Reference and Representation in the Works

of Gao Xingjian and Samuel Beckett

COLEMAN, Tara Jean

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment

of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Philosophy
in
English (Literary Studies)

© The Chinese University of Hong Kong

August 2008

The Chinese University of Hong Kong holds the copyright of this thesis. Any person(s)
intending to use a part or whole of the materials in the thesis in a proposed publication
must seek copyright release from the Dean of the Graduate School.
(I[^望
UNIVERSITY ~ y M / J
 Thesis/Assessment Committee

Professor ZHANG Benzi (Chair)

Professor HUDDART, David (Thesis Supervisor)
Professor PARKER, David (Member)
Professor ZHANG, Longxi (External Examiner)
Abstract of thesis entitled, "Reference and Representation in the Works of Gao
Xingjian and Samuel Beckett":

In this thesis I examine the writing of Samuel Beckett and Gao Xingjian, focusing on one
play and one novel by each writer. I begin by investigating the reception each author
received, both by reviewers and literary critics, as well as the critical tradition that has
developed around them. It becomes clear that Beckett's critics have had a difficult time
associating his work with Ireland and with any political reading at all, while Gao's critics
have had a difficult time removing him from his Chinese heritage and depoliticizing his
work. The comparison between the two reveals that in fact, both writers create a tension
between the local and the universal in their work, and treat representation as a problem. I
use their similarities to ask whether the distinctively different reception is the product of
critical oversight or a fundamental difference between the two writers' work.

Later in the thesis, I move beyond the issue of critical reception to ask whether the
difficulty with localizing each author is not the result of an overly narrow idea of the
political as an act of conscious resistance in a text. In order to suggest that it might be
possible to find an alternative to this strong idea of politics, I question the idea that a
universal text is apolitical by demonstrating that the idea of universality attributed to
these writers is influenced by Western European values. In fact, no text is completely
universal, and at the same time, no writer should be expected to represent his or her
nation at the expense of his or her art. I argue that instead of assuming that political
readings must discover a political statement in the text, we may choose to read these
works as opening up new spaces for change.

I employ the work of post-colonial theory, particularly that of Homi K. Bhabha, to

suggest that although Beckett and Gao did not intend to make political statements in their
writing, their position as marginal writers allowed them to narrate from a unique
perspective. Once we understand that the tensions in these texts are not problems but
productive spaces, I contend, we may begin to understand why each writer's work is so
enigmatic, meaning different things to different people.

Submitted by COLEMAN, Tara Jean

for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English (Literary Studies)
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2008.

ii
Abstract of thesis entitled, "Reference and Representation in the Works of Gao
Xingjian and Samuel Beckett":

本論文中筆者審視塞繆爾•貝克特(Samuel Beckett)和高行建的作品，聚焦於每位
作家的一駒戲劇和一本小說。論文的第一部份，筆者檢視每位作家得到的評價和圍
繞他們所發展出來的評論。在這些研究中我發現歷來的評論家們往往難於將貝克特
的作品與任何政治性的解讀或與其祖國愛爾蘭聯係起來；而關於高的評論則難於
脱離作者本人的中國背景和與之相關的政治性色彩。這兩位作家之間的互相比較，
可以看出他們在各自的作品中，皆制造了本土性與普遍性之間的張力，並都將呈現
視作一個問題。因此從他們的相似點出發，我質疑關於兩位作家的不同解讀傳統是
否源fi于長期以來的對其他解讀可能性的失察抑或兩位作家創作之間的根本區別。

在論文的第二部分，我開始思考是否可以對政治性這一概念作不同解讀。我質疑
普遍文本都是無關政治的觀點。筆者對“普遍性”的作品之所以是“非政治”，
是因為二位作家的“普遍性”的概念本身很大程度是西歐思想的說法有所質疑。
寊際上沒有任何文本是完全普适的；同樣亦沒有任何作家可以通過其寫作來展現他
/ 她 的國家。與 其 假 設 文 本 的 政 治 性 解 讀必然與文本的政治立場相關，我認爲這些
作品提供了新的解讀空間。

我運用后殖民理論,尤其是霍米•巴巴(HomiBhabha)的相關論述來説明雖然貝
克特與高無意在寫作中做任何政治性聲明，但是作為邊緣作家、地位卻賦予了他們
以獨特角度敍述的可能。一旦我們暸解存在于他們文本中的張力不應是問題而是
俱有牛成力的空間，或許我們可以開始理解為什麼同一作家在不同的讀者面前存在
不同解讀的可能性。

Submitted by COLEMAN, Tara Jean

for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English (Literary Studies)
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2008.

iii
 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 26

Chapter 2 61

Chapter 3 脱

Conclusion ⑷

Bibliography 144

iv
 Introduction

When Samuel Beckett and Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in Literature in

1969 and 2000 respectively, a similar confusion arose when trying to determine the

writers' national origins. Regarding Beckett's award, John Harrington quotes from The

New York Times: "It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Beckett should be regarded

as an Irish or a French writer, although Nobel officials recognize the country of work and

residence. Mr. Beckett has lived in Paris since 1937，and has written mostly in French."'

Meanwhile, Harrington writes, "Some European news agencies contacted the Irish Times

for information about the winner, but the Dublin paper expressed surprise that it should

be considered in any way knowledgeable about Beckett."^ A similar confusion attends

attempts to define Gao's national identity. Having lived in China until the age of 47,

Gao's writing continues to display a strong connection to Chinese literary and cultural

traditions, and he has composed the majority of his work in Chinese. Yet he has held

French citizenship since 1997 and has not returned to China since he left in 1987. The

influence of the Western cultural heritage, in particular the literary styles and artistic

philosophy of the French tradition, is easily visible in Gao's writing. He has even written

a few plays in French, and is generally regarded by his European audience as a French

writer. As K.K. Tam notes, the awarding of the Nobel Prize highlighted a confusion of

identity for Gao, too. There is an obvious difference, however, in the way that each

writer's work has been viewed in relation to his national background. For Beckett,

Harrington points out, "There was no parallel confusion [...] in regard to the sort of work

1 Quoted in Harrington, John. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991, p. 1.
2 Harrington, p. 1.

1
for which Beckett was being honored."^ The Swedish Academy promoted the uplifting

aspects of Beckett's writing by awarding him the prize "for his writing, which - in new

forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”斗

Meanwhile, the international press expressed more skepticism about the work's

transcendence of the degradation it portrayed. But although the Irishness of the author

might have been in question, as well as the transcendent power of the work, all were

agreed on the universal resonance of the work's themes. When Gao was awarded the

prize, on the other hand, it was "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and

linguistic ingenuity, which has opened up new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.

In this statement, Gao is described both as a universal writer and as a part of the vanguard

of modern Chinese literature. Although the questions Gao raises can be understood

universally, his achievement is not seen as one which opens up new paths for world

literature - despite his residence and citizenship in France, he is still seen as part of the

Chinese tradition.

Although both Beckett and Gao notoriously deny that their work can be

understood to "mean" something in the sense of referring directly to the worlds in which

they lived and wrote, they are distinguished from each other by the fact that the local in

Beckett's work was, from the beginning, seen as unimportant to the overall project, while

Gao has always maintained the adjective "Chinese." The reasons for this are complex,

and I do not propose to offer one simple explanation, but it is a distinction worth

investigating. Actually, the emphasis on questions of language and a supposedly

3 Harrington, p. 2.
4 "Literature 1969." Nobelprize.org. < http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/> 23 July
2008.
5 Press release by the Swedish Academy. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000.” 12 October 2000.
Nobelprize.org. <http://nobelprize.org./nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2000/press.html> 31 July 2008.

2
universal exploration of human experience in Beckett's work is one which has gained

increasing attention in the field of Beckett criticism. This is no doubt due in part to the

upsurge in poststructuralist critics in the decades after Beckett first became popular.

David Pattie describes the various ways in which Beckett criticism has followed major

trends in literary criticism itself, observing that, "especially in the last fifteen years,

[Beckett's] work has become a battleground on which literary critics have contested their

various positions.，,6 In fact, the question of Beckett's Irishness was not lost on Beckett's

original audience. Harrington notes that, "When Waiting for Godot [which brought

Beckett his initial fame], was in its first productions, the matter of its universal and

humanist or local and Irish import was an issue." ^ More than twenty years later, Vivian

Mercier's influential book, Beckett/Beckett was one of the first critical studies to address

the tension between the universal and the local in Beckett's work. Mercier sought to

demonstrate that "Beckett is unique, as we all are, but he has not descended from another

planet" and demonstrated this by addressing the interaction between various dichotomies,

such as Ireland and the world, in Beckett's work. Other books have gone even further to

connect Beckett's writing to his life, such as Eoin O'Brien's The Beckett Country, which

documents the geographical and autobiographical references in Beckett's writing and

Mary Junker's Beckett: The Irish Dimension, which traces the local influences on

Beckett's plays, in particular the Irish and French literary heritages and the Protestant

heritage. In a different but related vein, books such as John Harrington's The Irish

Beckett and David Lloyd's Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial

Moment do not aim directly to trace influences and references, but rather to situate

6 Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge, 2000, p. 103.
1 Harrington, p. 171.
8 Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. x.

3
Beckett in the Irish literary tradition, by looking at the way his work fits into, rather than

leaves behind, recognizable patterns in Irish writing. In the early years of Beckett

criticism, the work of tracing references in the texts to points in the physical or cultural

world of the author was part of an attempt to come to terms with such difficult and

ambiguous texts. Martin Esslin says of the irony: "Inevitably there exists an organic

connection between [Beckett's] refusal to explain his meaning [...] and the critics'

massive urge to supply an explanation."^ Despite a great deal of critical effort to trace and

decipher allusions within the texts, the belief that the trajectory of Beckett's work

encompassed a gradual subsuming of these traceable references to the bare material of

universal human experience remained dominant in Beckett criticism. The resurgence in

the 1990s of books arguing for a connection between Beckett and Ireland demonstrate the

imbalance in critical commentary that prevailed from 1969 to 1989. Peter Boxall explains:

As early at 1977，Vivian Mercier suggests that his sketch o f the national, class and

denominational conditions that underlie Beckett's writing would probably already seem

familiar to his readers. Since at least then, the claim that Beckett's writing emerges from,

and contains a certain nostalgic reference to, a white, male, Protestant, Irish,

impoverished bourgeois culture, is recognised and undisputed by the majority o f his

critics. This residual cultural location, however, is almost always read as a patina, a trace,

or a dash o f local colour, that has no bearing or influence on his universality. When a

biographical or train-spotterish interest is betrayed in the odd cultural details that pepper

Beckett's writing, it is shrouded in anxious caveats that assure the reader that such details

are o f signal unimportance in the wide and empty expanses o f the Beckettian poetic

terrain.'"

9 Esslin, Martin. "Introduction." Ed. Martin Esslin. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965，p. 1.
Boxall, Peter. "Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading." Irish Studies Review 10.2,
2002: 159-170，p. 161.

4
Despite convincing arguments for the grounding of Beckett's writing in a place, time and

culture, it has remained difficult for his critics to find a way of reconciling that fixedness

with the belief that his artistic genius relies on his ability to reach beyond it. In other

words, the local is seen as a threat to the universal.

There are undoubtedly many reasons why Gao has been received differently from

Beckett, but it seems unlikely that his Chineseness has stuck with him simply because he

continues to write in Chinese, or because his works continue to display Chinese cultural

influences. Gao's first recognition as a writer came in Beijing in the early 1980s，when he

was assigned to work as a playwright for the People's Art Theater. At that time, the

literary scene in China was still experimenting with the possibilities and freedoms that

were opened up by the end of the Cultural Revolution and what Merle Goldman calls the

"tacit coalition" that had developed between the intellectuals and the state." When Gao's

plays Alarm Signal and The Bus Stop were first produced, their use of modernist forms

(especially The Bus Stop's affinity to the Theater of the Absurd and Waiting for Godot,

which I will discuss in the next chapter) attracted a lot of attention. When this similarity

to a Western form was added to the plays' abandonment of the strictures of socialist

realism which had dominated Chinese literature since Mao laid out his program for art in

1942，it was enough to ensure that Gao's writing was fully caught up in the tumult of

politics. From the point of view of his non-Chinese audience, however, Gao was the first

to bring avant-garde theater to Beijing. In an article written in 1989 and entitled "The

Myth of Gao Xingjian," Jo Riley and Michael Gissenwehrer wrote that "By means of just

three plays, two kinds of myth have been created around Gao Xingjian." The first myth

“ G o l d m a n , Merle. " A New Relationship Between the Intellectuals and the State in the Post-Mao Period."
An Intellectual History of Modern China. Eds. Leo Ou-fan Lee and Merle Goldman. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.

5
was perpetuated by certain "academic and theatre professionals" as well as members of

the younger generation in China who saw Gao as "the most avant-garde, creative and

stimulating playwright of his time." The second myth was perpetuated by "both China

experts and theatre scholars" in the West, who "have unquestioningly adopted him as 'the

most advanced new dramatist in China in content and form'."'^ Riley and Gissenwehrer

argue that the reality is between these two myths, but even twenty years later Gao's work

remains stuck on one or another of those poles. Unlike Beckett, little attention was ever

paid to "explaining" his works by way of their Chinese influences and references. Most

of his non-Chinese critics have stressed his work's applicability above and beyond the

Chinese context. The work of the critic has not been to restore the local in Gao, but to

bring out the universal. The difference between Gao and Beckett's critical reception,

however, lies in the difficulty of this endeavor. Most of Gao's critics and translators

preface their discussions of his work with biographical and historical information. The

fact that he left China in 1987 to pursue literary and intellectual freedom, his subsequent

renunciation of his Chinese citizenship after the incident in Tiananmen Square in 1989，

and the fact that his works are banned in China are all invoked in order to explain,

paradoxically, why Gao must be seen as an independent writer, working outside the

constraints of nation and history. In particular, biographical information is supplied in

order to emphasize Gao's belief that his writing should be free of politics, free to mean

whatever it might mean, and that the writer may employ different beliefs and ideas at his

leisure without the assumption that he is attempting to say anything concrete about the

world around him. There is a similar impulse here as was detected in the case of

12 Gissenwehrer, Michael and Jo Riley. "The Myth o f Gao Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tam. Soul of Chaos:
Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University o f Hong Kong, 2001，p. 111.

6
Beckett's critics - a desire to understand the impact of outside influences on the

production of the text without trespassing on its potential to transcend those forces. But

the constant repetition of Gao's life story in the process of analyzing his work

undermines the attempt to downplay the connection between the life story and the work,

so that Gao's Chineseness remains much more a part of the public idea of his work than

Beckett's Irishness does.

O f course, Gao is not the first writer for whom it is difficult to dissociate national

background and public perception of the work. In this he joins many other writers who

were born outside of the West.'^ In the critical discussions which have surrounded the

development of the categories of world literature and post-colonial literature and theory,

there has been a recognition of the tension between the wish to understand the connection

between an author's national background and his or her writing and the need to allow the

author to speak of and for different times and places. It often seems to be the case that

writers wish to be free of association with any sort of fixed political, national or cultural

entity while critics tend to reassert those connections in order to better understand the

writer's work. For example, Dennis Walder quotes Nayantara Sahgal's comment that,

“First we were colonials, and now we seem to be post-colonials. So is 'post-colonial' the

new Anno Domini from which events are to be everlastingly measured?" Walder argues

that even though writers who are now generally understood to be "post-colonial" resist

categorizations of their work which they wish (or attempt) to avoid, this does not mean

” 1 recognize that the term "the West" is problematic in that it can refer to a variety o f different groups,
locations or nations depending on how it is employed. In this case, G a o ' s Chinese audience can be
considered to reside primarily in Mainland China (though his works are banned there) and Taiwan. H o n g
K o n g presents a more complicated case, because although G a o ' s works can be read and performed here in
Chinese, the critical approach to his work has often been more closely aligned to Western critical modes o f
thought than those from the Mainland. Outside o f these locations, however, G a o ' s work has been primarily
translated, published, discussed and staged in Europe, North America and Australia, and I will refer to
these places and audiences collectively as "the West."

7
representations of the nation, or of social and cultural conditions, are not present in their

works. As Walder replies to Sahgal:

Yet that residue, that additional layer o f British colonial culture [which Sahgal claims is

only one layer 丨aid upon the many layers o f her Indian consciousness], is there, and it has

shaped the thematic and formal preoccupations o f Sahgal's novels. What she is resisting

is the assumption that this is the only, or indeed always the most important thing to notice

about her w o r k "

According to Walder, writers who originate outside the West but are read in the West,

and writers born or raised in countries which have experienced colonialism, produce

work which cannot escape its own layers of historical and cultural influence. However, a

recognition of those layers is not necessarily a limitation of the possible readings of the

work.

If this is the case, then it becomes necessary to ask why so many of Beckett's

critics have not found those layers of history and culture to be important to understanding

his work, while Gao's critics have found it necessary to highlight those layers in order to

encourage the reader to look beyond them to the new ideas his works seek to create. It

would be simplistic and wishful thinking to believe that this is simply because Ireland is

neither non-Western nor post-colonial enough to merit this sort of analysis. The question

of whether Irish writers do or do not fit into the category of "post-colonial" has already

been explored in the context of James Joyce's writing, and Ireland has been found to

occupy a unique, but not insignificant, place in post-colonial studies” O f course Ireland

14 Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998，p. 2.
15 See for instance Attridge, Derek and Marjorie Howes (eds.) Semicolonial Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000; Cheng, Vincent. Joyce, Race and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995; Gillespie, Michael Patrick (ed.) European Joyce Studies 11: James Joyce and the Fabrication of an

8
was colonized by the British, and suffered the same kinds of loss of culture and language

as many other colonized countries. At the same time, many theorists have argued that

Ireland's participation in the building of the British Empire, as well as the cultural

affinities between Ireland and Britain (in comparison to other colonized cultures), mean

that Ireland was in a sense a semi-colony. Beckett's own background, of course,

complicated matters. He was a Protestant Irishman, but lived in what is now the Republic.

He attended Trinity College, Dublin, but left Ireland for Europe in his mid-twenties. The

result, as Mercier suggests, was that while Joyce had a wealth of Irish material to work

with, "Joyce may never have even suspected that, while his own hoard of Irish

knowledge and feeling was virtually inexhaustible, Beckett had brought from his

carefully insulated suburban community little that was usable and durable."'^ Specifically

Irish concerns seemed to gain little sympathy from Beckett. Furthermore, Beckett's

immense and erudite knowledge of the Western literary and philosophical traditions has

ensured that he is viewed as firmly grounded in that tradition, rather than as an outsider

entering into it. Yet even if the influence of colonialism on Beckett's Irish sensibility is

relatively small, it would not make him the first post-colonial writer to have emerged

from a position of privilege and distance from the harsher experiences of colonialism. In

fact, postcolonial theorists, especially those associated with the Subaltern Studies group,

have spent a good deal of time thinking about the effect of privilege on the marginality of

the writer. But rather than reverse the hierarchy and privilege the under-privileged, it

makes more sense to see every writer as possessing some sort of privilege, and to be

aware of how it affects the thinking and writing of the author. This is something similar

Irish Identity. Atlanta: Roldopi, 2001; Nolan, Emer. James Joyce and Nationalism, London: Routledge,
1995.
丨6 Mercier 1977，p. 37.

9
to what Gayatri Spivak advocates as "unlearning our privilege as our loss."^^ It is an

understanding of the effects of privilege which does not deny anyone's right to speak, but

also respects the fact that each person's perspective limits what he or she can say, and

that one's perspective can always be supplemented by someone else's. While it may be

unusual to hear Beckett referred to as a post-colonial writer, therefore, one must be able

to identify the reason for the strangeness of such a characterization. If it is only because

Ireland is not usually thought of as post-colonial, that is hardly a solid enough reason.

Most likely it has more to do with the discomfort critics feel when associating him too

closely with potentially political readings.

For Gao, whose relationship with his nation of birth is so strained, the impact of

the West on his writing also differs from that of most post-colonial writers. As a foreign-

born writer living in the West, he is burdened with the assumption that he has something

to say about China, and the weight of this burden is not something he shares with other

post-colonial writers. In the late and early centuries, China was a semi-colonial

state. It was part of an informal empire, in that certain parts of China and Chinese cities

were possessed by foreign powers, while the idea of China loomed large in the

imaginations of Western imperial nations. At the same time, the arrival of Western ideas

and technologies had a huge impact on Chinese culture and thought.'^ Yet Gao was born

17 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.

Ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1990，p. 8.
181 will not digress to elaborate on this impact here, but it is important to note that the dislocation o f old
customs, ideas and ways o f life which resulted from the massive importation o f Western ideas into China
(in many instances by choice) was just as i f not more damaging to the Chinese cultural tradition as it was to
formally colonized cultures such as India. Tu Wei-Ming argues, "Although China has never been subjected
to the kind o f comprehensive colonial rule experienced by India, China's semicolonial status severely
damaged her spiritual life and her ability to tap indigenous symbolic resources. Chinese intellectuals have
been much more deprived than their Indian counterparts ever were. While Indian intellectuals have
continued to draw from the wellsprings o f their spiritual life despite two centuries o f British colonialism,
the Western impact fundamentally dislodged Chinese intellectuals from their Confucian haven" (Tu Wei-

10
in 1940, in the middle of the War of Resistance Against Japan, so he never really

experienced semi-colonialism firsthand. When he first began publishing his works,

Chinese intellectuals were still very concerned with the potential for Western influences

to override indigenous traditions, but Gao's education at the Beijing Foreign Languages

Institute, and his subsequent decision to move to France permanently, make it difficult to

argue that he would sympathize with the nationalist and sometimes xenophobic concerns

held by some Chinese intellectuals at that time. Like Beckett, Gao also consistently

denies that his work has any connection to political or national concerns. In addition, his

background is just as problematic if one wanted draw direct connections between his

writing and his nationality in the way that critics often do with post-colonial writers. As

an attempt to escape rough politicization of Gao's work, for example in the form of

Frederic Jameson's "national allegory," Gao's critics will often identify him as a

participant in world literature, a seemingly neutral and universal category. But that

decision is made as the result of an inability to reconcile the local and the universal.

"World literature" is a sort of no-man's land, but it remains one in which the Chinese

influence on the writing cannot be brushed aside (hence Torbjorn Loden's categorization

of Gao's novel Soul Mountain as "world literature with Chinese characteristics"). In short,

Beckett is read as if he has nothing important to say about Ireland, or as if what he has to

say about it is not essential to his writing, while Gao is read as if what he has to say about

China (whether he says it in his creative or non-fiction writing) has an effect on his

writing. Gao cannot avoid "speaking as" a Chinese writer.

ming. "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center." The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being
Chinese Today. Ed. Tu Wei-ming. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994，p. 2).

11
 As I will discuss further in the next chapter, when Gao first published his

influential scholarly book Preliminary Exploration Into the Art of Modern Fiction, and

when his plays were first performed in Beijing, he incited a strong debate about the

proper form and purpose of modernism in Chinese literature. Several well-known writers

spoke out in support of his work, and even though his plays were eventually banned and

he was criticized by the government in the “oppose spiritual pollution" campaign, the

plays were received with much enthusiasm. When he won the Nobel Prize in 2000,

however, his reception on the mainland was not very favorable. Julia Lovell describes the

complex causes for the negative response to the announcement of the first Chinese-born

Nobel laureate for literature. One of the strongest was the sense that since Gao was an

exiled writer and since whatever recognizable references to China his work contained

were always those to a China of the past, he was not a true representative of Chinese

literature. Likewise, he was seen as an inappropriate choice for the first Chinese writer to

win the prize. Lovell quotes one anonymous critic's response in an interview as follows:

I don't believe he represents China, the problem is that the world thinks he represents

China. I f he was a good writer, we wouldn't need to raise the issue o f whether he

represents China or not. But because he's not good enough, and he's taken to represent

China, I find it all very strange - 1 don't see why he should represent China.''

There are several ideas being expressed here. The fact that Gao is not Chinese enough to

represent China is less important to this critic than the fact that his non-Chinese audience

thinks he is representatively Chinese. Once Gao's writing becomes a part of world

literature, it is not only his Western readers that expect him to speak for China, but it is

also his Chinese readers. As Lovell describes it, "The desire expressed by contemporary

19 Lovell, Julia. " G a o Xingjian, the Nobel Prize and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath o f the
Nobel Prize 2000”. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14.2, 2002: 1-50，p. 30.

12
poets for a literature rendered universal and independent of the national political unit by

the artistic power of its fictionality is juxtaposed with their objections to the currency in

the West of an 'incorrect' Chinese reality. [...] Writers are anxious for international

recognition both as creative writers and as acute chroniclers o f the Zeitgeist o f

contemporary Chinese society."

A third problematic issue being expressed by the critic in the quotation above is

the idea that Gao is not "good enough" to represent China to the world, and that if he

were good enough, the issue of representation would not matter at all. It would seem that

a contemporary Chinese writer could either represent a more realistic, or representative,

picture of China to the world, or, if his work was aesthetically superior, then the question

of reference would slowly disappear into the background. In fact, this second option is

exactly how Beckett is viewed, as a writer who is so "good" that his nationality is

inconsequential. What this critic's comment leads one to ask is what kind of writing

makes a writer "good enough" to lose the burden of representing (or misrepresenting)

China?

This is exactly the sort of question that Jameson is asking in his much-criticized

article, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital." Jameson questions

the idea that only works which deal with the question of "subjectivity" and avoid the

question of the political are worthwhile in the eyes of the Western canon. Much of the

reason non-Western texts, (which he refers to as Third-World for lack of a better term),

are dismissed by Western readers as "not as good as" their own tradition's masterpieces

is because of the sense that the moment politics enters art, it becomes something less,

something more distant, more "other." O f course, while Jameson's larger project of

20 Lovell, p. 35-6.

13
formulating a political reading of texts of world literature that enhances, rather than

detracts from, their greatness is understandable and necessary, his suggestion that, "All

third-world texts are necessarily [...] what I will call national allegories" has

understandably elicited a great deal of criticism.^' Critics such as Zhang Longxi, for

example, take issue with the way that Jameson's formulation subsumes individual

expression of subjectivity to a broader national narrative. In the field of Chinese literary

studies, the critic Liu Kang takes a similar line as Jameson, arguing that a writer's

attempt to counter Maoist politicization of art with an art-for-art's-sake aestheticism is

itself a political move. While this may be the case, Zhang stresses that what is at stake in

such an argument is not a matter of textual interpretation, but the very freedom of the

writer. He says,

I am perfectly willing to see the viability o f [Jameson's and Kang's] views, but when we

consider the specific situation o f Chinese literature and criticism, depoliticizing in the

sense o f setting literature and literary studies free from the ideological control o f the state,

at the present at least, seems to me a more effective strategy than endorsement o f

politicization. It is also from such a critical position that I propose to reconsider the

problem o f "subjectivity" as a still meaningful theoretical problem in C h i n a ?

Zhang's point here is not to be taken lightly. Without distinguishing between intellectual

and public discourse, it becomes difficult to understand if the "politics" one is ascribing

to these texts is that of the academic world or totalitarian governments.

Especially in the discussion of Gao's works, I agree that given the political and

social realities of China at the time Gao was writing (both during the times when he lived

21 Jameson, Frederic. "Third-World Literature in the Era o f Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15’ 1986:
65-88，p. 69.
22 Zhang Longxi. Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998，p. 149.

14
in China and since), it is an ethical obligation for the reader or critic to allow him the

opportunity to make this type of claim to absolute freedom as a writer. As David

Weisberg describes in Chronicles of Disorder: Samuel Beckett and the Cultural Politics

of the Modern Novel, Beckett, too, emerged as a writer during the 1930s and 1940s, when

all artists were expected to choose between "committed" and aestheticist art. That

decision overrode all other artistic decisions, and Weisberg argues that we must

recognize that Beckett's decision to choose neither side was a conscious effort to think

his way beyond the aesthetics/politics division. Through my discussion of two works by

Gao and two works by Beckett, I will return to these works' exploration of the problem

of subjectivity. In the process, I will also argue that these works have effects in the world

that could broadly be called political. In doing so, I am not suggesting that these complex

and multi-layered works should be stripped down to a simple political message.

Ultimately, I read Jameson's article as an attempt to expand the range of books

considered to be part of "the canon," and as a suggestion that instead of seeing Third-

World texts as requiring separate standards of judgment (thus setting them forever apart

from the great works of Western literature), readers might instead expand their idea of

what is "good enough" to be included. To do so, we must realize that the standard of

aesthetic independence which we expect of great works is not necessarily universal, but

only one idea of what makes a work "good enough" to stand apart. The problem with

Jameson's article lies in its suggestion that the texts he examines are ultimately "about"

something else, something non-textual. By ascribing a referential political function to

literary texts, Jameson reinscribes a "hard" politics into Third-World literature. This

gesture is precisely what Beckett's critics argue is the danger of politicizing his work. In

15
order to find a political message in Beckett's work, they stress, we must identify features

in Beckett's radical negativity as somehow subversive, as referring to something. For

example, Leslie Hill argues that if representation (either political or discursive), has the

potential for violence, then:

The implications for any political reading o f Beckett are not insignificant. For what they

suggest is that to address the political dimension o f Beckett's work by endeavouring to

translate the author's writing into the ready-made terms o f an established political

discourse is to do little more, in fact, than to reiterate a gesture o f v i o l e n c e ,

I will attempt to demonstrate below that there may be an alternative to the suggestion that

violence must be resisted with violence, and that the question of the political necessarily

divides representation into its political (parliamentary) and discursive (creative) forms.

