Jenny Lee
Northwestern University
It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in
accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge
of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time
when the struggle seems so unfairly weighted against them
(Said xvii).
Upon returning to Chile from Sweden after receiving
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971, Pablo Neruda addressed a massive, adoring
crowd at the National Stadium in Santiago with passionate expressions of love,
pride and gratitude for the Chilean public, humbly reasserting his position as
the poet of his people, and rededicating his poetry to the multitude of
Chileans with whom his poetry had become synonymous throughout the tumultuous
years of his life. Speaking of the imminent civil war that would erupt a few
weeks before his death, Neruda gravely intoned, I have a duty as a poet,
as a politician and patriot, to warn all of Chile of this danger. As writer
and citizen, my role has always been to unify Chileans. . . If Chile, if the body
of Chile, were wounded, my poetry would bleed
(Passions
317).
The winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000,
Gao Xingjian, faced a very different reaction from the national adulation which
greeted Neruda's return to Chile. Barred from setting foot in the country of
his birth because of his status as a political dissident, the nearest Gao came
to mainland China was in a brief visit to the autonomous region of Hong Kong
where he was received with heavily guarded excitement
(Grammaticas).
Despite the fact that he had been ensconced in
France for the past two decades, however, Gao Xingjian was not spared the
onslaught of media and public criticism from the country from which he had been
exiled. Nearly every academic, writer, and politician from mainland China had
an opinion about Gao Xingjian. Gao was variously accused of being a
Frenchman who happened to write in Chinese,
a writer who had
compromised his pure
commitment to art by publicly defending
himself against political attacks from the Chinese government, or, according to
one professor who disliked the tone of Gao's Nobel acceptance speech, too
proud, not like [Joseph] Brodsky [the winner of the 1987 prize], who
acknowledged the greatness of Russian literature that came before him
(Lovell 29).
Ironically, Gao Xingjian's bitterest critics were
pro-Western, cosmopolitan writers who believed that the Nobel Committee had
succumbed to political and cultural tokenism by choosing a writer who was
Chinese
(as no Chinese-language writer had won the prize before)
and yet conveniently fell within Western anti-Communist sympathies. According
to these critics, Gao was nowhere near the best that contemporary literature in
Chinese had to offer. In addition, the Committee was accused of shady internal
politics because Gao's translator and strongest advocate, Göran Malmqvist, was
a member of the Swedish Academy (30). Despite their differing concerns,
however, the common irony shared by these various attacks on Gao was their
resulting politicization of a writer whose own position on literature had
always been fiercely private, anti-political and anti-nationalistic.
This essay will be concerned with two writers with
very different convictions about their public roles as well as the social
relevance of their literary works. Even independently of the public reaction
they have inspired, it is nevertheless still difficult to find two individuals
who have expressed more opposed views on what they perceive to be the writer's
relationship with his or her natural constituency
or
the national culture to which the writer professes the closest ties (Said xxii). Neruda —
the distinguished Chilean statesman and devoted Communist whose political and
literary careers paralleled as well as nurtured each other's development — is a
perfect example of Edward Said's representation of the intellectual as a public
figure who is committed to empowering oppressed groups in society. On the
other end is Gao, who embodies Said's romantic notion of the solitary
spirit in opposition
both by circumstance and conviction. Both
were, or continue to be, exiled at some point in their careers, but even the
reasons behind their shared experience of exile are fundamentally different —
Neruda's was politically motivated, as he was affiliated with the party that
was currently out of power; Gao, on the other hand, chose
exile because of the government's persistent attacks
on the supposedly subversive content of his creative work (Falcoff 52). These
Nobel laureates, separated by nearly three decades, exemplify Nobel Committee's
post-1970s shift away from selecting writers who have been politically engaged
towards those who have been more unaligned
and artistically
independent (Lovell 17).
