyuan) 43, 46–48, 86, 96, 103, 105

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Index Neutral attitude (zhongxing yanyuan de taidu)/Neutral performance 46–47 New Culture Movement (Xin wenhua yundong) 171n2, 177n18 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzschean 41, 92n96, 174 Nineteen Eighty-Four 88 Nirvana 90, 139, 142, 167 No Exit 191–92n76, 220–21 Noumenon 24, 179 Nouveau théâtre 6, 173–74 Numinous, mysterium tremendum 9, 15, 21, 32, 165–68 Nuoxi 43 O’Neill, Eugene 174 Oedipus 10, 13, 18, 26, 33–37, 52, 111n37, 164, 174, 176, 208 Oedipus Rex/Oedipus the King/Oedipus Tyrannous 26, 34, 173, 220 Omnipotent theatre 52 One Man’s Bible 8n33, 148 Oresteia 18n4, 181 Orestes 100–1, 176 Orwell, George 88 Other-within-the-self 10, 14, 27, 30, 53, 82, 107, 120, 166, 190, 213 Otto, Rudolf 9, 166 Otto, Walter F. 158 Ouyang, Yuqian 173, 180 Pan-Dionysianism 123 Panpsychism 115 Parabolic Drama 73, 75, 95 Pascoli, Giovanni 28 Pathei mathos (learning through suffering) 82 Pavis, Patrice 52 Peer Gynt 30, 51 Pentheus 15, 37, 40–42, 49, 54, 112, 157, 159 Performance in alienated voices 51 Peripeteia 25, 27, 31 Phèdre 35 Phenotext 80 Pirandello, Luigi 63–64, 81n64, 100, 107, 174 Plato 36–37 Poetics 18–19, 26, 149 Polis 8, 186, 196, 204, 209, 218

241 Polyphony ( fudiao) 60, 76, 221 Poor Theatre 61 Postdramatic 7, 59 Postdramatic transnationalism 3 Posthuman condition 50, 139, 145 Posthumanism, Posthumanist 49–50, 145 Posthumanist impulse 49–50 Pre-tragedy, pre-tragic 4, 14, 65–67, 73, 76, 94 Principle of Individuation 41–42, 92 Prometheus 73 Proteus 20 Psychodrama 98, 102, 104, 106 Psychological field (xinlichang) 14, 53, 56, 63, 92, 98, 116, 217 Psychologism 50 Qing dynasty 177 Qu Yuan 181n37 Quah, Sy Ren 2, 32n55, 83, 92, 94, 96, 103, 139, 166, 187 Quantum physics 54, 78, 84 Quinones, Ricardo 28 Racine, Jean, Racinian 35, 151, 181, 190, 204, 206 Revolutionary Literature 182 rheseis (intersecting speeches) 161 Ricœur, Paul 33–34, 36–37 Riley, Jo 83, 91, 94–95 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 73n43 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Sartrian 4n15, 13, 27, 30–32, 35–36, 45, 55, 65, 123n76, 153, 155, 174–75, 182, 191–92, 205, 220 Savarese, Nicola 3 Scheler, Max 18, 24 Schelling, Friedrich 18 Schismatic performance 15, 104, 106, 108, 120, 126n90, 133, 170–71, 189, 215 Schopenhauer, Arthur 24, 92n96, 168, 178–79 Schubert, Franz 158 Second Sino-Japanese War 181 Segal, Charles 80 Self-centered performance 117–18, 120–21, 125, 215 Shakespeare, Shakespearean 18n4, 22, 25, 37, 39, 61, 79, 81n64, 147–49 Simulacrum, Simulacra 108–9, 129, 207

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242 Sisyphus 74, 164 Six Short Plays 61 Snow in August (Bayue xue) 5, 61, 63n11 Socialist realism 203 Soja, Edward 12, 220–21 Sophocles 35, 164 Soul Mountain (Lingshan) 1, 8n33 Sparagmos 10, 13, 15, 39, 41–42, 47, 49–50, 58, 79, 92, 85–86, 88–90, 92–93, 97–100, 102–3, 106, 108, 112–13, 116, 118, 123, 125, 128, 130, 133, 137–39, 154, 156, 170, 193–94, 202, 211, 214–15, 217–18, 220 Stanislavski, Konstantin 60 States, Bert O. 12n51, 75, 80 Steiner, George 8, 10, 33–34, 174–75, 190, 222 Stichomythia 195, 200 Storm, William, Stormian 10–16, 39–42, 49, 56–58, 65, 77–81, 83, 86, 97, 107, 112n39, 115, 169–70, 188, 194, 202, 213–14, 217, 220 Stream of consciousness (yishi liu) 61 Strindberg, August 174 Structure of feeling 19, 172, 175 Surrealism 50 Swedish Academy 1 Szondi, Peter 18–21, 38–39, 46 Szuszkin Marc 11, 151–53, 217 Tales of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing zhuan) 5 Tam, Kwok-Kan 8n34, 67, 93, 124, 130, 132, 137, 139 Tartarus 91, 115, 162 Tay, William 67 The Bacchae 10, 37, 39, 49, 54, 112, 125, 157, 190n71, 194, 201, 214 The Birth of Tragedy 41 The Bus Stop (Chezhan) 4, 14, 59, 61–2, 64–8, 70–1, 73–77, 94–8, 146, 187 The Coefore 192 The Death Collector (Le Quêteur de la mort, Kouwen siwang) 5, 14, 38, 57, 75, 102, 129n100, 132, 148–50, 152–53, 155, 158, 165, 170, 203, 214–15, 218 The Flies 192 The Other Shore (Bi’an) 2, 4–6, 14, 16, 31, 53, 59, 61, 64–7, 70, 72–3, 76–7, 81–5, 91–97, 99–100, 104, 124, 128, 137, 156, 170, 215, 217–18