My political reading of Gao's and Beckett's texts will look at the way they

dramatize difference and engage with key questions (rather than just pointing at them). In

this understanding, the political is much more than a clunky invasion of the physical

world into the aesthetic realm of the text. I shall set aside the question of what that

physical world is or means outside of our understanding of it in the text. In doing so, I

follow along with Marston Anderson's choice to suspend “intractable epistemological

questions" in his discussion of realism in modern Chinese literature, in favor of

examining "the act of representation as a kind of intellectual labor (or, in linguistic terms,

as a motivated speech-act) whose characteristic traces may be discovered in the text." In

Anderson's terms, “[t]he real may, at least provisionally, be viewed simply as an effect of

the fiction.，’24 Anderson divides the realist work into two levels, that of "'objective'

23 Hill, Leslie. “ ‘ U p the Republic!': Beckett, Writing, Politics". MLN 112.5, 1997: 909-928, p. 910.
24 Anderson, Marston. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period. Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1990, p. 7.

16
social representation" and that of "self-conscious allegory." The idea of realist writing as

self-conscious allegory moves beyond the mimetic nature of Jameson's national allegory

to a level of intellectual labor, to writing about writing, and the process of creating a

dynamic and changing literary environment. These texts, Anderson argues, may be

talking about something in the world outside of the writing, but they are also doing

something, in that they are creating new realities. Although the texts I will discuss here

are not part of the realist tradition, they are as much about the process of writing and the

nature and function of literature as they are about something in the non-textual world. It

is in the interaction between these two levels that I locate the political in Beckett and

Gao's writing. I find this sense of the political the most radical, because as these texts

create spaces of difference and tension between opposing concepts (local and universal,

word and world), the reader is forced to rethink the assumed incommensurability of these

binaries. In the ebb and flow between similarity and difference, these texts help us to

imagine a way to move beyond dichotomies, even if they do not "show" us how to do so.

Furthermore, my notion of the political is one which helps reconcile the problems

of reference and representation which these texts present. After all, these texts do nothing

if not complicate the notion of artistic representation as a mimetic process of describing

the world. In the first chapter, I will discuss Gao's The Bus Stop and Beckett's Waiting

for Godot’ both of which deny any attempt to rationally explain what is happening on the

stage, and call attention to the gap between the structured nature of narrative and the

impossibly unstructured nature of the reality of our experience of the world. In the second

and third chapters, I examine Soul Mountain and The Unnamable in more depth. I will

refer to both as novels because they clearly develop out of that narrative form, but in their

17
radical departure from the realist project, they have few of the traditional characteristics

of the novel form, such as plot and character development or conflict and resolution. Soul

Mountain explores the predicament of the writer, existing in language while trying to

explore human psychology and experience. The Unnamable moves from pure writing to

pure speaking, where all that is "real" is the speaking voice, and the impossibility of ever

knowing the source or meaning of the words being spoken is the sole (painful) presence

of the text. I will argue that all four texts present a problem of representation, and that

this very fact is the first indication that they do not successfully transcend local reference

to address universal concerns, nor are they stuck in a rigidly political reality. The problem

of representation in all these texts is precisely the result of doing two things at once. In

the first chapter, I question whether the different interpretations which Gao's and

Beckett's plays receive can be attributed to socio-political factors or if there is a

fundamental difference between the two plays. By ending with the possibility each play

presents for a way out of the static repetition of its action, I lead into my exploration in

the second and third chapters of each author's attempt to look beyond the problems of

language which he explores in depth. In order to show how Beckett and Gao try to work

their way past the endlessly repeating play of opposites，I employ a model of writing

which complicates long-held notions of writing as mimesis, and chooses to see the

product of writing as itself a process.

In order to understand how these works challenge notions of writing from their

own traditions, we must first look more closely at the way philosophical ideas about

representation affect traditional ideas about literature. In Beckett's writing, the relentless

attack on the assumed ability of language to represent the world objectively is a response

18
to the Western rational tradition, stretching all the way back to Plato's belief that man

was capable of objectively judging the world, so long as the affective power of poetry did

not interfere. Many critics have identified Beckett's assault in particular on Descartes,

who initiated the division between subject and object, the self and the world, assuming

that once the mind was separated from subjective experience, rational truth could be

ascertained. In denying an objective or rational answer to the question of what is going on

in his texts, Beckett suggests that the subjective experience is, in fact, the only one we

have to go on when living in the world. But unlike a modernist, for whom language

would be the saving grace in the face of the threat to self and subjectivity, Beckett's art is

famously one of failure, where there is no longer any hope for transcendence or recovery

through language. As a post-war writer, Beckett can no longer see art's power as

anything but destructive, nor can he see the progress of modernity as anything but

threatening. Yet he does not give up, and he does not turn back. For Gao's work, it is

important to note that representation, in the sense of mimesis, has never been a problem

for Chinese aesthetics or philosophy as it has been in the West. As Anderson points out,

since ancient times, writing was viewed as the final phase in the "coming-to-be" of the

world. Writing and consciousness were indivisible, and the writer was merely a medium

for the expression of "the way of nature." The most important characteristic of a writer,

therefore, was to be open-minded for the Way (the Dao) to pass through his mind.

Anderson writes:

The literary work, a manifestation o f human consciousness and o f universal pattern, can

never be reduced to a mere shadow o f the real world, as it was for Plato; its ontological

sufficiency is never open to doubt. Chinese aesthetic philosophers thus concerned

themselves little with the mimetic relationship o f art object to real world but instead

19
 directed their attention to the affective and didactic capacities o f art, its power either to

awaken in readers the range o f emotions that motivated the work's composition or to

reveal to readers the network of'principles' that were thought to support both the natural

and social w o r l d s ”

In this tradition, art was valued for is affective power, not banished or feared for its

ability to sway the emotions and skew our rational and clear observation of the real. O f

course, it is difficult to trace separately the Chinese and Western influences on Gao's

writing. But in his discussions of the problem of writing and its distance from the

subjective world of experience Gao demonstrates concerns which are shared with

Western writers (like Beckett) and also display the drastic change in traditional beliefs

that were caused by rapid modernization in China. The coming of the West and

modernity meant, for Gao, a fundamental dissociation from the wellspring of traditional

culture and philosophies, and Gao's writing is a constant effort to reach back to those

sources. At the same time, like Beckett, he is not entirely modernist in that he no longer

holds any hope that such a return to unity will ultimately be successful. He views the

events of the twentieth century (in this case, events such as the Cultural Revolution), as

having drastically severed writing from its previous ability to rejuvenate and create. His

poetics, too, is one of weakness.

Even though Beckett and Gao come from different philosophical and cultural

traditions with different ideas about language and the process of writing, all four texts

ultimately remain ambivalent towards representation. In none of them is it possible to

determine conclusively whether they are about something outside, beneath or beyond

language (be it the physical world, human consciousness, or something else) or whether

25 M . Anderson, p. 13.

20
writing itself takes precedence as the dominating referent of the text. Questions are

constantly raised, but never answered, in these works. Because of their ambivalence to

representation, as I will demonstrate, these works call our attention to representation as a

problem - in fact, they dramatize the problem of representation, rather than simply

engaging in it, or talking about it. The word representation^^ contains an inherent duality

- i t may mean either artistic representation, as in the creating of an image of someone or

something, or it may mean political representation, the act of speaking for someone or

something. In a way, this duality of representation is common sense. We know from

Benedict Anderson, for example, that the idea of a nation — of China, for example - is

never the fixed entity it appears to be, but is rather an "imagined community.”27 When

speaking of what Gayatri Spivak calls "masterwords" - "the people," "the worker," and

"woman" are others - we are always constructing an image of a group or community

which is much more unified than the diversity which characterizes the actual experience

of being in that group. Likewise, Spivak says, one can never speak from a particular

position without speaking for others who share the same position. So while we may

respect Beckett's and Gao's claims that they have nothing to say, that they speak only for

themselves, it is impossible to understand their words without orienting them in reference

to something which they are not (in other words, without placing them under some

masterword category or another). No writer, in fact, stands on an aesthetic high ground,

from which he or she can criticize others' work for being political.

26 The word "representation" carries very similar meanings in French as in English. The Chinese language
does not have one word that covers both senses o f "representation" in English, but in my understanding, the
words which are most nearly equivalent to artistic and political representations are biao xian and dai biao
[ 表 現 and 代表]，respectively. Both o f these words contain the character biao[表]which connotes the
external, as in "to show or express" or "a model or example." The connotation o f the external helps to
illustrate the way that two seemingly different ideas in English are connected in meaning.
27 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism.
London: Verso, 1991.

21
 At the same time, in saying that these two writers are fundamentally speaking for

a group or groups, we do not need to place the burden of representation on their shoulders

as a conscious process. The importance of Spivak's understanding of representation is not

simply that it calls our attention to the way that artistic representation always implies

political representation of some sort. Conversely, what Spivak helps us to see is that

speaking for a group always involves an act of fiction - the creation of an image or a

unified idea out of multiplicity and difference. There is no way, therefore, that anyone

can objectively speak for, or about, a group. Just as a photograph is never an accurate

picture of an entire scene but always captures one perspective, claims to represent the

truth about a group or a nation forget that we are always speaking for others, and

constructing an image of them which mirrors our own perspective. Spivak says,

It is not a solution, the idea o f the disenfranchised speaking for themselves, or the radical

critics speaking for them; this question o f representation, self-representation, representing

others, is a problem. O n the other hand, we cannot put it under the carpet with demands

for authentic voices; we have to remind ourselves that, as we do this, we might be

compounding the problem even as we are trying to solve it. A n d there has to be a

persistent critique o f what one is up to, so that it doesn't get all bogged down in this

homogenization [...] I think as long as one remains aware that is it a very problematic

field, there is some h o p e ?

Whether they set out to do so or not, both Beckett and Gao tell one version of the story of

their experience - of their nations, of their times - but no one can criticize that truth as

less "representative" than any other. In Gao's case, because the country he is representing,

in both senses, is not part of the mainstream experience of his non-Chinese readership,

the split between representative responsibilities is much more apparent than it is for

28 Spivak, p. 63.

22
Beckett. But once we look at the inner workings of both authors' texts, we see that as

they question language's ability both to mean something in relation to itself and to

express something about the world, these texts are dramatizing the problem of

representation.

Another post-colonial critic who, like Spivak, emphasizes interpretation and

theory as a process is Homi K. Bhabha, who no longer even speaks of the representation

of the nation, but of its narration. In his book The Location of Culture, Bhabha suggests

that we abandon ocular metaphors for the very reasons we have seen: thinking about

writing as representing something, thinking about entities such as "the nation" or "the

people" as having an image, requires uniformity and freezes what is an ongoing process

into a single moment. Bhabha's work is very useful in theorizing the way that a literary

work may contain the potential to imagine and produce new political realities, regardless

of whether the author intended to say or do anything in the course of his or her writing.

He writes not only about post-colonial writers, but also about marginals, migrants, and

minorities, privileging all of them as uniquely positioned to write the national narrative,

and I will make use of his ideas in my readings of Beckett and Gao in the following

chapters. As I have discussed above, neither Beckett nor Gao can be solidly categorized

as "post-colonial," and neither was the sort of economically marginal person that the

word "migrant" calls to mind. Both chose to leave their countries of birth (though later

events meant that Gao became permanently exiled from his). But regardless of the degree

of choice and privilege afforded each writer, their existence on the margins of two

societies (that of their birth and that of France or, more broadly, Europe) creates a

distance which affords them a unique perspective on both. Bhabha formulates a concept

23
of what he calls "nation as narration," in which the nation's representation through

language (which, since there is no tangible entity called the nation outside of its

representation, is all we have to go on) is fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand,

nations are represented as Anderson's imagined communities: they "always loom out of

an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless f u t u r e . T h e i r force

as ideology stems from their appearance of having always-already existed, despite the

material and historical circumstances that give rise to the nation. This aspect of narrating

the nation is pedagogical because it is inherited by the members of its community in a

stable, unchangeable form, and in order to continue its project of homogeneity, it

necessitates a certain forgetting of the forces at work in its composition. On the other

hand, in order for this pedagogical narration to continue to perpetuate the myth of the

unified nation, it must be reasserted again and again. Bhabha calls this second aspect of

narrating the nation performative, borrowing from several theories of performativity. The

ambivalence of the national narrative results from the coexistence of these two types of

narration. He summarizes the tension between the two as follows:

The scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs o f a

coherent national culture, while the very act o f the narrative performance interpellates a

growing circle o f national subjects. In the production o f the nation as narration there is a

split between the continuist, accumulative temporality o f the pedagogical, and the

repetitious, recursive strategy o f the performative. It is through this process o f splitting

that the conceptual ambivalence of modem society becomes the site o f writing the

nation?^

29 B. Anderson, p. 12.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004，p. 209.

24
Bhabha's temporal model helps us to see that as an image of wholeness is repeated over

time, the repetition is never a "return of the same," but always involves a slight difference.

In these slight differences, these spaces in-between, we see that the nation is much more

layered and complex than it appears. Likewise, writing about culture, politics or history

that enacts their temporal process of continually becoming, rather than standing outside

and representing these ideas, will be able to call attention to their complexity in a unique

way.

Those who write on the margins of society, whether because of their location or

other reasons, are best positioned, says Bhabha, to recognize the gaps in the smooth and

continuous repetition of the pedagogical. The lived experience of the marginal writer is

that of the gaps and disconnects that make up the daily life of the nation. For Bhabha, the

position of the in-between is one which is most tenuous, but also holds the most potential.

In writing the narrative of the in-between space, marginal writers open up interpretive

gaps which may later be filled with new narratives. Significantly, this is not a conscious

process of planned resistance; it is one which happens gradually, in almost imperceptible

intervals, but is nonetheless powerful. In the chapters that follow, I will trace the many

layers of in-betweeness which exist in the four texts I have chosen. By writing from this

multi-layered space of the in-between, these texts put seemingly dichotomous concepts in

dialogue with one another, refusing to settle on one or another option. This back-and-

forth movement is repetitive, but not monotonous, for in its unpredictable movement we

begin to see the potential for a third space, beyond the poles of incommensurable

opposites. I will argue that this movement, this process of writing, is the space of the

political in both Beckett and Gao.

25
 Chapter 1

When Homi Bhabha describes the process of "narrating" or "writing" the nation,

he is not only talking about the writing of fiction. For Bhabha, by thinking about the

nation as something written, as part of a never-ending process of becoming, rather than as

something which is there, solid and unchangeable, we can better understand the

complexities and contradictions at the heart of the modern nation. Of course writers of

literature are a major part of the national narration, and this thesis is only concerned with

two literary writers, but Bhabha argues that anyone living on the borderlines of the nation

is also a part of this process. To explain how this is so, he uses another metaphor of

language: translation. Postcolonials, marginals, migrants, and minorities all participate in

a process of translating languages and cultures, and just as a translator is acutely aware of

the mismatch between words and things 一 a gap acutely felt when meaning is lost in

translation - marginal people have the potential to be the most attuned to the mismatch

between the pedagogical narration and the reality of the nation. Without knowing two

languages, and recognizing the spaces between them, one is not able to translate from one

to the other. Similarly, Bhabha says, “it is living on the borderline of history and

language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the

differences between them into a kind of solidarity."^' Both Samuel Beckett and Gao

Xingjian made France their home after leaving their nations of birth, and the French

language and culture was the pathway through which they achieved much of their

notoriety as writers. Both studied French literature and initially worked as translators, but

more than that, their experiences translating cultures gave them exactly the kind of

31 Bhabha, p. 244.

26
perspective on the reality of national, cultural and political life that Bhabha stresses

challenges all of us to rethink our understanding of communities and cultures.

Both Beckett and Gao have made strong statements in their limited discussions of

their writing advocating that their work not be read as having only one meaning, or

referring to one thing or idea. In their eagerness to respect this position, both authors'

critics have rushed to abstract their readings of Beckett's and Gao's texts, separating

them from such concrete things as influences and references. In place of political or

localized discussions of their texts, criticism of both authors has tended toward formalism,

emphasizing the universal reach of these texts' explorations of abstract notions such as

"the self or "society". As I have begun to describe in the Introduction, I am not

interested in dismantling these arguments, but in complicating them by suggesting that

the local need not be abandoned for fear of constraining or stifling the text. My notion of

marginality is one which takes into account the presence of the local in the text (and

therefore does not entirely abstract it from the circumstances of its composition) but at

the same time is does not limit the text to those local influences and implications. By

examining the way that marginality (of the author, of the text, of the characters) calls

attention to the gaps and discontinuities that make up our daily life, we may better

understand the way these texts make use of the tension between local reference and

universal significance. Bhabha's description of the national narration as being split

between the pedagogical and the performative is one which refuses to ascribe definite

meanings to texts, but sees them as constantly engaging and resisting different

understandings of truth and history. He writes:

This double-writing or d\ssQm\-nation, is not simply a theoretical exercise in the internal

contradictions of the modem liberal nation. [...] The liminal figure o f the nation-space

27
 would ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical

authority for themselves. This is because the subject o f cultural discourse - the agency o f

a people - is split in the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contest o f narrative

authority between the pedagogical and the performative " (212)

In this chapter, I will look closely at the two plays which brought each writer to the initial

attention of the literary world. Both Beckett's Waiting/or Godot and Gao's The Bus Stop

are, among other things, plays which make use of ambiguity to deny any attempt to

assign one meaning to the action of the drama. Written at pivotal points in both authors'

careers, these plays are a good entry point into the impact of marginality on both writers'

work, and are good test cases for my political reading of their writing.

Before I continue, however, I would like to make a comment about my use of

translations. In Beckett's case, much has been written about Beckett's major works,

which were written in French and translated by the author later on. Because of the case of

self-translation, and because this self-translation was often also a revision of sorts, most

of Beckett's critics agree that both the English and French versions must be considered

as authoritative in their own right. Just as the translation cannot stand alone from the

original, the original is altered by the translation. For this reason, and following along

with the practice of Beckett's English-language critics, who generally only quote from

the French in order to discuss a difference or discrepancy between the two versions, I will

quote primarily from the English version of Waiting for Godot, and solely from the

English version of The Unnamable in Chapter Three. When dealing with Gao's texts,

however, I have chosen to include the original Chinese in footnotes. Although this is not

often done, I find the translations to be lacking in many instances (through no fault of the

Bhabha, p. 212.

28
translators, but rather because of the greater loss of meaning and effect that comes from

translating Chinese into English). In The Bus Stop, the use of local slang and the humor

would often be lost. In Soul Mountain, the choice of language, the rhythm and sound of

the writing, as well as the effect of Gao's sentence structure, can all be appreciated only if

the original is included. In order to preserve the flow of this English-language thesis,

however, I have kept the original in footnotes.

I will begin by considering Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, a play which

was first published in France in 1952, followed by its first performance in Paris in 1953.

Beckett's own English translation, Waiting for Godot, was published in 1955, in the same

year of the play's first performance in London. Godot^^ was written during the same

period as the three novels, Molloy, Malone Meurt and L'Inmmable, a period which

Beckett himself described as a "frenzy of writing.，’34 Since the play and the three novels

were the first major works published in French by this Anglo-Irish writer, it is

understandable that these works raised interesting questions about the location of the

setting and the cultural or national background of the characters. Since Godot is set in a

place without any visible character - the only description is ‘‘A country road. A tree,"

followed by a mention of a "low mound" — and without indication of where in the world

such a place exists, it was assumed to represent any- and everywhere (WG 7-8). The

cosmopolitan naming of the characters — Estragon, Vladimir, Lucky and Pozzo,

suggesting French, Russian, English and Italian origin, respectively - coupled with a lack

“ I n most o f this chapter I will refer to the play in general terms, and because most o f the passages I quote
do not change considerably in meaning between the French and English versions, my comments will
mostly apply to both. I will refer to the play, therefore, as Godot, to take into account both language
versions. The English version will be cited in the text as WG from: Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot.
London: Faber and Faber, 1956, The French version will be cited in footnotes (when necessary) as AG
from: Beckett, Samuel. En Attendant Godot. Paris: Minuit, 1952.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury,
1996, pp. 378 & 358.

29
of the sort of character development expected of drama was likewise assumed to be an

indication that these characters were Everymen. As is well-known, the two heroes of the

play, Vladimir and Estragon, are both waiting for a man called Godot, but they wait

without any certainty about their location or their lives up to this point. They endure the

waiting by filling their time with word games and simple debates, and they feel

entertained by the coming and going of Lucky and Pozzo. But the plot does not develop,

and Godot never comes. Because of the unconventional nature of both the technique and

the subject matter of the play，the initial response to the play was a mixture of admiration

and indignation. According to Beckett's biographer James Knowlson, although reviews

were good and the play had many "distinguished admirers" in French literary and

dramatic circles, there were many who responded with incomprehension, or even anger,

to the play. ^^ Among the play's initial supporters, the play's resistance to traditional

tactics of plot and character development constituted its greatest achievement. In the

often-quoted words of Vivian Mercier, “Its author has achieved a theoretical

impossibility - a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their

seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has

written a play in which nothing happens, twice.

The seemingly universal applicability of the theme of waiting, even when all hope

of a guiding light seems lost, coupled with the stripped-down nature of the play's

aesthetic, contributed to an agreed-upon understanding of the play as a contemplation of

the human condition and the potentially self-effacing questions man encounters when he

Knowlson, p. 387.
36 Mercier, Vivian. "The Uneventful Event." Ed. Cathleen Culotta Andonian. The Critical
Response to Samuel Beckett, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998，p. 95-96.

30
has lost sight of all points of reference and absolute truths. But it did not take discerning

critics to arrive at this conclusion about Godot. As Martin Esslin has famously

documented in his book The Theatre of the Absurd, when "fourteen hundred convicts at

the San Quentin penitentiary" saw a performance of Waiting for Godot on 19 November

1957 by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, "what had bewildered the sophisticated

audiences of Paris, London and New York was immediately grasped by an audience of

convicts.”37 Esslin uses this anecdote as evidence that the group of plays which he terms

the Theatre of the Absurd, and which were still under attack from critics for being

incomprehensible and meaningless, actually “have something to say and cart be

understood.，’38 Over fifty years later, however, critics are no longer questioning whether

the play means anything, but whether a sense of meaning can be produced without the

assumption that the play's meaning depends on the absence of place, time and individual

identity.

In fact, Beckett's critics have always been interested in tracing the many historical

and biographical influences on his texts. In Godot, the experience of waiting and filling

up time, as well as that of witnessing the horrific conditions of the master-slave

relationship (here personified by Pozzo and Lucky) can be attributed to Beckett's

experiences both in Ireland and in Europe before and during World War Two. In recent

years, however, critics have tried to connect Beckett's texts more closely to Ireland. Two

examples are O'Brien's The Beckett Country, which "shows that Beckett's plays are not

based on the no-man's land of fiction, but on his observations and lasting impressions of

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd: Third Edition. London: Penguin, 1980，p. 19.
38 Esslin 1980’ p. 21.

31
life in his native c o u n t r y , a n d Mary Junker's own book, Beckett: The Irish Dimension,

which traces the Irish sources of locations, language and symbolism in Beckett's plays.

More than simply tracing points of reference to the physical world in Beckett's

plays, critics such as Harrington have argued that the most significant heritage of

Beckett's work is not cultural, but literary. He describes the "striking dramatic parallel"

between Godot and W.B. Yeats's Purgatory as well as similarities between Godot and

the work of other Irish dramatists such as J.M. Synge.4° Knowlson also documents many

possible inspirations for the play, both Irish and Western European. He writes:

The play also springs out o f Beckett's Irish background, not simply in the sense that the

English translation contains actual Irish phrases or sentence structures. Estragon,

Vladimir, Pozzo and Lucky have cosmopolitan names. But the world they inhabit -

sleeping in ditches, waiting by the roadside, eating scraps from chicken bones - the

lineage o f the tramps and the less easily defined 'feel' o f the characters (even in French)

is unmistakably Irish. As so often with Beckett, his inspiration is literary: John Millington

Synge's tinkers and beggars. Beckett admitted to feeling a great debt to S y n g e , '

Critical investigations of Godot's heritage all demonstrate that the play does arise out of

both a local, Irish, and more universal, or at least Western European, tradition. Harrington

stresses the point that the importance of Ireland to Beckett's work is not just the source of

scattered place names or linguistic peculiarities. Rather, its influence, through a literary

lineage, can be found on all levels of the play, including the thematic level so long

assumed to be exclusively universal in nature.

This coexistence of two traditions and two possible trajectories of influence

creates just the sort of "dynamic of contraries and oppositions" which Harrington argues

39 Junker, Mary. Beckett: The Irish Dimension. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995，p. 11.
4。Harrington, p. 180-2.
41 Knowlson, p. 379.

32
so many of Beckett's critics find in his work.42 The emphasis on dialectic brings with it

the possibility of shifting between two positions, and two powerful ways of interpreting

Beckett's work. Perhaps surprisingly，however，although it has always been so obvious to

critics that Godot engages in questions both Irish and European, local and universal, the

move from this recognition to an understanding of the play as having some political

import (in any sense) has been very tentative. I will keep coming back to this issue, but it

does seem that Adorno's defense of Beckett's politics (using Fin de Par tie/Endgame as

his example) as a "literary representation of a static c o n d i t i o n , i s the only formulation

which has any resilience. Adorno argues that the reality of contemporary art is the

recognition that art cannot reconcile subjectivity with the world of objects, and that

writing like Beckett's is political because it refuses to capitulate to the temptation of

realism. I will return to possibility of glimpsing a way beyond the binaries of art/reality,

global/local, political/apolitical in Beckett in my discussion of The Unnamable. For the

time being, I will use the comparison with Gao Xingjian's play to examine how the static

condition of Godot is also political in the sense that it opens up space for change, even if

it does not provide the slightest clue about how that change might be possible.

It may be surprising that it was not until the 1990s that Beckett's critics began to

use the word "political" in conjunction with his major work, and even then they did so

only hesitantly. Yet Gao Xingjian, whose works avoid being pinned down as much as

Beckett's, has always found his work both lauded and derided for its political

implications. Gao's play, The Bus Stop {Che zhan 车站]，was written in 1983，three years

after his appointment as a writer for the Beijing People's Art Theatre. His first play,

42 Harrington, p. 146.
43 From Harrington's discussion of Theodor A d o m o ' s essay, "Trying to Understand Endgame" in
Harrington, p. 182.

33
Alarm Signal [Juedui xinhao 绝X、J1言号],which was written and performed the year before,

was enthusiastically received and "had more than one hundred performances at the

Beijing People's Art 丁heatre.”^^ The Bus Stop was staged as an "experimental" play on a

small stage in the same theatre, and according to Tay, “[t]he play is truly a 'great leap

forward,' for it tries to break away from the realist and socialist-realist traditions of

modern and contemporary Chinese drama by employing, for the first time in the PRC,

certain elements of the Western avant-garde drama, including that of the Theatre of the

Absurd." In the case oiAlarm Signal, "heated discussion was evoked not by the contents,

but by the formal experiment with stage design, lighting, and the abandonment of

illusionism.”45 But The Bus Stop caused controversy both over its experimentation with

Western modes and over its content.

In many ways, The Bus Stop is an appropriation of Beckett's Godot\ like Vladimir

and Estragon, the characters in this play are waiting — in this case for a bus that never

stops for them. Also like the characters in Beckett's play, the characters in The Bus Stop

spend a lot of time talking about leaving, but they never do. Instead, they engage in

pointless debates and wonder about the meaning of life, particularly as the play goes on,

for the longer they wait, the more apparent it is that life, or at least their position in it, is

absurd. Certainly, The Bus Stop is a theatrical experiment which employs some of the

techniques used by Beckett and other playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd. At the

same time, however, it is immediately obvious to anyone reading the play that The Bus

Stop differs markedly from Godot in that it is more directly linked to a recognizable

44 Tay, William. "Avant-Garde Theatre in Post-Mao China: The Bus-Stop by Gao Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tarn.
Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian, Hong Kong: The Chinese University o f Hong Kong,
2001, p. 68.
45 Tay, p, 68.

34
reality and deals directly with social issues. For instance, the characters are named

according to their role in 1980s Chinese suburban society in the 1980s: the Silent Man,

the Old Man, the Young Woman, the Brash Young Man [translated elsewhere as the

Lout], the Man Wearing Glasses (a pseudo-intellectual), the Mother, the Carpenter, and

Manager Ma (a bureaucrat)."*^ They are not tramps, like Vladimir and Estragon, who have

no home or family and no definitive connection to the social world. Despite their

impersonal names, all the characters in The Bus Stop have a purpose for waiting to go

into the city, and they all claim to have other people waiting for them. Unlike Vladimir

and Estragon, who have nowhere else to turn and are waiting to be " s a v e d , t h e

characters in The Bus Stop are forced to wait by unforeseen circumstances; they did not

choose to come to this place to wait. Gao draws on this fact to create much of the humor

in the play, such as when the Mother [做母亲的]repeatedly laments that if she had known

she was going to have so much trouble, she would never have brought such a heavy bag.

The petty disputes that the characters engage in are less obviously intended to pass the

time, and more clearly the result of their frustration at being forced into this position

together.

Moreover, not only are the characters connected to society in a general sense, but

their concerns are also very much of their time. For example, the Man Wearing Glasses

[戴眼镜的]is studying to take the university entrance exam, and he is under great

pressure because in the early 1980s universities were just re-opening after the Cultural

English translations taken from: Gao Xingjian. "The Bus Stop". Trans. Carla Kirkwood Modern
International Drama 28.2 (1995): 7-34.
Intheorigina丨Chinese:沉默的人，大爷，姑娘，傍小子，戴眼镜的，做母亲的，师傅，马主任（119).
From: Gao Xingjian 髙 行 健 . " C h e z h a n 车站”.Shiyue 十 月 No. 3: 119-138.
47 V L A D I M I R : We'll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.
E S T R A G O N : And if he comes?
V L A D I M I R : We'll be saved. (JVG, 94).

