SOURCE: Chen, Xiaomei. “A Wildman Between Two Cultures: Some Paradigmatic Remarks on ‘Influence Studies.¹’” Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 4 (fall 1992): 397-416.

[In the following essay, Chen discusses Wildman in terms of both Western and Chinese cultural influences.]

In May 1985, when Gao Xingjian premiered his third play, Wildman, in Beijing, China, its critical reception was quite different from his first two plays, The Alarm Signal staged in 1982 and The Bus Stop in 1983.² Both of his earlier plays have been immediately recognized as being strongly “influenced” by the Western modern theater—by such people as “the formidable French dramatist, God-madman, Antonin Artaud,” and “a host of writers and theorists of the Theater of the Absurd.”³ The Western critics were unanimous in reviewing The Bus Stop as “the first play to introduce elements of the Theater of the Absurd to a Chinese audience.”⁴ Their Chinese counterparts, likewise, expressed a similar view. One of the striking features of The Bus Stop, as Wang Xining argued in a review in China Daily, is that it successfully “dissected modern Chinese urban society in a manner reminiscent of Beckett's Waiting for Godot.”⁵

However, Wildman, the third of Gao Xingjian's plays to be performed, elicited a quite different critical response. On the one hand, some Chinese and Western critics were still enthusiastic about its Western style and technique. Others, however, pointed to a new turn in Gao's interest, one which drew on the rich resources of Chinese theatrical traditions. Those who celebrated the return of Chinese tradition in Gao's latest play insisted that it owed its success mainly to its endeavor to enrich “the range of expression open to artists in all performing arts in China.”⁶ What is perhaps most interesting in this critical disagreement is the way that it heightens our awareness of the complexity of cultural relations which underlie the play, and leads to what has already become a central question about it—is the play primarily founded on a Chinese or Western model? This disagreement about Wildman has been further complicated by Gao's own declaration of intention which stresses his allegiance to the classical Chinese traditions in theater. In the “Postscript” to the published form of the play, Gao explains that Wildman is an attempt to realize his ideal of establishing a “modern theater” by drawing on traditional Chinese operas characterized by its artistic techniques of chang (singing), nian (speech), zuo (acting), and da (acrobatics).⁷ Interestingly enough, in characterizing this native Chinese tradition Gao uses the term “Total Theater”—a term which cannot fail to suggest to the Western consciousness the work of Antonin Artaud, and indeed the whole Gesamtkunstwerk tradition since Wagner—to designate his “ideal” theater in which artists would easily “recover many Chinese artistic techniques already lost in the last century.”⁸

Gao explicitly claims in his “Postscript” that this play does not attempt to win over its audience by the art of dialogue, a feature which he associates with the Western drama; instead, he claims, Wildman seeks a full employment of the traditional Chinese operatic, and above all, non-verbal techniques of dance, music, images, costumes, and make-up to compose a “dramatic symphony” which consists of several different themes, themes which overlap harmonies and disharmonies in order to fashion a “polyphony.” In Wildman, therefore, both language and music are used in such a way that they create a kind of “multi-voicedness.” Just as a symphony seeks to create “a total musical image,” Gao asserts, Wildman “tends to realize a total effect of action through multi-voicedness, counterpoints, contrasts and repetitions.”⁹ For the visual aspect of the play, Gao symphonizes a “multi-layer-visual-image” through the use of dance, flash-back scenes, shadows, and movements. Each actor in Wildman, therefore, must possess the “skills required by the traditional Chinese theater”: he must perform at once as a dancer, a singer, an acrobat as well as a speaking character. Costuming, our playwright demands, should not only be strikingly bright in color, as is required by the traditional theater to enhance the visual and physical effect on the senses of the audience, but it should also “truthfully reflect the local color of the mountain area along the Yellow River” which provides the play with its geographical background. A faithful portrayal of the primitive and natural lifestyle of the mountain folks, Gao Xingjian insists, is crucial for a successful production of the play. Fortunately, Lin Zhaohua, the Beijing director of Wildman, fundamentally preserved the “Chineseness” that Gao Xingjian so painstakingly spelled out. Wildman was for the most part performed in local dialect of the Sichuan Province, with episodic scenes which remind one of the traditional “opera-drama sketches,” mixed up with local folk songs, national minority dances, and Han epic singing.