However, the line dividing the two writers' positions
is not as clear as one might think. Gao has not been as removed from the
opportunities available to him to use his public platform as his individualist
stance initially suggests, as evidenced by his increasingly vocal criticisms of
China's oppressive cultural policies as well as of the Western market economy's
insidious commercialization of literature. (One critic has even complained,
Originally, Gao stood for artistic creativity, but now he's changed, he's
expressing opinions about the Mainland
(Lovell 29).) Neither had Neruda
ever been comfortable with the idea of politicized
poetry verging
on the language of propaganda. As Roland Bleiker points out, despite his
conviction to write in the language of everyday life, Neruda was fully aware of
the need for artistic innovation
to break through existing linguistic habits, for it is through these very
conventions, inaudible and seemingly harmless as they are, that practices of
domination become objectified
(Bleiker 1139).
As in the previous chapter, this chapter will
primarily examine the Nobel lectures of Pablo Neruda and Gao Xingjian and
highlight their ideas on the relations between society and the writer, and
society and literature (Neruda uses poet
and poetry
in
place of writer
and literature
), particularly in
relation to the function of language in both literature and politics. These
two writers' stances on literature's social function as well as on the writer's
responsibility to the public have been clearly shaped by their personal
experiences as citizens and artists, and thus are different. However, Neruda
and Gao share similar concerns regarding an ethics
of literature,
in which literature has an imperative to give
a voice to those who
are commonly sidelined in official narratives of history, whether they are
illiterate peasants (for Neruda) or the censored individual writer (for Gao).
More generally speaking, literature can claim to have an ethical dimension
through the role it plays in opening a space for voices to heard outside the
linguistically conditioned boundaries of political representation, in the space
between experience and the interpretation of experience (1131). This chapter
will be an attempt to show how their apparently conflicting ideas on
literature's (and the writer's) relationship to society compel a reassessment
of the relationship between literature and politics, as well as what it means
for literature to have a political
dimension, for which a
reinterpretation of politics may be necessary.
Pablo
Neruda — Poetry is the Bread of the People
Throughout his life, Pablo Neruda strove towards a
poetic philosophy in which the poet and his poetry were constantly being
reshaped by their immersion in the forces of nature, on one hand, and society,
on the other. Through these contributions from the earth and from the
soul,
Neruda hoped to suffuse his poetry with equal partners
solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to mankind and to the
secret manifestations of nature
(Towards
). Lifted nearly verbatim
from the pages of his memoirs, the first half of Neruda's Nobel lecture is a
harrowing account of his journey with several guides through the Andean
mountains towards the Chilean border with Argentina that he would cross into
freedom and exile in 1949. The narrative lends itself an almost primordial,
mythical quality that serves to illustrate the experiential (rather than
intellectual) origins of Neruda's poetry. Neruda believed strongly, however,
that the poet cannot sustain himself solely in the condition of solitude, even
when surrounded by the stark beauty of the Chilean landscape, nestled between
the mountains and the sea. I come from a dark region, from a land
separated from all others by the steep contours of geography. I was the most
forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy,
he
declared in his Nobel speech. But always I had put my trust in man. I never
lost hope. It is perhaps because of this that I have reached as far as I now
have with my poetry and also with my banner
(Towards
).
This
hope
in humanity would become the most powerful motivating force
behind Neruda's poetry. Particularly after the Spanish Civil War, which
galvanized his Communist sympathies in the face of the brutal deaths of
ordinary citizens as well as his fellow poets such as Federico
García Lorca at
the hands of the Fascists, Neruda's social and poetic commitments gradually
shaded into each other to the extent that it was difficult to see where one
ended and the other began. While his early volumes of poetry were marked by
solipsistic retreats into depression and burning passion, Neruda related in his
Memoirs the major turning point in
his poetic consciousness brought about by the events of the Civil War:
My visit to Spain had given me added strength and maturity. The
bitterness in my poetry had to end...Can poetry serve our fellow men? Can it
find a place in man's struggles? I had already done enough tramping over the
irrational and the negative. I had to pause and find the road to humanism,
outlawed from contemporary literature but deeply rooted in the aspirations of
mankind
(139).