35
Revolution and competition for entrance was fierce. Similarly, the Mother lives and

works in the suburbs because residence permits in the city were particularly hard to come

by at that time, but her husband and son live in the city, so she must fight the crowds to

return there every Saturday. Each has individual ambitions which are being thwarted by

endless waiting. In addition, since all of the characters in the play live outside the city,

their frustrations and concerns as they try to reach the city are strongly suggestive of the

struggle of common people to keep up with the economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping

era. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, many of the commentators on Gao's play focused on its

social implications and points of reference rather than on the play's formal

experimentation. While it is true that Gao "was recognized by Mainland drama critics as

one who started experimental theatre on the Mainland，，, 48 and that he was criticized for

his supposed obeisance to a foreign, Western dramatic form, the controversy that

surrounded the play was much more localized.

As K.K. Tarn describes it, both Gao's critics and his supporters understood the

play's value in social terms, whether as a pessimistic commentary on Socialism or as an

optimistic look at social reality. He writes, "The controversy this play aroused, however,

was chiefly on its ideological inclination and challenge to the socialist doctrines of

literature and art rather than on its artistic achievements and innovations, which are

unique among contemporary Chinese plays.，，49 A critic writing at the time of the

controversy in Beijing, He Wen [何闻],takes the generic naming of the characters as a

signal to interpret the play as an allegory. In a particularly vehement critique, he writes:

Y i p , Terry Siu-han. " A Chronology o f Gao Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tarn. Soul of Chaos: Critical
Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University o f Hong Kong, 2001, p. 314.
49 Tam, K . K . "Drama o f Paradox: Waiting as Form and M o t i f in The Bus-Stop and Waiting
for Godot." Ed. K.K. Tam. Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian.
Hong Kong: The Chinese Unviersity o f Hong Kong, 2001, p. 45.

36
“The Bus Stop, while depicting the despair of the would-be passengers, also relates,

through the mouths of its main characters, all kinds of malpractice, various unhealthy

tendencies existing in our society [...] Watching this performance, we are made to feel

that our lives are in total disarray, and that there is hardly any hope or future."^® Godot

was also initially understood allegorically; Gunther Anders wrote in 1954, “All

commentators are agreed on this: that it is aparable.""^^ Yet the various interpretations of

what Godot was a parable of were much more philosophical than those of Gao's play.

Some saw Godot as a stand-in for God and the play as a dramatization of waiting for the

second coming of Christ which might never occur, while others interpreted the nobility of

the main characters as they accepted their fate as an Existentialist metaphor.

The allegorical interpretations of Godot as a parable of a universal experience

give the play a much more far-reaching applicability than is allowed by the insistence that

The Bus Stop is a social commentary. Harry Kuoshu argues that although Godot can be

understood as arising out of a particular social context (that of post-war Europe), this

context does not explain why Godot does not come, so the audience is forced to think

more abstractly about the play's meaning. In The Bus Stop’ on the other hand, Kuoshu

reasons that the audience thinks first of social concerns that would cause the bus not to

come (he points out that in the years before private cars in China, waiting for the bus was

a common source of frustration and anxiety), and second of the ideological implications

of the characters' predicament. He writes, "In the highly politicized and Party-

manipulated culture of the People's Republic of China, the ideological implication of the

He Wen. "Postscript: On Seeing the Play The Bus-stop: He Wen's Critique in the
Literary Gazette." Trans. Chan Sin-wai. Renditions 19/20, 1983: 387-392, p. 387.
51 Anders, GUnther. "Being without Time: O n Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot" Trans, and
Ed. Martin Esslin. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965: 140-151, p. 140.

37
mystery is clear. One may argue that the play suggests a fundamental limit to the Party's

conceptual system, which denies individual initiative and has blocked a diversified access

to meaning in life."^^ This localized viewpoint is not only limited to Gao's Chinese

commentators. Geremie Barme, the play's first translator, writes:

Gao's work does not aim at forcing the audience to confront the half-realized fears and

anxieties o f the human mind. Rather his positivistic view o f contemporary Chinese

society has a definite moral undertone: unite and work together, but be careful not to

neglect the importance and value o f the individual. Gao might be inspired by Beckett and

lonesco, but he is keeping his themes well within the didactic tradition of Ibsen and

Stanislavsky."

Although Barme is not calling for an overtly political reading of the play here (in the

sense in which any artistic position not in line with the Party's doctrine is an act of

political defiance), he is still arguing that the play's primary orientation is socio-political.

Interestingly enough, The Bus Stop was being performed in Europe within a couple of

years of its introduction in Beijing, which would indicate a certain amount of universal

appeal. Yet as we have seen in the Introduction, even as Gao's reputation spread around

the world, his writing continued to be promoted for its ability to say something about

China and Chinese culture. In his own commentaries on his writing, Gao has always

struggled to de-localize his work, and to disconnect it from such straightforwardly socio-

political interpretations.

At such an early stage in Gao's career, long before his decision to leave China, it

may be difficult to argue that he was producing work that self-consciously sought

52 Kuoshu, Harry H. " W i l l Godot come by bus or through a trace? Discussion o f a Chinese
Absurdist Play." Modern Drama 4\ (1998): 461-473, p. 464.
“ B a r m e , Geremie. " A Touch o f the Absurd - introducing Gao Xingjian, and his play The
Bus-stop.” Renditions 19/20, 1983: 373-377’ p.373.

38
applicability or reference outside its own cultural context. At the same time, this does not

mean that one may rest comfortably with the assumption that this play is experimental in

form but not nearly as avant-garde, content-wise, as Godot. To attempt to defend the play

on this count, K.K. Tarn argues that the formal experimentation of The Bus Stop is

actually more central to its themes than the direct social implications:

It is true that in Beckett's play there are a number of philosophical and religious

references, which all tend to point to the basic absurdity o f the human situation. Yet it is

not simply a morality play; nor is it merely an Existential play in the vein o f Sartre or

Camus. It is an absurdist play with its mode o f expression characteristic o f the

abandonment o f the rational approach. In this respect, the sociopolitical references in The

Bus Stop are not as important as the act o f waiting, for what matters is not so much in

where and for what the passengers are waiting as in the fact that they are waiting. I f in

Waiting for Godot what counts is not Godot but the subject of waiting and the hope,

frustration and anxiety thus caused, then in The Bus Stop the bus or the bus company is

only o f secondary importance. Actually, the uniqueness o f both plays lies in their

treatment o f the subject o f waiting, that is, how the devices in structure, characterization

and language are used to present the motif of waiting.^''

Tarn's interpretation of the play is one which downplays the significance of location or

direct references and emphasizes the themes of waiting, absurdity, and hope. Along with

William Tay and Ma Sen in the same collection of essays, Tarn categorizes The Bus Stop

under the heading of the Theatre of the Absurd in order to demonstrate that there is more

to this play than mere social or ideological commentary, and to point out that its formal

experimentation is a thematic, not only technical, choice.

Important as it is to expand the applicability of The Bus Stop, however, I would

argue that defining this play as a Chinese instance of the Theatre of the Absurd is taking

Tam, p. 45.

39
the point a bit too far, or at least boiling the entire play down to a treatise on waiting.

Even if one did not take into account the fact that most of the playwrights associated with

the Theatre of the Absurd, Beckett included, did not wish to be labeled as such, even this

loose categorization is overstating the case for Gao's play. By taking a closer look at why

this is so, it will become clearer why emphasizing the universal potential of this play at

the expense of its local, national referents is, paradoxically, limiting. In this regard, it is

important first to reiterate what is meant by "absurdity" in the context of the Theatre of

the Absurd. In his Introduction to The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin quotes Camus

from The Myth of Sisyphus to explain the definition of absurdity as he understands it:

A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a

universe that is suddenly deprived o f illusions and o f light, man feels a stranger. His is an

irremediable exile, because he is deprived o f memories o f a lost homeland as much as he

lacks the hope o f a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the

actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling o f Absurdity."

For Esslin, although the playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd do not constitute a self-

conscious school, it is not merely a coincidental similarity of subject matter (plays

dealing with the absurdity of the human condition), but the "open abandonment of

rational devices and discursive thought" which unites these playwrights.^^ According to

Esslin, by enacting a complete dissociation from the world, by creating a condition of

alienation rather than just describing it, Absurdist plays more adequately represent the

philosophy of Existentialist playwrights like Sartre and Camus than their own

traditionalist plays do. In Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are unable to find any way to

confirm where they were before the start of the play, or if the boy whom Godot sends is

“ C a m u s , Albert. Le Myth de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard, 1942，p. 18. Quoted in Esslin 1980，p. 23.
56 Esslin 1980，p. 24.

40
the same as the one they met the day before. The audience, in its turn, is unable to step

outside or above these characters' conception of the world and figure out their own

version of the truth. Uncertainty extends all the way down to the level of language, when

the characters say one thing and do another. This is, of course, most notably the case

when they say, "Let's go," and yet do not move at the end of both acts.57 In Esslin's

formulation, this structural resistance to rationality is more important to the establishment

of absurdity than the pitiable condition of the characters or the pointlessness of their

bantering. In other words, it is not the fact that nothing happens which makes this play

Absurd, but the fact that we do not know why nothing happens.

The link between The Bus Stop and the Theatre of the Absurd must therefore be

based upon the increasing irrationality of the world of the play. According to Tam,

waiting is not just the basis for the plot but a "metaphor for life" in this play, in which

various characters begin to realize that it is absurd to waste one's life waiting and not get

any meaning out of it. The Old Man [大爷]begins the play with a rant about the

absurdity of a society where "backdoorism" rules, and he feels completely alienated from
CO ^^

his society, unable to comprehend it or find a way to improve his position. The Mother

57 V L A D I M I R : Well? Shall we go?

E S T R A G O N : Yes, let's go.
They do not move (94).

In The Bus Stop, interestingly, there is no stage direction to indicate that the characters do not actually leave
at the end. The play concludes with a more upbeat agreement between the characters to leave, and they help
each other prepare to go (the Brash Young Man carries the Mother's bag, etc.). The last line o f the play is
spoken by M A N A G E R M A : "Hey, hey, wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! I've got to tie my shoelaces!" ( 3 4 ) . [ 马 主
任 ： 喚 ， 唤 一 等 等 ， 等 等 ， 我 系 鞋 带 儿 呢 ！ （ 丨 3 8 ) . ] This is followed by a blackout，丨eaving an ambiguity
about whether they will wait for him, or go on, so we do not know if there is movement at the end or not.
But certainly this is not a disconnect between what they say they will do and what they actually do, as in
Godot.
“ “ 这 就 叫 ‘ 为 顾 客 服 务 ’ ？ 装 装 门 面 ！ 那 ‘ 大 前 门 ’ 其 实 都 从 大 后 门 走 啦 ! ” (120). The Old Man makes use
o f a play on words here, complaining about the brand o f cigarettes called " M a i n Gate," which are only sold
out o f the "back door": "Is this what they call 'Serving the Customer?' It's all a front. 'Main Gate'
cigarettes have all gone out the 'back door'" (7).

41
also makes the connection between waiting and her entire life early-on, when she says,

"Who meant us to be women? It is our fate to wait, to wait endlessly. First, we have to

wait for a young man to seek us out and then we have a hard time getting married. Then

we must wait for a child to be born, then for the child to grow up. By then we are old

ourselves..." (24).^^ Tam argues that because the characters are endlessly waiting for a

bus which may never come, without any explanation as to why they are waiting, The Bus

Stop is as Absurd as Godot. But this use of "waiting as motif does not characterize the

sort of "abandonment of rational devices" in the very structure of the play which Esslin

argues is the foundation of the Theatre of the Absurd. It is true that there are irrational

elements in this play, such as the rapid passing of time, when the characters realize that

ten years have passed since they first arrived at the bus stop. At the end of the play, as

well, the characters discover that all writing has worn off of the sign which they have

been waiting beside, and all that is left is a mark from a long-gone notice which was

pasted over the sign, possibly announcing that the stop had been removed. Just as

Vladimir and Estragon cannot know for sure if it they were in the same place the day

before, the characters of The Bus Stop are now unable to ascertain if this is indeed the

same bus stop they come to every week. The Mother says, "Can it be that this stop has

been removed? Just last Saturday I was,.." to which the Young Woman [姑娘]asks，

"Which last Saturday?" and the Mother replies, "Wasn't it last, last, last, last..." (32).^°

These characters seem unable to access the information which would explain their

experiences, but unlike in Godot, where the perspective of the audience offers no insight

59
谁叫我们是女人呢？我们命中注定了就是等，没完没了地等。先是等小伙子来找我们，好不容易
等到出嫁了，乂得等孩子出世，再等箱孩子长大成人，我们也就老了...（131).
做丨TJ：亲的：怎么，这站取消了？可上裙.期六我还...
姑娘：哪个上报期六呀？
做丨亲的：不就上上，上，上，上...（136-7).

42
about the rational workings beyond Vladimir and Estragon's predicament, in The Bus

Stop there is always the question of why these characters do not seek out another route to

the city, or at least why they do not return home. The Silent Man [沉默的人]does leave

the bus stop midway through the play, and although for a while only the Young Woman

knows that he is gone, when the others discover it they spend the rest of the play

lamenting the fact that he has probably reached the city already. In Godot, Vladimir and

Estragon have nowhere to go, and it is Godot himself who is their savior; here the bus is

only the conduit to the city, which is the ultimate goal. Even if the characters knew no

other way of getting to the city other than taking this bus, they know how to return home,

and often talk about doing so. Manager Ma does attempt to return home, claiming that his

dinner in the city is not worth wasting his life waiting for. He is initially wary about

going back because night has fallen and he would be alone on the road, but when he sets

off and returns soon after, he never offers an explanation for why he returned, primarily

because rain began to fall and he was wet and sneezing. From the perspective of the

audience, these characters' failure to decide to move in some direction together and their

list of excuses for not doing so seems inexplicable, but the circumstances of the play are

not necessarily so difficult to rationalize. Although The Bus Stop follows the tradition of

the Theatre of the Absurd by eliminating traditional components of drama such as plot

and character development, it gives the audience the opportunity to envision a way out

for the characters, thus encouraging more political interpretations of the play.^' As

Gissenwehrer and Riley write, "The play has a strong message to convey the energy of

forward movement. The play encourages its characters "to move on." [...] Although we

61 In fact, I believe that categorizing Godot as part of the Theatre o f the Absurd also simplifies the play, and
downplays the role which more localized elements play in the work, a role which I will describe in further
detail below.

43
do not know if the characters on stage do go in the end of not, Gao's treatment is clear. In

fact, his intentions are perhaps too clear for those who wanted to see more radical ideas in

Gao's plays. While Gao is as dissimilar to younger playwrights of his time as he is to the

'scar' writers and other literary companions such as Bei Dao, Gao is equally far from

Beckett.”62 It has come to light, therefore, that with The Bus Stop, as with Godot, there is

a tension between the potential for both universalized and localized readings of the play,

and neither seems sufficient on its own.

What we have seen, therefore, is that Godot is difficult to politicize because of its

lack of references to ideas and things outside the world of the play. (Alternately, we

might say that the only lasting political reading of Beckett's plays up to this point has

been Adorno's, which argues that Endgame is political precisely because it refuses to

participate in realism, but such a formulation is so static that it has stunted further

political readings for decades.) Meanwhile, The Bus Stop is difficult to depoliticize

entirely, because its use of techniques from the Theatre of the Absurd is coupled with a

strong connection to social issues in China at that time. This raises an important question

of whether the relative emphasis on the universal in Beckett versus the local in Gao is the

product of historical and critical circumstance or whether there is, in fact, a fundamental

difference between the two plays. Is reading The Bus Stop as an instance of the Theatre of

the Absurd simply the wrong way to rescue the play from heavy-handed political reading?

Or are the difficulties of such a reading evidence of the play's failure to transcend its

socio-political reality and maintain validity in other contexts? As we saw in the

Introduction, Beckett's critics have already acknowledged the fact that criticism of his

works has grown and changed according to changes in the nature of criticism itself. The

62 Gissenwehrer and Riley, p. 118.

44
initial formulation of Beckett as Existentialist, as a philosophical playwright, was not

seriously challenged until the 1980s. David Pattie suggests that roughly between 1980

and 1995，focus shifted to the way language was used in Beckett's texts, and following

along with theoretical fashion, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, and

psychoanalytic studies of Beckett appeared. One might add that the increasing desire to

re-evaluate Beckett in light of the political is also evidence of critics' changing priorities.

Even so, it has been difficult to escape the foundational ideas that have shaped readings

of Beckett over the course of more than fifty years. For example, in its fragmentation, in

its repeated enactment of the difficulties of language and the impossibility of accessing a

realm of truth beyond language, Beckett's writing seems to be quintessentially

postmodern. Yet it is not as nihilistic as it initially appears to be, and many critics have

argued that the most enduring feature of Beckett's writing is its humanity. There is no

simple way, therefore, to determine whether the emphasis on the supposedly universal

themes in Beckett's work (which are paradoxically understood as the result of a writing

that refuses to make any claims beyond its own boundaries), are the result of Beckett's

own postmodern, post-war response to the limits of traditional attitudes towards language

and representation or that of his critics. This difficulty is useful, however, because it

reminds us that many aspects of the canonical view of Beckett's texts point to unique and

fundamental elements of his writing. One of the reasons why localized readings have

done so little to dislodge this canonical view is because rather than engaging with the

ability of Beckett's writing to move beyond the socio-political in favor of an alternate

reading, they have brushed that ability aside. As Boxall writes, "A reading of Beckett's

writing that brings it within the horizons of a known socio-political world fails to respect

45
its untranslatability, its dwelling beyond the horizons of the said in an unimaginable and

unnamable future, a geography of possibility which is 'preliminary to any politics

w h a t s o e v e r ’ W h i l e recognizing the way that Beckett criticism has evolved alongside

the evolution of literary criticism, then, we must also recognize the way in which the

axioms of that critical tradition cannot be easily dismissed.

Even if the trajectory of Beckett criticism has been historically-driven, therefore,

politicizing his works risks heavy-handed, obtuse criticism. In Gao's case, though, it

seems even more likely that the play's socio-political orientation is primarily the result of

the cultural politics of its time and therefore needs to be reconsidered. In order to

determine whether the circumstances surrounding the play's production and release have

been unnecessarily pigeonholing critical responses to this play, therefore, those

circumstances must be understood more fully. As I mentioned above, in 1983, the period

of relative freedom enjoyed by artists and intellectuals since the death of Mao was

quickly changing back to one of restriction and fear of experimentalism. This was

primarily due to the authorities' discomfort with the direction some intellectual

discussions were taking. As Wendy Larson summarizes it, "the theoretical controversies

appeared to converge on the four concepts of humanism {rendaozhuyi), alienation (bihua),

modernism {xiandaipai), and realism (xicmshizhuyf),从 The increasing experimentation

with modernist techniques borrowed and adapted from Western sources was a point of

concern for party authorities who believed that while certain elements of Western thought

and artistic form could benefit the national literature, these forms should by no means be

63 Boxall, Peter. "Introduction to 'Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics". Eds. Marius Buning et al.

Beckett and Religion; Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics: Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 9, 2000: 201-221, p.
211.
Larson, Wendy. "Realism, Modernism and the Anti-'Spiritual Pollution' Campaign in
China,” Modern China 15.1, 1989: 37-71’ p. 37.

46
treated as if they were fully appropriate for representing Chinese society. As He Wen

states, "We support the discriminating use of the best modern literature from the West. It

has already been shown that when this is done properly, it helps our own creative writers.

But we must certainly not lavish uncritical praise on the social attitudes and creative

concepts of the Theatre of the Absurd."^^ According to this perspective, because

modernism arose in the context of and in response to the pitfalls of Western capitalism,

its concerns, especially its preoccupation with the self s alienation from society, were not

appropriate for the literary depiction of Chinese socialist society. Under Maoist thought it

was essential that literature produced in China represented progress under socialism and

united the individual with the masses - in other words, that it served to "enlighten the

benighted, and, with a clear-cut standard of love and hatred, exert a transforming

influence on the people to heighten their awareness, and encourage them to have the will

to fight for the great cause of socialist construction."^^ Although support for the

"revolutionary romanticism" of Mao's era had waned, many still believed that realism

remained the most effective and appropriate mode for Chinese literature. Even defenses

of modernism, as Larson notes, often were couched in arguments about the similarities

between modernism and realism, and the social uses of modernism. Gao's perceived

"veneration" for Beckett and his play's perceived failure to offer a solution to the

problems it presents brought Gao under criticism in this debate. In the fall of 1983, Deng

Xiaoping responded to the debate by launching a campaign to "oppose spiritual

pollution"[清除精神污染运动].The campaign was "another euphemism for Western

ideas and values seeping into China, along with the influx of Western goods and

“ H e , p. 390.
66 He. p. 391-2.

47
businesses.”67 Although it lasted only six weeks due to pressure on Deng from reformers

within his government, it was enough to ensure that both The Bus Stop and Alarm Signal

were banned. The experience of the campaign was to have a lasting effect on Gao's

writing, and the feeling of estrangement from the literary world is discussed by the

narrator of Soul Mountain. Gao's early plays were therefore remembered as much for the

political attack that was mounted on them as for their modernist experimentation.

Once we acknowledge the cultural and social forces that went into initial

responses to Gao's plays, it seems important to search for a reading that pays more

attention to the play itself than to the uses to which it can or cannot be put in society. As

with Beckett's plays, political criticism of The Bus Stop looks only for points of reference

to the outside world as evidence of the play's meaning, rather than remaining sensitive to

the subtleties of the play's language and theatrical effects. Even more importantly in

Gao's case, ignoring the potential of an apolitical reading risks forcing the play, and the

playwright, back into the box of socialist realism in which it was placed by the state. In

other words, to say that readings of Gao's plays which attempt to rescue it from

ideological/political readings are political after all is to deny the importance of such an

attempt, the importance of the possibility that a very local text could have applicability or

interest beyond the borders of its initial context. But as we have seen above, there are

elements of Gao's play which are very different from Beckett's, such as the orientation of

the characters in relation to a specific social and cultural place and time, and the ever-

present option which they have (and Beckett's characters do not) of reaching their goal

by an alternate route, or at least starting over again.

67 Goldman, p. 509.

48
 The fact that the Silent Man (in the minds of the remaining characters, at least)

does make it to the city adds further support to the argument that the other characters

could have found their own solution to the problem. The Silent Man's exit is

accompanied by a musical tune which is repeated each time busses pass without stopping,

to ensure that his success is a constant reminder of the other characters' failure,® He

looks at the Young Woman for a moment before he goes, and she says later, "He didn't

blink an eye when he looked at you, it's as though he were looking through you" (20).69

The suggestion here is that he looks at her as if to dare her to look closely at herself, her

decisions and her life. Early critics of the play strongly objected to the implication that

the Silent Man was the modern-day incarnation of the hero of a one-scene play called The

Passer-by [过客]by Lu Xun [鲁迅]，which was performed directly before The Bus Stop,

with the same actor playing the Silent Man and the Passer-by. In The Passer-by, a lone

traveler meets an old man and a young girl on the side of the road and despite the old

man's prompts to give up the long journey, the traveler trudges on. He Wen, who follows

the Party's ideology in casting Lu Xun's nihilism in the light of a "transformation... from

a Darwinist to a fighter for communism," reads the figure of the Passer-by as a

revolutionary, who "severs all ties with the dark old s o c i e t y . B u t because Gao's Silent

Man abandons the noble socialist cause rather than the evils of the old feudal system, he

is an "arrogant individualist", not an "indomitable revolutionary."^' Although the ability

of the Silent Man to make it to the city is a repeating theme throughout the play, there is

68 The music o f the Silent M a n is described as " 痛 苦 而 执 糊 的 ” (125), which is translated as ‘‘mournful and
searching" (15). I think a more literal translation o f "painful or bitter" and "stubborn" would more
accurately describe the individualist, nihilistic nature o f this character, which connects him more obviously
to Lu X u n ' s character as well.
69
他看人的吋候，眼神都不带吃一下，就象要把人看穿了似的...（128).
7G He, p. 389.
7丨 He, p. 390.

49
also a brief suggestion by the Carpenter [师傅]that one of the busses that passes is full of

foreigners, which adds another possible social explanation for the characters' inability to

reach the city

By contrast, in Godot, the characters who come and go are Lucky and Pozzo, who

represent a particularly repulsive master-slave relationship, and their condition

deteriorates in the course of the play (again, inexplicably, they return in the second act

with a mute Lucky leading a blind Pozzo). Lucky and Pozzo cannot even confirm that

they remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon before. The same is true of the Boy (or

boys), sent as a messenger from Godot, who also remains enigmatic to the point of

offering no suggestion about where following him might lead. His condition is also

unenviable, as the first boy does not even know if he is happy or not, and reports that

Godot beats his brother and only feeds him “fairly well" (WG, 51; AG, 86-87). These

characters have not necessarily found a better situation for themselves, and more

importantly, leaving the scene would mean abandoning the possibility of Godot, as there

seems to be no other route to him. In leaving tangible options open to its characters, The

Bus Stop's social and ideological commentary maintains much more force than Godot's.

Ultimately, we have seen two different forces are at work in these plays. There is

a critical tendency, influenced in no small way by forces outside the texts, to read Beckett

as dealing with universally applicable themes and to read Gao as dealing with more

localized issues. At the same time, there are elements in each play which support such

readings, and which cannot be ignored if one is to propose an alternate mode of

interpretation. The conclusion to be drawn here is that the tension between the universal

and local implications of the plays must be preserved. In fact, this tension can be seen as

72 (Chinese p. 130; English p. 23).

50
the driving force on every level of these plays, and it is the key to developing the sort of

politicized reading of these authors which I will engage in throughout the rest of this

thesis. It is a reading which acknowledges the potential pitfalls of reading politically, and

yet insists upon doing so because to set aside the socio-political implications of both of

these texts is to deny their particular (and peculiar) power to have an effect on the real

world outside of the text.

What I would like to suggest is that one of the reasons why both of these plays are

so effective at creating a tension between what I might alternately call philosophical and

political levels of understanding and reference is because they enact a condition of

marginality, of existing on the edges of society, which creates a perspective of distance

without complete disconnection. As we have seen, both plays evoked strong reactions on

the part of their initial audiences - theatergoers stomped out of performances of Godot

and The Bus Stop has been banned in China for over twenty years. This reaction would

not have occurred if these plays did not speak directly to their audiences in some way. At

the same time, they would not have been able to spark so much debate had there not been

a large degree of uncertainty about what connection each play has to the real world. This

feeling of uncertainty is achieved because the characters are not wholly within, nor

wholly without, society as the audience knows it. Despite the drab, non-specific nature of

the set in both plays, the characters are not as cut off from their surroundings as if they

were in a true no-man's land. We have already discussed the social connections of the

characters of The Bus Stop at length, but even in Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are more

connected to some semblance of society than they appear to be. Estragon,s line, "Nothing

happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" has been read as representative of the

51
entire play, but in fact, people do come and go (fVG, 41). Pozzo and Lucky enter, exit,

and return, the Boy (or boys) comes and goes, and an unidentified group of people beat

Estragon in the night between the first and second acts. The two tramps may not have a

social relationship with anyone but each other at this point, but there was a time in the

past when they were members of society. Vladimir reminds Estragon, "Hand in hand

from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were presentable in those days"

(fVG, 10).73 They have been pushed to the edges of society, become outcasts, but they are

not completely severed from it. Similarly, the characters in The Bus Stop are waiting for

the chance to leave the margins of society, even if only temporarily, and reach the center

-the city - but they too have been abandoned and left to wait. Like Vladimir and

Estragon, they reassure themselves by constantly referring to the people waiting for them,

or to their importance to society. The Carpenter is one of the most consistent in his

refusal to turn back, declaring, "I have my craft to offer. They want my skill in town.

What have you got to offer?"

By virtue of this abandonment, as they desperately hold on to what they know

about their societies, these characters also begin to see things which they would not have

seen before. They gradually realize that their perpetual waiting is, in fact, a metaphor for

their lives. When Estragon says, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the

impression we exist?" he is acknowledging the fact that life is a process of finding

meaning, of finding a way to ground oneself amid ceaseless uncertainty (fVG, 69).

Vladimir, too, understands their position when he exclaims, "Let us not waste time in idle

discourse! [...] To all mankind they were addressed, these cries of help still ringing in our

” V L A D I M I R : La main dans la main on se seraitjete en bas de la Tour Eifell, parmi les premiers. O n
portrait beau alors (AG, 13).
74
俺有手艺，城里嬰俺的手艺！人家要你个哈？（129).

52
ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!" (fVG, 79). He chooses to define himself

not just through waiting, but waiting/or someone,/or Godot: "What are we doing here,

that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes,

in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come"

{WG, 80). When he says, therefore, "We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment.

