The Other Shore (4 page)

In this way he rejects Nietzsche and the individualism of the West, which he considers destructive. His attitude is not unlike that of the traditional Taoist or Zen Buddhist who, bent on seclusion or exile from society to cultivating his inner virtues and strength, still casts an indifferent eye to observe the world of humans in his somewhat aloof and detached position. However, while Taoism and Buddhism aspire to understanding the
tao
, Gao Xingjian insists on knowing and studying the self and its inner secrets in all its complexities; while the former represents inner peace, Gao Xingjian finds only pain and suffering, and unfortunately, there appears to be no salvation. The individual is helpless in the face of this predicament, for he is impotent to change himself or his world. He can assert his existence only by way of thinking and of the production of discourse (he once proclaimed: “I discourse, therefore I am”
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); ironically these tend to become as ineffectual and meaningless as the world he finds himself in—therein resides the frustration and insoluble dilemma of modern man.

The Plays

The Other Shore
彼岸
(Bi’an) (
1986
)

Written in early 1986,
The Other Shore
was originally scheduled to be performed by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre under the direction of Lin Zhaohua, but the rehearsal was suspended because the play was considered politically sensitive. This marked a turning point in Gao Xingjian’s thinking—he gradually came to the realization that the authorities would no longer allow his plays to be performed in China. (
The Other Shore
was subsequently performed in Taiwan by the Taiwan National College of Art in 1990 and by the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 1995. Both productions were directed by the playwright.)

The Other Shore
is a short but complex play. The plot is made up of disjointed narrative units that do not apparently or necessarily connect with one another, at least in a structurally coherent manner. However, each unit can be seen as self-contained and is interesting and meaningful by itself. Gao Xingjian considers the play as his attempt at “pure” drama:

The Other Shore
is different from conventional drama. One of the differences is that the play does not attempt to put together a coherent plot. I only intend it to be a revelation, to portray some of life’s experiences and feelings in a pure dramatic form, i.e., in the same way that music is pure.
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The title
Bi’an
(literally “the other shore” or “the opposite shore”) refers to
paramita
, the land of enlightenment in Buddhism. According to Buddhist beliefs, one is able to cross the river of life—from the shore of delusion and suffering to the other shore of enlightenment—by cultivating and perfecting the
paramita
virtues of generosity, morality, patience, vigor, concentration (or meditation) and wisdom. The play reveals the fundamental tragedy of human life: even after crossing the river and reaching the other shore, the characters find that enlightenment is unobtainable, and that they are still trapped in the delusions and sufferings of everyday life from which there is no escape. As Gao Xingjian says, “It is destined that the individual will never be able to acquire the ultimate truth, which is known as God or the other shore.”
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At least two issues stand out in the play: collectivism and personal salvation. In the opening scene, the game of ropes first illustrates the establishment of inter-personal relationships and the virtue and necessity of communal living. However, the ropes are soon subject to manipulation and control, and the relationships turn into unequal partnerships overrun by totalitarian rule. Then comes the river crossing by a group of actors, a difficult undertaking but hopeful of happiness upon its completion. After crossing the river to the other shore, the actors are accorded a temporary bliss through their loss of language. However, as soon as they are taught to speak again by Woman, a mother figure, they learn to distinguish between self and other and are anxious to seek out the outsider among them. Incited by their own words to irrational violence, they smother Woman to death and try to put the blame on one another. As the group tuns into an unruly mob, they need a leader to guide them. They try to pressure Man, who may be regarded as the
de facto
hero in the play, to take up the role. When Man refuses, they let themselves fall into the hands of a manipulating card-playing Master, who tempts them with wine and coaxes them into making fools of themselves. In an attempt to please Master, they willingly confuse reality with illusion and compromise truth with falsehood. Together they ridicule and persecute Man, the individualist among them. The various episodes in the first part of the play, at first appearing fragmented, are now given a thematic unity underscoring the flaw of collectivism, that it can easily degenerate into blind obedience and violence and play into the hands of a manipulative leader.

