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The Case for Literature | 
| Author: Xingjian Gao
Creator: Mabel Lee
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 550838
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 4.6 x 0.6
ISBN: 0300136269
Dewey Decimal Number: 028
EAN: 9780300136265
ASIN: 0300136269
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
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Product Description
When Gao Xingjian was crowned Nobel Laureate in 2000, it was the first time in the hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize that this honor had been awarded to an author for a body of work written in Chinese. The same year, American readers embraced Mabel Lee’s translation of Gao’s lyrical and autobiographical novel Soul Mountain, making it a national bestseller. Gao’s plays, novels, and short fiction have won the Chinese expatriate an international following and a place among the world’s greatest living writers.
The bold and extraordinary essays in this volume—all beautifully translated by sinologist Mabel Lee—include Gao's Nobel Lecture (“The Case for Literature”), “Literature as Testimony: The Search for Truth,” “Cold Literature,” “Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain,” and “The Necessity of Loneliness,” as well as other essays. These essays embody an argument for literature as a universal human endeavor rather than one defined and limited by national boundaries. Gao believes in the need for the writer to stand apart from collective movements, regardless of whether these are engineered by political parties or driven by economic or other forces not related to literature. This collection presents Gao's innovative ideas on aesthetics, and it constitutes the very kernel of his thinking on literary creation.
Praise for Soul Mountain:
“A brilliant sprawl of a novel that defies conventional notions of ‘the self’ and ‘literature.’”—Washington Post
“Startlingly poetic language . . . Bewitching narrative voices . . .One long immersion in buried strata of history and the psyche.”—Boston Globe
“Gao’s wanderer . . . has found survival . . . in words. And ultimately, it is the miracle of those words that wins Nobels.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
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| Customer Reviews:
Straight to the Truth July 27, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This slim but powerful book makes a case for literature as a living, crucial source of nurture and a noble human activity, in these times of doltish cynicism, profit-taking ignorance and commercially manufactured discouragement.
Gao stresses a rigorous program for the writing of literature, which earns it a place on my own short shelf of indispensable and inspirational books on writing. But the individual expression Gao champions should not be confused with the self-indulgent and programmatic confessionals lining the bookstore shelves. "In this postmodern age, which is concerned only with consumerism, the unchecked bloating of the individual is already a far-off myth..." Though he rejects ideological purposes, he does believe literature has social benefit, in the creation of empathy. "Yet through literature there can be a certain degree of communication, so the writing of literature that essentially has no goal does leave people a testimony of survival. And if literature still has some significance, it is probably this."
Gao Xignjian achieved his first success in China in the early 1980s with plays, and continued to write for the theatre, as well as fiction and literary essays through years of shifting political winds until he went into exile towards the end of the decade. His output only increased in the 1990s. Though his autobiographical novel, "Soul Mountain", was published in the U.S. in the same year as his Nobel Prize, and remains his best known work in America, it was completed shortly after he left China.
For Gao, the purpose of literature is simple: the search for truth. "...its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known or thought to be known, but in fact not very well known, of the truth of the human world." "For the writer, truth in literature approximates ethics, and is the ultimate ethic of literature."
But this truth is not in the realm of metaphysics or ideology. "Truth is perceptual and concrete. Full of life, truth is available for human observation at any time and in any place; it is the interaction between subject and object." It is the individual's "testimony of his times."
"The language required by literature comes from spontaneous speech that goes straight to truth." Gao is a particular champion of the auditory. "The human need for language is not simply a need for the transmission of meaning; language is also needed for one to listen to, and for affirming one's own existence."
"It is my view that the only responsibility a writer has is to the language he writes in." And that language must sing. "The musicality of language is of extreme importance, and music provides me with more insights than any sort of literary theory." "If I fail to hear music in the sentences I have written, I acknowledge defeat..."
Gao writes about his own approach to fiction and theatre, and (especially in a terse but harrowing chapter near the end) his battles with Chinese authorities, but all within the context of this literary purpose. Agree or disagree with his assertions, this is a book anyone involved in literature must read. In the main, it is a book that everyone should read to understand the activity of literature--the single voice singing a surviving truth beyond the amorphous noise.
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