In addition to the traditional Chinese theatrical conventions consciously explored both by the playwright and the director, Wildman's dramatic structure and theme are also indigenously Chinese. Unlike Western drama, which usually has an Aristotelian plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end, Wildman carries no obvious storyline. Instead, the play consists of a series of diverse episodes peopled by nameless characters who move in a more or less definite and identifiable place. The play is set in contemporary China in the rapidly-vanishing virgin forest of Sichuan province where some scientists and local people believe in the existence of wildmen, a sort of man-like monkey which is believed to offer the much sought “missing link” of traditional evolutionary theory. A nameless scientist, designated in the script only by the character name “ecologist,” goes into the forest to undertake research on wildmen, hoping to learn not only something about these strange “living fossils,” but also about the preservation of a living and natural environment which he believes is ultimately linked to the continuation of the human species.

In his travels the ecologist encounters lumber men, wood-cutters, and local “cadres”—bureaucrats who make their fame and living by destroying the forests. By virtue of their occupations, all of these people threaten the living environment of wildmen and thus come into conflict with the ecologist. In the course of the play he also sets himself in opposition to other city-dwellers who, like him, have ventured into the forests for the sake of tracing the whereabouts of the wildmen, though motivated by purposes quite different from his own. A newspaper man—again the character has no name and is designated only by his profession—for instance, is merely interested in hunting for “hot” or “exotic” news to please his readers in the city. Similarly, scientists representing opposing sides in a scholarly debate are at work collecting data only to prove or disprove the existence of the wildmen. Unlike the ecologist, they have no interest in investigating living creatures and their environmental conditions in order to protect them. They bribe innocent local people, especially children who cannot even understand the issues at stake, in order to prove the existence or non-existence of wildmen, thus bringing about quarrels, disputes, and disharmony in the mountain village in which peace, unity, and harmony once prevailed.

Another episodic strain of the play concerns a school teacher who devotes all his time and energy attempting to rescue an epic of the Han nationality—the only one of its kind—by writing down the performance of an old and dying epic rhapsodist. This epic, The Song of Darkness, recounts the history and development of the Han nationality from the time of its childhood—when it first began to separate itself from the wildman—up to the present time. Because of its nature and scope, the ecologist and teacher believe that the epic should be regarded as a “national treasure” which is “as precious as panda and wildman” for the Chinese nation. Integrated into this episode are other overlapping themes and “subplots” which deal with problematic and still unanswered questions in contemporary China about love, marriage, ethics, custom, tradition, corruption, and even ideological issues left unresolved from the Cultural Revolution.

Wildman is infinitely more complex than what I have just indicated here, but enough has been said, I think, to indicate the ways in which the play offers a view of an exceedingly problematic world that is full of contradictions and disharmonies. Yet unexpectedly at the end of the play we are offered an episode which is connected with many of the play's diverse concerns. Here a wildman appears to a little boy in a dream. The wildman imitates the boy's language and gesture, dancing with him happily, running with him into the depth of the forest. While these actions are taking place, the audience becomes increasingly aware of the epic singing and folk music which grows louder and more prominent in order to furnish an accompaniment to the scene. Central to this moment in the play's economy is a silent but nonetheless real “dialogue” between this child of modern man and his predecessor, between “mankind and Nature.”¹⁰ The image created by this last scene, one so strongly suggestive of harmony and cosmic totality, is clearly related to the spectacular ending of the traditional Chinese theater that overwhelms its audience with a Gesamtkunstwerk-like effect of singing, dancing and acting. Such an ending thematically embraces the Taoist vision of a harmony between nature and culture. It provides its audience with a catharsis that supposedly enabled them to come to grips with the cosmic and mythological forces in the universe. As the director of the play, Lin Zhaohua, points out: ultimately Wildman is about harmony, “a harmony between people and their nation, a harmony among people themselves. It urges the audience to think about its relationship to nature and to culture, especially ancient culture.”¹¹ It seems clear, then, that both in form and content Wildman can be viewed as a contemporary restoration of the theatrical, cultural, and philosophical traditions of China.

