[In the following essay, Kuoshu compares Bus Stop to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and explores the motif of waiting in both plays in terms of their different cultural contexts.]

The Bus-Stop, written by Gao Xingjian and performed by The People's Art Theater of Beijing, is a Chinese lyrical comedy that emerged with a group of experimental plays in Beijing in the early 1980s.¹ The play creates a bizarre situation of waiting, and its resemblance to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was pointed out by certain Chinese critics soon after its premiere. Since the playwright has a background in French literature, this observation came as no surprise;² nevertheless, it played its role in a quickly aborted political campaign of “anti-bourgeois-contamination.” A Party-authorized critic used The Bus-Stop's resemblance to Beckett's play to label it anti-socialist, assuming that the futile waiting in the play shows a loss of confidence in socialism, a loss ascribed to contamination by “bourgeois, idealistic, egoistic world views.”³ Although The Bus-Stop was degraded by Party authorities in the short-lived campaign, more experimental plays, one of them by the same playwright and performed in the same theatre, were staged with enthusiastic acceptance. Contrasted with the fact that massive non-participation actually aborted a political campaign under a regime whose functioning relied heavily and continually on new campaigns, the enthusiasm for the small experimental theatres testifies to an anxiety produced by such totalitarian control and a desire to move beyond it.

Situating these Chinese experimental plays in this political culture, one wonders about the meaning of waiting and how The Bus-Stop and Waiting for Godot produce a comparable situation of waiting. Clearly the same situation is almost impossible to reproduce in such different performances. This is especially true when one considers the different audiences in their historical contexts, expectations and resourcefulness in access to codes for comprehension.⁴ Let's suppose that Waiting for Godot were staged in China. The performance would be bound to communicate through different codes and thus would produce different meanings from those of its Western performances. The performance of The Bus-Stop, on the contrary, is prescribed by known codes in a Chinese cultural context. Although sharing some surface similarities, The Bus-Stop and Waiting for Godot articulate different concepts of waiting. They are, to use Umberto Eco's term, two different “cultural units,” that is, differed semantic units inserted into differed cultural systems.⁵The Bus-Stop, nevertheless, does activate its audience's recently acquired knowledge of Godot and may serve as a cross-cultural bridge for the Chinese to enter Godot-like absurdity.⁶ With these initial assumptions, I will first examine the differences between Waiting for Godot and The Bus-Stop and then explore the possibility of the latter as a cultural transcription, or parody, of the former. This discussion assumes that readers are familiar with Waiting for Godot and relatively ignorant of The Bus-Stop. It thus uses certain aspects of the former as points of departure for retrieving similar ones in the latter for comparison.

The Bus-Stop is performed, as dictated by the playwright, in a small theatre-in-the-round.⁷ The bare stage contains only a bus stop sign at the center and a fence designed to keep people in line while waiting for the bus. The play begins on a Saturday afternoon but ends God knows when, since even a watch battery will run out. A group of people, eight all together, gradually gathers to catch a bus to get from their suburb into the big city. They wait and wait, mistaking some passing vehicles for their bus, which never comes. Their hopes for the bus are aroused and crushed time after time, but still they wait. Shock sets in when they realize that they have spent years waiting for the bus. At this point, they notice that a silent man among them has left long before, deciding to walk rather than to wait—a spotlight reveals him behind the audience climbing up to, and then walking on, a raised stand. They then regret that they waited; they should have walked to the city as he did. As the play ends, the theme music of “the silent man” arises with a little variation into grandeur and liveliness, and the seven performers all start talking to different parts of the audience, commenting on their waiting.

The formal similarities of The Bus-Stop and Waiting for Godot are obvious. They both deal with waiting for someone or something that never comes—in one case for Godot, in the other for a bus. They both treat waiting as human situation—one set in front of a tree by a country road, the other at a bus stop by the side of a suburban street. They both present the waiting group as contrasted with someone else—Gogo and Didi with Pozzo and Lucky, seven people with the silent man. These correlations—Godot and the bus, the tree and the bus stop sign, Pozzo and Lucky and the silent man—serve as convenient points of departure for revealing not the kindred codes but the striking differences between the two texts. “The codes,” as Eco observes, “insofar as they are accepted by a society, set up a ‘cultural’ world which is neither actual nor possible in the ontological sense; its existence is linked to a cultural order, which is the way in which a society thinks, speaks and, while speaking, explains the ‘purport’ of its thought through other thoughts.”⁸ With these correlations coherently marking off two different cultural orders, it will be interesting to see if, at a certain point, a cross-cultural perspective can bring an understanding of differed expressions of kindred human dilemmas.