Although Neruda had an illustrious diplomatic career
that began with his appointment as honorary consul to Rangoon in 1927 and ended
with his ambassadorship to France in the early 1970s (spanning brief stints as
senator, presidential candidate, and Communist exile), it would be misleading
to identify the politics
in his poetry to be of the same nature as
that contained in his political roles. The politics of his poetry had to do
with looking beyond the individual towards the community and attempting to
dismantle political discourse by examining the very language by which it was
constructed. Neruda wrote from the standpoint of the working class and
peasants whose voices were typically marginalized in society, leading Bleiker
to observe that his writings were all about heeding to whispers that risk
drowning in the roaring engines of high politics
(Bleiker 1129). Neruda
considered his most effective political tool to be language itself — ordinary
language that would chronicle these voices authentically and reach the widest
audience possible, but also language to be exploded from within to produce new
visions and new ways of embodying the variegated experiences of Chileans — the
coal miners of the nitrate pampas, the Araucanian Indians, the peasants of Isla
Negra.
Neruda was very careful not to elevate his own status
as a poet above the heads of the people whose sword, whose handkerchief
my humble poetry wants to be
(Memoirs
149). Neruda always maintained that the poet is not
a little god
(a subtle slight of his fellow Chilean poet Vicente
Huidobro whom he quotes here, and whom Neruda frequently criticized for
bask[ing] in his own divine isolation
), but a baker who prepared
the daily bread for his community (296). Sometimes Neruda offered his poetry
as the weapon in the struggle for bread; other times his poetry was offered as
the nourishing sustenance itself. Neruda also often insisted that he was
not an intellectual,
and that his rich poetic images and ideas were
not culled from literary theories but from his everyday flesh-and-blood
experiences, elemental and often violently sensual, yet familiar and accessible
to anyone who read his poetry. (However, despite his glib portrayal of himself
and other poets of his generation as children of nature
who
rebelled against the decadent bourgeois literature of their times, Neruda was
by no means anti-book and anti-literature
— his lifelong passion
consisted in amassing rare editions of literary works for his personal library,
works which represented universal fragments of knowledge captured in my voyage
through the world
and the subterranean labor of conscience that led
me to the light
(Passions 334).
In keeping with his humble views of the poet's
position in society, Neruda believed that poetry itself is an action set free
the moment it is uttered or written, irreducible to a single
petrified
form intended by its creator. He explained in his
lecture that he was often unsure whether the creative control rests in the poet
or the poetry: I do not know whether I experienced this or created it, I
do not know whether it was truth or poetry, something passing or permanent, the
poems I experienced in this hour, the experiences which I later put into
verse
(Towards
). In a related anecdote in his Memoirs,
Neruda described an incident when he was asked what
is meant by a certain image in a poem dedicated to the memory of Federico
García Lorca. In response, Neruda had chided the individual for failing to
recognize that poetry is not static matter but a flowing current that
quite often escapes from the hands of the creator himself
(Memoirs
123). However, by giving poetry an autonomy separate
from the intentions of the poet, Neruda's comments nevertheless had greater
social and political implications than was evident on their surface. By
loosening the ties between the individual poet and his poetry, Neruda thus
placed poetry at the wider service of society: Poetry will water the
fields and give bread to the hungry. It will meander through the ripe wheat.
Pilgrims will slake their thirst in it, and it will sing whenever men struggle
and when they are at rest
(Passions 335).
Claiming such total freedom for poetry provided Neruda
with his best defense against his political detractors who accused him of being
a sectarian
poet. In the end, he stated firmly, the individual
poet makes only a small contribution to the entire body of poetry existing
throughout history and in the imagination. Thus, it is mistaken to expect one
poet to write for all people, for no poet has any considerable enemy other
than his own incapacity to make himself understood
(Towards
). Neruda
did not evade the issue of his own particular political commitments, however.