Yet, it would be a serious mistake to see in Gao Xingjian's play only a recuperation of indigenous Chinese traditions. As the terminology in which Gao describes his play suggests, anyone at all acquainted with the modern Western theater will not fail to be immediately impressed by the way it seems to exploit conceptions of the theater strikingly similar to those advocated by Antonin Artaud's notion of “the total theater” and Brecht's theory of “epic theater.” Artaud, of course, spent much of his life longing for a theater of “a pure action,” a theater of a latent force beyond rational speech or language, beyond “a written text” and “a literary tradition.” He therefore sought to create a theater wholly unlike the Western theater of his time, one which would present an “archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which the Principles … hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the deep.”¹² Artaud believed that fixed text, language, reason, order, even civilization itself with its attendant traditions, were barriers to the human spirit. He therefore called for a theater of physicality that was to create “a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression” which would be capable of throwing its spectators back to real life, not by imitation or illusion, but by a mystical, ritual, primitive, or archetypal spectacle of signs and gestures which spoke for the anti-rational element in human experience. Artaud therefore proposed to resort to mass spectacle, providing his audience with a “pure experience” which would create a sensation of totality, awakening in them an intuitive force which was expressed in a theater of the body. If language is used at all, Artaud observed, it must be a language beyond words and senses capable of evoking that which cannot be spoken. He therefore called his ideal theater “a sacred theater” because it was to have “the solemnity of a sacred rite.”¹³ Thus the Artaudian theater aims at a more universal, primordial force deeper than any psychological or social reality, a force that touches on “an idea of Chaos, an idea of the Marvelous, an idea of Equilibrium.”¹⁴

All of these Artaudian elements of the theater can easily be identified in Wildman. By means of non-verbal elements, Wildman provides for its audiences the kind of total and physical experience that Artaud so painstakingly emphasized. The time span of 8,000 years in Wildman's action and its invocation to Pan Gu, the Chinese God of creation in the primordial times, suggest to its spectators a cosmic view of the universe. The sharp contrast between the non-verbal, primitive wildman and the verbal but confused, problematic modern man shocks the spectators and thus attempts to throw them into a mystical and ritual experience which is “deeper than any psychological or social realities.” The world of Wildman extends far beyond the boundaries of anything uniquely Chinese and modern; indeed, the play seems finally concerned with issues that belong to a world much larger than that which is codified in the details of its dialogue, language, and setting. Much of the effect of the play is achieved by its spectacular physicality which seeks to create the sensation that Artaud said would simultaneously “touch on Creation, Becoming, and Chaos.”¹⁵

To a large extent, then, Wildman participates in the traditions of the Artaudian theater with its “passionate equation between Man, Society, Nature and Objects.”¹⁶ All of these concerns are crystallized in the last scene where, as we have already seen, amidst a mixture of pantomime, mimicry, and musical harmonies and rhythms, a wildman, the image of the primitive and the natural, dances with a little boy, a symbol of the childhood of civilization. At the end of the play, we are provided with the following stage directions:

They [the wild man and Xi Mao, the little boy] run onto an elevation at the back of the stage. XI MAO does a forward roll. He turns expectantly to the WILD MAN, who clumsily does the same. XI MAO runs, calling to the WILD MAN, who runs after him. They play hide and seek. XI MAO looks out from behind a stone. The WILD MAN sees him and runs toward him. XI MAO runs toward the elevation, and the WILD MAN follows. Gently, music starts and their movements slow down until they look as though they are in a slow-motion film. Then they perform a dance. XI MAO is nimble, the WILD MAN clumsy. When XI MAO and the WILD MAN play together, the WILD MAN tends to copy XI MAO's movements, even when in slow motion. The WILD MAN should always have his back to the audience. XI MAO draws back into an area of light at the rear of the stage, in front of a backdrop depicting the forest. All performers enter wearing makes, each mask expressing a different shade of emotion. The “happier” masks should be in the center of the stage. All move slowly toward the WILD MAN, to the rhythm of the LUMBERJACKS' dance and the melody from the song of the TEAM OF SISTERS. The sad cries of the OLD SINGER are heard, gradually fading out. XI MAO is seen and faintly heard saying, “xia, xia, a shame, xia, xia, xia. xia. A shame, a … shame.” Curtain.¹⁷

All these and other theatrical conventions seek to put the audience into a state prior to language and therefore help them to break away from the intellectual subjugation of the language, thus conveying to them a sense of “a new and a deeper intellectuality which hides itself beneath the gestures and signs, raised to the dignity of particular exorcisms.”¹⁸ With this world of “the Absolutes” and “the invisible” cosmic forces, Wildman also meets the demands of the Artaudian theater for a “a religious ritual,” and therefore moves towards what Leonard Pronko has characterized as “that meeting point where human and nonhuman, meaning and chaos, finite and infinite, come together.”¹⁹

