The Other Shore (3 page)

How does one achieve self-consciousness and yet still be “in” the performance and a good actor at the same time? The answer to this is Gao Xingjian’s idea of the tripartition of acting. In traditional Chinese theatre, Gao Xingjian explains, when the actor gets ready for the role he is to play, he extracts himself from his everyday activities, relaxes his body and focuses his mind to enter into his performance. During this time, he “purifies” himself into a “state of neutrality”; in other words, he is in a state of transition between his everyday self and his role. This neutrality can be explained by looking at the convention of
liangxiang
亮相
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(literally “to reveal oneself”) in Beijing opera. At the time of
liangxiang
, the actor 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, who applaud and voice their approval. The performance is briefly suspended, as the actor neutralizes his acting capacity and calls attention to the exhibition of his art.

Thus in any performance, there exists in the actor three identities—the self, the neutral actor, and the character. Neutrality is not tantamount to self-effacement; it demands a self-consciousness in the actor of his own make-believe. At the same time this 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 the stage and, more importantly, the audience. Neutrality then becomes a medium which enables the actor to control and adjust his performance, helping him to be in and out of his character not only before the performance but also many times during the performance. And because the actor is both experiencing (acting) and observing himself while performing, he is more able to project his feelings into the character for the audience’s enjoyment. In any theatre, what needs to be communicated is not reality but the feeling of reality. By embodying the three identities on the stage, the actor can challenge the character he is playing, empathize with him, pity, admire and even criticize him. The dramatic tension resulting from this kind of acting is beyond that produced by mere yelling and shouting which disguise themselves as theatre. In this way, not only the plot but also acting itself can be interesting and become the focus of the audience’s attention. And the actor, because his feeling for the character is not derived exclusively from his physical self, is awarded a high degree of satisfaction through an awareness of his own artistic creation.

Points of View in Drama

Gao Xingjian is concerned about acting, but being first and foremost a writer, he is also equally concerned about playwriting. He laments the demise of the playwright in the contemporary theatre. The playwright, according to Gao, has been forced to give up his former prominence to the director, who is now the absolute ruler of the stage. With the weakening position of the playwright, theatre increasingly relies on technology to support its predominantly visual presentation, and music, which is capable of generating tension through contrasts and variations (e.g. in a symphony), has also been abused, being given the task of covering up the inadequacies in performance. As the peripherals have taken over from real dramatic action, and abstraction, in the form of exegesis of ideas, emerges as the only objective, theatre tends to become non-drama or even anti-drama and comes closer and closer to the end of the road.
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As a playwright, Gao Xingjian is motivated by the desire to wrestle the centre stage from the hands of the director. He insists on the dramatic, the “drama” (戲
xi
) happening on the stage. His plays may not feature a well-made plot, and they may even resort to abstractions from time to time, but there has to be structural integrity—expositions, contrasts, conflicts, and discoveries, the essentials with which drama is made, and which are seen as “action” by the audience. The dramatic is not confined to externalities; most of Gao Xingjian’s recent works feature internal conflicts, the psychological drama within a character’s consciousness.

Gao Xingjian admits that his idea of the tripartite actor is not universally applicable to all kinds of scripts, and he remains unsure whether this theory of his has been the driving force behind his style of playwriting or vice versa. The idea is part of Gao Xingjian’s search for a new language for the contemporary stage; the drama of the modern man’s frenzied schizophrenia demands such acting as a complement, or even prerequisite. His understanding of performance, namely, the coexistence of the self, the neutral actor, and the character in the actor, opens up new possibilities in playwriting. Just as consciousness is capable of being realized by the tripartite actor, so it can also be interpolated on the discourse level to project different modes of perception.

It is evident that Gao Xingjian’s latest works, which are included in the present collection, all feature his newly developed ideas about narrative modes in drama and put into effect his demands on the actor. In these plays the characters not only speak in the first person, as is the case by dramatic convention, they also speak and refer to themselves in the second and third persons, being in and out of their own selves in the same play or even in the same scene. For instance, in
Dialogue and Rebuttal
, the hero and the heroine speak in the first person in the first half of the play, and then switch to the second and third persons respectively in the second half, when they are languishing in a state of apparent meaninglessness as spirits after their deaths.

Gao Xingjian’s experiments in the narrative modes of drama may have been inspired by the special features of the Chinese language. Many times he has commented that the Chinese language, being an uninflected language, facilitates shifting the “angle” or perspective of narration. “As the subject in a Chinese sentence can be omitted and there are no verbal conjugations, it is quite natural to displace the ‘I’ as the subject by a zero subject. The subjective consciousness can be transformed, achieving a pan-subjective consciousness or even self-effacement. And it is just as easy to change the ‘I’ into the second person (you) or the third person (he/she). The ‘I’ as ‘you’ is a case of objectification, and the ‘I’ as ‘he/she’ one of detached observation, or contemplation. This really affords the writer tremendous freedom!”
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Commenting on the new possibilities of his dramatic strategy, Gao Xingjian says:

The character, which usually appears on stage in the first person, can be divided into three different points of view and can speak in three different persons, and the same character will then have three psychological dimensions. The character as both agent and receptor is enriched by many perspectives, which enable a more complete mode of expression. And from his various observation platforms, the same character will be able to generate and express many different attitudes towards the outside world and towards his own experience of it.
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The shift in narrative mode is not a mere substitution of “I” by “you,” “he” or “she”; it also has implications for the actor and the audience’s point of view. With the “I” relating the story of “you,” “he” or “she,” the character is functionally divided into two separate roles of addresser and addressee, or narrator and narratee, even though they are both physically embodied in one person. The second or third person self functions as the observed, who operates in the external world made up of other characters. As the “I” is insulated from direct contact with the external world, he is equipped with a different perspective from that of his divided double, and in his capacity as a non-participating narrator, he can be more objective in assessing his own consciousness as that of someone other than himself.