How many people can boast as much?" even though he acknowledges Estragon’s doubt

that this fact is anything extraordinary, the key to Vladimir's self-definition is his ability

to maintain relations to others, despite the growing chaos {WG, 80). He knows that they

are not "saints," and that their position in society is fragile, but he also knows that this is

not just about them, and that they have the chance to represent "all mankind," to use their

marginal position to address the ‘‘cries of help" in a way no one else can. The Old Man in

The Bus Stop also recognizes the potential of their situation to incite change, but he feels

it is too late for him. He says to the Young Woman:

Y o u walk in front o f me. Don't let an old man hold you back. I f I lie down some place,

please take the time to dig a hole for me. Don't forget to place a plaque on it which reads:

"Here likes [sic] a chess fanatic who, upon his death, had no regrets. He had no skill, he

simply played chess his whole life. Always hoping to get the chance to go to the Cultural

Center to display his talent. His waited and waited until he was old and useless. He died

on the road to town (31)7^

Since he thinks he is finished, he tries to inspire others，giving the Young Woman and the

Man Wearing Glasses a look when she responds to this speech with the question, "What

7 5
你们前面走，别叫我这老头子拖累你们。我呀，要倒在哪儿，烦大家给我刨个坑。别忘了插个牌
子，就这么写上-•笔，就说是有那么个死不知悔的棋迷，哈本事没有，就下了•一辈子棋，老t店箱
寻个机会，进城里文化官去诚派显派。等呀，等呀，人也朽了，就栽在进城的路上了（136).

53
are you saying?"^^ as if to encourage the developing romance between the two, and he

tries to persuade the Brash Young Man ['隅小子]to take up a trade. All of these are

moments when the characters of these two plays begin to see that their position on the

edge of society allows them a very slight, but very important, chance to change their lives.

The characters themselves may not remain cognizant of this throughout, but the audience

is, which is what creates the suspense that Mercier describes for Godot, keeping the

audience watching, even though nothing is happening.

As if to push this point even further, both plays contain moments in which the

actors step out of character for a moment and call attention to themselves as actors, in a

position between the fictional world of the play and the real world of the audience. One

of these points in Godot is when Vladimir leaves the stage to go to the bathroom:

V L A D I M I R : I'll be back.

He hastens towards the wings.

E S T R A G O N : End o f the corridor, on the left.

V L A D I M I R : Keep my seat.

Exit Vladimir.
[•••]

P O Z Z O : {looking up). You didn't by any chance see - {He misses Vladimir.) Oh! He's

gone! Without saying good-bye! How could he! He might have waited!

E S T R A G O N : He would have burst (35)/''

76
您就是哪儿的话呀？（136).
77 V L A D I M I R : Je reviens. (// se dirige vers la coulisse.)
E S T R A G O N : Au fond du couloir, b gauche.
V L A D I M I R : Garde ma place. (// sort.)
[...]

P O Z Z O : {levant la tete). Vous n'auriez pas vu - {II s 'apergoit de I'absence de Vladimir. Desole.) Oh! II
est parti!...Sans me dire au revoir! Ce n'est pas chic! Vous auriez du le retenir.
E S T R A G O N : II s'est retenu tout seul. (57)
[The change in the last line from the French to the English seems to indicate a desire to make the point o f
the exchange more explicit.]

54
In The Bus Stop, characters face the audience and make comments directly to them on

several occasions, such as when Manager Ma says to the audience, "All of them are

under an evil spell" (18)7^ Additionally, Kuoshu points out that, "Gao's play, as its

actions require, has to be performed in an area where the performance space is totally

encircled by the seating area. During the performance, the members of the audience

actually become each other's background for watching, decreasing the distance between

the audience and the performers" (468). Because the audience surrounds the actors, the

space of the seats is actually an imagined part of the scene, where the buses would

presumably be driving through, and when the characters enter and exit the stage (the bus

stop) they must do so by going through the audience. A good example of how the

audience becomes part of the play occurs soon after the rest of the characters discover

that the Silent Man has left, when the Old Man becomes worried that they may be at the

wrong stop, and thinks that maybe they should be waiting on the other side of the road.

He says:

O L D M A N : {trembling, to the audience): Are you waiting for the bus? {To himself.) I

can't hear. {Speaking louder.) Are you waiting for the bus that goes into the countryside?

{Talking to himself.) Still can't hear me. {To M A N W E A R I N G G L A S S E S . ) Y o u n g man,

I ' m hard o f hearing. Could you please ask them if they are going to the countryside? If

they're all waiting to go back, I won't bother going into town" ( 2 0 ) "

Even more interesting is the point at the end of the play when all seven actors step out of

character and speak directly to the audience in unison, in effect echoing overlapping

monologues of one actor after another. They discuss the theme of waiting directly, and

78这一个个都中邪了（127).
79(颤棘棘地对观众)诸位也都等车？（自言自语）听不见。（更大声些）诸位等车回乡下去？（自
言自语）还听不见。（对戴眼镜的）年青人，我耳朵背，你问问他们是不是回乡下去？要都回去，
咱也别为进这城遭罪了（128).

55
the last section is led by the Actor Playing the Brash Young Man, who says, "... I don't

understand... It seems they are waiting...Of course this isn't a bus stop... It isn't a

terminal...They want to go...They should go...They have said all there is to say... We

are waiting for them...Ahh, let's go..." (34).^° Because of its ambiguity, the "they"[他们]

of whom this actor is speaking at this point is both the characters at the bus stop and the

actors on the stage, and this actor asks the question the audience is probably thinking,

"Why are we still here?" The effect of passages like this is to draw the audience into the

play, but also to draw attention to the fact that the play is on stage, and the characters

actually have nowhere to go. On a meta-theatrical level, the audience realizes that even if

the characters of the fictional world have the potential to go somewhere else and end all

of this waiting, the actors cannot actually go anywhere so long as the time allotted for the

performance continues. The same is true in Godot, when Pozzo makes an elaborate show

of leaving the stage in Act One, saying, "I don't seem to be able ... {long hesitation)...

to depart," to which Estragon replies, "Such is life" (47). This again calls attention to the

fact that if all the actors were really able to depart, then the play would end. The actors,

like the characters, are stuck, on the edges of the world which they occupied before the

scene began, longing to return to it.

As I have already elaborated in the Introduction, even though neither Beckett nor

Gao is a post-colonial writer in the generally understood sense of the term, the marginal

position of both of these writers gives them the same sort of perspective, privilege, and

even responsibility in writing about their societies as post-colonial theory gives to post-

colonial writers, regardless of whether or not they desire such a privilege. Both Godot

不明內，好象是...他们在等...当然不是午：站...不是终点站...他们想走...那就该走了...说完了...
我们在等他们...啊，走吧（138).

56
and The Bus Stop are dramatizations of that marginal position. Gao was writing as a

member of the new and still uncertain avant-garde, attempting to adapt a Western form

and introduce modernist ideas without completely erasing his own cultural background

and tradition. The kinds of anxieties he was facing as an author - desire to speak out

against society but fearful of doing so outside of the designated channels, frustration with

the system but uncertainty about whether abandoning that system is the best choice - are

all faced by his characters. The tension between Western formal experimentation and

local connotations is felt on many levels through this sense of in-betweenness. For

Beckett, taking a break from the difficulties of writing his three novels, and having

recently made the switch to writing in French, Godot finds him straddling two traditions:

the Irish heritage he left behind and the greater Western European tradition which is his

literary inheritance (as much or even more than the Irish literary heritage), and which is

the cultural tradition he had migrated into. In fact, much of what I have been referring to

as universal implications of this play are in fact Western European themes, such as the

alienation felt by a generation who lived through World War II and was looking for a

way to reconnect to a world which had lost faith in its most guiding beliefs — God, the

fundamental benevolence of humanity, a belief in progress. The sense of the absurdity of

life, of a "divorce between man and his setting" which is supposedly universally

applicable, was not as directly applicable to non-European situations as it was assumed.

As we have seen, Ireland did not fit squarely into this picture either, because it was at

once a part of Western Europe's modernization and a part of the British Empire until

shortly before Beckett left for Paris. This gave Beckett the ability to deal with these

themes in a detached manner. Just as Vladimir and Estragon cling to what they know of

57
the social world to maintain their sanity, Beckett relies on the narratives of Western

humanism to create the foundation of a play which calls those narratives into question.

What we see here is the effect of each author's position as a marginal writer being

enacted in the course of their play by the actors themselves.

In essence, these dramatic performances are performatives in their own right,

because they do not just present a picture of marginality in the image of the characters,

but they create a condition of marginality for the actors, giving physical presence to the

position of the playwrights. A performative utterance, in the sense in which J.L. Austin

originally theorized the term, is one which does not simply describe something, but

accomplishes an act in the very process of being spoken. It relies on convention for its

force, and it is effective because it repeats a word or phrase in a different context, with

different conditions. And when Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler elaborated the idea of

the performative, they emphasized the power of repetition to open up spaces, in the slight

gaps between one repetition and another, for potential change. Repetition is a structural

feature of both of these plays. But when lines and phrases and thoughts are repeated over

and over again, or when cliches or highly formal language is used, it becomes obvious to

the audience that these repetitions are taking place in a highly altered, and ironic,

context.^' Because the audience is given the opportunity to step outside of the world of

81 One o f the most pronounced instances o f this in Waiting for Godot occurs when Vladimir says, "Hope
deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?" (10). This is only found in the English version, and
Ishrat Lindbland points out that the parallel line in the French, "C'est long, mais ce sera bon. Qui disait
9a?" is unlikely to be recognizable as an allusion (276). He suggests that the changed line in the English, "is
instantly recognizable as alluding to Proverbs (13.xii). This recognition o f the source in English makes
Vladimir's forgetulness more pronounced, and also has the effect o f making those who do remember the
quotation correctly, 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick but when desire cometh, it is a tree o f life,' apply
it with tremendous irony to the situation o f the two tramps as demonstrated by the play" (Lindblad, 276).
This is a good example of the way that the repetition o f well-worn phrases opens up the gap between the
characters and the audience, giving the audience the potential to see beyond the seemingly hopeless
situation.

58
the play and think on a meta-dramatic level about the questions raised in the course of the

action, these repetitions are not dull and numbing, but provocative. They demonstrate

Bhabha's idea of the power of writing in the margins - it is a reproduction of the

everyday from a slightly different angle, which opens up new horizons of possibility. If

they did not do this, the audience would certainly not sit through hours of this sort of

nonsense.

While both plays enact a position of marginality and make use of that position to

ask the audience to look at their social and cultural situation in a new way, the major

difference between these two plays lies in the breadth of that horizon of possibility which

is opened up for the audience at the end. Even at the end of Godot, the audience cannot

find a rational explanation that wholly encompasses all the uncertainties of the play, and

cannot even suggest what the characters might or should do to help themselves, but the

play still leaves its audience with the nagging suspicion that there must be a better way.

Beckett's enduring humanity, on which all critics seem to agree, shines through because

despite the pathetic state of these characters, we, like they, still hold out hope either that

Godot will come, or that they will save themselves (even after the play finishes). The

interspersing moments of clarity, such as when Estragon finally remembers that he is

waiting for Godot,^^ help to build this tension. The brilliance of the play is in its subtlety;

we cannot give name to this possibility for change, because the play does not give any

hint about where we should look to find that better path - it seems to exist somewhere

beyond conventional or already-imagined possibilities. This is what Boxall means when

82 P O Z Z O : Yes yes, let your friend go, he stinks so. {Silence.) What is he waiting for?
V L A D I M I R : What are you waiting for?
E S T R A G O N : I ' m waiting for Godot (87).

59
he so eloquently describes the play's "dwelling beyond the horizons of the said in an

unimaginable and unnamable f u t u r e . W h e n politicizations orient Beckett's work in

already-defined terms or priorities, therefore, it is no wonder that the play immediately

appears limited and less interesting. This is, perhaps, the reason why The Bus Stop seems

lacking in its ability to transcend its socio-political context as easily as Godot. The Bus

Stop leaves open the possibility that practical solutions still may be found - the characters

could go forward, return home, or at least get together and make a plan — and this boxes

in the potential of the situation to give rise to new ways of envisioning the world.

“ B o x a l l , 2000, 211.

60
 Chapter 2

It seems to be the case, as Frederic Jameson insinuates in his discussion of "third

world" literature, that from a Western perspective, literary works which are deemed to be

part of the canon achieve a universal status, and are no longer directly connected to their

national tradition. Whereas works outside the canon, on the other hand, in particular

works written by non-Western writers, are often primarily associated with a national

literature, and only secondarily associated with world literature, if at all. I am not, of

course, engaging in a discussion about canon formation here, but it is important to

recognize that when a writer like Gao Xingjian enters the Western literary

consciousness^'^, he is often connected to his national literary tradition in a way that

writers already writing in the Western tradition are often not. While it is certainly

important to many that national literatures be maintained, Gao presents a particular

problem when we try to connect him to one single tradition, as we have already seen.

Although he has been living in France for more than twenty years, he has not written

many works in French. Yet the literary and philosophical influences on Gao's writing can

be traced as much to Western writers and thinkers as Chinese. He is both a writer and a

painter, and his ideas about art are influenced by both media. As a writer, Gao is

particularly outspoken about his refusal to bend to market forces, or to any effort to fix

and categorize his work, either in national, political or artistic terms. For him, being

associated with a label or movement implies an obligation to a larger force or group,

84 Unlike in my discussion of^ The Bus Stop, I am focusing here on Soul Mountain's participation in the
Western literary world and the category o f world literature, rather than its participation in a more local
Chinese tradition. This is mainly because the novel is banned in Mainland China, so he is not familiar to
most readers there, although the same is not true o f overseas Chinese communities, o f course. But I am also
approaching Soul Mountain from the perspective o f the Western literary world because o f my interest in
questioning whether its continued status as a "Chinese" novel is because o f its inherent features or because
o f that process o f adoption into the category o f world literature.

61
which he fervently resists.^^ He thinks that literature should be above politics, yet he

affirms his right to write about political matters.^^ He is not only a writer of fiction, but

also a critic who has written and spoken about topics ranging from modern Chinese

literature, theatrical techniques, literary freedom, and his own writing, making it difficult

to dissociate those opinions from the ideas and techniques of his creative writing.

In addition to the difficulties which the figure of Gao as an author produces if we

attempt to fix him in one or another tradition, a novel like Soul Mountain only

compounds those difficulties. The novel was written both in China and in France, is

highly autobiographical, narrates a mix of events and opinions without ever settling on

any one of them, and all the while meditates on bigger questions of selfhood and human

nature. When faced with such a novel, readers are understandably left searching for a way

to situate it. This confusion is evident in much of what has been written about the novel.

Gao's reviewers, if we take only the paratext of one edition of his novel as a sample,

uneasily shift between asserting that he "has helped illuminate the human condition"

{THES) or "transcends cultural barriers" {Daily Telegraph), and attempting to ground him

with statements such as: "Gao's portraits [...] are vivid and shine a light on their place

and time" {Time Out). It seems that it is not just the form of the novel which makes it

difficult, as many comment, to say precisely what it is about. More generally, there is an

uncertainty of how to situate an "imagination infused with European and Chinese

cultures" {The Australian). As another reviewer describes it:

85 He calls his position, which he says is not to be confused with a belief or a doctrine, "Without I s m s " [ 沒
有 注 意 ] . I n a his preface to an essay under that name, Gao argues that "In being without isms one is not
rashly attempting to establish some sort o f theory, but this is not the same as not speaking," and, "Without
isms does not promote political messages and lacks this capability, but it is not without political attitudes."
From: Gao Xingjian. "Author's Preface to Without Isms". The Case for Literature. Trans. Mabel Lee. New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2007，25&28.
86 In fact, right underneath the copyright information the publisher has printed, " G a o Xingjian asserts the
moral right to be identified as the author o f this work."

62
 Arguably [Gao's] finest work.. .Soul Mountain is a quirky, thick, playful monster o f a

book，a bit like what one might expect i f Beckett or lonesco had traveled in China and

been steeped in Chinese myths. It is not easy to say what the novel is about - and yet the

marvel is that somehow it is still both engaging and elegant {New York Times)尸

We can recall that the Nobel Committee was equally as vague about whether Gao's work

is valuable for its universality or for its innovation in the field of Chinese literature.^^ Just

as critics of The Bus Stop were often eager to delineate the many possible connections

between that play and various elements of Western dramatic tradition, but were unable to

completely skive off its sociopolitical context, here the sense that the novel transcends the

sociopolitical, but not quite, is very strong.

As I have already noted in the Introduction, when Gao's literary critics try to free

Gao's writing of its sociopolitical context, they often must explain the historical and

political circumstances surrounding his writing, thus undermining their attempt. It seems

that even a high awareness of Gao's personal wish and political right to de-politicize and

de-localize his writing does not make that process easy. It may be that the best way to

understand Gao's writing is to recognize the multiplicity of its influences and audiences

and to allow it to roam beyond the borders of the two national literatures to which it

could potentially belong. Mabel Lee suggests that "[Gao] represents that underrated yet

increasingly frequent writer and artist who is 'in-between'" in the sense of being in-

between national literatures and cultures. "Thus," she argues, "the critical evaluation and

87 All review quotations are taken from the back cover and first page o f the paratext in the 2004 paperback
edition, published by Harper Perennial.
88 Interestingly, the Chinese translation o f the statement (which I assume was not the original), does not
refer to the oeuvre as one o f "universal validity" but as one which "has value for the whole world": ‘‘以表
彰 其 作 品 放 諸 四 海 皆 準 的 價 値 … ” F r o m : 高 行 健 . < 靈 山 > 臺北市：聯經，1990年，529. This suggests
that from the Western perspective, the highest value o f literature is its ability to have meaning no matter
what its location, while from the Chinese perspective, the highest value o f literature is its ability to produce
meaning that the whole world can appreciate. This perspective allows the work to maintain its local identity.

63
assessment of his work is a priori best performed in the comparative literary and cultural

studies mode." 89 Another critic, Torbjorn Loden, similarly argues that because Soul

Mountain draws on both Chinese and Western cultural traditions, "The result is highly

original and constitutes a whole that transcends by far the sum-total of its integral parts. I

think we are therefore entitled to look upon Soul Mountain as a piece of 'world literature

with Chinese characteristics.It seems that in order to better understand this writer,

and this novel in particular, one must give up either/or dichotomies and begin to think in

terms of the in-between - in terms of that which is, like the often-used metaphor of the

Roman god Janus, looking in two directions at once, towards the past and the future at the

same time. Almost fifteen years ago, Homi Bhabha suggested that rather than see world

literature as a space for the interaction of distinct national literatures, literary studies may

be better served by looking to those very writers whose works exist between cultures and

traditions:

Where, once, the transmission o f national traditions was the major theme o f a world

literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories o f migrants, the

colonized, or political refugees - these border and frontier conditions - may be the

terrains o f world literature. The centre o f such a study would neither be the 'sovereignty'

o f national cultures, nor the universalism o f human culture, but a focus on those 'freak

social and cultural displacements'

Bhabha would argue that Loden's "world literature with Chinese characteristics" is just

world literature in the present moment; we should not expect Gao's writing to shed all of

89 Lee, Mabel. "Nobel Laureate 2000: Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain." CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.3, 2000，paragraph 1.
90 Loden, Torbjorn. "World Literature with Chinese Characteristics: On a Novel by Gao Xingjian." Soul of
Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Ed. Kwok-kan Tarn. Hong Kong: The Chinese University
Press, 2001, p. 273.
91 Bhabha, p. 17.

64
its "Chineseness" in order to achieve true universalism any more than we should expect

that the first Chinese-born writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature should be doing

more to write about China and to shun his outside influences. According to Bhabha, the

debate about whether to see such writers as "universal" or "national" is a non-question;

instead, we should investigate the new positions and understandings which emerge when

we conceptualize a work like this as neither one, nor the other, “but something else

besides’ which contests the terms and territories of both."^^

What is this "something else besides"? In the case of Soul Mountain, it is a

conception of the novel that frees it from neither/nor dichotomies - it is neither universal

nor local, neither politicized nor apolitical, does not fit squarely in either the Chinese or

Western literary traditions - and allows the interaction between these elements to create

something new. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that Soul Mountain is worthwhile, not

for its depiction of China at a particular place and time, and not even necessarily for its

meditations on the human condition, but for the way it enacts many of the complex issues

which literatures around the world were (and are) facing: the problem of representation,

the question of the position of art in relation to politics, and the condition of in-

betweenness which is increasingly the subjective experience of the contemporary world.

In other words, although 1 will demonstrate that ultimately the local, recognizable points

of reference in the novel are subject to larger questions of language and the self, I find

that it is the dramatization of that self s struggle to locate itself in a world of shifting

borders which makes this novel a valuable addition to the trove of world literature.

One of the unique features of Soul Mountain which becomes apparent almost

immediately is that experience of reading this novel actually gives one the sense of

92 Bhabha, p. 41.

65
participating in a ritualistic performance. The narration is repetitive and rhythmic,

sometimes approaching a dreamlike quality similar to stream-of-consciousness narration,

yet there is not much of an arc of plot or character development. Rather than telling a

story, the narrator seems intent on engaging in a self-conscious performance, speaking in

what he calls a soliloquy before the reader, and constantly calling attention to the

performed, fictional nature of the text. Many critics point to the similarities in technique

between Soul Mountain and much of Gao's drama, especially works written around the

same time as the novel. Sylvia Lin connects the narrative technique to the "alienation

effect" that Gao often employs in his drama, saying, "Both [Soul Mountain and One

Man，s Bible] are difficult texts because the author constantly forces readers away from

the plots and into his reflections on larger issues. In this sense, they have the quality of

the 'alienation effect' made famous by Brecht，one of Gao's favorite Western

playwrights.，，93 Henry Zhao also devotes a brief chapter in his book about Gao and

Chinese Theatre Experimentalism to Soul Mountain, arguing that it may "help us to

understand his plays.，，94 He associates the novel with a period of Gao's plays which he

calls "Mythological/Ritual," the first half of the name describing the subject matter and

the second the technique of the writing.^^ I am going to go even further than these critics

to suggest, as I did with The Bus-stop, that the dramatic elements in this novel originate

not just in the ritualistic or alienating nature of the delivery of the narration, but in the

performative nature of the writing itself. This is not a novel which describes a changing

world, but one which, in the act of writing, exposes the incongruities and contradictions

Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. "Between the Individual and the Collective: Gao Xingjian's Fiction." World
Literature Today 75.1, 2001: 12-18, p. 18.
94 Zhao, Henry Y . H . Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism.
London: School o f Oriental and African Studies, 2000, 103.
Zhao, p. 22.

66
inherent in the conditions of its own production, and as the writing progresses and the

narrator struggles to come to terms with his position in relation to others and to society,

the potential for new ways of understanding and conceiving of the world and those

relations is created.

In the Introduction, I discussed the idea of the dualism of representation, and the

way in which it is impossible to avoid "speaking for" others at the same time as one

describes or creates them through art. Likewise, in speaking from a particular position,

one is always creating an image of those who share that position. I quoted Gayatri Spivak,

who reminded us that critics do not need to feel trapped by this double bind; we can stop

trying to find a way out and simply keep in mind the fact that this is how representation

(in both its political and artistic senses) works. For this reason, although I recognize that

Gao Xingjian has every right to deny any politicization of his work, I find it impossible to

make sense of his writing, particularly the two works I have chosen to discuss here,

without seeing them as in some way connected to cultural and political concerns. At the

same time, even though it has been ten years since Zhang Longxi proposed "the problem

of 'subjectivity' as still a meaningful theoretical problem in China," I believe that it is

still important to remember the threat that strong politicization of this novel could present

to its ability to explore this problem.^^ In this chapter I will show that the narrator of Soul

Mountain spends almost the entire novel meditating on the question of subjectivity. By

using some of Bhabha's ideas to trace the way that this quest turns back on itself to

question its own possibility, I do not mean to deny or erase the importance of individual

concerns. Rather, I will suggest that for many contemporary Chinese, particularly

96 Zhang, p. 149.

67
migrants and political refugees, the question of subjectivity is far more complicated than

it may seem. In the case of Soul Mountain, therefore, I think it is important to understand

the conditions in which such a text was produced in order to determine whether it

achieves what it sets out to do, or fails, or does something else besides.

In general, we could contextualize Gao's novel simply as a fictional

representation of a character whose experiences closely resemble those of the author as

he explored rural and outlying areas of China during the mid-1980s, in a period when

China's economic reform and opening up to the West was raising questions about the role

of culture, the interpretation of history, and the implications of modernization. What I am

interested in, however, is the way that both on the level of the story and on the level of

the work itself, Soul Mountain represents a position of marginality, a position whose

circumstances must be understood before a close reading of the novel can take place. In

the previous chapter, we saw the way that The Bus Stop enacts a position of marginality

for the audience and the characters by putting both in a position of being stuck in-

between. In the case of the audience, while watching the play they are not included in the

action, but yet do not feel entirely separated from it; in the case of the characters, they are

waiting for a bus on the edge of the city, not yet a part of the excitement within it, but

unable (for some unstated reason) to bring themselves to return to their homes in the

suburbs. The condition of being just on the edge of metropolitan society nicely parallels

the author's position as barely within the limits of acceptability in the Beijing theatre

scene in 1982, when the play was first completed. The events oiSoul Mountain are based

on those which took place in Gao's life in the months following the production and

68
cancellation of The Bus Stop, and so the connection between these must be addressed

more directly here.

The criticism which Gao's play received from intellectuals and party authorities

was severe: He Jingzhi, the chief of the Propaganda Department of the Chinese

Communist Party, called The Bus Stop '"the most pernicious play' since the

establishment of New China," and when the campaign to stamp out "spiritual pollution"

began in late 1983, Gao was one of the primary targets.^^ Because Gao had made every

attempt to keep his play free of content which would be offensive to party bureaucrats, as

it was the content of artistic works which had attracted the most negative attention in the

past, it came as a shock to find his play being criticized for its form and techniques. The

political situation at that time was such that the controversy escalated very quickly, and

Gao heard a reliable rumor that He Jingzhi was planning to send him for "training" in

Qinghai Province.^^ When this was added to the discovery that he had been falsely

diagnosed with lung cancer, Gao felt he had been given a second chance at life and made

plans to get out of Beijing as soon as possible. The five months which he spent traveling

along the length of the Yangtze River, from its roots in Sichuan province all the way to

the East China Sea, became the basis for his first novel, Soul Mountain.

Gao had already begun thinking about the novel in 1982, but the extensive notes

he made while climbing mountains and visiting minority settlements during this period

were the basis for the novel. The majority of the work was written in the time just before

and just after Gao chose to emigrate to France. It was completed and sent for publication

in 1989, soon after the incident in Tiananmen on June 4，Gao's public condemnation of

97 Quoted in Lee, Mabel. "Nobel in Literature 2000: Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics o f Fleeing." CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 5.1, 2003, paragraph 5.
Lee, 2003, paragraph 4.

69
which set him up for future expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party. Once Soul

Mountain won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000，all of his works (fiction and non-

fiction) were banned in Mainland China. What began as a self-imposed exile (for the

purposes of artistic creation) on the part of the author has now developed into a condition

of actual political exile. During the period in which Soul Mountain was being written,

Gao was still composing completely in Chinese, and his subject matter was still very

directly related to China. He was truly in-between two cultures, traditions, and languages.

When reading the novel with this in mind, the reader notices a clear link between the

narrator's sense of self-banishment (induced by the threat of an even more severe

banishment) and that of the author.

Because of the strong connections between the author's life and the events of the

novel, it would be very easy to equate the narrator of Soul Mountain with Gao himself, or

to use his own experiences and ideas about the novel to explain it. In this chapter,

however, I am interested in what the novel - the writing — accomplishes, not with what

the author did or thinks about the work. I recognize that this is a very fine, if not

imaginary, distinction, but I believe it is worth attempting to maintain if one is to think

about the text as more than a social, political or historical document. Having briefly

outlined those of Gao's personal experiences which I believe are essential to

understanding the tensions in which the novel was created, therefore, I will turn away

from referring to the figure of the author as much as possible in order to focus on the text

and the experiences of the narrating self. After all, only Gao knows what actually

happened during those five months - all we know is what the character(s) thinks and

experiences.

70
 It is also in order to focus on narrative techniques that I refer to Soul Mountain as

a novel, even though it includes few of the features usually associated with the novel

form. Apart from the loose thread of traveling along the Yangzte River, there is no plot

development to speak of here, and the work is comprised mostly of flashbacks,

philosophical musings and retellings of folk songs and stories. Furthermore, the persona

of the narrator is split into several different voices, which are referred to only by the

pronouns "I," "you," "she," and “he.，，99 These pronoun voices make up the primary

characters of the novel, but because no one is named, these pronouns become mixed up

with those referring to people these pro noun-characters meet. Dialogues, especially those

between the "you" and the "she," are rarely written with quotation marks, and it is often

difficult to distinguish one character from the next. Even references to the world outside

of the narrator's subjectivity, such as stories told to him by others, or songs or poems he

has found along the way, are enveloped in his storytelling, creating a narrative in which it

is impossible to know what is real and what is imagined. Through this experimentation in

form, the work leaves the reader constantly uncertain about what the text is referring to or

even about who is speaking. It becomes necessary, 1 think, to treat the work as entirely

fictional (and "novel" remains the best term to describe such fiction) and to refer to the

unnamed voice as the narrator, not Gao.

The fragmented nature of the narrative, and the way it calls its own claims to truth

into question are, of course, not simply ploys to keep the reader on her toes. These

elements are the mode of expression for a figure who feels out of step with many

99 I will discuss the pronouns in more detail later, but for now I must note that in order to avoid confusion
and in order to treat these pronoun personas as characters, according to the structure o f the novel, I will
refer to them as the " I , " the " y o u , " the "she" and the "he", which may at times run counter to their
grammatical usage as pronouns alone.