Yet, as soon as we have identified the similarities between Wildman and its Western counterparts, we are also tempted to “decenter” this claim by arguing for the opposite “truth.” Artaud emphasizes the dynamics of action and the higher forces of violent physical images that “crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator.” He even went so far as to exclude from the theatre any “copy of life,” or any concern with aspect of social and psychological realities.²⁰ Within his limited concern of trying to restore theater to its original direction, to “reinstate it in its religious and metaphysical aspect,” Artaud makes explicit that his theater must “break with actuality,” and that its object must not be to “resolve social or psychological conflicts” or “to serve as battlefield for moral passions.” The function of theater, he insists, is to express objectively certain secret truths that “have been buried under forms in their encounters with Becoming.”²¹ For him, language, tradition, and the theatrical masterpieces of the past are responsible for the decline of the Western theater. If a contemporary public does not understand Oedipus Rex, he argues, it is the fault of this ancient Greek play, not of the public, since the latter has learned too well that the theater frequently deals with the themes of incest, morality, falsehood, and illusion. A concentration on social realities and their attendant problems is regarded in the Artaudian model as being outside of the legitimate concern or the proper domain of theater.

In recognizing this claim of Artaud's “total theater,” we are immediately brought face-to-face with the way that Wildman rejects some of Artaud's demands. There can be no denying that Wildman is firmly foregrounded in the contemporary Chinese society; its concerns, as we have noted earlier, are occasional in the best sense of that term. Though its episodic structure forecloses the possibility of its offering a “solution” at the end of the play, Wildman nonetheless raises in a striking and even direct way unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions about love, marriage, tradition, bureaucracy, science, morality, and even the current national preoccupation with ecology and environmental protection. It is true that Wildman can be categorized as a traditional dance and music drama, and that in this sense it seems to meet Artaud's demand for a form of theater that is closely related to ritual and religious ceremony. But it is also true that its basic thematic matter is concerned with a conflict between nature and culture that is specific to a moment in late twentieth-century Chinese history. In fact, precisely because these thematic concerns are historically so far removed from the primitive and the ritual experience in which they are theatrically mediated to us, the play is able to go beyond Artaud by combining that sense of primitive “magic culture,” which Artaud's theater seeks, with much that is not Artaudian—an entirely modern world with its own social and psychological dimensions.

The same dichotomy between that which belongs to the “total theater” and that which does not becomes apparent when we attempt to locate the kinds of theatrical gestures and movements which Wildman employs. From one perspective the play's actions seem to look back to that moment when religious ceremony emerged from its purely ritualistic origins and was transformed into the beginnings of what we know as theater.²² On the other hand, the play's action definitely goes beyond the first beginnings of the theater. It includes elements which we associate with a “mature” theater, with its combination of the verbal with the non-verbal, the actual with the imaginative, the social with the psychological, and above all, the sensational with the individual. Wildman is at once descriptive and narrative, spectacular and physical. The opposing claims for the traditional and the modern, the intellectual and the physical—seen by Artaud as irreconcilable or as hurled against each other—are here coupled together. It is perhaps in this sense that Wildman realizes the ideal of a theater of “totality” which goes well beyond Artaud's demands and in which the basic disparity between self and others, subject and object, reason and sensations, language and signs are finally engulfed and united.

But Artaud is not the only Western theoretician of the drama whose work is relevant to Wildman. Gao Xingjian observes in his “Postscript” that Wildman's emphasis on the mise en scène and spectacle does not aim at creating verisimilitude. It is intended, on the contrary, for reminding “its audience that it is acting,” not real life. Gao therefore expressly requires that masks be used in the production of Wildman in order to emphasize the dichotomies, contradictions or multi-voicedness within the characters. At the outset of the play, the actor who plays the part of the ecologist steps out of his character and exhorts his audience to enjoy the play fully without worrying about the whereabouts of the actors, who may sometimes appear sitting in the audience. There need not be, he implies, any barriers between the world of the audience and the world of the play. In the middle of the play, for instance, the ecologist takes off his mask more than once in order to assume his identity as an actor. In this guise he recites poems and provides background information. Earlier, at the outset of the play, he even “narrates” what would normally be regarded as stage directions and theatrical comments. In this way, the actor openly disowns his character. He calls attention to his many different roles—the ecologist, the actor who plays the ecologist, and a stage director. He is, he reminds us, at different times all of these figures, and yet he is “really” none of them. Such a discourse seems intended to prevent us from establishing an emotional identification with the ecologist or any other character. All of these devices are suggestive of the Brechtian theater, of course. In his article “The Wildman and I,” Gao Xingjian openly admits such a Brechtian influence, especially as concerns the now classic theory of the “alienation effect.”²³ For him, Brechtian distancing devices help break down the conventional notion of the theater as representation of real life.²⁴