Index The other shore (concept) 14, 16, 85–6, 89, 91–2, 97, 99, 102, 156, 165–66, 168, 213, 218 The Outsider (L’Etranger) 25, 74, 77 The Seagull 112n39 The Sleepwalker (Le Somnambule, Yeyoushen), TS 4, 14, 61, 102, 116, 119–20, 126, 130, 156, 165, 215, 218 The Trojan Women 196 The Wilderness (Yuanye) 181 Theatre of cruelty 50–61 Theatre of Exploration (tansuo xiju) 59n2 Theatre of imagination 98 Theatre of Situation/Dramaturgy of Situation 55, 153 Theatre of the absurd 7, 12, 16, 39, 61, 75, 93–95, 98, 213n4 Theatre of the mind 47, 118 Theatre of the tragic 10–13, 16, 59, 93, 95, 98, 212–13 Theatrical illusion 52 Theatrum mundi 146 Thirdspace 12, 14, 16–17, 28, 51, 54, 100, 102–3, 212–13, 219–22 Thirdspace tragedy 212–13n4, 220–21, 223 Thunderstorm (Leiyu) 16, 181–82, 190–91, 193, 201–2, 206, 208, 210–11 Tian Han 180 Todorov, Tzvetan 125–26n90 Total actor 52 Total theatre (wanquan de xiju) 2 Totalitarianism 187, 209 Traditional Chinese tales/legends 5 Traditional Chinese theatre/drama, classical Chinese theatre/drama 3, 61, 81, 177 Tragic abyss 47, 109, 114, 126, 162, 168 Tragic community 11, 194–95, 198, 200–1, 209, 218–19 Tragic contraction 28–29 Tragic downfall 24, 35, 118, 220 Tragic field 14–16, 48, 52, 57–58, 66, 77–81, 83–86, 88, 90–94, 98–100, 102, 104–6, 108–11, 114–18, 120–24, 129–30, 132, 135–36, 139, 147, 151, 153, 155, 160–61, 164–65, 167, 170–71, 188, 192–95, 198–99, 202, 209, 213, 216–18, 220–21 Tragic mode 11–12, 14–15, 37, 39, 42–43, 47, 51, 57, 59, 61, 63–64, 73, 76, 81–82, 90, 95, 99, 102, 106–7, 149, 165, 168, 170, 172–73, 188–89, 193, 207–8, 214–18

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243

Index Tragic nonentity 112, 114, 215 Tragic reversal 27, 29–30 Tragic scission 36 Tragic Self 5, 13–14, 18, 25, 33, 35, 37, 45, 58, 107, 168, 219, 222 Tragic space 11, 55, 150–52, 155–56, 205, 213, 216 Tragic vision 51 Tragicomedy 2, 67 Transculturalism 2 Transnationalism 2–3 Tripartite Performance/Tripartite Actor/ Acting/Tripartition 8, 42, 44, 47–8, 92, 106, 188 Ulysses 24–25, 28–31, 36 Uncanny 129, 157–60, 167 Valéry, Paul 121, 152 Veil of Maya 41 Veltruský, Jiři 114 Verfremdung, V-effekt 39, 42, 44–46 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 77, 124, 152, 203, 209, 223 Virgil 97 Viscosity, viscous 30–31, 36, 46 Von Szeliski, John 175n10 Waiting for Godot 14, 65–66, 149 Wang, Guowei 178–79 Weekend Quartet (Zhoumo sizhongzou) 5 Wild Man (Yeren) 60n3, 61–62 Williams, Raymond 19, 174 Williams, Tennessee 174 Wood Krutch, Joseph 172, 175n10

xiandai beiju qingjie (Modern tragedy complex) 172, 177–78, 182, 208 xiandai dongfang xiju (Modern Eastern drama) 61 xiandai ren de kunjing (Modern man’s predicament) 9, 16, 26, 28, 32, 48, 50, 53n129, 169, 184, 208, 212, 223 xianshi pai (Realist school) 180 Xin Qingnian (New Youth) 171n2 Xiong Foxi 180 Xiqu (see Traditional Chinese theatre/ drama) 44, 177 Xu, Zhimo 180 xueli pai (rational school) 179 xungen wenxue (root-seeking literature) 62 Yang Lian 189 Yeung, Jessica 3, 5, 9n37 Yip, Terry Siu-han 124, 130, 132, 137, 139 Zeitgeist 6 Zen Buddhism 9, 58, 82, 90, 131, 140, 142n146, 145 Zen plays/drama/theatre 5, 61, 98 Zhang, Ning 73 Zhao, Henry Y. H. 5, 53, 61, 83, 98, 103, 117, 140n140, 144, 184n46, 185n50, 187 Zhou, Zuoren 177n18 Zhu, Guangqian 178–79 Zhuangzi 32n55, 140, 144, 148n171 Zong, Baihua 179

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