71
different centers of power: the intellectual, in relation to the predominating ideology; the

cultural, in relation to the dominant Han Confucian culture; the geographical, in relation

to the metropolis and other centers of so-called "human society"; the national, in relation

to China; and the artistic, in relation to the conventions of modern fictional and narrative

technique. I will not attempt to outline each of these areas of tension one by one, but

instead hope to demonstrate that all of these positions of marginality are interconnected,

and that their interaction and conflict with one another creates the multivocal character of

the novel. As I will discuss below, the narrator subsumes all of these concerns into a

larger need to re-discover the self and restructure its relationship to the world around it.

This is ostensibly because he does not dare have an opinion on anything outside of his

own ideas, desires, and interests. In this vein, a general trajectory can be traced through

the novel which is based on the narrator's struggle (through his various personas) to find

freedom - from mainstream culture, from the demands of the literary world, and from the

anxieties of life in general - and I think that it is important to follow these threads despite

many diversions and detours in order to outline what the novel is doing. Later, I will

argue that once we look beyond the narrator's stated aims to the functioning of the

writing more generally, it will become more clear how the novel may create space for

change unbeknownst to the narrator.

Before we can determine whether the novel does something more than it claims,

of course, we must understand the way the narrator frames his journey. The quest which

underlies the novel is acknowledged from the first chapter, when the character "you" is in

a mountain county town in the South of China, beginning a search for a place called

Lingshan. Lingshan is translated here as Soul Mountain, and he has been told by a man

72
on a train that to find Lingshan - a place he has never heard of- he should "[t]ake the

train to Wuyizhen, then go upstream by boat on the You River." If these names were

to be translated, as Richard John Lynn suggests, it would mean something like: "He is to

follow the Particular River to the Town That Isn't There. The ironic humour and paradox,

lost in the translation, is meant to alert the reader that Soul Mountain is not a realistic,

logical narrative, that odd things are sure to happen.”⑴！ I would add that this ironic

naming also suggests that the narrator is going to spend the novel searching for

something that cannot be found. Even the translation "soul" for ling is debatable, since

ling usually connotes "soul" only when combined with hun. As Luo Shao-ping suggests,

"By itself, ling is used to mean something or someone quick and clever, spirited and

intelligent, a fairy, sprite, elf, goblin, in other words, something or someone otherworldly,

whimsical and mischievous, miraculous and magical.’截 I find the potential dualism

between the spiritual or internal and the supernatural or external in the word ling to nicely

encapsulate the two levels of searching that take place in this novel. Externally, the

narrator is looking for forms of culture and ways of life which are distinct from those of

the dominant Han, Communist, metropolitan society he lives in. He is especially attracted

to supernatural happenings, such as shamanism, and to philosophies and religions, such

as Daoism and Buddhism, which are more mystical and less grounded than the

Confucianism which dominates mainstream Chinese culture. Internally, he is looking for

Gao Xingjian. Soul Mountain. Trans, Mabel Lee. London: Harper Perennial, 2004, p. 3. Hereafter page
numbers will be cited in the text.
Original C h i n e s e : 可 以 坐 車 先 到 烏 伊 那 個 小 鎭 ， 再 沿 尤 水 坐 小 船 逆 水 而 上 。 F r o m : Gao X i n g j i a n . 高 行
健 . L i n g s h c m . 《 靈 山 》 T a i B e i : Lianjing 臺北市：聯經，1990 年，p. 3.
101 Written by Richard John Lynn in a review o f Soul Mountain and quoted in Luo Shao-pin, " M a g i c
Mountain and Sacred Script: A Bakhtinian Reading o f the Novels o f Gao Xingjian." Critique 46.3, 2005:
283-300，p. 283
丨02 Luo, p. 283.

73
a language and a form of writing which can convey and help him discover a more

authentic and unified self, free from the pressures of society and closer to nature. In fact,

in the second chapter, the first person version of the narrator divides up these two types

of journey, assigning the first to himself and the second to the "you": "While you search

for the route to Lingshan, I wander along the Yangtze River looking for this sort of

reality" (11). Indeed, the chapters which narrate the thoughts of the "you" are much

more abstract and psychological than those of the "I". Even though the "you" is also

constantly telling stories, there is little evidence to suggest that they have originated

anywhere outside of his own imagination. When we look more closely, however, we will

see that the distinction between the "I" who roams around on the borders of mainstream

culture and the "you" who explores the limits of the self as it tries to free itself from

lasting connections to the outside world, are not as distinct as they are declared to be.

Although the reality which the "I" seeks alternates between the natural and the

supernatural, ultimately, finding that reality is only important for what it can reveal about

the self in its relation to the world. The "you" character, who was created in order to

provide distance for the " I " to examine himself, turns out to be asking the same sorts of

questions as the "I," only the "you" explores the psychological and spiritual domain,

while the " I " is thinking about culture, politics and art. If we return to the passage quoted

above regarding "this sort of reality," we see that the reality being sought is that which is

most different from the reality the " I " has known. The statement is made just after the " I "

has met a retired village head of the Qiang nationality. The village head recites

incantations and the " I " says he can “feel the mystical pull of the words and a demonic,

I。 3 你找尋去靈山的路的同時，我正沿長江漫游，就找尋這種真實。（12)

74
powerful atmosphere instantly permeates the room." He then says, "This is all starkly

real" (11).*。* He goes on to describe being wrongly diagnosed with lung cancer and

feeling that he has been given a chance to find a better way of living. He says, "I should

have left those contaminated surroundings long ago and returned to nature to look for this

authentic life" (12).'°^ The narrator is on a journey to find something more pure, natural

or authentic, but the ultimate purpose of finding these things is to improve his own life

and outlook. On one level, his "return to nature" involves traveling to some of the most

remote and desolate mountain regions in search of a "primitive loneliness devoid of all

meaning" (112).'®^ He wants to find the "unadorned splendour and beauty" which only

nature provides (59)严 But these experiences in nature are always described in terms of

how they make the narrator feel, whether it be "indescribable sadness" or a "sense of

joyful freedom such as [he had] never before experienced," a sense that one is completely

oneself (59 & 61).io8 The "authentic life" is not really to be found in nature at all, but in

the life of villagers and minority peoples. In one passage, he is listening to the sound of

drums from a distant village and thinks that if he had remained in the village where he

was once sent to do reform work, he would be "without my present anxieties." For him,

the simplicity of village life embodies the qualities of nature he is looking for:

Nothing could be more natural than the evening scene o f smoke from chimneys, tiled

rooftops, and the near and distant sound o f drums.

The drumbeats repeat nan-nan na-na over and over and seem to be telling a wordless

legend. The colour o f the water and the glow of the sky, the blackened rooftops, the pale

感受到了这语言的魅力，這種魔怪森然的氣息就瀰漫在[…握子裡。[…]這都真真切切。（12)
我早該離開那個被污染了環境，回到自然中來，找尋這種實實在在的生活。（12)
那種原始的失去一切意義的寂寞吧？（114)
大自然毫不掩飾的華麗（59)
說 不 清 的 惋 惜 & 一 種 從 未 有 過 的 舒 暢 ( 5 9 & 61)

75
 grey cobblestones vaguely visible in the courtyards between the houses, the soil warmed

by the sun [...] submerged lust and the thirst for happiness, tremors in the mind induced

by the sound of the drums, the desire to be barefoot and sitting on a doorsill work black

and shiny by all the people who have sat upon it, all suddenly converge (160-61).‘的

In this passage, the various sensory aspects of village life are described, and through a

connection with the body, the lifestyle is portrayed as being one with nature. In the last

line, everything converges, not in the external world, but within the body of the viewer.

Images like this conjure up memories of the years when he was a child living in the

countryside as a refugee from the Japanese occupation. In part, his desire to return to

nature involves a return to this simple life, which is connected to childhood. In the first

chapter, as the "you" wanders around a bus station, the narrator says, "You try using the

mellifluous local accent to be friendly, you want to be one of them. You've lived in the

city for a long time and need to feel that you have a hometown. You want a hometown so

that you'll be able to return to your childhood to recollect long lost memories" (8)"⑴ In

all of these passages, it is clear that whether the " I " is looking for the supernatural, the

natural, or an authentic life, he is ultimately looking for ways to revive his self, or his

soul.

The narrative form of the novel creates a situation where history and counter-

history, culture and counter-culture, can be layered and engage in a dialogue with each

other. In particular, the splitting of the persona of the narrator into various pronouns helps

to explore different aspects of the narrator's psyche, and also different ideas about how

I。9没有比這暮色中的坎煙，瓦頂，這又逼近又遙遠的鼓聲更自然的了.
反反覆覆的鼓點像在訴說一個沒有言辭的傳說，喃喃吶吶。水色天光，變得灰唁了的屋頂，那
屋場間接縫依稀可辨灰白的一塊塊石板，曬得暖和的泥土 […]潛在的愁望和對辛福的渴求，鼓聲
在心裡喚起的震動，也想打赤腳和坐到人家磨得烏亮的木門濫上去的願望，都油然而生。（161)
II。你也想用這溫款的鄉音同他們套點交情，也想同他們融成一片。你長久生活在都市裡，需要有
種故鄕的感覺，你希望有個故鄕，給你點寄託，好回到孩提時代，撿回漫失了的記憶。（9)

76
his life should be lived. Apart from the brief gesture already quoted from the first chapter

-when the " I " tells the "you" to go find Lingshan while he roams along the Yangtze

river — no further explanation is given about the purpose for the pronouns until over

halfway through the novel, in chapter 52. The narrator explains that the "you" was

created to give the " I " someone to talk to, and likewise, the "she" was created by the

"you" to alleviate his own loneliness. The "I" says:

In this lengthy soliloquy you are the object o f what I relate, a myself who listens intently

to me - you are simply my shadow.

As I listen to myself and you, 1 let you create a she, because you are like me and also

cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a partner for your conversation.

So you talk with her, just like I talk with you.

She was bom o f you, yet is an affirmation o f myself (312).川

The "you" encounters the "she" early-on, but he finds out little about her as they spend

more time telling each other stories than talking about themselves (or at least admitting to

talking about themselves). Most of the time, the "she" listens to stories told by the "you,"

which blend almost seamlessly with their dialogue, and often the stories they tell each

other and the story of their own interactions are completely intermingled. The "you"

actually seduces the "she" with stories, and though she originally says that she hates his

violent stories, she comes to find them comforting, and asks him to keep talking to make

her feel better. She tells him, "you just go on making up all sorts of beautiful children's

112
stories to provide a refuge for her weak and fragile soul" (301-2). After she becomes

⑴這漫長的獨白中，你是我講述的對象，一個傾聽我的我自己，你不過是我的影子。
當我傾聽我自己你的時候，我讓你造出個她，因爲你同我一樣，也忍受不了寂寞，也要找尋個談
話的對手。
你於是訴諸她，恰如我之訴諸你。
她派生於你，又反過來確認我自己。（319)
“2還偏要去製造種種美麗的童話，讓人脆弱的靈魂有個寄託。（310)

77
angry and leaves him, he realizes, or acknowledges, that she was only another part of him

and part of the stories he told himself: "You don't really know her at all, whether what

she told you was truth or only half truth. Her inventions and your fabrications merge and

are indistinguishable" (303).'There is also a "he" who the "I" says is what he calls

"you" when the "you" has turned his back and left him. But the "he" (as a pronoun-

character) does not play nearly as large a role in the novel as the other three.

This innovative use of pronouns is found in Gao's other work. It is part of his idea

of the "tripartition" of the actor, a theory influenced by the practice of the Beijing Opera

actor, who "freezes his movement for a few seconds to mark his entrance or the

completion of a display of martial arts, dance sequence, etc., thus making himself "appear

before his audience [...] The performance is briefly suspended, as the actor neutralizees

his acting capacity and calls attention to the exhibition of his art.，’i4 For Gao, the actor

should be able to separate his "real life" self from his character, and occupy a space in

between the two, which is entirely neutral. This demand for self-consciousness "also

equips the actor with a 'third eye, of inner vision which, because of the detachment from

the character he is portraying, is capable of observing his performing self, the other actors

on stage and, more importantly, the audience."''^

In Soul Mountain the use of pronouns allows the narrating voice to reflect back on

itself, to self-consciously present his self to the reader in the way that actors in Chinese

operas pause to present their characters to the audience. The image of the soliloquy which

the narrator presents nicely encapsulates the fact that the character is not only speaking to

"M尔對她並不了解，她說的是真實假，或半假半真？她的編造又同你的臆想混合在一起，無法分
清。（311)
“ “ F o n g , Gilbert C.F. "Introduction." The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian. Trans. Gilbert Fong. Hong
Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999，xx.
115 Fong, p. XX.

78
himself, but to an audience, and therefore his self-reflection also involves a dialogue with

the listener. As if to remind the audience of this, the line, "what else can I talk about?" is

repeated in various forms throughout the novel. The distance created between the narrator

and his other personas allows him to examine some of the deep and painful aspects of his

own psyche. For example, after the "you" first meets the "she," he lets her go back to

wherever she is staying without asking for a way to get in touch with her again. He

decides he wants to see her again, but does not have the courage to go back to the spot

where he met her. He says, "That sort of rash behaviour damages one's self-esteem. But

then you detest yourself for being too rational. You don't even know how to go about

starting a romance, you're so weak you've lost your manliness, you've lost the ability to

take the initiative. Afterwards, however, you decide to go to the riverside to try your

luck" (41).i 16 The distance created between the " I " and the "you" allows for this kind of

harsh self-examination. Often, lines such as these also suggest underlying, but unstated

historical and social concerns. We may ask, for example, if his loss of ability to take the

initiative is the result of decades of being told how to think and act. Moments like these

crop up constantly, such as in chapter 68 when he is climbing mountains and says that he

must distract himself by telling stories. These stories turn into an absurd stream of images

ending with the repetition of the phrase, “give me back my head" (438). "7 Though the

image refers to "countless toads with their big mounts gaping at the sky," the undertone is

clear.丨丨8

那種唐突有損你的自尊，可你有討厭你過於清醒。你都不會去愛，軟弱得失去了男子的氣槪，
你已經失去了行動的能力。後來，你還是決定，到河邊去，去試試運氣。（41)
"7我頭還來(457)
無以計數的瞻蜍朝天張開一張張大口（457)

79
 Through the technique of telling stories to himself (or to other versions of his self),

the narrator gathers other possible ways of living and thinking and weaves them into his

own journey. Often, the stories the narrator hears are incorporated into his own

descriptions of a person or his own story about an experience. In one instance, he meets a

Yi nationality priest, who relates a story from a Nationalist officer he met in the

mountains, most of which is paraphrased by the voice of the narrator. The story ends with,

"He asks if I write fiction - he can give me the story for nothing" (124)」i9 The shift from

the pronoun "he" (referring to the officer) to "he asks" (referring to the priest) is sudden,

and the comment is ironic, given that the priest has, in the terms of this narrative, already

given the narrator the story. There are many other points when characters "attempt" to

give the " I " a story, or even ask him to write something up for them, thus calling

attention to the narrative process as it is going on. In these instances, the " I " is claiming

these stories for his own, using them in his journey of self-discovery. Even as the

narration constantly calls its own truth status into question, though, it is clear that in

appropriating the words of others he cannot cease to speak for them. Just as it is

impossible to dissociate completely the two types of representation, here it is impossible

to dissociate the construction of a self-consciousness from the speaking for other

consciousnesses and perspectives which necessarily accompanies it.

As these examples begin to demonstrate, the narrative framework creates a

situation where the narrator is using cultural and historical questions to examine his

psyche, but through the process of storytelling and dialogue, the reader is given an

interesting, new perspective on those very questions. The aims of the narrator to find

他問我寫不寫小說？她可以把這故事白白讓給我。（126)

80
more authentic ways of life and to find unity in his soul are undermined by a constantly

shifting narrative which does not allow any one perspective to prevail. In an article

analyzing Gao's novels from a Bakhtinian perspective, Luo Shaopin argues that the use

of dialogue and pronouns as characters creates a polyphony in the novel, "reflecting the

splitting of a monologic and single consciousness in the search for the expression of a

democratic, independent, and individual Luo uses Bakhtin's idea of the

dialogic to argue that the official discourse (what Bakhtin would call monologism — a

voice which informs and never expects an answer), is undermined by the polyphony of

the novel. She also uses Bakhtin's idea of heteroglossia to argue that the multiplicity of

stories and histories in the novel creates an alternative mode of being, a plurality in which

all voices co-exist and none can pose as authentic. She quotes Michael Holquist's

discussion of heteroglossia as "the literature of the fabliaux and Schwanke of street songs,

folksayings, anecdotes [...] where all 'languages' were masks and where no language
101

could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face” In Soul Mountain, this would mean

that all languages and all potential ways of being are on equal footing. Yet she goes on to

argue:

The narrator's pilgrimage in Soul Mountain is a search for a "primitive," unspoiled

natural environment and an "authentic" Chinese culture that is indigenous, folk,

heterogeneous, and southern as opposed to the authoritarian, official, and monologic

northern culture. The marginalized, premodem folk culture becomes important as an

alternative to official, modern socialist culture.'^^

What is perhaps most interesting about the narrator's search for alternative, independent

voices and cultures is that he yearns for unity and purity, not multiplicity and diversity,

12° Luo, p. 286.

121 Quoted in Luo, p. 290 [italics mine]
122 Luo, p. 294

81
the bedrocks of Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. For most of the novel, the narrator is

looking for cultural artifacts and stories that offer alternative histories, not because he

wants to celebrate the multiplicity of possibilities they offer, but because he wants to use

them to return to a point in time before life became "contaminated," just as he wants to

get back to his childhood.

The desire to find alternatives which can restore unity and purity is very clear in

the passage where a friend of the narrator gives him a notebook full of supposedly

simple and uninteresting folk songs, but the narrator becomes extremely excited. After

he reads the first one, he says:

"This is a folk song which hasn't been vandalized by the literati! It is song gushing

straight out o f the soul! D o you realize this? Y o u ' v e saved a culture! It's not unique to

the smaller nationalities, the Han nationality also has a genuine folk culture which hasn't

been contaminated by Confucian teachings!" I can't contain my excitement (358).丨23

The purity of these folk songs, unadulterated by Confucian culture, is exactly what he is

seeking. When he discovers that he has only read the prelude and that the rest of this

Record of Darkness has been lost, then, he becomes enraged:

" W h e r e else can reverence o f the soul be found? Where else can we find these songs

which one should listen to while seated in quiet reverence or even while prostrated be

found? W h a t should be revered isn't revered and only all sorts o f things are worshipped!

A race with empty, desolate souls! A race o f people w h o have lost their souls!" I angrily

declare. He watches me with a worried look without saying so much as a word. I realize

“這是沒被文人蹭踢過的民歌！發自靈魂的歌！你明白嗎？你拯救了一種文化！不光是少數民
族 ， 漢 民 族 也 還 有 一 種 不 受 儒 家 倫 理 教 化 污 染 的 真 正 的 民 間 文 化 ！ ”我興奮得不行。（365)

82
 that I must have drunk the rice wine too quickly and that I am consumed by my rage

(361).丨 24

In this passage the link between preserving a sense of unity for a cultural tradition and

discovering a way to unify or recover the soul is brought out. But as with all the other

forms of purity that the narrator is seeking, this purity is illusive. The same is true of the

childhood memories that he tries to recall, for every time that he imagines he is about to

reach them, he feels them slipping away again.

From the perspective of the narrator, the use of dialogue and the mode of

storytelling is the result of a fundamental mistrust of writing, a self-conscious attempt to

move the narration closer to spoken language. The narrator's search for authenticity is

directly connected to his belief that the metropolis and the literary world have led him

away from "real" life. In Chapter 2 he says:

In those contaminated surroundings I was taught that life was the source o f literature, that

literature had to be faithful to life, faithful to real life. M y mistake was that I had

alienated myself from life and ended up turning my back on real life. Life is not the same

as manifestations o f life. Real life, or in other words the basic substance o f life, should be

the former and not the latter. I had gone against real life because I was simply stringing

together life's manifestations, so o f course I wasn't able to accurately portray life and in

the end only succeeded in distorting reality (12).'^^

In this passage, the " I " is reacting against the tradition of socialist realism which

preached that literature should represent the people when in fact it was forced to represent

I24 “還哪裡去找對靈魂的敬畏？哪裡還能在找到這應該端坐靜穆乃至於葡付傾聽的歌？該崇敬的
不去崇敬，只崇拜些莫名其妙的東西。一個靈魂空虛荒涼的民族！一個喪失了靈魂的民族！ ”我慷
慨激昂一番。
從她一言不發望著我那副愁苦的樣子，我才知道我一定是酒喝孟了，邪火攻心。（370)
在我那個環境裡，人總教導我生活是文學的溫泉，文學又必須忠於生活，忠於生活的真實。而
我的錯誤'洽恰在於我脫離了生活，因而便違背了生活的真實，而生活的真實則不等於生活的表象，
這生活的真實或者說生活的本質本應該是這樣而非那樣，而我所以違背了生活的真實就因爲我只羅
列了生活中一系列的現象，當然不可能正確反映生活，結果只能走上歪曲現實的歧途。（12-13)

83
an ideological and political view of the people. But in referring to "manifestations,"

which can also be understood as images or representations, the "I" is also worrying about

his writing, which had focused on the superficial, external aspects of life rather than on

its essential or more spiritual aspects.The narrator says that life does not have ultimate

goals, but "not having a goal is a goal, the act of searching itself turns into a sort of goal,

and the object of the search is irrelevant" (342).*^^ Fiction, he says, should also be like

this. He compares fiction to philosophy, saying that fiction is different because "it is the

product of sensory perceptions" (315).'^^ In order to move fiction further away from logic

and closer to the life of real people, many different modes of writing are borrowed from

traditional Chinese sources, such as the "gazetteers of the Warring States period," the

“chuanqi romances of the Tang Dynasty" and the "episodic novels and belles-lettres of

the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (453).'^^ The disorder of the narration in this novel aims at

a closeness to perception, to the randomness of experience. No story has a beginning or

an end because life is also incomplete, and there are always new ways of interpreting the

past.i3G The narrator does not worry about discovering the meaning behind the stories he

tells; he searches for stories which can get one closer to life.

126 In the Chinese, what is translated as "manifestation" is in fact two separate words, biao xiang [ 表 象 ] a n d
xian ； [ 現 象 ] ， n e i t h e r o f which are usually translated as "manifestation," the latter being usually
understood as "phenomenon." The use o f xiang in both links up the two with the notion o f appearance, just
as "manifestation" and "phenomenon" share the concept o f that which is perceived and physical rather than
intuited or conceptual.
I27沒有目的便是目的，搜尋這行爲自成一種目標，且不管掃尋甚麼。（349)
I28它是一種感性的生成(322)
I29戰國的方誌；唐代的傳奇；明清的章回和筆記(471)
Hence the passage where the narrator finds a line on the tomb of Y u the Great which reads, "history is a
riddle," and goes on to elaborate twenty variations on that line, ending with: " O h history oh history oh
history/Actually history can be read any way and this is a major discovery!" (450-51).["歷史是謎語";“歷
史阿歷史阿歷史阿歷史/原來歷史怎麼讀都行，這真是個重大的發現！ (468)]

84
 The desire to bring fiction closer to life is exemplified in the tale of the Grand

Marshall, which the narrator takes from biji fiction.^ An entire chapter is devoted to this

story, and when the story is over, other possible ways of telling it are proposed, ending

with:

Or the story could be developed into numerous intricate and complex theories. It all

depends on how the storyteller tells it.

The Grand Marshall protagonist o f the story has a name and a surname so a great deal o f

textual research, examining historical texts and old books, could be carried out. But as

you are not a historian, don't have political aspirations, and certainly neither wish to

become an expert in Buddhism, nor to preach religion, nor to become a paragon o f virtue,

what appeals to you is the superb purity o f the story. Any explanation is irrelevant, you

simply wanted to retell it in the spoken language (284-5).'^^

The concern here is not the truth behind the myth of history, but rather the "purity of the

story." By ending with the line, "you simply wanted to retell it in the spoken language,"

the narrator indicates that part of the purity of the story would consist in its existence in

the spoken language, because this is closer to real life. Existing as it does in written novel,

this line has a double meaning. In the sense that modern Chinese literature is written in

the vernacular, baihua [白言舌]，the story has in fact been taken from a period when

writing was done in classical Chinese, or wenyan [ 文 言 ] ， a n d has been retold. But in

another sense, the narrator's "soliloquy" is constantly exposing itself as writing, as

⑴ The genre o f biji [筆言己]’ which literally means "pen jottings" and is a type o f literature characterized by
short sketches, is understandably attractive to the narrator (and to the author, as the style o f the novel owes
something to it).
抑或再演繹出許許多多精微而深奧的學說，全在於說故事的人最後如何設釋。
故事中的這主人翁大司馬且有名有姓，翻查史書和古籍，大可作一番考證。你既非史家，又沒有
這類政治野心，更不想當道學先生，也不傳教，也不想爲人師表，你看中的只是這個純而又純的故
事，任何設釋同這故事本身其實都無真接關係，你只想用語言將這故事重新表述一番。（291)

85
something other than what it pretends to be. The effort to move away from literature fails

because the soliloquy cannot exist independently of the text which calls it into being.

When the narrator talks about language directly, he says that it should come as

close as possible to representing sensation, and he laments that linguistic structures are

like a child's blocks, which "can only construct fixed patterns" so that "no matter how

they are moved you will not be able to make anything new" (351).^^^ Again, what he

longs for is unity and purity in language, a language which will express feelings and

sensations. He wants a language "transcending cause and effect, or logic" (350)134:

How is it possible to find a clear pure language with an indestructible sound which is

larger than a melody, transcends limitations o f phrases and sentences, does not

distinguish between subject and object, transcends pronouns, discards logic, simply

sprawls, and is not bound by images, metaphors, associations or symbols? Will it be able

to give expression to the sufferings o f life and the fear o f death, distress and joy,

loneliness and consolation [...] muddle-headedness, sudden enlightenment, never

comphrehending, failing to comprehend, as well as just allowing whatever will happen to

happen ( 3 5 1 ) . ' "

In searching for this "clear pure language," the narrator is looking to access a self that is

just as primordial - a self before self-consciousness. His mistrust of structure in politics,

culture and language, is a manifestation of his mistrust of the self as constituted by

structure, by language. The "you" chapters which are most enigmatic are the ones in

which the narrator tries to capture a sense of self that is before or beyond language. These

⑴只能搭固定的圖像；再怎樣變換，也玩不出新鮮(357)
I34超越因果和邏輯的語言（357)
I35怎麼才能找到有聲響，又割不斷，且大於族律，又超越詞法和句法的限定，無主謂賓語之分，
跨越人稱，用掉邏輯，只一味蔓延，不訴諸意象比喻聯想與像微的明淨而純粹的語言？能將生之痛
苦與死之恐懼，苦惱與歡喜，寂寞與欣慰[...]與昏瞋，與恍然大悟，與總也不明白，與弄也弄不明
白，與由它去了，統統加以表述？（358-9)

86
chapters describe dreams, sexual lust, and nightmares about a "black tide." In reference to

Gao's drama, critics such as Fong point out that the intended effect of the language is to

create a sense of alienation on the part of the audience, not in order to incite social action

(as with Brecht), but in order to allow the audience to feel the power behind the words, to

almost let the words fall away:

G a o X i n g j i a n ' s language is largely lyrical and at times even gossipy, yet it can be

extremely powerful and moving in its indifference and apparent irrelevance, containing

words o f ‘‘unspoken wisdom." As with many Zen Buddhist texts, his words "speaks

directly to the heart," [sic] striking at the innermost core o f the human soul. When they

are most effective, they are graced with an almost magical power derived from a

spellbinding rhythm akin to chanting, evincing a materiality beyond mere utterance and

primary referentiality. The idea is to allow the mind o f the audience to "wander in

contemplation" among the words so as to grasp their true spirit, which resides as a

sublimated effect beyond the language being used.'^^

I think that the "you" chapters in Soul Mountain are attempting to achieve that

kind of effect, to collapse the distance between language and psyche, but I am more

doubtful than Fong about the possibility of the attempt. Part of the enigma of the novel is

that it constantly strives for something which it never achieves. As I will discuss in the

next chapter, Gao's work is similar to Beckett's in the sense that it is a writing of failure,

of looking for an escape from language which it will never accomplish. If we read the

novel as succeeding where it only almost succeeds, we will miss an important part of its

in-betweenness.

On the level of life, as well as language, every time the narrator tries to make

sense of the world, to find peace, and to unify experience, he is foiled. Modernity creeps

丨 36 Fong, p. XXV.

87
in everywhere the narrator goes: in the form of the plan for building the Three Gorges

Dam, which he mentions several times, through deforestation and poaching, and through

the tenuous relationship between local cadres and their superiors in Beijing. The impact

of modernity creates a disconnected and shifting worldview which Gao hopes to

reconnect and fix, but cannot. In this sense, this narrator shares a lot with post-colonial

writers, many of whom began by searching for a way to return to a point in history before

their languages, traditions and cultures began to be mixed up with those of the colonizer.

But as Bhabha stresses, borrowing from Franz Fanon, not only is it impossible to recover

this past, but the attempt shuts off the possibility for renewal and moving forward. Fanon

warns that in its attempts to recover tradition and restore history to colonized peoples,

nationalism in anti-colonial struggles has to be careful not to replace colonial power with

the hegemonic power of masterwords like "nation" or "culture." Bhabha writes, "[Fanon

is] far too aware of the dangers of the fixity and fetishism of identities within the

calcification of colonial cultures to recommend that 'roots' be struck in the celebratory

romance of the past or by homogenizing the history of the p r e s e n t . W h a t the native

intellectual needs to do is recognize that "[t]he changed political and historical site of

enunciation transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs

of a free people of the future."'^^

For Gao, this would mean allowing the symbols of past and present oppression to

be transformed into "liberatory signs," not just for the "Chinese people" as imagined by

other Chinese intellectuals, but also for those who, like him, do not quite fit under that

broad label. There are moments, particularly those when the narrator is being playful and

I " Bhabha, p. 13.