Early inroads of politics into his poetry were made during his student days in
Santiago when the workers' movement began to consolidate against the oppressive
regime of President Arturo Palma, and Neruda's decision to commit himself to
the Communist cause occurred, as mentioned above, during the Spanish Civil War,
many years before he actually joined the party in Chile in 1945. As Edward
Said notes in Representations of the
Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, the intellectual has an
imperative to take the side of the oppressed, a principle Neruda claimed as the
driving force behind all his activities, political and poetic: In the
midst of the arena of America's struggles I saw that my human task was none
other than to join the extensive forces of the organized masses of the people,
to join with life and soul with suffering and hope, because it is only from
this great popular stream that the necessary changes can arise for the authors
and for the nations
(Towards
). Neruda believed that the popular masses
are the instigators of as well as the inspiration for social and artistic
progress, which thus doubly implicates the writer as artist and citizen in
their struggles:
[T]he truth is that I can
find no other way for an author in our far-flung and cruel countries, if we
want the darkness to blossom, if we are concerned that the millions of people
who have learnt neither to read us nor to read at all, who still cannot write
or write to us, are to feel at home in the area of dignity without which it is
impossible for them to be complete human beings. . . [W]hat would have become of me
if, for example, I had contributed in some way to the maintenance of the feudal
past of the great American continent? How should I then have been able to raise
my brow, illuminated by the honor which Sweden has conferred on me, if I had
not been able to feel some pride in having taken part, even to a small extent,
in the change which has now come over my country? It is necessary to look at
the map of America, to place oneself before its splendid multiplicity, before
the cosmic generosity of the wide places which surround us, in order to understand
why many writers refuse to share the dishonor and plundering of the past, of
all that which dark gods have taken away from the American peoples. (Towards
)
The
poet's duty falls between the poles of realism and the mythic, filling the
mighty void with beings of flesh and blood
while partaking of the
task of making fables and giving names
(Towards
). Thus on one
hand, the poet is to function as a critical mirror of reality, cautious of
romanticizing and thus falsely depicting the harsh realities of daily life for
many people. For this, Neruda gave the example of his poetic rendering of the
peasant woman who washed the villagers' laundry every night: If I had
been one of the poets of the past who loved beauty for beauty's sake, and art
for art's, I would have celebrated that ritual washerwoman in the figure of a
priestess presiding over her temple of foam, her vestments, and religious
veils. But I, a poet of our times, saw in that washerwoman not a ritual but a
sorrowful reality, the lives of millions of women of our enormous, forsaken
America
(Passions 344). At
the same time, however, the poet, in a long line of bards and storytellers of
the past, is charged with the duty of creating new myths, reawakening the
old dreams which sleep in statues of stone in the ruined ancient
monuments
(Towards
). Neruda offered this credo for writers in the
Americas in particular, whom he enjoined to participate in the reconstruction
of the myths of the indigenous peoples that had disappeared under the narratives
of colonial discourse.
Of course, treading the fine line between myth and
reality requires a vigilant command of language, as well as a creative desire
to manipulate language in order to transform the very means of representing
experience. For Neruda, the very goals of poetry are connected to the
expressive and communicative functions of language (an idea that will also be
seen in a variant form in Gao Xingjian's thinking). Poetry aspires to guide
the poet towards self-understanding (expression of the psyche), and to convey
the varieties of human experience to others (social and communicative
expression). At the level of interaction between the poet, the poem and the
reader, poetry creates social consciousness by enabling the reader to become aware
of himself as part of a wider human community, whose experiences are
conditioned, codified and valued to such a large degree through the mediation
of language.
Without the poet, of course, there can be no poetry.
Thus, the question of poetry's social ramifications is inseparable from the
question of the writer's function in society. According to Neruda, a writer's
fate is tied to his people,
and Neruda did not claim elevated
status for the writer, only the freedom to write according to personal convictions.
Of course, Neruda noted that in politically difficult times in which freedom
of expression is severely restricted, the writer's choices are limited to
taking the side either of those in power, or of those who are disenfranchised
of their civil liberties. As expected, however, it is no question which choice
Neruda advocated, and his demands for the treatment of writers and artists in
his society were firmly tied to the aspirations of the Chilean people:
We
[artists and writers] do not expect preferential treatment. We do not
contemplate a court of crowned thinkers, favored by dynamic intellectual power.
