Gao Xingjian

This chapter looks at how Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, has brought Zhuangzi’s spirit of absolute liberation and freedom to the highest level. A discussion of his novelSoul Mountainand the poems “As Free as a Bird” and “Roaming Spirit and Metaphysical Thinking” shows how Gao’s self-exile and his persistent pursuit of the aesthetic spirit of literature embody Zhuangzi’s spirit of individual freedom and liberation. By successfully turning the meaning of “exile” from negative to positive, Gao has recreated a nature, or a Garden of Eden, in which he can transcend all kinds of restrictions and wander freely in the literary world. Gao Xingjian’s tropes of fleeing and self-exile, closely associated with his literary works, represent one of the most compelling cases of the interplay between literature and individual freedom at the end of the twentieth century.