138 Bhabha, p. 56.

88
leading the reader down a never-ending spiral of unanswerable questions, when he seems

to be experimenting with the power of language itself to provide him with the freedom he

seeks. When the "he" is directly questioned by a literary critic if he is from the

"searching-for-roots" school of writers (discussed in the Introduction), instead of directly

denying it, or acknowledging that the novel could be taken in this way, as Louie claims,

139 the narration reads, "He hastens to say that you sir have stuck such labels on him.

However，the fiction he writes is simply because he can't bear the loneliness, he writes to

amuse himself. He didn't expect to fall into the quagmire of the literary world and at

present he is trying to pull himself out" ( 4 5 3 ) . W h e n he neither affirms or denies his

connection to the "searching-for-roots" school, and claims to be pulling out of the literary

world in the context of a literary narrative, the novel demonstrates the impossibility both

of trying to strike "roots" and of trying to escape the "quagmire of the literary world," or

even language itself.

As I have said, the narrator's attempt to go back to an imagined, prior moment of

unity is rendered impossible from the beginning by the very structure of the novel, and it

reminds us that such disorientation is an unavoidable part of the experience of modernity.

Gradually, as the novel winds on (and around), the narrator realizes that complete

freedom from society and an "authentic" life are unattainable for him, or possibly for

anyone. In one incident, he ends up spending a horribly uncomfortable night in a cave

and he thinks, "I must return to the smoke and fire of the human world to search for

sunlight, warmth, happiness, and to search for human society to rekindle the noisiness,

139 Louie, p. 146.

14。他連忙說，這些標籤都是閣下貼的，他寫了小說只是耐不住寂寞，自得其樂，沒想到竟落進文
學界的圈子裡，現正打算爬出來(471)

89
even if anxiety is regenerated, for that is in fact life in the human world" (222).⑷ These

moments come and go, but never develop into a sustained critique of the possibility of

finding one's "soul" or self. It is for this reason that I find the model of dialogism useful,

because it reminds us that any attempt to claim authenticity for one voice will always be

undermined by another. In a similar vein, Bhabha suggests that we abandon ocular

metaphors - of image and counter-image, of split screens - because they hold onto

notions that one might be able to get beyond representations of "reality" to access truth,

and because they provide no structure in which differing viewpoints can be articulated at

the same time, with neither taking control. He chooses instead to think in the language of

negotiation and translation, in the sense that one who stands on the borders of two

languages must translate ideas back and forth and is always aware of the slippages of

language. By thinking in this way, he suggests, following Derrida and Foucault, we will

become aware that political referents "make sense as they come to be constructed in the

discourses of feminism, Marxism or the Third Cinema or whatever, whose objects of

priority [...] are always in historical and philosophical tension, or cross-reference with

other objectives.’，i42 Applying this point to Soul Mountain, we see that it is impossible to

search for cultural objects or languages which could serve as "a pure avenging angel

speaking the truth of a radical historicity and pure oppositionality."'"^^ Instead of looking

for the discourse which will overturn the monologism of the dominant culture, instead of

trying to approximate his dialogue to "real" life to escape the artificiality of writing, the

narrator might be better served by creating a "temporality of negotiation or translation," a

我必須回到人間煙火中去，去找尋陽光，去找尋溫暖，去找尋快樂，去找尋人群，重溫那種喧
鬧，那怕再帶來煩惱，畢竟是人世間的氣息。（220)
142 Bhabha, p. 38.
丨43 Bhabha, p. 38.

90
model which stops worrying about the problems of representation and begins to create

spaces for ongoing change.

There are moments in this fragmented narrative when I find the beginnings of the

sort of thing Bhabha is talking about here. The clearest moments are those when the

narrator directly confronts his position as a writer who feels the need to remain within

society, but who cannot ignore the contradictions he finds in it. The option traditionally

available to Chinese poets who found themselves unable to create within the restrictions

of their contemporary society was exile. In traditional China, exiles found safe havens in

Daoist or Buddhist monasteries as recluses. They lived as close to the edge of society as

possible, but did not completely leave the bounds of Chinese civilization. At one point,

the narrator reflects on the way that exile enabled the work of two of China's most

famous poets: Qu Yuan and Li Bai:

W h e n the officer o f the three wards, Q u Y u a n , was driven from the palace gates he

probably passed a l o n g the bottom o f this slope and certainly w o u l d have plucked a lotus

to wear in his belt. Before the lake shrank to this small pond the banks were covered with

fragrant plants w h i c h he w o u l d have used to weave a hat. It was here, in this fertile water-

rich land, that he gave vent to loud singing and left to posterity his peerless songs. H a d he

not been driven from the palace gates perhaps he m i g h t not have become the great poet.

S i m i l a r l y , i f Li Bai had not been driven from the court o f Emperor X u a n z o n g o f the Tang

Dynasty, he w o u l d probably not have become the immortal poet and there w o u l d not be

the legend o f his setting out in a boat while drunk and trying to scoop up the m o o n from

the water ( 3 1 9 ) ，

4 4
1 三閭大夫屈原被逐出官門大槪就從這土被下經過，肯定採了這唐裡的荷花出作爲佩帶。海子湖
還未萎縮成這小水塘之前岸邊自然還長滿各種香草，他想必用來編成冠築，在這水鄕澤國憤然高
歌，才留下了那些千古絕唱。他要不驅出官門，也許還成就不了這位大詩人。
他之後的李白唐玄宗要不趕出官延，沒準也成不了詩仙，更不會有酒後泛舟又下水榜月的傳說。
(325).

91
When discussing the landscape painter and poet Gong Xian, he expresses the idea that

one risks going mad if one remains in a world which seems to be constantly working

against oneself. He says, "Gong Xian didn't go mad, he transcended the world. Because

he did not want to fight against the world he was able to preserve his innate nature [...]

He did not fight, he did not rationalize, and hence preserved the totality of his being"

(445-6). 145 This sense that transcendence would be his only option, and yet is impossible

for him to achieve, is the source of his anxiety.

The narrator does not wish to suffer the same fate as the "father of modem

Chinese literature," Lu Xun, who gave up his creative writing in order to answer his own

call for Chinese literary youth to "cease being bystanders and to participate in bringing

about the social and cultural reforms necessary to save the n a t i o n . T h i s decision

caused Lu Xun great agony, and the experience of having to put forward a public

persona and write only in private is expressed in the collection of poems entitled Yecao

[里予草，Wild Grass] from which the prose poem, "The Passer-by," was taken. In the

chapter of Soul Mountain when the narrator visits Shaoxing, the hometown of Lu Xun,

he wonders about a line (spoken by Lu Xun's public persona) which he used to recite at

school: "I spill my blood for the Yellow Emperor.，，"？ He says he now has doubts about

it and wonders, "But why is it necessary to use blood to promote the spirit of one's

ancestors? Can one achieve greatness by spilling one's hot blood? One's head is one's

145沒瘋的倒是襲賢，他超越這世俗，不想與之抗爭，才守住了本性。[…]也不是對抗，他根本不予
理會，才守住了完整的人格。（463-4)
146 Lee, 2003, paragraph 10.
1 47 “ 我 以 我 血 薦 軒 轄 ” (465)

92
own, why does it have to be chopped off for the Yellow Emperor?" (448).'"^^ It is at the

end of this section that the " I " thinks: "In seeking to survive and yet to retain the

authenticity existing at parturition one will either be killed or go mad, if not one will

constantly be on the run. I can't stay long in this small town and flee." (448).i49 Later,

the narrator remembers advice an uncle whom he admired gave him not to get involved

in either literature or politics and to become an observer. He says, "From that time on, I

too became an observer" (475).^^° He rejects Lu Xun's decision and wishes to avoid

association with political movements or "schools" in order to maintain this stance as an

"observer," even, it seems, if it means always being on the run.

The sense of maintaining impartiality to observe society, or the idea of "cold

literature" which Gao also advocates in his critical writing, would seem to fall in line

with certain features of Daoism or Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. There are

similarities between the idea of a writer who is merely a bystander, above politics, and

the "traditional Chinese Zen Buddhist, who chooses to detach himself from the 'dusty'

human world while being in it, casting a 'cold eye，on everything, especially the

absurdities and the shortsightedness of the unenlightened."^^' The narrator visits many

monasteries and temples on his journey, and even questions a Daoist and a Buddhist

monk on their decision to renounce society, contemplating whether or not being a true

recluse is a possibility for him. But eventually he realizes that he cannot completely

abandon society, saying, "I am not a recluse and still want to eat from the stoves of

148發揚組先爲甚麼偏要用血？將一腔熱血薦出來又是否光大得了？頭本來是自己的，爲這軒轅就
必須砍掉？（465)
I49求生存而又要保存娘生真面目，不被殺又不肯被弄瘋，就只有逃難。這小城也不可多待，我趕
緊逃了出來。（466)
我這才開始觀察（493)
151 Fong, p. XV.

93
human society" (401).*^^ Just as he came to the conclusion, after exploring desolate

mountains, that he wanted the warmth of society, after spending a few nights in the aptly-

named Palace of Supreme Purity, he realizes that he cannot find what he is looking for by

completely closing himself off. The purity which he sought may in fact be impossible for

him to achieve. He says, "It is also impossible for me to be a recluse. For some reason, I

hastily depart from the Palace of Supreme Purity. Is it because I can't endure the purity of

non-being? [...] It seems, in the end, I am just a connoisseur of beauty" ( 4 1 T h e role

of a connoisseur of beauty could mean many things, but it is certainly connected to the

idea expressed by this narrator that language should aim to express life and emotion. i54

The narrator's desire to be only an "observer" cannot involve completely detaching

himself from the world in the style of a Zen Buddhist. The other option, then, would be to

completely retreat into contemplation of the self, but this, too, cannot be done to the

extent of eliminating interaction with others. Fong describes the tension as follows:

But while the Zen Buddhist is keen on pursuing a supreme happiness, the understanding

o f the tao, Gao Xingjian does not consider himself so lucky, for as a modern man

obligated to explore his own soul, he simply cannot afford the luxury o f hiding his

torment behind the tao. Instead, he forces his way into the self and compels it to

reluctantly admit to its own inadequacies, its fragmentation, its impotence to act, and its

inability to eradicate the evil in and around it.'^^

152我不是隱士，也還要食人間煙火。（415)
我也當不了隱士，說不清爲甚麼又急著離開了那上清官，是忍受不了那清爭無爲？[…]看來，充
其量我只不過是個美的鑑賞者。（427)
154 In this sense, the narrator sounds like John Keats' idea o f a negatively capable poet, who is "capable o f
being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason，，and for whom
"the sense o f Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." Quoted
from: Keats, John. "Letters." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Eighth Edition: Volume D: The
Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. London: W . W . Norton & Company, 2005.
Fong, p. XV.

94
This is a description of Gao's dramatic standpoint, but it could just as easily be a

description of what goes on throughout the narration of Soul Mountain. In fact, Soul

Mountain has also been understood by Gao's critics as representing an "in-between"

stage in his career as well. Fong describes Gao's dramatic career as a spectrum from a

period of "public subject matter" (such as The Bus Stop) to "more private concerns,"

from "the culture and system specific" to "the more universal." He locates the turning

point in Gao's play The Other Shore, which was written around the same time as Soul

MountainHenry Zhao also chooses not to include the novel in his category of

"Zen/Xieyi" dramas, presumably for similar reasons.

Apart from its composition at a transitional point in Gao's career, the novel raises

concerns about the possibility of living in a permanent condition of marginality or in-

betweenness. As the narrator wanders in search of a comfortable stopping-point and yet

finds none, he performs the condition which Bhabha calls "unhomeliness," which is "a

paradigmatic colonial and post-colonial condition, [but] has a resonance that can be heard

distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a

range of transhistorical sights." Bhabha says, "To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor

can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into

public and private." We have seen that the narrator's sense of uprootedness has caused

him much anxiety, and that he often transposes private anxieties onto public concerns and

vice versa. The difficultly of distinguishing between the public and private in this novel is

echoed in its position midway through Fong's spectrum of Gao's drama, and using this

156 Fong, p. XV.

I " Bhabha, p. 13.

95
formulation, it would appear that the difficultly is due to the narrator's experience of

"unhomeliness."

The narrator does, of course, recognize that he will never be "at home" in the way

that he dreams of being. His search for his childhood is essentially a search for this

feeling, but he says, "You realize that the childhood you have been searching for doesn't

necessarily have a definite location. And isn't it the same with one's so-called hometown?

[...]Although you were born in the city, grew up in cities and spent the larger part of

your life in some huge urban metropolis, you can't make that huge urban metropolis the

hometown of your heart" (328)」58 His attitude towards his return to the metropolis at the

end of the novel is markedly ambivalent. In one passage, he sees a woman outside of a

temple on a mountain in a martial arts pose, and looking at her narrowed, expressionless

eyes, thinks, "[The woman's eyes] have their own closed world which I will never be

able to enter. They have their own method of survival and self-protection and roam

beyond the fringes of what is known as society. However, I can only return to pass my

existence in what people are accustomed to calling a normal life, there is no alternative

for me, and probably this is my tragedy" (415)」59 In the eyes of this woman, the narrator

sees a glimpse of the potential to go beyond the boundaries of society, something which

he will never achieve, except in fleeting instances, and in a life of movement. The image

of being on-the-run, of having no roots and nowhere to call home, is one which opens the

158你恍然領悟，你徒然找尋的童年其實未必有確磐的地方。而所謂故鄕，不也如此？[…]儘管你生
在城裡，在城市裡長大，你這一生絕大多數的歲月在大都市裡度過，你還是無法把那龐大的都市作
爲你心裡的故鄉。（334)
“59他們自有一個我永遠也走不進去對我封閉的世界，他們有他們生存和自衛的方式，游離在這被
稱之爲社會之外。我卻只能再回到眾人習以爲常的生活中去苟活，沒有別的出路，這大槪也是我的
悲哀。（432-3)

96
possibility of a life of self-imposed exile in the future, even though that option is never

named. He says:

I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces. There are so many people in

this big wide world and so many places to visit but there is nowhere for me to put down

roots, to have a small refuge, to live a simple life. I always encounter the same sort of

neighbours, say the same sort o f things, good morning or hello, and once again am

embroiled in endless daily trivia. Even before this becomes solidly entrenched, I will

already have tired o f it all. I know there is no cure for me (400).'^°

The language of "tragedy" and "no cure" which characterizes these statements on the fate

of the narrator to be in a state of flux and movement are not unexpected. But I would

argue that although this condition may be a "tragedy" on a personal level for the narrator,

it is also the impetus for writing, the condition which incites the construction of a new

social and cultural identity. As Bhabha argues, "The unhomely moment relates the

traumatic ambivalence of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political

existence.”i6i For Bhabha, ambivalence is the mark of a splitting between competing

narrative modes, between imagined unity and actual heterogeneity, and although the

"unhomely" moment may arise out of a "traumatic ambivalence," it also enables the

translation and negotiation that bring out new ways of envisioning the world.

The narrator's ambivalent return at the end of the novel performs the tension

between the comforting draw of unity and authenticity and the constant reminders of the

contradictions within that dream which cause it to slip away just as he seems to get close

to it. From the point of view of the narrator of this novel, a writer working in the years

我寧願飄然而來，飄然而去，不留下痕跡。這廣大的世界上有那麼多人，那麼多去處卻沒有一
處我可以扎下根來，安一個小窝，老老實實過日子，總遇見同樣的鄰居，說一樣的話，你早或是你
好，再捲進沒完沒了的日常繁璃的糾葛中去。把這一切都弄得確•不移之前，我就已經先腻味了。
我知道，我已不可救藥。（414)
丨61 Bhabha, p. 15.

97
just after the opening up of China must engage in a writing back on two sides: on the one

hand, he must revisit and work through the pain of the Cultural Revolution in order to

move forward, on the other hand he must defend his cultural and personal identity from

the threats of modernization, internationalization and commercialization. Soul Mountain

is the result of the writer's struggle to find a place for his language (and through language,

for the self) in a rapidly changing and uncertain world. But this is a novel which does not

simply reflect a condition or position, but enacts it. The performative element of marginal

writing is what Bhabha emphasizes is its most powerful tool. Because novels like this one

are written in the margins, they call attention to the way that the dominant culture's

reassertion of itself is not as consistent, nor as unitary, as it seems. The narrator of this

novel attempts to find his own voice while resisting the pull of both Chinese nationalist

culture and an encroaching Western culture. Every time he tries to find a safe haven in

what Bhabha calls the pedagogical narration of the nation - the homogenizing, mythical

idea of a traditional culture — he knows he is far too aware of the constructed nature of

that myth to accept it.

Even if Gao does not wish to recognize this, the novel performs a position that is

very important, if not unique, and it calls attention to key questions about the future of

Chinese literature. It questions, for example, the feasibility of a literature which aims to

represent "what's going on inside China,"'^^ and yet wishes that more authentic versions

of Chinese literature (those not written by exiles living in the West) received more

recognition on an international scale as part of world literature. Lovell suggests that it is

162 " A s a writer," asserted Li Feng, “I worry about how to be in China. The value in China o f [Chinese]
writers abroad has to be very low, because although they seem powerful abroad, they don't understand
m u c h o f what's going on inside China. The greatest honor for a writer is acknowledgement from your own
people... Y o u r works have to exercise influence and provoke discussion amongst this people" (Li Feng,
2001). Quoted in Lovell, p. 40.

98
possible, in the aftermath of what she calls the Nobel Complex in China, that literature's

role as "international ambassador for China" will diminish. At the same time, she says,

"as long as the nation-state remains the principal unit of accounting in global transactions,

and as long as intellectuals remain opinion makers in nations around the world, these

links between national identity and literature retain a powerful hold on global

consciousness.，,163 As "what's going on inside China" becomes increasingly complex and

the "reality" of China becomes nearly impossible to represent with any sense of

wholeness, and especially as the social prestige accorded to literature in Chinese society

fades in proportion to increasing attention to economic concerns, it is possible that the

fragmentation and disconnectedness in Soul Mountain may not seem so strange or out of

place. It performs an emerging identity, which will likely seem more "representative," in

both senses, over time.

In the model of performativity and negotiation which I have been employing to

make sense of this novel, nothing is fixed or stable, and the focus is not on cultural

objects but the process of creating culture, the act of writing. What is important, then, is

not what a cultural event or a text is, but what it does. Unlike in The Bus Stop, where I

argued the author is still concerned with giving some kind of direction to the audience,

here there is no sense that the path is being laid out. There is no more "telling," but there

is "showing," in the sense of demonstrating how change happens, as it happens. In this

way, it is easy to understand how judgments made on Soul Mountain based on what it is

or what it tries to represent in an artistic sense would find little to hold onto. If, on the

other hand, the novel were to be judged according to what it does, it could be seen as an

attempt to dissolve the assumed contradiction between representing the universal and the

Lovell, p. 44

99
particular (or the human condition and the state of the self in Chinese culture), at the

same time. It can be seen as a novel which confronts head-on the problems of the

imbalance of power between opposites - mainstream and marginal cultures, or the drive

to modernize and the preservation of tradition - and yet instead of simply inverting the

hierarchy, looks for a way through the binaries. In his use of dialogue and fragmented

storytelling instead of a more traditional narrative, Gao is proposing one option for

escaping these powerful dichotomies. In describing the shift to the language of discourse

and textuality, Bhabha cites a point about another type of performance which is related to

the point I am making here, and which is similar to what several critics have argued about

Gao's drama:

Paul Gilroy also refers to Bakhtin's theory o f narrative when he describes the

performance o f black expressive cultures as an attempt to transform the relationship

between performer and crowd 'in dialogic, rituals so that spectators acquire the active

role o f participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may

symbolize or even create a community [Bhabha's emphasis].'^''

Although Gao would not say that he is seeking to create any sort of community, if we

think temporally rather than spatially, his writing does open the way for a community to

begin to be created, for other writings (Bhabha would call them supplements) to pick up

where the novel left off, or, to use another metaphor, to join the dialogue and keep the

stories going. With that in mind, the Swedish Academy might not have been as far off the

mark as they seemed at first glance, because in awarding the Nobel prize to Gao because

he has "opened up new paths for the Chinese novel and drama," they were recognizing

the way that Gao's writing is doing something, not just representing something. I would

164 Bhabha, p. 44

100
add that this "something" which it is doing, this performing of an identity in flux, is not

only valuable as an innovative step in the Chinese literary tradition, but as a part of a

larger tradition of marginal writing and world literature.

101
 Chapter 3

If Gao Xingjian，s Soul Mountain is a difficult text to discuss without considering

the author's personal life and beliefs, then Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable seems at

first glance the exact opposite, a text which seems to evade every attempt to connect it to

the outside world, whether it be the world of the author or the reader. The former features

a narrator who not only shares the same nationality as the author but also describes events

which occurred in the author's own life; the latter features a narrator who not only lacks a

name and even the certainty of a body, but also narrates from a place and time which is

almost impossible to pin down because the text negates every assertion it makes. It may

seem strange, therefore, to look at these texts side by side in terms of their engagement

with the world and particularly with any kind of political ideology. Although Gao's novel,

as we have seen, complicates the connection between storytelling and the world by

questioning its own truthtelling power, Beckett's text engages in such a rigorous self-

negation that it seems impossible to find any positive term which could be political in any

way. Despite their differences, however, these novels share a tension between the

universal and the local, a constant questioning of the authority of the narrating voice, a

distrust of language, and a similar longing to reach beyond language to find something

new. Considering all of this, it is revealing that as a writer, Gao has spent his career

trying to dissociate his writing from notions of the political, while Beckett's critics have

just begun to labor (and only tentatively) at finding a political dimension in his writing. In

what follows, 1 will attempt to tease out a notion of the political capacity of Beckett's The

Unnamable, a capacity which is defined not so much by its connection to any existing

real-world political positions, but by its more fundamental potential to make use of the

102
existence of differences to try to imagine new and better ways of living and being in the

world. As I do so, I hope that Gao's novel will remain in the background as a point of

comparison. If the underlying similarities between the two novels are much stronger than

they initially appear, as I will demonstrate, then it will be necessary to ask if the

differences between the novels is enough to justify the significantly different attitudes

these authors' critics have adopted toward their relationship to the political.

In the Introduction I discussed some of the critical studies of the Irish dimension

in Beckett's writing, noting that it is not the impossibility or improbability of such

attempts which causes most critics of his writing to shy away from them. Rather,

localizing, and, even more daringly,politicizing, Beckett's work seems to violate two

artistic sanctities: the authority of the author and the autonomy of the text. In the first

case, as I have described, we are faced with an author who, regardless of his personal

political affiliations during his lifetime, consistently denied that his work "meant"

anything outside of the words on the page. In a century where artistic freedoms came

very much under threat, both from totalitarian governments and forceful calls for

committed, politicized art to resist those governments, it has been important to respect the

authorial freedom to resist the pull of politics from both sides. In the second case, we

must contend with the reality of Beckett's texts, which so radically disorient notions of

form, space and time that every attempt to identify a political (or apolitical) claim seems

to already have been denied by the text itself. Many critics have found that as soon as one

begins to find a possible positive political model in Beckett, the bottom falls out and all

textual support for the model is lost. In his discussion of Beckett's relation to the genre of

103
Utopia as one possible way of thinking about a political Beckett, for example, Abbott

writes:

Without question, Beckett wants us to feel the weight o f political injustice, the outrage o f

tyranny, the stifling inhumanity o f engineered lives, the bitter residue o f a system o f self-

interest. Yet, at the same time, he communicates a vision of history as, at once, blind and

catastrophic - wholly beyond the reach of narrative control. [...] In pointedly adopting

the highly politicized form o f the Utopia, Beckett pointedly withdraws from it any hope o f

the historical mechanism of Utopian reform. [...] We can, of course, postulate another

world with another kind o f history, unendorsed by Beckett, and situate Beckett's work

within it. And we can further imagine Beckett's work performing a vital function within

such a world. But it would appear from the evidence that we do so without Beckett's

authority.'"

When confronted with the possibility that a political reading of a text not only goes

against the author's stated claims for his work, but against the evidence presented by the

text itself, defending that reading becomes more difficult than simply saying that the text

is doing something the author did not predict.

If we subscribe to the view that a political reading of a text must produce a

political message that is recognizably connected to the real world, then we assume that

such a reading must be supported by the author's authority. If we wish to find this type of

politics in a text like Beckett's, it seems that the only option left to the critic is to negate

the denial, to argue that the negativity is somehow subversive, which leaves no positive

term from which we can build a political position. As Boxall says, "Without saying what

it is that you resist, it is difficult to articulate a poetics of resistance.”i66 Boxall writes

Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996，p. 139.
Boxall, p. 209.

104
about the way that recent postcolonial readings of Beckett's work have struggled to

reconcile such interpretive gaps - "where Beckett's politics are seen to stem both from

reference and resistance to reference.，,i67 In their attempt to find a positive political

reading and give voice to silenced concerns, Abbott also points out that critics such as

Steven Connor and David Lloyd end up occluding those very voices by deconstructing

terms like "author" or "identity." He writes, "This jettisoning of terms for the subject has

left in their place, at best, the existential/postmodern turn occluding reifications of

intellectual culture. What is missing, and no doubt impossible, is a term that identifies the

topic (the place of attention) while, at the same time, it acknowledges unknowing."^^^

Abbott is looking here for a political term which serves a similar function as Beckett

hoped the term "the unnamable" would serve; a term which both signifies something in

the real world (identifies a point to which it refers) and refuses to fix its meaning, thus

pointing to the difficulties inherent in signification, (as postmodernism has helped us to

do). O f course, even Beckett's term "the unnamable" is unable to fully achieve the

"double intent" that Abbott is looking for here, as it eventually acquires its own

signification and loses its "unknowing."

Even if we respectfully set aside the problem of working without Beckett's

authority (as we did with Gao) these critics are suggesting that it is nearly impossible to

find a political reading which sees the text as continually renewing itself and opening up

new ways of thinking and yet has practical and measurable connections to the real world.

It would seem that there is still no way to get out of the self-contradicting nature of an

attempt to read Beckett locally and politically. At the same time, if we look closely we

167 Boxall 2000, p. 210.

168 Abbott, p. 140.

105
find that a large portion of recent Beckett criticism on other subjects has been perfectly

comfortable working towards, and concluding in, in-between spaces of various sorts. For

example, Paul Davies writes, "[The four nouvelles and the 'trilogy' of novels] all

describe a borderline between the salvation of an epoch and its destruction"^^^ and Simon

Critchley argues, "The dramatic tension of the Trilogy, to my mind, is found in the

disjunction that opens up between the time of narrative, the chain of increasingly

untenable and untenable stories, and the nonnarratable time of the narrative voice，"?。.

These are perfectly defendable positions, yet if we should conclude that Beckett's writing

produces or (even more daring) is produced as a result of a tension between the local and

the universal, the engagement with a local identity and the disengagement of an

uncommitted (post)modernism, then this position seems unstable. I suggest that instead

of looking for specific political concerns on display in Beckett's texts, instead of

searching for stable reference points in narratives which resist and avoid their own

referential function, it may be possible to understand the way that these texts never quite

fit into pre-formed categories, and never seem to cease the back and forth movement

between oppositions, as itself a measure of their ability to move back and forth between

being located in a national, historical and political context and existing in a space of

unknowing. We might say that their dislocation, their ability to create despite never

settling on a subject matter, is the source of the political in these texts.

The notion of the political Beckett that I wish to propose here, then, is one which

is not concerned with the political commitment (or lack thereof) on the part of the author

169 Davies, Paul. "Three novels and four nouvelles: giving up the ghost be born at last." The Cambridge
Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 43.
170 Critchley, Simon. " W h o Speaks in the Work o f Samuel Beckett?" Yale French Studies 93, 1998: 114-
130’ p. 115.

106
or with positive or negative terms in the text which engage or deny political concerns.

Rather, I wish to examine the potential for political effect which the text produces

alongside these two realities. Although there are many differences between Gao's Soul

Mountain and Beckett's The Unnamable, I will demonstrate that both texts have similar

performative capacities which are a result of the in-between conditions of writing, which

enable them to create spaces for imagining new realities, and which demonstrate by

example how movement can take place in spite of negation and nothingness. What I am

not suggesting here is that Beckett's writing must be viewed through the lens of his

Irishness, or that Ireland colors every word in his texts. What I am suggesting, however,

is that by linking the located, physical position of marginality occupied by the author

(and the novel) to the more abstract notions of in-betweenness identified by many of

Beckett's critics, we may find that the tensions in the text are productive, or have the

potential to be so, in material ways. At the same time, we can stop struggling so hard to

solve the "problem" of representation, because we can focus on what the words do, not

what they say or represent. Ultimately, we will be looking in between or beyond the

words, to the inexpressible visions to which Beckett so notoriously gestures towards

throughout his oeuvre.