MARKERS OF CODES: GODOT AND THE BUS

In Beckett's play, Godot seems to be deprived of any practical relationship with the two tramps. Since the audience can hardly tell in any practical sense why the two tramps wait for him, it must move to a metaphysical plane to understand the tramps' relationship to Godot. This kind of move is typical in an uncoded situation, as Eco explains in A Theory of Semiotics:

Faced with uncoded circumstances and complex contexts, the interpreter is obliged to recognize that the message does not rely on previous codes and yet that it must be understandable; if it is so, non-explicit conventions must exist; if not yet in existence, they have to exist (or to be posited).⁹

Since the play does not prompt the audience to see much significance in performing the details of ordinary, everyday activity, it encourages a transcended perception of them as depicting a metaphysical situation. Are there social reasons for such depiction? Yes. Herbert Blau has drawn on the words of Winston Churchill—“What is Europe now? It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding-ground of pestilence and hate”—to establish the atmosphere out of which Godot was born: the despair, hunger, and disease of postwar Europe.¹⁰ The social reasons, however, still cannot explain why the tramps should wait for Godot. The play further prompts the audience into a metaphysical contemplation: “Please note that the author doesn't say so, but he forces us to say it. In ‘Godot’ there is ‘God.’”¹¹ Godot leads the audience, as one critic puts it, “toward a metaphysics of boredom.”¹² The play forces the audience to face the subjective reality of the tramps.

The bus in Gao's play, by comparison, is closely related to the life of the people who wait for it. These people want to get into the city and, therefore, have to wait for the bus. In a country where there were no private cars at the time of the play's production, nothing was more familiar in one's life than the bus. People and their relationships to the bus automatically remind the audience of social problems. Often there are not enough buses for all the passengers; people have to stand in line waiting for the bus; when the bus is too full for everyone to get on it, the queue is no longer respected. Getting into the bus becomes a battle of pushing and elbowing the others away. In this chaotic situation, so-called “backdoorism” (favoritism) becomes more and more prevalent in interpersonal relationship—those who are in favor with the bus company, or the bus driver himself, will be let on the bus through the back door while the others battle to squeeze in through the front door. Being reminded of all this, the audience will worry about the deterioration of human relationships. They wonder why there cannot be more buses, realize how the huge population of the country has become a serious social problem while the planned economy cannot provide enough jobs, and so on. In Gao's play, these social problems are vividly represented in people's waiting for the bus. Each time people mistake a passing vehicle for their bus, they try to enforce the rule of the queue, an effort that always causes tension in their relationships. A rural market director, who is last to join the group on the stage, even shouts to the driver of a passing vehicle he mistakes for the bus that he has just favored the bus company with some rare commodities and demands the privilege of the back door.

While there are abundant codes for understanding the wait for the bus in practical terms, the play also pushes its social and political critique beyond everyday concerns toward the depiction of an existential boredom:

GLASSES: Ah, life …

GIRL: Do you call this living?

GLASSES: Sure it is. Despite everything we're still alive.

GIRL: We might as well be dead.

GLASSES: Why don't you end it all, then?

GIRL: Because it seems like such a waste to come into this world and then get nothing out of life.

GLASSES: There should be some meaning to life.

GIRL: To live on like this, not really alive and not dead either—it's so boring!

(All walk on the spot and then turn around in circles as if possessed.)

(Bus [The Bus-Stop] 385)

The anxiety here, not unlike that in Waiting for Godot, is related to the mystery that the bus never comes and the production of meaning is blocked. In the highly politicized and Party-manipulated culture of the People's Republic of China, the ideological implication of the mystery is clear. One may argue that the play suggests a fundamental limit to the Party's conceptual system, which denies individual initiative and has blocked a diversified access to meaning in life.