But just as our observation of the Artaudian elements in Wildman led us also to see the presence of the opposite, so here too the Brechtian nature of the drama is undercut in our very act of recognizing its presence. Brecht's “alienation effect” aims basically and fundamentally at keeping the spectators from being emotionally involved so that they can intellectually contemplate the possible meanings of the play. In the “Postscript” to Wildman, however, Gao Xingjian paradoxically specifies that the director should create in the play a kind of “cordial atmosphere” in which the actors directly communicate with the audience (a Brechtian technique as well as one that recalls the works of Thornton Wilder) so that the audience can feel free and happy to participate in the total experience of the theater, as if they were enjoying an entertainment during a festival (a notion which is decidedly un-Brechtian). The production, our playwright specifies, should also leave enough time between each act so that the audience is able to think intellectually, reflect, and ponder over what they have just experienced. Wildman, therefore, offers its audiences a multiple, polyvalent, and even contradictory experience in which the body and mind, the primitive and the contemporary, the universal and the local, the sensational and the intellectual, the subjective and the objective, the illusionary and the actual are all joyfully united and combined. It is at once Brechtian and anti-Brechtian, Artaudian and anti-Artaudian. It is at once both and yet neither.

Gao Xingjian's Wildman, therefore, presents to us a strange and yet stimulating dramatic phenomenon which raises in a radical way a number of theoretical issues that are not restricted to “the dramatic” in the narrower sense of that term, but which reach into the theory of literature in general, and, as the rest of this study will suggest, into the theory and practice of Comparative Literature in particular. Gao's play raises questions of the first order about the “canonical” practice of “influence studies,” and it is to this concern, both relevant for the comparative study of dramatic texts and non-dramatic texts, to which I shall now turn.

Ulrich Weisstein has said: “the notion of influence must be regarded as virtually the key concept in Comparative Literature studies, since it posits the presence of two distinct and therefore comparable entities: the work from which the influence proceeds and that [to] which it is directed.”²⁵ That is to say, cross-cultural literary studies, as a comparative discipline, have depended largely on the “key notion of influence studies” which are characterized as one-to-one relationships between “emitter” and “receiver” texts. At first sight, the general concerns of this essay—the relationship between one national theater and that of the other—seem to be the proper subject for these kinds of “influence studies.”²⁶ On further consideration, however, these concerns can be seen to raise, perhaps in a radical way, theoretical questions on the validity and legitimacy of such traditionally conceived “influence studies.” It will be the burden of the rest of this essay to set the discussion on Wildman, and the Western dramatic theories on which it seems to draw, within a broader context of some critical theories of canon formation in the West and the East alike.²⁷

As our discussion of Wildman has already suggested, it is exceedingly difficult if not impossible, to determine which cultural tradition evoked in Wildman is the “emitter” and which is the “receiver.” Did the Chinese traditional theater influence the West by means of Brecht's theories, which, as Brecht himself admitted, were derived in some sense from Chinese sources? In that case, Chinese theories of drama made a detour through Western cultural traditions only to come back to China to exert an influence on the modern Chinese theater. Or did Artaud and Brecht influence Gao Xingjian, who, in turn, found in the West that which had been lost in the contemporary Chinese theater? Or is it, more simply, the case that Gao reached back into his own national traditions to create his play?²⁸ To raise these questions is to see that it is impossible simply to posit the “presence of two distinct and therefore comparable entities.”

The question of whether Wildman is indigenously “Chinese” or characteristically “Western” can here be seen as deeply puzzling. Wildman appears to be both, and yet, it can never be “proven” to be one or the other. As we have seen earlier, Wildman has been received as the most “Chinese” play Gao has ever written, and this very “Chineseness” in the play has even been declared as part of his own attempt to rescue modern Chinese theater from being too much influenced by its Western counterparts. However, as soon as we have discovered everything that can be identified as “Chinese,” these characteristics can immediately be “decentered” in order to prove just the opposite claim. We might, then, be tempted to say that the play is the product of Western influence. But clearly the matter can not be solved so facilely. Furthermore, talking about the play's “Westerness” invites yet another confusion: one perceives at the same moment the Artaudian as well as the anti-Artaudian elements, the Brechtian as well as the anti-Brechtian characteristics. It seems pertinent, therefore, to first of all attempt to “decide,” if ever possible, the nature of “Chineseness” and of “Westerness” in the context of our discussion before one can even begin to discuss, and therefore to challenge, the concept of the relationship between an “emitter” and a “receiver” in the traditional mode of “influence studies.”