The scenes that follow describe Man’s search for personal salvation as he tries to assert his independence in the community of man. Besieged by adversities, he feels smothered by the unreasonable demands on his individuality. As a result, he is frustrated in every way, a total failure in human relations. With his non-conformist stance, he cannot get along with the masses, nor can he obtain any understanding from his father and his mother; even his yearning for love is denied him. An outcast turned cynic, he strives frantically to pick up the pieces of his life, doing so literally by rearranging the arms and legs of mannequins to make them whole again and, like God, he tries to create his own version of human society. But when the mannequins become too many, he finds himself helplessly drawn into their collective pattern of frenzied movements: this is mob behaviour once again. All the time his actions are haunted by the underlying presence of the Zen Master and his chanting, as if he is casting a “cold” eye of indifference on the futility of all of Man’s undertakings. In the end, Man leaves the stage “a drooping, blind, and deaf heart,” and the masses become actors again as the play reverts to the everyday life of the beginning, the world before the river crossing to “the other shore.”

To an extent The Other Shore expresses the author’s misgivings about collectivism and its darker consequences. The ending offers no salvation for the persecuting masses and their irrationality, and there exists no one, like the “silent man” in Bus Stop or the ecologist in
Wilderness Man
, who takes on the role of the harbinger of hope. Communication is impossible despite human interaction, or because of it, for language is highly suspect, a means of deception, violence, and the distortion of intentions. As a result the individual can only seek refuge in the “dark and shady forest” of his heart, reminiscing about his past life until life itself perishes. But all is not futile—for all its darkness and despair, the play also affords a glimpse of self-knowledge in the pursuit of an equilibrium between the self and the outside world.
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Of course we are treading on dangerous ground in attempting to interpret the unity and the meaning of the play. It is as if each interpretation leads to another that is its contradiction, and there is always the risk of oversimplification. Perhaps it is better to just regard the play, as Gao Xingjian suggests, as a training exercise for actors. To our writer,
The Other Shore
is an experiment in pursuit of a modern theatre, using Eastern drama as a starting point. As with Peking opera, it is actor-centred, and communication with the audience is mostly derived from the directness of the actors’ performance.
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The play is also the first piece of work by the playwright embodying his idea of the neutral actor:

Crossing the river to the other shore is a key moment in the performance. After the rigorous movements of playing with the ropes and rapidly exchanging partners, the actors relax their bodies and lie on the floor to listen to the music. As they let the music evoke their feelings, their bodies are not motivated by ideas. This is a process of self-purgation.
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From this moment on the actors will be able to “forget” themselves and to effectively focus their attention on observing their own body movements and listening to their own voices. And Shadow, Man’s super-ego, is the physical manifestation of the neutral actor on stage: he is there to observe, evaluate and even make fun of “Man” in the encounter of the self with his other.

Between Life and Death
生死界
(Shengsijie) (
1991
)

In 1989, Gao Xingjian finished
Exile
(
Taowang
逃亡), which is set against the background of the 1989 Tiananmen incident. The play describes the stories of three characters, a young man, a young girl student, and a middle-aged writer, who are in hiding and running from the pursuing PLA (People’s Liberation Army) soldiers. It unmasks and examines the fundamental human weaknesses, such as fear and desire, and the naive idealism among the participants in the Democracy Movement, and casts doubts on the wisdom, and even the possibility, of the intelligentsia’s intrusion into politics. In the end, the only way out for all the characters, as for the writer in real life, is to go into exile.

Between Life and Death
, written two years after
The Other Shore
, can be seen as an attempt by Gao Xingjian to chastise the Chineseness in him (probably because of his displeasure with the adverse reactions to Exile in 1989) and pursue writing for a universal audience. The setting is unspecified and, except for the appearance of a Buddhist nun, there is no reference to anything specifically Chinese. The heroine, without any indication of her nationality, is just called Woman; she could be “everywoman.” She serves as the play’s narrator, describing her tortured life story, her fears and sensitivities, which are seen as typical of the female sex. In light of this, the play apparently champions feminism, especially women’s sufferings at the hands of men. As the narrator-heroine says, “In her life, a woman is destined to suffer five hundred times more than a man.” Even women help men to oppress other women, and they can be more vicious than men to their own kind. However, the play’s concerns are actually more ambitious, as the collectivist themes in Gao Xingjian’s previous works have been displaced by the more subjective question of the self and the existential.