But in full awareness of the contribution that artists and writers make to the
development and the honor of our nation, we demand consideration of our lives
and our problems, assurance that the young may continue their creative
development without opposition. But we know — and that is why we are here —
that, first and foremost, our people must be elevated to the life of human
dignity they deserve (Passions 325).
Gao Xingjian —
Literature is the Voice of the Individual
The writer is not the
conscience of society nor is literature the mirror of society. The writer
flees to the margins of society: he is a non-participant, an observer who
looks on dispassionately. There is no need for the writer to be the conscience
of society, for there has long been a surplus of social conscience. The writer
simply uses his own conscience and knowledge to write his own works. He has
responsibility only to himself
(qtd. in Burckhardt).
Gao Xingjian's Nobel lecture is presented as a series
of brief, aphoristic statements on literature, language, and the figure of the
writer. In the first two hundred words of his speech, Gao sweeps aside God,
nationalism, politics and history from the space he designates for literature.
He puts forward a striking case for literature that, on the surface, opposes
everything Neruda had wanted for his poetry. Whereas Neruda viewed poetry as a
kind of prism mediated by the individual through which humankind can project
itself, Gao shuns the idea of the universal completely in favor of the
individual voice. For Gao, literature solely represents the voice of the
individual writer; it is not subordinate to politics, does not serve the
people,
and does not represent a national culture or the voice of the
oppressed. The writer, moreover, is not to be seen as a spokesperson for any
cause, or an embodiment of righteousness
no matter what his
personal views or his circumstances. Gao's views on literature in certain ways
approximate those of Nadine Gordimer, who argues for unchecked artistic freedom
in the conveying of human experience,
but his views that the persona of the writer is totally private and subjective
appear to contradict the notion (previously discussed in the other writers)
that the writer somehow inherently contributes to society, whether through his
social commitments or his creative work.
Gao's unwavering positions on the absolute autonomy
and subjectivity of literature and the writer's position stem directly from his
own personal experiences as a victim of the Cultural Revolution in China,
during which he was forced to burn a suitcase full of unpublished manuscripts
and eventually saw every one of his works banned from publication. After his
refusal to renounce his spiritually polluted
literary views that
were seen as subverting the foundations of revolutionary realism, Gao
disappeared into the forests and mountains of Sichuan Province, embarking on a
solitary ten-month trek which inspired his novel Soul Mountain
and precipitated his exile to France in 1987 as a
political refugee. As a result of these experiences, Gao has taken a hardened
view of ideology, or what he calls isms,
and all external pressures
and constraints on the creative act, warning that they harbor the potential to
destroy both literature and the individual's freedom (Gao, Case
).
At the same time, however, it was his experience of self-enforced silence
during the period of his greatest persecution that gave rise to his clearest
conviction about the function of literature:
During the years when Mao
Zedong implemented total dictatorship even fleeing was not an option. . . To
maintain one's intellectual autonomy one could only talk to oneself, and it had
to be in utmost secrecy. I should mention that it was only in this period when
it was utterly impossible for literature that I came to comprehend why it was
so essential: literature allows a person to preserve a human
consciousness (Case
).
For Gao, there are no idealistic prescriptives for
what literature should be; the
qualities he chooses to emphasize are what he considers to be inherently
present in literature itself (though often he presents these qualities as
innate potentials that are not necessarily universally realized). Because
literature is born
as an act of an individual writer, the act of
writing signifies a form of self-realization, a material and existential proof
that goes beyond a mere, ephemeral conversation with oneself. From my
experience in writing,
Gao declares, I can say that literature is
inherently man's affirmation of the value of his own self and that this is
validated during the writing, [and] literature is born primarily of the
writer's need for self-fulfillment
(Case
). His own experiences give support
to his conviction that literature represents a primal human need for
self-affirmation: I began writing my novel Soul Mountain
to dispel my inner loneliness at the very time when
works I had written with rigorous self-censorship had been banned. Soul
Mountain was written for myself and
without the hope that it would be published
(Case
).