But our difficulties are not due solely to the complications and contradictions embedded in the term “Western dramatic tradition.” The words “Chineseness” and “the Chinese theater” have a similar long and seemingly “confusing” history, and this history is further complicated, in the West at least, by generations of Western critical acts of “misreading” and “misunderstanding.”²⁹ As Leonard C. Pronko has rightly pointed out in his Theater East and West, the traditional Chinese theater “has had a history of singular mis-comprehension and mis-interpretation in the West.”³⁰ When one considers the sheer difficulty of communicating across cultural boundaries, it is easy to agree with Pronko's claim. But Pronko's implied evaluation of misunderstanding and misreading, common as they are, constitutes at best only a partially valid view of these activities. Pronko assumes that “mis-comprehension” and “mis-interpretation” are undesirable activities, and that it is the task of cross-cultural studies to remove them. But as a good deal of recent literary theory has insisted, “misreading” and “misunderstanding” are not wholly negative actions. On the contrary, for critics like T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom, these once-thought “negative” activities are the means by which literary history is made and—I would add—cross-cultural influence takes place.

For Eliot, Bloom, and a number of other theorists, Western literary production is motivated by an intense quest for the novel, or the apparently new. “Strong” writers and critics seek ways of escaping—or apparently escaping—the “father” tradition in which they have been formed, and the process of “misunderstanding” and “misreading” provided a convenient means for their accomplishing this goal. In an attempt to say what apparently had not been said before, some Western writers turned, and continue to turn, to the novelty of exotic literature. But the exotic literature was not studied or appropriated for its own sake. Rather it was appropriated and reworked for the apparent strangeness which it offered to audiences. Yet paradoxically, the otherness could not be allowed to remain as otherness, for in order for Western audiences to appropriate it in some way, the strange had to be made familiar; the exotic had to be domesticated, even if in the process it ceased to be exotic. To take a specific example, eighteenth-century European writers, motivated by an “anxiety of influence,” turned to classical Chinese drama as a source of novelty. Yet in order to make these strange texts comprehensible, they “misread” them by making them conform to traditions of Western drama. Let us first of all consider briefly the process by which this paradoxical transformation took place.

Fan Xiheng, in his essay “From The Orphan of Chao to Orphelin de la Chine,” describes for us a brief history of the transformation of a Chinese drama from the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) into Western dramatic repertory. This Yuan drama, known as The Great Revenge of the Orphan of Chao (Zhaoshi gu'er dabaochou), is attributed to Ji Junxiang and was first performed in China around the thirteenth century. The same play was later re-written by another anonymous author under the title of The Story of the Orphan of Chao (Zhaoshi gu'er ji). According to Fan Xiheng, Ji Junxiang's Yuan drama was first translated into French in the 1730s, which brought about other translations into English, German, Italian, and Russian.³¹ This Chinese Yuan play has thus over the centuries inspired several generations of Western dramatists such as the Englishman William Hatchett, who adopted Ji's Chinese story into his The Chinese Orphan, and the Italian playwright Pietro Metastasio, who wrote his own version of Eroe Cinese, to name only a few. A better-known case, of course, is Voltaire's Orphelin de la Chine, which was so successful in its Paris premier that it was immediately translated into Italian and English. Yet, this process of transformation was by no means a one-way street. Not only did the original Chinese text inspire Western readers, but Chinese readers, upon reading their Western peers' re-creation of the Chinese text, did not hesitate to translate these Western texts back into Chinese language again. During the Second World War, for instance, a Chinese writer by the name of Zhang Ruogu translated Voltaire's French play, which was originally based on Ji's Chinese orphan story, into an abridged prose version “in order to raise the morale of the Chinese people in their struggle against Japanese invaders.”³²