In a similar way to Soul Mountain, the first novel of Beckett's "trilogy" opens

with a character narrating from the margins of society, almost beyond its reach, but never

quite stepping outside its borders. In Molloy, the eponymous character spends time in the

forest and at the seaside, and although he is not sure that he is still in his "region" at parts,

believes it is improbable that he could have left it. He says, "Though I fail to see, never

having left my region, what right I have to speak of its characteristics. No, I never

107
escaped, and even the limits of my region were unknown to me. But I felt they were far

away.，’i7i Like Gao's narrator, while he spends most of his time at the margins of his

region and of his society, he does not express a wish to go somewhere else, but he also

does not feel attached to its social world in the way that others seem to. Because of

"living so far from words so long," Molloy does not communicate well with people, so

the only person he sees regularly is his mother, with whom he communicates by means of

knocks on the head (31). Harrington writes that this problem of feeling distanced but not

wholly disconnected from place is an important feature of Beckett's novels. He argues

that this issue is central to Irish literature as a whole, but Beckett abstracts it "into a new

form of that attraction and repulsion from home" which he argues is a common feature of

modern Irish literature. The difference is that most other writers in Irish literature express

that ambivalence to place more directly, "with adequate signposts for provincial

landmarks."172 The problem Molloy faces is that without a sense of place, he cannot have

a sense of identity. He cannot remember the name of his town, and when questioned by

the police, he cannot remember his own name for a time. He says, "And even my sense of

identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate" (31). Even though

Molloy uses a markedly indistinct word for place, "region," he shares the same desire of

the narrator of Soul Mountain to escape place, to dis-locate the self and discover it in

isolation from a sense of place. Yet neither narrator succeeds. Harrington argues that the

failure of the attempt at a "superannuation of place" is a key feature of the Beckettian

poetics of failure, because it is a failure which fails to negate completely: "The

hermeneutics of place in Molloy extract instead the attractions of both home and away,

171 Beckett, Samuel. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press,
1958，p. 65. [Hereafter cited with page numbers in the text].
丨72 Harrington, p. 157.

108
the limits of both, and an impasse between those a l t e r n a t i v e s . I n fact, the use of the

word "region" exemplifies this impasse, as it simultaneously distances the narrator from

more familiar sense of place, such as nation or home, and calls attention to the question

of place by the very strangeness of the phrase "my region." The inability of Molloy to

recognize the region he has (probably) never left, and the ambiguous features and

boundaries of this region only highlight the fact that one does not need to know where

one is to be there. Even though we have so little to go on, as readers we still assume, as

does Molloy, that he is somewhere - it is unimaginable to be completely dislocated.

In The Umamable the sense of placelessness is taken to the extreme. The

speaking voice presents several possibilities for his location: in the beginning he speaks

of being in a circular space whose walls cannot be seen; in one of Mahood's stories he

speaks of being in an enclosed yard outside a rotunda where his family lives, and in

another he lives in a "receptacle" or "jar," cared for by the woman who runs the chop-

house across the street; when speaking for/as Worm, he is in a room, surrounded by

"them," which has holes in it for their lanterns and for them to speak to him and grab him

through. Near the end of the novel it seems none of these are the true location of the

narrator, yet no other alternative is offered. Even more disorienting is the fact that the

unnamable cannot remember if he has ever been anyplace else besides this non-place. If

he is repeating the words spoken by others, by "them," as he sometimes claims, then the

stories of Mahood and Worm may not have anything to do with the experience of the

voice. But at other times, the unnamable thinks he may be completely alone in this non-

place, so it is possible he either invented or remembered these stories. One would expect

this situation to lend support to the characterization of Beckett as the "Nayman from

Harrington, p. 159.

109
Noland," as Richard Ellmann calls him in Four Dubliners. A sense of place continues to

reassert itself, however, as it does in Molloy, not through unconscious references to the

world, but through the inability of the narrator to function without some sense of place,

however provisional. To begin with, the unnamable cannot function without some sense

of having come from somewhere. He says, "Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the

revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of

myself as being here forever, but not as having been here forever. This will greatly help

me in my relation" (295-6). Even more than that, the voice finds it impossible to let go of

the question of place because without it, he cannot define himself. And until he can speak

of himself, he cannot go silent. In other words, first he must say where he is, then he must

say who he is, then he can proceed. The novel begins, after all, with the question "Where

now?" before "Who now?" and "What now?", and later the voice asks, "Where am I?

That's my first question, after an age of listening" (349). Later, he reasons out the process

as follows:

It's o f me now I must speak, even i f I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a

step towards silence and the end o f madness, the madness o f having to speak and not

being able to, except o f things that don't concern me, that don't count, that I don't believe,

that they have crammed me full o f to prevent me from saying who 1 am, where I am, and

from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put an end to it, from doing what I

have to do (324).

The unnamable remains convinced to the end that he will eventually utter the right words,

whether on his own or with "their" help, which will allow him to "say I." When he finally

speaks, the "where" will be as important as the "who": "what I shall say, if I can, relates

to the place where I am, to me who am there [...] What I say, what I may say, on this

110
subject, the subject of me and my abode, has already been said [...]，’ (301-302, my

emphasis).

All three novels demonstrate the importance of place and the impossibility of

being nowhere in a physical sense, but in The Unnamable we discover that being and

place are inextricably linked. This remains true even through the end of the novel, when

it would seem that we are hearing a voice coming from nowhere. Richard Begam

characterizes the novel as "the end of man and the beginning of writing," arguing that the

last third of the novel moves toward "a condition of pure textuality, toward a literature

that seeks to free itself from representation and expression.，，i 74 Actually, in this

seemingly plotless and characterless section, the problem of place comes up even more

frequently, and often it is invoked as a way to escape "all their balls about being and

existing," such as when the voice says, "Quick, a place. With no way in, no way out, a

safe place" (348). Harrington suggests that the failure actually to write from "nowhere" is

more important in the end of the novel than the desire to be nowhere. He writes,

"Alternatively, a reading can locate the Beckett narrator on the brink between somewhere

and nowhere in reference to the former rather than the latter.，“ 75 What we see in this

section is a struggle with the experience of being on the brink of nowhere, not a narrative

coming from nowhere at all.

The obvious question which Harrington's point leads us to, located as it is in a

book called The Irish Beckett, is whether this "somewhere" that Beckett's novel is on the

brink of is Ireland, Europe, or the world more generally. Harrington asks it himself when

he says, "The text demands consideration of what sense of place may be 'gone' and what

174 Begam, Richard. Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996,
pp. 149 & 155.
丨 75 Harrington, p. 167.

Ill
sense of place remains."'^^ While it is certainly easy to see how the "[i]mmobility before

a dialectics of place, inability to establish place, and inability to escape place" in

Beckett's writing is shared by many writers in the Irish canon, is it evidence of the

"Ireland in Beckett，，？「71 propose that it may be more useful to think of the ways in

which the problematic connection to place found in The Unnamahle is something which

Beckett shares not only with other Irish writers, but with others living in marginal or

emigrant communities, particularly those who have experienced colonialism. Harrington

states that the three novels "are sufficiently social and historical" to offer something

affirmative, but do not.'^^ I agree that any reading of these texts which purports to find a

positivist message or a model of transcendence would be wishful thinking. But as we

have seen, the work of Homi Bhabha helps us to recognize the possibilities that being in-

between can open up for new models of understanding identity and experience. In fact,

apart from discovering that the three novels eventually lead the reader into various

theoretical spaces of in-betweenness, several critics have noticed the way that the novels'

characters' position at the edges of society gives them unique perspectives on the world

that the rest of us lack. Davies，for example, argues that by virtue of never feeling that

they are "fully born," Beckett's characters cannot become fully absorbed in the world,

and therefore notice things regular people do not, like the killing at the abattoir, or the

way a stone feels.

The in-between experience of Beckett's characters in the three novels is much like

Bhabha's notion of unhomliness, which I discussed in the last chapter. If we recall, for

Harrington, p. 167.
177 Harrington, p. 170-1.
178 Harrington, p. 171.
179 Davies, p. 51.

112
Bhabha, the condition he calls "unhomliness" - which is "not to be homeless," but of

course，it is not to be "homed" or "at home" either - is a "paradigmatic colonial and post-

colonial condition" which still resonates "in a range of transhistorical sites.，，】We hear

the echo of unhomliness when the voice says: "Even Mahood's stories are not any old

thing, though no less foreign, to what, to that unfamiliar native land of mine, as

unfamiliar as that other where men come and go, and feel at home, on tracks they have

made themselves [...]，，(314). What land is that "other" land? In a series of novels written

in French but containing characters with Irish names, it is very likely France, the land of

residence as unfamiliar as the native land. When the issue of place returns at the end of

The Unnamable, the narrator expresses a longing to be at home with more depth and

power than can be found up to that point in the three novels. He suddenly says, "I wanted

myself, in my own land for a brief space, I didn't want to die a stranger in the midst of

strangers, a stranger in my own midst, surrounded by invaders, no, I don't know what I

wanted [...] (396). He repeats several times the wish to be able to describe the place he is

in, saying that " i f 1 could put myself in a room, that would be the end of the wordy-

gurdy" (399). He thinks that knowing his place could finally bring him to silence not

because he would be alone, but because he could have something to talk about:

I could be motionless and fixed, I'd find a way to explore it, I'd listen to the ehco, I'd get

to know it, I'd get to remember it, I'd be home, I'd say what it is like, in my home,

instead o f any old thing, this place, i f I could describe this place, portray it, I've tried, I

feel no place, no place round me, there's no end to me, I don't know what it is, it isn't

flesh, it doesn't end, it's like air [...] (399).

I8G Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 13.

113
If the unnamable had a place, could "be home," then he would find the "end to me"; he

would be able to find the borders of himself.

We might say, therefore, that the feeling of unhomliness in The Unnamable is not

just one other feature of in-betweenness, but one of the major themes of the text. By

means of feeling distanced from the world, from language, and from the self, the narrator

is able to see these things in a different light. Unhomliness has an influence on many of

the key problems raised in the course of Beckett's oeuvre. Moreover, as I will argue

below, it is not a problem set out by the text and never overcome. It is, rather, the source

of much of the text's dynamism, and possibly even a point of entry into the (broadly-

speaking) political nature of the novel. Before I can explain how this happens, it is

important to notice that although the novel calls our attention to the question of place and

refuses to allow it to slip into the background, it also does not allow the issue of place to

become a battleground, as it was for the writers of the Irish Literary Revival or for the

many writers at this time promoting a "committed" literature. Almost as soon as it is

poignantly invoiced, the idea of place is brushed aside. The relationship between the

novel and any sense of place is ambivalent, in the sense in which Bhabha uses the word

to describe the interaction between pedagogical and performative narration. That is to say,

it does not merely display a lack of concern, or even uncertainty, in relation to place, but

it displays the co-existence of opposing attitudes toward place. In doing so, it produces a

back and forth movement that encourages the reader to work through the problem,

instead of passing it by. It may be true, as will be clearer below, that the novel gives the

reader little help in answering the questions it asks, but even so this ambivalent attitude is

nothing if not productive.

114
 To understand how ambivalence is a marker of movement we should remember

that in Bhabha's formulation, the tension between the pedagogical and performative

narrative addresses produces ambivalence. This discursive ambivalence becomes more

obvious when the representation takes place at the margins of the nation. In "Signs Taken

for Wonders," Bhabha is speaks specifically of the impact of the discourses of colonial

power on the colonized. He says, "the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split

between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and

difference.’，i81 He uses the Derridian concept of differance to describe the way that the

colonial presence occupies a "space of double inscription" in which power is neither fully

asserted nor fully negated, but both processes occur at once. The interaction of these

opposing forces produces a structure of uncertainty at the heart of the nation's narrative

address. Bhabha quotes Derrida:

whenever any writing both marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable

stroke... [this] double mark escapes the pertinence or authority o f truth: it does not

overturn it but rather inscribes it within its play as one o f its functions or parts. This

displacement does not take place, has not taken place once as an event. It does not occupy

a simple place. It does not take place in writing. This dis-location (is what) writes/is

written.''^

Ambivalence, in this sense, does not refer to the attitude of the writer towards his writing,

or to the coexistence of positive and negative feelings towards the nation or the political.

Nor does it refer to the attitude of the narrating voice to its subject. The voice may say,

"This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says" but the narration

can disrupt even if the narrator is indifferent or uncommitted to resistance (307). As a

丨8丨 Bhabha, p. 153.

182 Bhabha, p. 154. Quoted from Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Barbara Johnson (trans.) Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1981，p. 193.

115
feature of marginal writing, not as a psychological state, narrative ambivalence calls our

attention to contradictions in seemingly-solid beliefs we hold about being, language and

even national belonging without making concerted attempts to replace these ideas with

new concepts. As Bhabha points out later in the same essay, "Resistance is not

necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or

exclusion of the 'content' of another culture, as a difference once perceived. It is the

effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating

discourses [...]，，Because the performative always intervenes in the smooth and

seamless repetition of the pedagogical, difference is perceived "within the rules of

recognition" of discourses of power, not between competing discourses or cultures. The

same can be said of dominant discourses of all sorts found throughout Beckett's writing:

whether they appear as dry phrases repeated without meaning in Godot or as faint

memories which may or may not have been actual experiences of the voice in The

Unnamable, discourses of power are repeated and asserted at the same time as they are

exposed as less authoritative than they try to appear. This process is not one which

negates one discourse and replaces it with another; it is disruptive, but not confrontational.

In the last chapter, I argued that Soul Mountain questions the validity and strength

of the master-narrative of the nation by putting multiple perspectives and competing

ideologies into dialogue with one another. In The Unnamable, as I have said, it is difficult

to find points of reference outside of the text, so it is more difficult to say that the novel

allows marginal viewpoints a voice and a chance to disrupt the continuous presence of

the dominant discourse. In a novel in which the refrain, "But it's entirely a matter of

voices, no other metaphor is appropriate," insists on the linguistic nature of the entire

Bhabha, p. 157-8.

116
enterprise, it seems impossible to ascribe a non-linguistic function to the incessant

uncertainties of the text. ^^^ Interestingly, Bhabha's own analysis has drawn criticism for

its basis in linguistic theories and concepts, the argument being that such concepts are too

distant from the workings of political and social change in the real world to be effective.

If we look at the use of language in The Unnamable as an example, though, we can see

that by questioning and rethinking our assumptions about the workings of language, we

are questioning the systems of thought on which our ideas about the nature and function

of political and social change are built.

As I mentioned above, the text of The Unnamable constantly questions very basic

aspects of its own construction, such as the source of the speaking voice, the location of

the narration, and the very humanity of the voice. The unnamable says he is speaking the

words that "they" tell him to speak, but he is never quite sure that he is not completely

alone, and if it is not actually he who has been speaking all along: "But now, is it I now, I

on me?" (310). He is unable to control his words, and so he is defined by them. He says,

"I'm in words, made of words, others' words" (386). During Mahood's story about being

in ajar, the speaker longs for a way of confirming his existence outside of his ability to

speak. He wonders why only the woman who cares for him seems to notice he is there,

even though he sees people pass all the time: "How is it the people do not notice me? I

seem to exist for none but Madeleine" (341). He desires recognition from an other, whose

sanity he can trust, to prove that he is a self:

H o w , under these conditions, can M a h o o d expect me to behave normally? The flies

vouch for me, i f you like, but how far? W o u l d they not settle with equal appetite on a

l u m p o f cowshit? N o , as long as this point is not cleared up to m y satisfaction, or as long

184 T, p. 325. Also found, in slightly varied form, on pp. 345，347 and 384.

117
 as I am not distinguished by some sense organs other than Madeleine's, it will be

impossible for me to believe, sufficiently to pursue my act, the things that are told about

me (341).

Although this is supposedly one of Mahood's stories, which the speaker is not

experiencing, the perspective adopted in this passage, particularly in the first line,

immediately jolts us out of the story and causes us to wonder who, and where, this

speaker really is. If the speaker doubts his own existence, or refuses to believe "the things

that are told about me" — told by whom, we might ask - then the reader surely has no firm

ground to stand upon.

Late in the novel, the uncertainty of the text grows even stronger, and the

unnamable toys with the question of the limits at which a voice ceases to be a self and

begins to be just sounds. At one point, the he says that he is everything and everywhere:

"I'm the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows [...] I'm

all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling

[...]”（386). But this formlessness and placelessness is too threatening, too difficult to

maintain, and so, like any rational mind must, he makes assertions to define, wall-off, and

restrict. Often these "resolutions," as he calls them at one point, try to answer, once and

for all, the perpetually unanswered questions of the text: “There, now there is no one here

but me, no one wheels about me, no one comes towards me, no one has ever met before

my eyes [...] And Basil and his gang? Inexistent, invented to explain I forget what" (304).

After the longest continuous passage of the novel (nearly four and a half pages without a

full stop), in which the question of the speaking voice is arguably the most ambiguous,

the narration proceeds with its longest list of resolutions:

118
 But I really mustn't ask myself any mors questions, i f it's I, I really must not. More

resolutions, while we're at it, that's right, resolutely, more resolutions. [...] Assume

notably henceforward that the thing said and the thing heard have a common source,

resisting for this purpose the temptation to call in question the possibility o f assuming

anything whatever. Situate this source in me, without specifying where exactly, no

finicking, anything is preferable to the consciousness o f third parties and, more generally

speaking, o f an outer world. [...] Overcome, that goes without saying, the fatal leaning

towards expressiveness. [...] Speak o f a world o f my own, sometimes referred to as the

inner, without calculating. Doubt no more. Seek no more (390).

Because these resolutions are found in a text which refuses to affirm absolute truths or

final answers in any way, of course, they ultimately fail to help matters at all. They are, in

fact, set up to fail. By being so remarkably distinct from the rest of the text, the force with

which these statements attempt to fix truths and find answers exaggerates their impotence.

At the same time, they enact the drama of a rational mind trying to make sense of the

irrational world around it.

The failure of the narrator's attempts to fix the narrative in some recognizable

structure, as well as his failure to completely escape it and narrate from a space of

complete formlessness, placelessness and ambiguity, does more than demonstrate the

inherent limitations of narration and storytelling. When the desire to resist uncertainty

and gain control reaches down to the level of language, it highlights problems of

signification that underlie any attempt to understand the self or the world. In a text with

very little connection to the physical world and its points of reference, the separation

between words and things becomes very obvious. Words show themselves to be

understandable only in relation to other words, and to lose their meaning the more one

tries to pin them down. From the very beginning, the unnamable tries to fix the most

119
essential concepts of his narrative by naming them, but he can only define them in

relation to other words, rather than in relation to experience or sensation. The second line

of the novel reads, "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep

going, going on, call that going, call that on" (291). This process of naming (or calling)

continues throughout the text, but it is not just the "I" that "calls" things; "they" call

things, too. (Or at least, the " I " tells us that they call things.) It is always done in an

attempt to gain control over the signification of words amid the radical uncertainty of

their source or reference. In a novel where "going," for example, does not mean going

somewhere, "going" must mean something else, like not stopping. These new meanings

are not completely distinct from the old meanings, but they challenge the reader to drop

any preconceived notions - of "thinking", of "on" - and adapt new ones for the duration

of the narration. Unsurprisingly, the effort is unsuccessful, because the old ideas of words

like "thinking" and "on" maintain their influence, while the new definitions gradually

fade. The same is true of the term, "the unnamable." Even though the speaking voice is

never referred to as such, except in the title, the voice cannot avoid taking on the same of

"the unnamable" in some sense, or else it would also be unspeakable.

The ineffectiveness of these gestures, to wall-off, to name or to un-name, is a

good example, in fact, of the way pedagogical narration, those fundamental truths we

base our ways of thinking around, need to be re-asserted in the time of the present.

Bhabha uses a long quotation from Claude LeFort to explain the way that the "enigma of

language," the fact that it is both "internal and external to the speaking subject," is

concealed because we treat ideology as if it were outside language. In reality, as soon as

it is stated, we see that, "the exorbitant power must, in fact, be shown, and at the same

120
time it must owe nothing to the movement which makes it appear."'^^ Ideology must, in

other words, be repeated in language, but appear to maintain its position outside, or prior

to language. When the unnamable asserts his new language rules within his narration, this

"ambiguity of representation" is highlighted. Without the constant repetition and

reassertion of this rule in the text, it will fail to acquire the appearance of having

originated outside language, and the speaker will fail to forget its origins in language. The

exceptional circumstance, a successful instance of naming, confirms the rule. That is,

when the unnamable names Worm: "I therefore baptise him Worm" (337). This speech-

act is a successful performative, in the way that J.L. Austin defines the performative.

Because, in this case, the entity being called "Worm," does not already have a proper

name, the speaker is able to name him，in order to bring him into the linguistic system.

(He is otherwise an amorphous, undefined presence.) The success of this speech-act relies,

again, on its repetition, and if it were not used for the rest of the novel to refer to this

entity, it would fail, too. The difference with words such as "thinking" and "going," is

that much more repetition is required before the speaker can first forget the old meaning,

and then forget the origin of the new meaning.

Even though the resolutions and the naming fail, they begin to reveal the true

nature of signification. As speakers of language, we cannot simply assert our control over

its function, even though we believe ourselves to be in control of our words. The need for

words to assert their power but looking as if they are not asserting anything challenges us

to rethink our assumptions of the representation of seemingly ahistorical processes, such

as culture, or politics. Even nations, which are modern concepts, never seem to have a

Bhabha, p. 210. Quoted from LeFort, Claude. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986，pp. 212-14.

121
history; as Benedict Anderson describes it, the nation "looms up imperceptibly out o f a

horizonless past.，，丨 86 When we pay closer attention to language, however, we realize that

unless the signification o f these concepts gives the impression o f having arisen before

time and language, it will not hold. In other words, it must originate in the time o f the

pedagogical, which Bhabha explains as follows:

It is precisely this repetitive time o f the alienating anterior - rather than origin - that

Levi-Strauss writes of, when, in explaining the 'unconscious unity' of signification, he

suggests that 'language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to

signify gradually'. In that sudden timelessness o f ' a l l at once', there is no synchrony but a

temporal break, no simultaneity but a spatial disjunction.'®^

The suddenness with which things come to signify - outside o f time — must be taken into

account, says Bhabha, if we are to understand the gap between the anteriority o f the

pedagogical and the continuous repetition and re-signification o f the performative address.

The unnamable also seems to understand this, because there are a few occasions when,

desperate for control, he risks hyperbole and attempts to access the pedagogical, to reach

back beyond and before the time o f signification. In a passage set off as its own

paragraph, he says:

How, in such conditions, can I write, to consider only the manual aspect o f that bitter

folly? I don't know. 1 could know. But 1 shall not know. Not this time. It is I who write,

who cannot raise my hand from my knee. It is I who think, just enough to write, whose

head is far. I am Matthew and I am the angel, I who came before the cross, before the

sinning, came into the world, came here (301).

186 B. Anderson, p. 132.

Bhabha’ p. 228. Quoted f b m L6vi-Strauss, Work of Marcel Mauss, p. 58. Emphasis Bhabha's.

122
In this moment, as well as in others, such as when he says he is "that unthinkable

ancestor of whom nothing can be said" (352), the unnamable tries to locate himself

outside of time and language, in the "homogenous empty time" of the pedagogical.'^^

This is impossible, of course, because by virtue of being declared in language, these

statements acquire an origin. As Derrida argues, an important feature of performatives is

their iterability, that is, their participation in a chain of cited and citable speech-acts.

Standing alone, a performative will always fail.

As the unnamable discovers, embracing the inevitability of repetition is also not a

viable alternative. Molloy seems to think he sees the fundamentals of the concept when

he says, "If I go on long enough calling that my life I'll end up by believing it. It's the

principle of advertising" (53). What Molloy does not understand, however, is that

repetition can never be a return of the same, but must always be made up of some slight

difference. As contexts change, the repeated phrase changes its meaning slightly, too, and

the speaker can never completely control this process. This is dramatized in The

Unnamable when the voice gives three different definitions for silence, "that's what I call

going silent," within five lines (393). When the speaker tries to let himself dissolve into

the words of others, to find peace in the certainty of repetition, he cannot. He feels "that I

am they, all of them [...] and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite

different, a quite different thing" (386). Steven Connor notes that the voice in The

Unnamable is stuck between two poles when it comes to repetition. On the one hand, he

tries to define himself apart from others, only to find that he is constituted by others'

words and expressions of selfhood. On the other hand, he tries to find a fullness of being

188 Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the philosophy o f history." Illuminations. Hannah Arendt (trans.). New
York: Schocken Books, 1968，p. 263. [Quoted in both Anderson and Bhabha].

123
by duplicating the selves of others exactly, only to discover "some infinitesimal residue

of difference unaccounted for, a residue that points back to the originating self. Neither

abstention from or identification with repetition can enable the self to 'say As a

result, Connor locates the self ir The Unnamable in an in-between space: "[The voice]

must always inhabit a 'space' which is a 'space between', always inside and outside its

stories, signifier and signified, gazer and spectacle, original and copy, between the terms

of all the other metaphorical polarities which are used to represent representation.”】卯

Language, it turns out, can neither represent the truth about the self or the world, nor can

it provide a place of retreat, an organizing mechanism to restrict the chaos of being in the

world.

From the above discussion we can see how The Unnamable self-referentially uses

language to question its nature, and in the process displays in full view the ambivalent

movement between the performative and the pedagogical. But we have yet to see how

this connects to a sense of engagement with the physical, social world. Once we

recognize the ambivalence at the heart of the narrative address - of the people, of the

nation - then what? For one thing, as Leslie Hill tells us, the problem of the uncertainty

of reference, and of meaning exceeding reference, is certainly political:

For what it tells us is that meaning is always contextual, even if contexts can (and must)

change. [...] The political meanings o f any text cannot be determined absolutely. Which

is not to say that texts do not give rise to political effects. Indeed, quite the reverse.

Politics itself is always a matter o f context and contexts, o f localised struggles o f

interpretation and over interpretation，where what is at stake is not only language and

discourse, but power and authority, discursive as well as material. [...] To the extent that

189 Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988 p 77
19。Connor p. 77. ’ .

124
 they are always contextual, texts are always political, but they are never reducible to any

single context: there is always an excess and a margin that spills beyond any particular

political reading and cannot be controlled by it.'^'

O f course, this still leaves us suspended in recognition, but with nothing to do. We need,

says Bhabha, "another time of writing'' and he calls for a double-writing, a writing which

he finds emerging in marginal texts. This double-writing traces the movement between

the pedagogical and the performative, but it is effective because it does not simply pile

new representations on top of old ones, but supplements the narrative, and in doing so,

starts the movement of change. Borrowing the model of supplementarity, Bhabha quotes

Derrida to explain how the supplement functions:

It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of.. .If it represents and makes an image it is

by the anterior default of a presence.. .the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern

insistence. ..As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity o f a presence, it

produces no relief... Somewhere, something can be filled up o f itself... only by allowing

itself to be filled through sign and proxy.'"

In this model, the process of repetition does not just produce slight differences which are

added onto the end of the original. The supplement is more like a gene mutation, which

has the potential to completely change the functioning of the whole. As Bhabha says,

"The supplementary strategy suggests that adding 'to' need not 'add up，but may disturb

the calculation.”i94 It is not a matter of plurality, but doubling, so neither entity remains

unchanged.

191 Hill, pp. 913-14.

192 Bhabha, p. 202.
193 Bhabha, p. 221. Quoted from Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. G.C. Spivak (trans). Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 145.
丨94 Bhabha, p. 222.

125
 If the supplementary strategy is the force behind the power of marginal narratives

of the nation, then it is also part of the storytelling strategies of both Beckett and Gao. As

we have seen, it is irrelevant whether or not each author set out to re-write the story of

their nation: "The minority does not simply confront the pedagogical, or powerful

master-discourse with a contradictory or negating referent.”i95 Instead, in questioning the

function of language and the relationship between the self and its place and time, these

writers are creating a textual space in which the supplementary strategy is at work.

Bhabha describes the process as follows:

Insinuating itself into the terms o f reference o f the dominant discourse, the

supplementary antagonizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological

solidity. The questioning o f the supplement is not a repetitive rhetoric o f the 'end' o f

society but a meditation on the disposition o f space and time from which the narrative o f

the nation must begin严

We have already seen how Gao "antagonizes the implicit power to generalize" in Soul

Mountain by creating multiple perspectives and refusing to give one the dominant voice.

His writing spotlights the inability for the homogenous picture of China created by

nationalism to match the reality of experience. Though Beckett is not always telling a

specifically Irish story, many critics and philosophers have written about the way that he

takes on the entire discourse of Western rationalism - from Descartes onwards - by

demonstrating the impossibility of ever achieving an objective perspective to judge and

observe what is always subjective experience. As with Gao's novel, Beckett's disruption

of the fluid and unconscious signification of language helps to disorient the basis on

which most of the fundamental concepts of Western philosophies rest. By relentlessly

195 Bhabha, p. 223.

丨96 Bhabha, p. 223.

126
unsettling notions of place and time, he leaves only what Boxall calls "disruptive spaces,"

and leaves the open question of whether a different foundation might not help us move

away from some of the paralyzing difficulties of modernity.

In Soul Mountain, the supplementary strategy is achieved by weaving stories

within stories, situating them in a monologue which is also a series of dialogues taking

place between the personas of a split self. Similarly, The Unnamable is composed of

various stories, woven together in a mono/dialogue where the speaking voices are never

clearly defined. In both novels, pronoun ambiguity is used to create uncertainty about

voice and sequence, which allows the stories to intermingle and reflect backwards and

forwards on one another. Unlike in Gao's novel, however, Beckett offers no final

explanation for the ambiguity of pronouns. Gao's narrator suggests that the I，you, she

and he should be read as versions of the self, so we can imagine one self, albeit divided,

behind the narration. Beckett's unnamable narrator is unnamable in part because there is

no way to resolve the contradiction between a voice which speaks only the words of

others and a voice which speaks only by itself. He says, "it's the fault of the pronouns,

there is no name for me, no pronoun for me, all the trouble comes from that, that, it's a

kind of pronoun too, it isn't that either, I'm not that either, let us leave all that" (404).