Gao also believes that the written word is
magical,
because it allows communication between separate
individuals, even if they are from different races and times. It is also in
this way that the shared present time in the writing and reading of literature
is connected to its eternal spiritual value
(Case
). Thus, literature
positively affirms the immediate, eternal
present because of its
relevance at the moment of meeting between one writer and one reader, a moment
that can be repeated over and over again whenever the work is read. Despite
its symbolic function as the spiritual meeting-ground between separate
individuals, however, Gao remains firm that a work of literature's broader
impact on society is an extra-literary effect, to be determined not by the
writer's own intentions nor by any quality intrinsic to the literary work. He
believes that since literature is an individual engagement in which the writer
and the reader (if any) participate of their own will, the activity of
literature cannot be said to have an essential duty to the masses
(Case
).
Like Neruda, Gao does not accord the writer a superior
position in society. He notes gravely that the writer is usually among the
first citizens to be sacrificed in any kind of cultural revolution
in order to prevent the writer's spreading of potentially subversive and
counterrevolutionary ideas. (This is particularly true in China, where writers
have been discouraged from creative activity and largely limited to performing
the functions of investigative reporters and social scientists (Calhoun 130).)
However, because he dissociates literature from the masses,
Gao refuses
to grant the writer a fundamentally social role or responsibility. In a subtle
attack on those who support him for being a political dissident, Gao notes that
it would be just as critical a mistake to lionize a victimized writer as to
condemn or persecute him. In keeping with his anti-dogmatic stance, however,
Gao is careful not to claim his conception of the writer to be absolute, but
says only that a writer may have the freedom not
to align himself with any predetermined partisan
politics or theories. As a banned writer faced with literary suicide, Gao
himself chose the condition of exile in order to continue to be able to express
himself without any constraints.1
Being a writer in exile may have divorced Gao Xingjian
from a homeland, but it has only served to intensify his commitment to his
native tongue. When other factors no longer exist, you're left facing
only your language,
Gao writes in his essay The Bearable Lightness of Exile.
He continues, I'd say a writer has a responsibility only to his language; he is not responsible for the 'motherland' or the 'people.'. . . When you're only responsible for language, your demands on language are far more rigorous
(105). In his view, it is unnecessary for a contemporary writer to go out of his way to promote the preservation and propagation of a national culture by rehashing hackneyed cultural metaphors: For a writer of the present to strive to emphasize a national culture is problematical. Because of where I was born and the language I use, the cultural traditions of China naturally reside within me
(Case
). Instead, the writer's creative task begins with the
very exploration of language itself by looking carefully at what has
already been articulated in his language and address[ing] what has not been
adequately articulated in that language
(Case
).
Gao considers the communicative function of language
to be secondary to its self-expressive function — that is, to speak one's
thoughts to oneself first before conveying them to others. As with Neruda,
however, Gao believes that the power of language ultimately rests in its
connection of the individual subject with the world through his linguistic
conception of human experience:
Language
is the ultimate crystallization of human civilization. It is intricate,
incisive and difficult to grasp yet it is pervasive, penetrates human
perceptions and links man, the perceiving subject, to his own understanding of
the world. . . As with a curse or a blessing language has the power to stir body and
mind. . . Language is not merely concepts and the carrier of concepts, it
simultaneously activates the feelings and the senses and this is why signs and
signals cannot replace the language of living people. (Case
)
Gao's
arguments about language, literature and writing are not without flaws. Gao's
vocalized convictions can be seen as contradicting his own stance, firstly by
resolving his position into a set of principles regarding literature, and
secondly by using his visible and prestigious position to launch his scathing
criticisms of China's cultural policies as well as of the market
commodification of literature. Most importantly, his strongly individualist and
anti-political position has a tendency to marginalize his deeply held humanist
convictions about literature. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Gao
presents a vision in which the writer does make an important contribution to society by demonstrating through
literature the primacy of the individual human voice. In support of this, he
writes that the writer has an ethical imperative to tell the truth:
Truth when the pen is taken up at the same time implies that one is sincere after one puts down the pen. Here truth is not simply an evaluation of literature but at the same time has ethical connotations. . . For the writer truth in literature approximates ethics, it is the ultimate ethics of literature (Case
)
In his ideas on ethics in literature, Gao goes one
step beyond Neruda, who had called for writers to faithfully reflect human
experience but without the imperative to distort visions in order to
challenge the entrenched forms of representations
(Bleiker 1140). For
Gao, however, the principle of distortion is a key component of the writer's
task in the unmasking of reality:
In the hands of a writer with a
serious attitude to writing. . . [l]iterature does not simply make a replica of
reality but penetrates the surface layers and reaches deep into the inner
workings of reality; it removes false illusions, looks down from great heights
at ordinary happenings, and with a broad perspective reveals happenings in
their entirety (Case
)
Judging from these insights, what Gao is thus
proposing is not a cleavage between literature and society, but a reshifting of
emphasis from the writer to his work. Although, as mentioned above, he believes
that the enduring value of a work is an extra-literary response that reflects
historical and social conditions rather than the intentions of the writer;
nevertheless the consequence of that work's endurance returns to the
fundamental significance of literature: The clamor of the writer and his
actions may have vanished but as long as there are readers his voice in his
writings continues to reverberate
(Case
).
Does Gao believe, then, that the literary work can
bring about change in society? Gao's immediate answer is no, since the
individual voice is nevertheless still too inconspicuous in comparison to the
grand sweep of official history. He offers hope through the literary voice,
however, as a kind of alternative history, similar to Neruda's notion that
poetry embodies the voice of those who normally have no power to speak:
History is not all that humankind possesses, there is also the legacy of
literature. . . When the great laws of history are not used to explain humankind it
will be possible for people to leave behind their own voices
in
literature (Case
). Gao humbly concludes his Nobel lecture with a graceful
expression of gratitude towards the Swedish Academy for awarding this
Nobel Prize to literature, to literature that is unwavering in its independence,
that avoids neither human suffering nor political oppression and that further
more does not serve politics. . . [and] for allowing me to ascend this dais to speak
before the eyes of the world
(Case
).
Conclusion
The aims of this essay have been to compare the claims
made by Gao Xingjian and Pablo Neruda regarding the relationship between
writing and society. These writers respond differently to the question of whom
literature is meant to serve: For Gao, it is the frail
individual,
for whom literature challenges the hegemony of the unknowable laws
which manipulate human history (Case
), while Neruda believes that poetry is
to be put to the service of an honorable army. . . which moves forward
unceasingly and struggles every day against the anachronism of the refractory
and the impatience of the opinionated
(Towards
).
Despite their differences, these writers share a very
important concern regarding literature's imperative to give voice to those
outside the strict boundaries of political and historical representation.
However, an examination of the deeper similarity between their views requires a
reconsideration of the relationship between literature and politics, as well as
in what sense literature can be considered political.
Both
literature and politics are linguistic engagements, or ways of representing
human experience through language. Because the expressive and communicative
components of language constitute ways in which the self perceives and
organizes information about itself and others, both literature and politics
may be understood as discourses which formally articulate a concern with
persons as linguistic beings, as selves thrown amongst other selves
(Buckler). In addition, since these discourses are concerned with the acknowledgment
and valuation of selves, literature and politics can both be considered as humanistic
engagements, a notion which becomes an important link
between the ideas of Gao and Neruda (Buckler).2
In order to discover in what sense literature can be considered
political,
it is necessary to distinguish politics
proper
from the more general sense of politics used above, the
latter being a social and linguistic form of representation. By honing in on
the inevitable gap that opens up between an event and the way this event
has been imbued with meaning and significance,
literature can negotiate
and transcend politics proper and thus become political
in terms of
the latter sense (Bleiker 1131). Bleiker goes so far as saying that literature (or poetry)
is intrinsically political
because it resists being drawn into the narrow black-and-white debates
that characterize politics [proper]. Instead of getting entangled in myopic
purposes of agitation, poetry seeks to investigate the forces that have already
circumscribed the functioning of politics, the ones that have silently predetermined
what can be said and what not
(1138).