Among several Western transformations mentioned above, one of the earliest “creative misreadings” was William Hatchett's well-known adaptation of the Chinese Yuan drama, published in England in 1741. He attracted his audience and gained a certain amount of notoriety for himself by his “new” work with a borrowed “exotic” story and a foreign “parentage.” Having to cope with the burden of his own Western tradition in order to find for himself a place in his own cultural tradition, Hatchett “creatively” distorted the Chinese Yuan play and actually presented it as “an English neo-classic play, observing the unity of time,” though in fact his Chinese “father” story takes place over some twenty-five years.³³ It is clear that the so-called “Chinese influence” at this early stage of cultural exchange amounts to nothing more than an expression of the European taste for the exotic, the different, the dissimilar which must be garbed in Western clothing to make it attractive. The image of the “Chinese theater” that Hatchett's work suggests is only a Westerner's own arbitrary interpretation—or, better, “misinterpretation” and “misunderstanding”—of it. It is a product of a Western search for things “anew”—foreign manners, interesting events, plots or characters of curiosity. Yet in Hatchett's play these elements end up pathetically conforming to the older taste and tradition for which they were intended as an antidote, in this case, the neo-classical theater.

But this account is not complete in itself. It does not represent a naive moment in Chinese-Western cultural relationships. Attempts like Hatchett's to offer to the West such distorted and “creative” introductions of the Chinese theater decisively shape the literary and theatrical expectations of the Chinese theater. The word “Chineseness,” therefore, inescapably means for the eighteenth century English audience something drastically different from what it meant in its original Chinese setting. Such audiences found in the Oriental theater what on first consideration seemed not available in their own. And these “exotic” elements “found” there and “introduced” to the West were always strikingly different from their Chinese “sources” in terms of stylization, symbolizing, movement, make-up, and music. Even in the twentieth century, despite increasing knowledge of contacts with China and Chinese scholars, the reception of the Chinese theatrical tradition by figures like Bertolt Brecht was still to some extent inspired by a “creative” misunderstanding of the ingenious works of his foreign “critical” fathers and appropriated in such a way as to enrich his own limited space of “imagination.” Since Brecht appeared on the historical scene much later than his “fathers” like Hatchett and Voltaire, he explored with much more vigor than his predecessors what had been left unsaid in the Western reception of the Chinese theater. In order to outwit his Western predecessors, Brecht's “creative misreading” of the Chinese dramatic tradition was, to employ again the mechanism described in T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a conforming and a surrendering to the two cultural traditions. At the same time, of course, it was an oedipal rebellion against both.

Brecht's concept of “Verfremdungseffekt” first occurred in his essay entitled “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” written in 1936, occasioned by Brecht's seeing Mei Lanfang's performance in Moscow. As his article reveals, Brecht was deeply impressed by the Chinese actor “who constantly keeps a distance between himself, his character, and the spectator. … Consequently he never loses control of himself; his performance is constantly on a conscious, artistic level with all emotion transposed.”³⁴ As Pronko rightly points out, however, Brecht's “alienation effect” was a product of nothing more than his “misunderstanding” of the Chinese stage conventions. Chinese spectators were expected to react emotionally to the sad or happy scenes in Chinese opera. Pronko has also observed that Chinese music, originally used to appeal to deep emotions, was interpreted by Brecht as a means to break illusion and to establish a distance.³⁵ In terms of the present argument, Brecht rebelled against his Western “father critics,” who first introduced the Chinese theater to the West, by pointing out those elements of “Chineseness” in the Chinese theater which they failed to perceive. He was therefore no longer interested in the exotic foreign manners and curious plots, as were his predecessors. Above all, he was not interested in seeing the Chinese tradition as “classical” and hence Aristotelian. His notion of “alienation effect” which he believed to be “Chinese,” however, as Pronko has rightly pointed out, “inspired” only his own version of reading the Chinese performing arts. His “unfamiliarity” with the Chinese theater, however, paradoxically makes him conform to the earlier tradition of the Western “critical fathers,” who revised Chinese theater in order to make it palatable to the West.

Seen from this perspective, Brecht is no “genius,” nor is he a “strong” poet. For all of his attempts to do otherwise, he only repeats what his Western “father Critics” had done in the past. His “misreading” and “misunderstanding” of the Chinese theater, and as the result of it, his creative notion of “alienation effect” are no more “ingenious” than his “critical” fathers' creation of a Chinese neoclassical drama. At the same time his “misreading,” or the deliberate use, of the Chinese theater also betrays Brecht as an unfaithful “critical son” to his Chinese ancestors. By an act of “creative” treason, however, he paradoxically fits himself into the foreign tradition as well as his own. He is therefore making a place for himself only by standing on the shoulders of ancient “giants” in two traditions.