There is no pronoun for something which is neither this nor that, or both this and that.

For a time, the voice tries to rid itself of the pronoun "I" because it is "really too red a

herring" (343). He declares: "I shall not say I again, ever again, it's too farcical. I shall

put in its place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it. Anything to please

197 When Boxall says that Beckett "creates spaces which disrupt and exceed the limits of written space," he
describes it as an ultimate negativity, "something akin to a black hole" (Boxall, Peter. "Samuel Beckett:
Towards a Political Reading." Irish Studies Review 10.2, 2002, p. 163). I argue that disrupting boundaries
and opening up gaps can create space for movement and change.

127
them, it makes no difference" (355). The ambivalence of the last line of this quotation

indicates that he does not believe there is much use in replacing one pronoun with

another, and he is right; it only causes more confusion. For example, when the voice later

speaks of Worm using "he," we assume he is speaking about Worm, not himself.

Supposedly Worm cannot speak, only hear, but it is also possible that this is only what

"they" have told the unnamable. Is it also possible that if the voice is relaying "their"

words, and if the voice is replacing " I " with "he," that the "he" is really referring to the

voice, and that the voice is actually Worm? On page 263, the voice returns to the use of

“1，，，without comment, and so we wonder if "he" was actually Worm all along, and now

he has returned to referring to himself, or if we have just changed from "he" back to " I "

without changing the entity to which the pronoun refers.

The ambiguity of the pronouns is compounded by the ambiguity of whether we

are reading a monologue or a dialogue. As we have seen, the voice claims he is alone, but

then claims he is not speaking: "It's true I have not spoken yet" (154-155). On the one

hand, the variety of pronouns and registers employed by the voice could all be attributed

to one speaker. On the other hand, there are moments - sometimes phrases, sometimes

entire passages - when the narration switches to a mode of meta-commentary which

could be read as another voice. At times there is a question and answer sequence going

on. And at other points, two different thought processes mingle, even though it is not

clear if questions are being asked and answered. We can take the following as an example:

"Where I am there is no one but me, who am not. So much for that. Words, he says he

knows they are words. But how can he know, who has never heard anything else? True"

(355). It is impossible to say whether there are two speakers in passages such as this, or if

128
it is one (possibly schizophrenic) speaker talking to himself. And how can one be "where

I am" but yet not bel Ultimately, this is a narration in which all possibilities are both true

and false at the same time. It is a form of double-writing in which each new statement

adds onto earlier statements, both completing and negating them.

The result of the inability to resolve these contradictions is a novel in which the

speaking self, in not being able to speak o/itself (in not being able to "say I"), and yet not

completely speaking/or others, dramatizes the problem of representation. If, as Derrida

said of the supplement, "something can be filled up of itself... only by allowing itself to

be filled through sign and proxy," then the stories and voices in The Unnamable create an

image of a self, but only by filling it up with images of others. To try to make sense of it

all, the reader must move back and forth through the narration, using new information to

complete incomplete pictures, while always looking ahead to predict what will be

reinscribed later on. The chicken-and-egg question of who comes first, the person

representing or the thing being represented is dramatized here. For example, the voice

often mentions other characters from earlier Beckett novels, and indicates that he has told

their stories, that he has been the narrating voice all along. If it is true that these

characters have never spoken for themselves, even while speaking in the first person,

then they have always been represented in both senses. The voice asks, "Did they ever

get Mahood to speak? It seems to me not. I think Murphy spoke now and then, the others

too perhaps, I don't remember, but it was clumsily done, you could see the ventriloquist"

(348). In this description, the characters precede the voice speaking for them. Later in the

novel, the voice changes his mind and wonders if he invented the others. He says, "It is I

invented [Mahood], him and so many others [...] in order to speak, since I had to speak,

129
without speaking of me [...] It is they asked me to speak of them, they wanted to know

what they were, how they lived, that suited me [...]" (396). At this point, he is no longer

speaking for Murphy, Malone and the others. Yet in connecting his story to theirs, he

continues to disrupt their representations and replace their voices. In the tension between

these two possibilities, the voice recognizes the way that speaking/or always includes a

certain amount of creation, even if the being exists in some form beforehand.

As a novel, therefore, in which every new statement neither denies nor supports

an earlier story or claim, but rather supplements the original by disrupting it, doubling

back on it, The Unnamable represents (in both senses) a new space of narration that

cannot be contained under the old binaries of presence/absence, narrator/narrated, or

subject/object. The novel is the new time of writing Bhabha is looking for, which calls

attention to the contradictions of its own practice at the same time as it looks towards new

ways of telling. In Soul Mountain, competing points of view lead the reader to imagine

alternate realities which are not about the conflict of the majority culture with competing

minority cultures, but which are dynamic spaces of interaction. By the end of the novel,

the narrator begrudgingly accepts his position as a marginal figure, calling it his

"tragedy." The Unnamable takes the potential for a new reality a bit further. Instead of

creating disruptive in-between spaces but still longing for a past unity, this text has

moments of reveling in spaces of uncertainty and transition. Although these moments are

set amid a great deal of negation, they keep recurring throughout the text. Their presence,

however ethereal, is the point at which we can see the imaginative potential of double-

writing, of the practice of differance which never settles on one possibility.

130
 One of the most consistent of these metaphors of uncertainty is that of the color

grey. At several points in the beginning of the text, when trying to ascertain the nature of

his environment, the speaker meditates on what he calls "this grey" which surrounds him.

The first extended mention of it is set apart, as if to highlight the grey:

Whether all grow black, or all grow bright, or all remain grey, it is grey we need, to begin

with, because o f what it is, and o f what it can do, made o f bright and black, able to shed

the former, or the latter, and be the latter or the former alone. But perhaps 1 am the prey,

on the subject o f grey, in the grey, to delusions (301).

The unnamable tries to figure out if the grey is contains more light or more dark, but in

this passage, he extols the grey for its ability to be both. At the end, he suggests he may

be prone to delusions, and we wonder if this is not a realization that in his world, being

neither/nor, or both/and is a difficult task. A few pages later, when trying to isolate

himself from the voices and from all ambiguity, he says, "Yes, out with them, there is no

light here. No grey either, black is what I should have said" (304). As expected, he cannot

get rid of the voices, and later regrets cursing the grey: "All the rest I renounce, including

this ridiculous black which I thought for a moment worthier than the grey to enfold me"

(306). When he returns to ruminating on Worm's environment later in the text, he returns

to the grey, mentioning twice that it seems to go with everything: "This grey to begin

with, meant to be depressing no doubt. And yet there is yellow in it, pink too apparently,

it's a nice grey, of the kind recommended as going with everything, ruinous and warm"

(361, also on 362). In going with everything, however, it seems to penetrate everything,

be everything. Even the silence is grey (365). He speaks of the grey as man-made: "it's

they who make this grey, with their lamps" (364) and wonders if Worm suffers from the

grey (365). Despite these slightly negative associations with the grey, however, he still

131
asserts that the grey is better than either white or black, because of the possibilities it

holds: "[...] that is not the point, to believe this or that, the point is to guess right, nothing

more, they say, If it's not white it's very likely black, it must be admitted the method

lacks subtlety, in view of the intermediate shades all equally worthy of a chance" (374).

Clearly, in a novel which breaks down oppositions of all kinds, the image of grey

suggests a third space, which does not settle on one side or the other of the binary, but yet

partakes of both. It is, significantly, a space of possibility.

Richard Begam speaks at length in his book about another image of a third space

in The Unnamable, that of the tympanum. It only occurs once but is a powerful metaphor,

one which happens to have been used by Derrida as well. Begam argues that the novel

has an essentially ternary structure, despite the binary structures of Molloy and Malone

Dies. He sees the last third of the novel, in contrast to the stories of Mahood in the first

third and the stories of Worm in the second third, as the time where Beckett seeks to

transcend binaries and find a third term. Begam argues that Beckett eventually gives up

on the dream of transcendence, but still looks for an alternative to binary constructions.

Begam writes, "He finds that alternative not so much beyond the binary terms of the

Western traditions as within and between them, in that space of differance that separates

-and ultimately subverts - subject and object, narrator and narrated."'^^ The figure of the

tympanum (the eardrum) exemplifies this in-between alternative, as it is neither inside the

body nor outside, but a membrane which separates the two and is part of both. Near the

end of the novel, the unnamable tries to figure out if he has a body, and if he can be a self

without a body. He says,

198 Begam, p. 177.

132
 [...]they'll tell me who I am [...] and I'll have heard, without an ear I'll have heard, and

I'll have said it, without a mouth I'll have said it, I'll have said it inside me, then in the

same breath outside me, perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the

middle [...] I ' m neither one side nor the other, I ' m in the middle, I ' m the partition, I've

two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I ' m the

tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either [...]

(383).

This is an image of a space that represents two things at once, "in one breath," and yet

does not belong to either. It is used by Derrida to describe, says Begam, "the peculiarly

self-divided character of postmodernity," which tries to escape the traditional

philosophical method that begins by assigning limits and boundaries to its discourse. In

this alternative, "to ‘tympanize,’ or to philosophize in Derrida's specifically Nietzschean

sense, involves breaking down those limits by positioning oneself on both sides of the

tympanum Begam sees a commonality in the use of this figure in both Beckett

and Derrida, but he cautions against formulating the tympanum as the third term, because

this would only draw new borderlines and return us to the same type of inside/outside

dualism. Begam suggests, "We therefore might better describe it not as a term but as a

region or zone, intending to recall that third part of Murphy's mind where he was 'caught

up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion.,，卯• The unnamable reminds us of this point

when he says, "the essential is never to arrive anywhere" (71).

It is important to take Begam’s caution against defining, or naming, the

alternative space to heart. By dint of its very title, Beckett's novel reminds the reader that

the way out of the trap of binaries is not a third term at all; the voice is, of course, not

Begam, p. 177.
Begam, p. 178.

133
unnamed but unnamaZ?/e.2⑴ As is well-known, the final image of the novel is one of a

threshold and a door, and while the image of the door comes up elsewhere in the novel, it

becomes much more prominent towards the end，The unnamable says, "the door, it's

the door interests me" (407). The final lines read:

[...]perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have

carried me to the threshold o f my story, before the door that opens on my story, that

would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I，it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know,

I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

(414).

For some, the novel's ending in a doorway, its inability to cross the threshold, represents

a failure to get beyond the "persistent interstitiality" of the Yet as Bhabha's work

demonstrates, we need to get beyond ocular metaphors and think in terms of time and

process in order to see how one can be in-between, but not stuck. Bhabha's model is not

dialectical, a series of back and forth movements searching for ultimate synthesis, but a

constant disruption, a process of unexpected movement. Beckett's novel enacts the

unsettling, but surprisingly hopeful, time of writing that Bhabha looks for.

In Beckett's writings, the image of the door is connected to an even more

appropriate image which helps the reader understand the need for moving, not stable,

metaphors: the image of the seaside. Molloy describes at length his time spent by the

seaside, and although he says he felt "no worse there than anywhere else," his description

2⑴ Begam also comments on the frequent use o f the word "unnamable" by Derrida to refer to what is
produced in the space opened up by differance (pp. 152-5).
The importance o f the image o f the door is such that it is possible, in using the word "tympanum," that
Beckett also meant to invoke the second use o f the word to refer to the space above a doorway and below
an archway, often ornamented, as in a Gothic church.
Connor, p. 77.

134
demonstrates that he is much more attuned to the pleasures of this place than anywhere

else. He may even feel something like "at home" there:

M u c h o f my life has ebbed away before this shivering expanse, to the sound o f the waves

in storm and calm, and the claws o f the surf. Before, no, more than before, one with,

spread on the sand, or in a cave. In the sand I was in my element, letting it trickle

between by fingers, scooping holes that I filled in a moment later or that filled themselves

in, flinging it in the air by handfuls, rolling in it (68).

In this passage, Molloy chooses to describe himself not as "before" the sea, but "one

with" it. Even more so than the door, the seashore is a place that, like the sand, is ever-

changing, ebbing and flowing. The metaphor recurs suddenly in The Unnamable, when

the voice brings it up to compare the distant sound of the sea to his voice: “I strained my

ear towards what must have been my voice still, so weak, so far, that is was like the sea, a

far calm sea dying - no, none of that, no beach, no shore, the sea is enough, I've had

enough of shingle, enough of sand, enough of earth, enough of sea too" (309). He rejects

the thought of the sea, as if he did not even mean to think it. But it returns again, on the

same page as the image of the tympanum, almost as if it came out, again, unconsciously.

He imagines they will say when he finally goes mad, at which time they will "depart, thus

communing, in Indian file, two by two, along the seashore, now it's the seashore, on the

shingle, along the sands, in the evening air, it's evening, that's all I know" (383). The

reference to the shingle in many of the images of the seaside is even more interesting,

because as an ecosystem which supports more life than the dunes of sand, the shingle is

an extremely dynamic place. It suggests, therefore, a place of living and dying, of change

and renewal, not at all a space of fixity and stagnation.

135
 To help underline the importance of transitional spaces such as doors and the

seashore to the kind of writing that the novel enacts, we can look briefly at a poem

Beckett wrote about the same time as The Unnamable (in 1948). I will quote the untitled

poem in the original French, followed by Beckett's English translation, because as

Marjorie Perloff states, "This is a case where Beckett doesn't do justice to his own

poem”:204

je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse

entre le galet et la dune
le pluie d'ete pleut sur ma vie
sur moi ma vie qui me fuit me poursuit
et finira le jour de son commencement

cher instant je te vois

dans ce rideau de brume qui recule
ou je n'aurai plus a fouler ces long seuils mouvants
et vivrai le temps d'une porte
qui s'ouvre et se referme

my way is in the sand flowing

between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life,
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end

my peace is there in the receding mist

when I may cease from treading these long shifting
thresholds
and live the space of a door
that opens and shuts

There are many things that can be said about this poem, but the most striking is the

succession of images of transition: "receding mist," "sand flowing," "long shifting

thresholds." In the English, the speaker's "way" is in the sand, but in the French, we hear

again the feeling of being "one with" the course of the sand, when he says, "je suis ce

204 Perloff, Marjorie. "The Space o f a Door: Beckett and the Poetry of Absence." The Poetics of
Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981，p. 245 (note 41).
Beckett, Samuel. Collected Poems 1930-1978. London: Calder, 1984, p. 57.

136
cours de sable." Again, we see the shingle and the dune, with the speaker in between. In

the English version, the sixth line of the French is lost, in which the speaker directly

addresses the "cher instant," which he sees, in the curtain of receding mist, as the moment

when he no longer needs to tread the "long shifting thresholds." This could be interpreted

as a desire to escape the movement of the sands. But the last two lines express a longing,

instead, to "live the space of a door," or "vivrai le temps d'une porte."^®^ Considering our

discussion of the shift from metaphors of location to those of time and succession, it is

interesting that Beckett uses the phrase, "the time of a door" in the French, and yet shifts

to "the space of a door" in the English. Both concepts are difficult to imagine, as is most

of the poem. But here, even the door is not an unmoving threshold, because it "opens and

shuts." Perloff asks, "What does it mean to 'exist in the shifting sands between the

shingle and the dune,' to 'live the space of a door that opens and shuts'? Suggestive as

they are, Beckett's dream images refuse to divulge what he called a ‘notion.’”:。？ This

may be true, but as we have seen, divulging a notion may be exactly what Beckett sought

to avoid, and what we should stop looking for in his writing. This poem evokes precisely

the sort of dream image which is, though yet an image, an experience of movement

through a space and time which is neither fixed nor linear.

Perloff compares this poem to a painting by Magritte, The Field-Glass of 1963, in

which the space of a door is also an "unsolvable mystery." Perloff is not the only critic to

consider Beckett and Magritte together, and other paintings also come to mind in this

regard, such as The Human Condition (1935) and The Promenades of Euclid (1955), both

206 In the English, it is slightly ambiguous whether the verb "to live" is something the speaker also wishes
to cease doing. In the French, however, I think that the use o f ' a u r a i " and " v i v r a i i n the same tense,
indicates that he wishes to first, cease to tread the thresholds, and second, live the time o f a door.
207 Perloff, p. 246.

137
of which feature a canvas whose image is the same as or a part of the door or window

behind it. Many of Magritte's paintings ask the viewer to consider whether they are

paintings about the meaning of painting (or representation) - what I referred to earlier as

the chicken-and-egg question of representation - or whether they are paintings about

uncertainty. This is even more true of The Treachery of Images (1928-29) which depicts

a pipe and the words, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). Beckett's novels

demand the same consideration, because they make the same sort of statements: "They

say they, speaking of them, to make me think it is I who am speaking. Or I say they,

speaking of God knows what, to make me think it is not I who am speaking" (370). There

is no way out, and it may be asked if this is just writing about the troubles of writing (a

classic, postmodern, self-referential text). Or is it writing about indeterminacy, about the

impossibility of feeling at home in our structures, once we are made aware of their

constructed and contingent nature?

I think it is both, and if so, then this point is probably the missing link in the

search for a political import to Beckett's writings. The genius of Beckett's three novels is

that instead of longing to escape language in the search for the self (as Gao's novel

describes), these novels turn in on language, so that language is all there is. Whereas

Gao's novel is about writing, and the writer's dilemma when confronted with the world,

Beckett attributes the problem even deeper, to the structuring of thought through

language. Yet he also recognizes the inability to escape these structures completely. Both

Soul Mountain and Beckett's three novels ultimately work their way towards an idea of

some sort of way of being or thinking that escapes binaries, or is at least comfortable

existing between them. In this way, they follow Godot, which, as we saw, did not attempt

138
to suggest what the alternative to waiting might be. Probably the major difference

between Beckett's novels and Gao's Soul Mountain is that in Beckett, there is

simultaneously no hope that the new time of writing, as I call it, could be adequately

expressed in our language, and yet there is also no firm indication that it could be

expressed outside of it. There is no "clear, pure language," as Gao's narrator hopes, but

yet we carry on anyway.

The enigma of Beckett's novel is that even though it gives the reader no hint

about how to answer the questions it asks, it also gives one the sense that if the answers

exist, they are embedded in the text somewhere, as part of the writing. The anguish, the

despair and the hope of the novel are never asserted, but enacted, and the writing

manages to look toward a new way of thinking, even while denying that we can rise

above the problems it presents. The experience narrated in this novel is, of course, one

which any reader can understand. At the same time, the feeling of being disjointed,

dislocated, and struggling to make sense of one's self in the world is arguably most

tangible, most raw, for post-modern, post-war, Westerners, or for migrant, marginal and

post-colonial peoples. These people are most alive to the realities of language's otherness,

and to the connection between being and place. If Gao's writing appears universally-

relevant, it may be because the issues he represents resonate with people in these groups

(who do make up a large portion of the world population). Similarly, Beckett's supposed

universality may be due to the fact that in writing from a post-modern, post-war, post-

colonial, emigrant position, he voices the experience of people from a wide range of

backgrounds. If the broad reach of their messages makes them universal, it also makes

them political. In thinking about the potential for a political Beckett, Boxall wonders if

139
"the textual ity of the political world" makes it difficult to "approach the moment at which

the materiality of culture may impose some sort of limit or demand on Beckett's writing

that could bring these two elements into some kind of dialogue with each other.，摘 For

Gao, certainly, the challenge of the political is that it is always a matter of textual ity and

materiality, never one or the other. For Beckett, too, the textual is always material, and

vice versa. That is not to say that one discredits or weakens the other. In fact, it makes

consideration of one without the other impossible. They are mutually reinforcing

concepts, like black and white, dark and light, home and away.

208 Boxall 2000，210-11.

140
 Conclusion

Throughout this thesis I have been comparing two writers who were born into

different traditions, belonged to different generations, and ended up sharing a language

and a nation in their exile. I did not specifically set up my approach to this comparison

from the outset, preferring to let each author's work shed light on the other in multiple

and even unpredictable ways. Most of the direct comparisons I have made have related to

the critical reception and tradition of criticism that has surrounded each author and his

work. To a certain extent, Beckett and Gao have been held to different standards, with

Gao often being expected to "represent" China to the world while Beckett was often

assumed to be writing about the universal experience of man. On the other hand, both

authors have caused uncertainty among even their most discerning of critics, due in no

small part to the way that both writers complicate what we mean by ideas like

"representation," "location," and "universality" in the first place. It has been my intent to

demonstrate that although Beckett is generally placed firmly within a Western literary

tradition, while Gao has been placed on its margins, both writers were approaching that

tradition from a marginal perspective. Though the conditions and results of that position

is different for each, it provides each writer with a valuable insight into both the tradition

they left and that which they adopted. It is this, as much as for their "representativeness"

or lack thereof, which makes them worth reading.

What I have avoided is the type of comparative approach which seeks to prove

that one work or group of works is essentially "as good as" the other, or that despite their

different origins they are essentially saying the same thing. This sort of approach does

nothing to enrich our understanding of each work in its own right. Instead, I believe it is

141
 important to allow each work to remain independent while at the same time using each

work to ask new questions about the other. In essence, therefore, this thesis has adopted

an approach to comparison which seeks to use two texts, two authors, or even two sets of

world views, to ask critical questions about each other. In setting up the comparison by

looking more carefully at the connection between interpretive tendencies and the often

overlooked socio-political factors which influence those tendencies, I have not been

suggesting that there is any way of stepping outside of those factors and judging the work

objectively. I do believe, however, that only when readers are alive to their own position

in relation to the text, are they able to begin to view the text from other vantage points.

Although there may be biographical connections between these authors, and although the

two plays share certain structural features, putting side-by-side two novels which, in

themselves, have little in common was part of the attempt to suggest new angles for

approaching these texts. In the process I have suggested that if we understand multiple

ways of looking at a text, if we can see it from both the inside and the outside, then we

can see its complexity and its multi-tonality much more clearly.

The position from which this thesis has been written is, in general, a Western one,

especially in that it has been theoretically grounded in post-colonial theory as it is used in

the West. While I did not primarily set out to use these texts to critically examine the

validity of those theories in different contexts, I have also avoided directly applying

theory to text, as if the theory was a universally applicable tool. Instead, I tried to take a

sideways approach to post-colonial theory, by using ideas for different purposes than

those for which they are generally assumed to be intended. I have attempted to stretch

post-colonial theory a bit farther and possibly approached some of its limits.

142
 Ultimately, we have seen that both Gao and Beckett's texts occupy a space of the

in-between, and that because of this they engage in a process, not of representing people

or things, but of continuous creation. As we have seen, they do this in very different ways,

and to fail to acknowledge this is to deny these texts their creative power - their ability to

suggest or to produce the potential for new possibilities, even if they cannot give voice to

those possibilities. It is significant, for example, that Gao's narrator in Soul Mountain

longed to bring literature closer to reality. The disconnectedness of the narration aimed to

approximate the disjointedness of experience, resulting in a narrative packed with a

variety of stories, texts and voices. On the other hand, Beckett's writing, in particular The

Unnamable, strips narrative down to the bare minimum, leaving only traces of the voices,

stories and cultures that went into its making. Beckett does not ask what life is beyond

language, but what remains once language is broken down and torn away from life. As I

have argued, both writers engage in an act of failure, constantly asking questions that

cannot be answered, and seeking to write the story that cannot be written. Because these

are in-between texts, because they can never settle on one side or another of the binaries

they present, they encourage an ongoing process of active reflection and interpretation on

the part of the reader. Through each author's attempts, failures, and renewed attempts,

these texts speak to one another despite their many differences. In the end, the fact that

these writers are not alone in their attempt to find a better way of writing highlights the

importance of their endeavor.

143
 Works Cited

Abbott, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1996.

Anders, Gunther. "Being without Time: On Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot,, Trans, and

Ed. Martin Esslin. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood

Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965: 140-151.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of

nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Anderson, Marston. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Barme, Geremie. "A Touch of the Absurd 一 introducing Gao Xingjian, and his play The

Bus-stop:, Renditions 19/20，1983: 373-377.

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.

Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press,

1958.

Collected Poems 1930-1978. London: Calder, 1984.

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the philosophy of history." Illuminations. Hannah Arendt

(trans.). New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004.

Boxall, Peter. "Samuel Beckett: Towards a Political Reading." Irish Studies Review 10.2,

2002: 159-170.

"Introduction to 'Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics". Eds. Marius Buning et al.

144
 Beckett and Religion; Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics: Samuel Beckett

Today/Aujourd'hui 9，2000: 201-221.

Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
Critchley, Simon. "Who Speaks in the Work of Samuel Beckett?" Yale French Studies 93,

1998: 114-130.

Davies, Paul. "Three novels and four nouvelles: giving up the ghost be born at last." The

Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994.

Esslin, Martin. "Introduction." Ed. Martin Esslin. Samuel Beckett: A Collection of

Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965.

The Theatre of the Absurd: Third Edition. London: Penguin, 1980.

Fong, Gilbert C.F. "Introduction." Trans. Gilbert Fong. The Other Shore: Plays by Gao

Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999.

Gao Xingjian. "Author's Preface to Without Isms”. Trans. Mabel Lee. The Case for

Literature. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007.

Soul Mountain. Trans. Mabel Lee. London: Harper Perennial, 2004.

"The Bus Stop". Trans. Carla Kirkwood Modern International Drama

28.2 (1995): 7-34.

Gao Xinjian.高行健• Lingshan.《靈山》TaiBei: Lianjing 臺北市:聯經，1990 年.

高行健.“Chezhan 车站”.Shiyue 十月 No. 3: 119-138.

Gissenwehrer, Michael and Jo Riley. "The Myth of Gao Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tam. Soul

of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese

University of Hong Kong, 2001.

145
Goldman, Merle. "A New Relationship Between the Intellectuals and the State in the

Post-Mao Period." Intellectual History of Modem China. Eds. Leo Ou-fan Lee

and Merle Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Harrington, John. The Irish Beckett. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

He Wen. "Postscript: On Seeing the Play The Bus-stop: He Wen's Critique in the

Literary Gazette” Trans. Chan Sin-wai. Renditions 19/20, 1983: 387-392.

Hill, Leslie. “‘Up the Republic!': Beckett, Writing, Politics". MLN 112.5, 1997: 909-928.

Jameson, Frederic. "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism."

Social Text 15, 1986: 65-88.

Junker, Mary. Beckett: The Irish Dimension. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995.

Keats, John. "Letters." The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Eighth Edition:

Volume D: The Romantic Period. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. London: W.W. Norton

& Company, 2005.

Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury,

1996.

Kuoshu, Harry H. ‘‘Will Godot come by bus or through a trace? Discussion of a Chinese

Absurdist Play." Modern Drama 4\, 1998: 461-473.

Larson, Wendy. "Realism, Modernism and the Anti-'Spiritual Pollution' Campaign in

China." Modern China 15.1’ 1989: 37-71.

Lee, Mabel. "Nobel Laureate 2000: Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain.”

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.3, 2000.

"Nobel in Literature 2000: Gao Xingjian's Aesthetics of Fleeing." CLCWeb:

Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 5.1, 2003.

146
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun. "Between the Individual and the Collective: Gao Xingjian's

Fiction." World Literature Today 75.1, 2001: 12-18.

"Literature 1969." Nobelprize.org. <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/

laureates/1969/〉23 July 2008.

Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment. Durham:

Duke University Press, 1993.

Loden, Torbjorn. "World Literature with Chinese Characteristics: On a Novel by Gao

Xingjian." Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Ed. Kwok-kan

Tarn. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001.

Lovell, Julia. "Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the

Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000". Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14.2,

2002: 1-50.

Luo Shao-pin, "Magic Mountain and Sacred Script: A Bakhtinian Reading of the Novels

of Gao Xingjian." Critique 46.3 (2005): 283-300.

Mercier, Vivian. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

"The Uneventful Event." Ed. Cathleen Culotta Andonian. The Critical

Response to Samuel Beckett. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

"The Nobel Prize in Literature 2000." 12 October 2000. Nobelprize.org.<hWp://

nobelprize.org./nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2000/press.html> 31 July 2008.

O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland. Dublin, Black Cat and

London: Faber, 1986.

Pattie, David. The Complete Critical Guide to Samuel Beckett. London: Routledge, 2000.

147
Perloff, Marjorie. "The Space of a Door: Beckett and the Poetry of Absence." The

Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1981.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.

Ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1990.

Tam, K.K (ed). Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The

Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.

"Drama of Paradox: Waiting as Form and Motif in The Bus-Stop and Waiting

for Godot.” Ed. K.K. Tam. Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian.

Hong Kong: The Chinese Unviersity of Hong Kong, 2001: 43-66.

Tay, William. "Avant-Garde Theatre in Post-Mao China: The Bus-Stop by Gao

Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tam. Soul of Chaos: Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian.

Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001: 67-76.

Tu Wei-ming. "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center." The Living Tree: The

Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today. Ed. Tu Wei-ming. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1994.

Walder, Dennis. Post-colonial Literatures in English: History Language Theory. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Yip, Terry Siu-han. "A Chronology of Gao Xingjian." Ed. K.K. Tam Soul of Chaos:

Critical Perspectives on Gao Xingjian. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of

Hong Kong, 2001: 311-339.

Zhang Longxi. Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative

Study of China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

148
Zhao, Henry Y.H. Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre

Experimentalism. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2000.

149
 • .

.... ‘ ... .

. •

• •

- ••
, - .

- . ‘ ‘ ‘ . . . . • .
• • • , • •

• •； ； , ;.. :.‘: • ： • .: /..

. • ’ .、.,- ., •:+•-.. ‘ . . —. • . - ., ..、：. .：...：.. • :: J :::

CUHK Libraries

004546562