The discourse situation in Gao Xingjian’s plays mostly points to the exploration of the self, the centre around which all the happenings revolve and towards which all the meanings gravitate. In combining the narrating and experiencing selves, the narrative situation is capable of generating tension among the divided selves of the same character, with the “you” being closer to the implicit “I,” but not less confrontational than the third person self (“he/she”), who is further removed. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, “otherness” can never be firmly grasped. The other is basically a locus of the subject’s fears and dears; they do not belong to an external category, but are internal and unchangeable conditions of man’s existence. Viewed in this perspective, the dreams and speeches, when they are expressed on the stage, illuminate the split in the subject’s imaginary register and its elements.

The process opens up new venues of communication for the theatre. For instance, the “you” in
Nocturnal Wanderer
, in its capacity as the observed self of the “I,” is the main character in the play whose fate and emotions are on display. In this manner, the audience gets to see the play’s actions with an awareness of the non-experiencing “I” and his implicit judgement on the “you.” They are thus given a comprehensive picture of the drama, the complexity of the character and his inner conflicts which have been externalized, and his relationship with the world at large. In
Between Life and Death
, the heroine examines her own life in a series of narrated flashbacks. Here the implied “I” plays the role of narrator retelling the story of “she,” who is the projected and experiencing self of “I.” In this manner, a degree of objectivity is achieved because the narrating “I,” detached from immediate experience, can be largely sheltered from self-pity. Thus on the level of expressiveness, shifting the narrative mode facilitates self-examination and makes it easier for the unconscious to reveal itself.

The modern stage has come a long way since the Stanislavskian method of realistic acting, i.e., total identification and immersion in the character being portrayed. Brecht’s epic theatre introduces the third-person narrator, and highlights stage narratology by adding another dimension to communication in the theatre—the audience, made aware of the existence of a world outside the world of the play, are “alienated” from the performance and performers. For Gao Xingjian, his idea of the theatre goes beyond alienation and invoking the audience’s rationality. It is inherent in and grows out of his conception of the world of the play, a world focusing on the consciousness of both actor and character, self-contained in its ostentation, yet made expansive so as to involve the audience both emotionally and intellectually. The key word is “self-consciousness.” Gao Xingjian’s self-conscious art reveals itself not merely in its self-reflexivity or in its relation to the world at large, i.e., how the world looks at the self; it can only be understood as self-observation in an alienated and detached manner. The relationship between the first-person self and his “other” hangs in a delicate balance, covering the whole spectrum of subjectivity and objectivity. The resultant potential for dramatic tension and conflict is part and parcel of his idea of the theatre, which encompasses both acting and playwriting.

Drama and the Modern Man

Gao Xingjian insists that his ideas should not be regarded as supporting technique for technique’s sake, nor are they merely aimed at rhetorical purposes. His pursuit of a new theatre is intended to reveal the naked realities of modern man and his living conditions—privileging formalism would only bury the truth of these realities and conditions.
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Gao Xingjian is not a fan of the modern theatre (so-called “spoken drama” in Chinese) dominated by words and their meaning-generating functions. Far more concerned with the unstated emotions in language and in performance, he aspires to a “modern language,” akin to the language games found in
Zhuangzi
《莊子》and in the
Diamond Sutra
《金剛經》, that will express a feeling of detachment and a kind of “free and easy” contemplation as embodied in Taoist and Buddhist texts.
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In this he finds an ally in the Chinese language, which he tries to rejuvenate and develop into an appropriate medium of expression for the stage:

…I am not at all a cultural chauvinist, and I don’t have in me the incomprehensible arrogance typical of the Chinese race. The only thing I want to do is to rejuvenate this ancient language, so that it can be equally able to express the bewilderment of modern man, his pursuits, his frustrations in not being able to attain them, and in the final analysis, the sufferings and happiness of living, loneliness and the dire need for expression.
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Gao Xingjian’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 of “unspoken wisdom.” As with many Zen Buddhist texts, his words “speaks directly to the heart,” striking at the innermost core of 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 of 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.
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Gao Xingjian does not resort to yelling and screaming in his writings. He is not a revolutionary, and he refuses to fight other people’s war other than the one that resides in his heart. In concentrating on the self, Gao Xingjian’s writings can be regarded as subjective and individualistic. However, his is a distinctive kind of individualism, one that values the self but not at the expense of others. As he says of his novel
Spiritual Mountain
:

My perception of the self has nothing to do with self-worship. I detest those people whose desire is to displace God with himself, the kind of heroism which aspires to defeat the world, and the kind of self-purgation which puts on the guise of a tragic hero. I am myself, nothing less, nothing more.
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