The story is about a woman who faces the end of her life’s journey in both mental and physical exhaustion. The various episodes in her monologue fall mainly into three categories. First there is her love-hate relationship with Man, who has no speaking parts but expresses his reactions to her monologue by performing pantomimes. She keeps nagging him, accuses him of infidelity and threatens to leave him. But when he disappears and eventually transforms into a pile of clothing, she is full of remorse, wishing that he could have stayed and made up with her. This is a sad comment on the fate of Woman, and of women in general—she attempts to assert her independence, but in the end she finds that she still has to depend on Man, at least for his companionship.

What follows are reminiscences of Woman’s tainted past. She spent a harrowing childhood in a windowless house. She tried to get her mother’s attention by cutting her finger with a pair of scissors. She was raped by her mother’s lover. She had an affair with a woman doctor and her husband, in which she was used as a plaything to spice up their sex life. And then there was her irksome one-night stand with some unknown man. According to her own admission, she has abandoned herself to living a life of sin after being manipulated and exploited by both men and women. Feeling guilty and remorseful, she takes off her ring, her bracelet and her earrings, all tokens of her past experiences, to purge herself of her sins, but all is in vain. As her disappointment grows, she feels increasingly depressed about herself, thinking that she is unfit to be a mother and unworthy of a warm and comfortable home. She is alone in the world among its evil and squalor, with nothing to look forward to except the end of her life.

The latter part of the play features a series of hallucination scenes. Here Woman finds herself languishing in a state “between life and death” as she makes various frantic attempts to discover the meaning of her existence in her encounters with the supernatural. A masked man appears, chases her in his car and warns her of a bloody disaster. Then she slides down into the depths of icy water. A nun, whom Woman first mistakes as the Buddhist Bodhisattva, disembowels herself, cleanses her intestines, puts them on a plate and then throws them in Woman’s face. A man dressed in black and perched on high stilts approaches, watching over her with a big black eye in his hand. A headless woman follows Woman, also with a big eye in her hand. The play ends with Woman musing aloud on the question of her identity while an old man tries to catch an imaginary snowflake with his hat.

As spectacle, the hallucination scenes in the last part of the play are the most dramatic and effective. The images are horrifying and dreamlike, and their accompanying earnestness and intensity make them disturbingly real. One recurring image in these scenes is the big eye, which appears twice and each time sends shudders down Woman’s heart. The first one, painted on a man’s hand, denotes the eye of other people and the opposite sex, and Woman feels that this eye has been following her all her life. The second is the eye carried by the headless woman, presumably embodying the soul of the heroine, and the eye is the inner eye. The fear of being spied upon lingers and terrorizes Woman as she feels that her judgement day is approaching.

In
The Other Shore
, Gao Xingjian resorts to externalization to realize his idea of self-examination by using different characters to portray the divided self, the observer and the observed. In
Between Life and Death
, he goes one step further towards subjectivizing and neutralizing the self: the two versions of the self are combined and contained in one character. The narrating “I” is the experiencing “she,” even though the two are distinguished from each other in the use of deixis. The former, referring to her own story in the third person, distances herself not only from past experiences but also from the actions and emotions of the present. Ubiquitous in its presence, the “I” reveals itself only through narration, depending on discourse to prove her being (despite the fact that language is evasive and is itself in a state of chaos). The gap between the two selves remains unbridgeable from beginning to end. The narrating “I,” like the big black eyes in the play, is always observing and implicitly evaluating, and so tends to transcend the immediacy of the moment. On the other hand, the “she,” as the reification of “I” and the object of narration, can only aspire to the physicality of experience, the world of suffering and emotion. Thus the “I” plays the role of a “cold” and detached observer, but the irony is that it cannot be without the impassioned “she” and her worldliness.