DECOR: A TREE AND A BUS STOP SIGN

While the decor of Beckett's play is accessible primarily in metaphysical codes, the decor of Gao's play communicates in social and ideological codes. Beckett's play seems set in nowhere: a tree can hardly reveal the exact location of the scene, and it can hardly contain much social meaning. This lack of social meaning endows the tree with metaphysical implications. A critic writes:

The tree on the stage, though it is a willow, obviously stands both for the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil (and, when it puts on green leaves, for the Tree of Life) and for the Cross. … it is also the Tree of Judas, on which they (Didi and Gogo) are recurrently tempted to hang themselves.¹³

Although others may disagree with his interpretation, this critic has surely found available codes that lend Beckett's decor a richness of connotation.

A Chinese bus stop sign is a plate printed with the bus route, which is like a map showing one's location and the bus's destination. In Gao's play, this bus stop sign is connotatively rich in its communication with the audience. First of all, it sets up a rural-urban contrast, which is much sharper than the Western world can conceive of in terms of living standards. The desire of the people who wait for the bus to go into the city is really the desire for a better life—one girl says: “Whenever I see city girls all done up and wearing those high-heel shoes, it makes me feel as though they've walked all over me and are flaunting themselves in front of me just to rub it in.” And a young man says: “I'm gonna have a taste of yoghurt if it's the last thing I do” (Bus 384, 320). The desire may also be interpreted as a national allegory, the rural-urban contrast replaced by an international perspective. With China's opening up to the world has come an anxiety about economic underdevelopment and the desire to catch up. Reproaching his carefree companion at the bus stop, a young man releases his anger: “We've been cast aside by life, forgotten. The world is fleeting by in front of you and you don't even see it. You might be happy to muddle along like this, but I'm not” (Bus 383). When asked about the value of taking the trouble to travel to the city for a chess tournament with city people, the old man retorts: “The whole point of chess is the feeling of exhilaration you get from it; it's all a matter of the spirit of the thing. The spirit of the thing, that's what life is all about” (Bus 383). Exchanges like these may possibly endorse a national allegory.

Secondly, the route printed on the bus stop sign reminds the audience of the country's journey toward a utopia. With an official ideology preaching that the present-day effort is to construct a society of great human happiness and an extreme abundance of material resources; with this ideology's strong teleological beliefs that the development of the country must be set on the right route to achieve these goals; and with the country's recent history of constant “battles” between the “socialist-roaders” and the “capitalist-roaders,” a Chinese audience can hardly miss the play's political allegory of the country's difficult and delayed journey from “the countryside” to “the city.”

The play challenges the above-mentioned ideology with a shock technique, a technique very similar to what Brecht says about his epic theatre, “What is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling,”¹⁴ even though Gao's earlier acknowledgment, consistent with his French background, is to Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty: to overwhelm the spectator completely and profoundly.¹⁵ This shock technique's function of demystifying an ideology coincides with Roland Barthes' idea that what looks natural must be perceived as historical.¹⁶ The myth being challenged by the play may not exactly be that of the utopia but rather the idea that there is a definite route for achieving this goal. In this respect, the bus stop sign posted on the stage as decor becomes crucial. It resembles Beckett's “tree of knowledge” as access to meaning. At the very beginning of the script, one finds the following description of the sign: “Owing to years of exposure to the winds and rains, what is painted on the plate is hardly recognizable now” (Ch [Chezhan] 119).

The passengers in the play, as a matter of habit, know this bus stop and gather here without needing to look at the sign. It is only when what appears to them as natural becomes absurd—that the bus never comes—that it occurs to them that they should have a look at the sign. They then find that the plate tells them nothing. There seem to be some stains on the plate, showing that a route change notice was probably pasted on it, but it has disappeared in “winds and rains,” The passengers are enraged:

OLD MAN: (heart-brokenly) Why is this sign still posted here? To pull our legs?

GIRL: Shall we leave? Let's go!

MARKET DIRECTOR: No, we have to sue them.