Neruda and Gao both agree that the writer can
accomplish this by using the existing structures of language to transform the
ways of representation from within language itself — to articulate what has not
yet been spoken, to discover and develop the latent potential inherent in
language
(Gao, Case
) and to break down literary molds with new forms
which arise from the urgent renewal
of historical change (Neruda, Memoirs
196). Through the innovation of
ordinary, everyday language, literature can function as testimony with a
certain measure of authenticity, whether in expressing the voice of the
individual writer or in lending a voice to others.
Of course, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
expect literature to flawlessly recreate the memories and experiences present
in the individual or collective human consciousness. However, Gao reminds us
that literature is not the same as a historical or political document, and thus
the truth
of literature takes on illuminated meaning:
Actually there are few
facts in documented testimonies and the reasons and motives behind incidents
are often concealed. However, when literature deals with the truth the whole
process from a person's inner mind to the incident can be exposed without
leaving anything out. This power is inherent in literature as long as the
writer sets out to portray the true circumstances of human existence. . . In the
hands of a writer with a serious attitude to writing even literary fabrications
are premised on the portrayal of the truth of human life, and this has been the
vital life force of works that have endured from ancient times to the present.
(Case
)
In
addition to the distinction Gao makes between the ways in which literature and
factual documents deal with truth, Bleiker comments that one of the most
important activities of the poet-chronicler involves inscribing the inevitable
silences within the narrative, and transfiguring their terrifying
void[s]
into hope (1134). At the conjunction of Neruda's I
see
and Gao's I am
is literature's I will
remember,
and it is this poetic rendering of events and memories which
would otherwise be forgotten that ultimately imbues literature with its
particular social ethics.
Thus, the writer's intellectual commitment need not be
judged by his explicit participation in or rejection of political activity,
which is irrelevant to his actual writing. By opening up a space for
alternative voices to be heard, literature interrogates the meaning making of
political discourse and thus itself performs a critical political function. In
keeping with this, Bleiker argues that Neruda's true
political and historical contribution must be
evaluated in terms of his poetry:
One may or may not agree with the content of Neruda's politics, but one can hardly deny that his influential poetry fulfills the function of a historical memory. . . Neruda's poems hold on to faint voices and perspectives that may otherwise have vanished into the dark holes of historical narratives. For better or for worse, Neruda's poetic testimonies are part of today's collective consciousness. They have entered the canons of Western thought. This is why even those commentators who are hostile to his politics readily accept the central role Neruda has played as a poet and a poetic chronicler of our time (1130).
Gao also reinforces this idea of the writer's primary function: If the writer wants to challenge society it must be through language
( Case,
italics added). His statement gestures firmly towards the
meeting-point between literature and political commitment.
Gao and Neruda both warn that the process of writing
is strewn with temptations and hurdles. According to Gao, the writer will
unavoidably meet with the temptation to use
literature as a vehicle for political ideas, but the
writer must remember that literature is not a forum for angry
shouting,
but the act of man focusing his gaze on his self
(Case
). On his part, Neruda alludes to the moments of unbearable loneliness
present in the process of writing. However, both offer a glimmer of hope
through the possibility that literature will survive as part of humankind's
historical legacy. Neruda writes, Each and every one of my songs has
endeavored to serve as a sign in space for a meeting between paths which cross
one another, or as a piece of stone or wood on which someone, some others,
those who follow after, will be able to carve the new signs
(Towards
). By
enlarging the record of human experience and bequeathing it to future
generations, literature is thus able to draw a continuous line of human
consciousness from the past towards the future. As Gao proclaims,
Literature is for the living and moreover affirms the present of the
living. It is this eternal present and this confirmation of individual life
that is the absolute reason why literature is literature
(Case
).