[…]

GLASSES: I think you have to blame yourself. Why didn't we take a good look at the sign? Why did we wait for so long? Let's go. There is nothing worth waiting for.

(Ch 137, intervening dialogue omitted)

Failing to offer access to meaning, the bus stop sign estranges the passengers on the stage. Likewise, the political campaigns in Chinese idiom are referred to as “winds and rains.” In this sense, the attention paid to the printing of a bus route faded by winds and rains gains strong ideological connotations as a challenge to the myth of the “socialist road.” The cruelty of the political campaigns in defense of “the socialist road” has turned the subject into a “sacred” one, deterring careful investigation. The shock is unavoidable when one is finally forced to look at it, only to find it has faded beyond recognition, just like the printing on the sign.

MANNER: POZZO, LUCKY AND THE SILENT MAN

A look at the shock technique used in The Bus-Stop leads our discussion into the manner of performance of the two plays. In Beckett's play, the waiting of Didi and Gogo is contrasted with the journey of Pozzo and Lucky. One critic writes, “Didi and Gogo stand for the contemplative life. Pozzo and Lucky stand for the life of practical action taken, mistakenly, as an end in itself. Pozzo's blindness and Lucky's dumbness in the second act rub this point in.”¹⁷ With this pessimistic contrast, walking is excluded as a solution to anxiety. The waiting in Beckett's play is a situation with no way out, similar to Sartre's No Exit. Waiting in this sense becomes an existential reality which, as one critic describes it, is “without past or future, irremediably present.”¹⁸

In Gao's play, waiting produces a strong desire for its negation. The way out of it is suggested by the silent man, who not only provides a contrast to those who wait at the bus stop but also gives them hope and eventually mobilizes them to leave. The silent man communicates with those who wait at the bus stop through music, the theme of which is established when he first leaves the bus stop (the action of the play freezes briefly to draw the audience's attention to the music). Gao prescribes that the music be “filled with painful but determined explorations.” While waiting, people at the bus stop constantly hear “the silent man's music.” When they finally decide to be on their way, the music of “the silent man” becomes a louder march (Ch 138).

The different natures of the performing space and the different roles of the performers in this space also designate the different ways in which the concept of waiting is communicated between the audiences and the performers. Beckett's play is often performed in a proscenium theatre with a picture-frame stage. There is not only a physical distance between the stage and the seating area but also a purposefully created perceptual distance that keeps the audience from identifying with the performers in their immediate actions on the stage. Geneviève Serreau points out an effective moment in Waiting for Godot on a proscenium stage:

… the spectator is involved in this process of detachment; what happens repetitively is that after a sudden destruction of theatrical illusion, the stage becomes a stage, that bounded cube which opens only into the terrifying gulf of the audience. Thus, Vladimir cries out to a frightened Gogo, who “makes a rush towards back”: “Imbecile! There's no way out there.” Then, gesturing towards the audience: “There! Not a soul in sight! Off you go! Quick! (He pushes Estragon towards auditorium. Estragon recoils in horror.) You won't? (He contemplates auditorium.) Well I can understand that.”¹⁹

Although this can be perceived as a theatrical joke, it also conveys a bitter sense of human isolation that increases the perceptual distance all the more. With this distance, the clownish style of acting becomes appropriate. Serreau writes,

… clowns traditionally play a parodic role, one of demystification. … in Godot the sacred monster that must be demystified is man … man thrown into existence and seeking to solve his own problem, or rather renouncing any solution since he cannot use his traditional tools (reality of space, time, and matter).²⁰

The sense of distance and the clownish style produce an unusual parody. The parody of human existence, it seems, has to be perceived at a distance that allows for metaphysical transcendence.

Gao's play, as its actions require, has to be performed in an arena where the performance space is totally encircled by the seating area. During the performance, the members of the audience actually become each other's background for watching, decreasing the distance between the audience and the performers. The viewers are encouraged to put themselves in the position of the performers. Let's look at an example:

OLD MAN: Maybe we should wait for the bus on the other side of the road?

GLASSES: No, that's for the bus going back to the countryside.

OLD MAN: (to the audience) You are also waiting for the bus? (to himself) They can't hear me. (louder) Are you waiting to go back to the countryside? (to himself) Still can't hear me. (to the young man with spectacles) Young man, my hearing is terrible. Could you ask them if they are going back to the countryside? If they all want to go back, we'd better not stay here to suffer as well.

(Ch 128)

“Going back” in this context signifies giving up hope. Faced with this option, one performer prefers waiting: “It doesn't matter too much to wait. You wait? It shows you still have hope. If you have nothing left to hope for, you're really damned …” (Ch 137). Waiting actually builds social bonding. Through communication between the performers and the audience, the stage and the seating area gradually merge into a shared situation of waiting, a shared social space. It is with the formation of this space that the role of the silent man becomes important. While the other performers walk through the audience to get into the acting space, the silent man walks out of the acting space—his music looms from behind the audience and he appears in the spotlight overlooking this space. The silent man seems to be the only character who achieves an allegorical aloofness.

The acting style of the silent man, however, can also be seen as the accent for the whole play. It corresponds to the other performers' occasional “lyrical transcendence” of the social space mentioned above, their comic detachment from roles, and their symbolic gesturing on a basically bare stage. This style, as Gao envisions it, should be “with poetic touches,” “resembling the performance of traditional operas such as Mei Lanfang while performing The Drunken Lady.”²¹ It is interesting to note that while Brecht used Chinese acting to speak for his Alienation Effects, Gao has a similar dialogue with this traditional dramaturgy so as to lend the performance of his play a small sense of absurdity. Nevertheless, he does not mention the similar Western use of this dramaturgy, which he surely knew of. One wonders if the ideological undertone of his Western predecessor deterred Gao's acknowledgment.

GODOT COMES THROUGH A TRACE

The silent man is a shadow of Lu Xun's Passerby, the title character from his allegorical poetic drama, written in 1925.²² When The Bus-Stop was staged, The Passerby was performed as a prelude, with the actor who played the silent man playing the Passerby. In a discussion with the audience after the performance, Gao was asked about the possible influence of the theatre of the absurd and Beckett. He dodged the question by saying that his inspiration came mostly from Lu Xun, as indicated by using The Passerby as the prelude for his play. It is hard to know how much politics played a role in Gao's answer. Acknowledging Beckett's influence might have been politically problematic, while raising the battle banner of Lu Xun, a politically elevated Lu Xun, was a gesture that could not be easily attacked by official ideology.²³ The early Lu Xun as a cultural nihilist, however, had always been difficult for Party-authorized readings. In the case of The Bus-Stop, no one would have wondered that Lu Xun could become a vehicle for Godot, that Lu Xun's Passerby could pass on his sense of absurdity, that feeling of loss of totality and an ambivalence about walking and staying put, to Gao's silent man, making him not as naively optimistic as he might first appear.

Although written about thirty years earlier than Waiting for Godot, The Passerby draws The Bus-Stop closer to Beckett through its contemplation of meaning and the image of the road. Devoid of social connotations, the setting of The Passerby is clearly akin to that of Waiting for Godot, since the place is only a vague “somewhere”—“to the east are a few trees and ruins, while to the west is uncultivated wasteland.” Attention, however, is drawn not to the tree, at which Beckett's characters look, but to “a trace that looks like a road yet is not a road”:²⁴

PASSERBY: Do you know what kind of place lies ahead?

OLD MAN: Ahead? Ahead is the grave.

PASSERBY: (Startled) The grave?

YOUNG GIRL: No, no, no! Over there are many wild lilies and wild roses.²⁵

The trace, which is both there and not there, both promising and menacing, is the Godot-like entity in Lu Xun's drama. Related to this “spatial representation of a temporal dilemma,” “the act of walking becomes,” as Leo Ou-fan Lee shrewdly observes, “the only significant act in an existence threatened with meaninglessness.”²⁶ Walking becomes a metaphysical allegory; even walking may not offer access to meaning, walking seems to be what life is all about. The anxiety, however, comes with the presupposition of the existence of meaning and road (or, in our Western case, meaning and tree). In Chinese intellectual history, road, or tao, has long been the key concept for offering a sense of totality. Lu Xun, an iconoclast in modern Chinese literature, may have denounced not only the ancient “road” but also the concept of the road as sacred—“for actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.”²⁷ The denunciation of a sacred road may not take place without anxiety; the life of a cultural rebel itself may turn out to be perceived as a road rarely traveled by others: “Long, long had been my road and far, far was the journey,” a line Lu Xun borrowed from the ancient political exile Qu Yuan to use as the prefatory inscription to his short story collection, Wandering.²⁸ Lee remarks that the decision made by the protagonist of Lu Xun's The Passerby seems to be “not so much that of a nihilist as that of an existentialist”; absurdity sets in with the loss of totality, the sense that the road is not readily available and the understanding that one has to get used to a life with no definite road.²⁹

The Passerby relays this sense of absurdity to The Bus-Stop. “Godot,” designating a loss of totality of meaning, comes to the bus stop along a “Lu Xun trace” and proclaims his arrival with the performers' discovery of a blur on the bus stop sign that they believed to be the print of a definite bus route. It is a blur that can be seen as the replica of the “Lu Xun trace” along which “Godot” travels. While the printed bus route is irretrievable, and the bus does not come, one has to get used to living without them. The waiting becomes absurd when the object of waiting, which has subtly changed from the bus to the printed route, becomes unrecognizable but still commands one's attention. One character in Gao's play reflects, echoing Lu Xun's dilemma: “Should I stay or go? It's the enigma of our existence. Perhaps Fate has decreed that we must wait here forever, till we all grow old and die. But why do people accept the capricious rulings of Fate? Then again, what exactly is Fate?” (Bus 381).³⁰

The silent man's act of walking corresponds to this contemplation. It becomes a statement of alienation, of abandoning the set road of the political totality. The silent man in Gao's play is not necessarily an allegory of achievement—that is, he is already there in the city—but he is an allegory of deviation: he is no longer yoked, as the others are, to “turn around in circles as if possessed” by the concept of a bus and a definite route. Although his action may not offer immediate access to meaning (his music expresses pain in exploration), the silent man draws the spotlight of admiration which differentiates him from Pozzo and Lucky and marks his action vis-à-vis the submission to totalitarian control as heroic. The Bus-Stop, after all, is not as nihilist as Waiting for Godot. It attributes existential absurdity more to the political result of totalitarian control than to an epistemological crisis. The silent man's call for deviated action and his challenge to the set route to the totality of meaning explains the artistic and ideological thrust of the Chinese experimental theatre. Its indebtedness to Western avant-gardists, in this perspective, may be not just a technical borrowing but a cultural transcription—the western codes that have produced their specific sorts of absurdity are transcribed into the codes of Chinese political culture to produce its own absurdity.

Notes

1. “Trace” is a fairly archaic word used by Leo Ou-fan Lee, in his study of the life and works of Lu Xun, to translate the term henji (marks on the ground) in the “stage directions” opening Lu's poetic drama Guoke [The Passer-by]: “To the east are a few trees and ruins, while to the west is uncultivated wasteland. Between both points runs a trace that looks like a road and yet is not a road.” Lu Xun, Guoke, in Lu Xun quanji [Complete Works of Lu Xun], vol. II (Beijing, 1981), 188, quoted and trans. in Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 101. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang translate henji as “a faint track.” See Lu Xun, The Passer-by, in Selected Works, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, vol. I (Beijing, 1985), 336.

2. Gao Xingjian's The Bus-Stop [Chezhan] (1983) was the second of three of his plays performed at The People's Art Theater of Beijing. The first and third were Juedui xinhao [Alarm Signal] (1982-83) and Yeren [Wildman] (1985).

   The Chinese script of Chezhan has been published in the bimonthly literary journal Shi yue [The October]. A partial English translation has been published in the journal Renditions. See Gao Xingjian, Chezhan, Shi yue (March 1983), 119-38; and Gao Xingjian, The Bus-Stop, trans. Geremie Barmé, Renditions 19-20 (1983), 379-86. Subsequent references to Barme's translation appear parenthetically in the text as (Bus), Subsequent references to the Chinese script published in Shi yue are my translations and appear parenthetically in the text as (Ch).

   Barmé's partial translation of The Bus-Stop was later collected into an anthology, along with an article of his on the play. See Gao Xingjian, The Bus-Stop, trans. Geremie Barmé, and Geremie Barmé, “A Touch of the Absurd: Introducing Gao Xingjian, and His Play The Bus-Stop,” both in Trees on the Mountain: An Anthology of New Chinese Writing, ed. Stephen C. Soong and John Minford (Hong Kong, 1984), 379-86, 373-78. For critical commentary, see also William Tay, “Avant-garde Theater in Post-Mao China: The Bus-Stop by Gao Xingjian,” in Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences, ed. Howard Goldblatt (Armonk, NY, 1990), 111-18.

3. Gao Xingjian graduated from the French Department of Beijing Foreign Studies University.

4. See He Wen, “On Seeing the Play The Bus-Stop,” Wenyi bao [Literary Gazette (Beijing)] (March 1984), 21-25.

5. I am using the term “audience” in such a general sense that it may refer to almost anyone living in a certain culture. The scope of this essay does not permit sociological distinctions of varied audiences.

6. For the idea of “meaning” as “a cultural unit,” see Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN, 1979), 66-68.

7. Waiting for Godot was first available to Chinese readers in an anthology of Western absurd theatre. See Samuel Beckett, “Dengdai gedno,” trans. Shi Xianrong, in Huandanpai xiju ji [A Collection of Absurdist Plays] (Shanghai, 1980).

8. I attended a performance of The Bus-Stop and a discussion with the playwright and the director following the performance (The Bus-Stop, by Gao Xingjian, dir. Lin Zhaohua, prod. People's Art Theater of Beijing, summer 1983). Some of the descriptions here are based on my personal experience and observations.

9. Eco, 61. See note 6.

10. Ibid., 129.

11. Herbert Blau, “Notes from the Underground,” in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York, 1967), 114.

12. Jacques Audiberti, “At the Babylone: A Fortunate Move on the Theater Checkerboard,” trans. Ruby Cohn, in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, 14. See note 11.

13. Alfonso Sastre, “Seven Notes on Waiting for Godot,” trans. Leonard C. Pranko, in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, 106.

14. G. S. Fraser, “Waiting for Godot,” in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, 135.

15. Bertolt Brecht, “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett, 2nd ed. (New York, 1974), 71.

16. See Gao Xingjian, “Gao Xingjian, Lin Zhaohua: tan Juedui xinhao de yishu gousi [Gao Xingjian and Lin Zhaohua on Alarm Signal],” in Juedui xinhao de yishu tansuo [Artistic Explorations of “Alarm Signal”], ed. Li Baoyun and Zheng Guangsai (Beijing, 1985), 104.

17. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 109-111.

18. Fraser, 133. See note 14.

19. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Samuel Beckett or Presence on the Stage,” in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, 21.

20. Geneviève Serreau, “Beckett's Clowns,” trans. Ruby Cohn, in Casebook on Waiting for Godot, 175.

21. Ibid., 172.

22. Gao Xingjian, “Youguan benju yanchu de jidian jianyi [Suggestions for the Performance of The Bus-Stop],” in Chezhan, 138. See note 2.

23. See Lu Xun, Guoke, in Lu Xun quanji, 188-94. See note 1.

24. The preeminence of Lu Xun (1881-1936) in the history of modern Chinese literature was posthumously enhanced by the Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung, who made Lu Xun the role model for Chinese writers. “The chief commander of China's cultural revolution,” Mao writes, “he was not only a great man of letters but a great thinker and revolutionary. … on the cultural front he was the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history.” Mao Tse-Tung, “On New Democracy,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. II (Peking, 1965), 372.

25. Lu, Guoke, 188, quoted and trans. in Lee, 101.

26. Lu, Guoke, 190, quoted and trans. in Lee, 102.

27. Lee, 102.

28. Lu Xun, “My Old Home,” in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (New York, 1977), 64.

29. Qu Yuen, Lisao [Encountering Sorrow], trans. David Hawkes, in Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, ed. Cyril Birch, vol. I (New York, 1965), 56; quoted in Lee, 43.

30. Lee, 102.