Like Brecht, Gao Xingjian proved himself as no exception in following this law of the formation of a literary history. Coming quite late on the scene of the Chinese dramatic imagination, Gao Xingjian tried to create things “new” for his Chinese audience by introducing “exotic” and foreign theatrical traditions in his first two plays—The Bus Stop and The Absolute Signal. As we have already mentioned, his first two plays were heavily influenced by such Western dramatists as Artaud, Beckett, and Brecht. Later on, however, when the Chinese audience was overwhelmed by a flood of Western-style theater on the Chinese stage after the “open-door” policy was instituted, Gao Xingjian abandoned his Western critical fathers and returned to his own Chinese “parentage” in the traditional theater. In this way he was able to meet the changing literary expectations of his Chinese audience. Yet for reasons already suggested, his return to his own cultural father figures was in fact a return to the “Chineseness” of a theater which had earlier appealed to his foreign “fathers,” and appropriated by them through acts of creative “misreading.” Once again, then, we have an example of “belatedness” in which a son poet, in this case Gao Xingjian, felt compelled to find things “new” in a foreign culture, a culture which in fact is “originally” his own.

In this case Gao was fortunate enough to live in a time and place which enabled him to embrace simultaneously his own literary tradition—“to recover many artistic techniques already lost in the last century”—at the same time he could use something newly “created” by his Western “parental critics” out of his (Gao's) own tradition.³⁶ As a belated critical son owing his debts to numerous “parental” critics from more than one culture, Gao benefits from both cultures, the East and the West, and from both historical heritages, the ancient and the modern, but he does so in a way that depends on misreadings and misunderstanding on every hand and in every direction. Because of this he ends up belonging exclusively to neither East nor West, but inclusively to both.

These remarks help us to understand the strange reception history of Wildman in which the play has been claimed by more than two national “parentages” in the critical reviews. On the one hand, Wildman can be perceived as a Chinese play only by those whose dramatic expectations are confined to a knowledge of the traditional Chinese theater. On the other hand, however, it can be regarded as being influenced by the Western theater only by those who take the concepts of Artaud and Brecht as purely Western, thus disregarding their debts to their Oriental “critical fathers.” In both cases, however, readers from different cultural backgrounds, with different dramatic and cultural expectations, inevitably receive Wildman differently. It could not be otherwise, even for those Chinese readers knowledgeable in Western theater or for Westerners who are acquainted with Chinese dramatic traditions. Just as producers of texts can only write from within their own historical and cultural space—and in Gao's case, that space was both Chinese and Western in paradoxical ways—so readers can only read on the basis of their own place in history. There are no ontologically grounded “truths” by which we can distinguish “Chineseness” from “Westerness.” The implications of this observation seem clear: what is important for us to pursue in our critical inquiry is the dynamics of interreactions and inter-relationships between tradition and individual talents, between literary production and literary reception. Needless to say, we cannot define or even separate one “comparative entity” from the other. Neither can we fruitfully determine such things as “emitter,” “receiver,” “origin,” “beginning,” “causality,” and “continuity.” Each term is inextricably tied to its opposite. There is no final reference, only shared properties of différance. Within that différance all that is Chinese appears as Western, all that is Western as Chinese. For sinology, then, world literature and world culture can no longer be ignored or assigned a secondary status as mere source or influence. Rather all that is “other” and “alien” to it—which is finally to say, all that is Western—must now be recognized and inscribed within its proper interests. All future studies of “comparative” drama, therefore, and perhaps in a more general sense, all future studies of any “national literature” situated in the context of world literature, need to take their departure from this observation.

Notes

1. I wish to thank Marvin Carlson, Eugene Eoyang, Clifford C. Flanigan, Iriving Lo, and Brian Caraher for reading an earlier draft of this essay.

2. For an English translation of Wildman, see Asian Theater Journal 7.2 (Fall 1990): 195-249, trans. Bruno Boubicek.

3. For a brief survey of the Western influence in Gao Xingjian and his plays, see Geremie Barme, “A Touch of the Absurd—Introducing Gao Xingjian, and his Play The Bus Stop,” Renditions 19 (1983): 373-76. For a more recent account of Gao Xingjian's indebtedness to Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, V. E. Meyerhold, and Mei Lanfang, see William Tay, “Avant-garde Theater in Post-Mao China: The Bus-Stop by Gao Xingjian,” Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writings and its Audiences, ed. Howard Goldblatt (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990) 111-18.

4. Barme 373-76.

5. Xining Wang, “An Unconventional Blend,” China Daily [Beijing] 21 May 1985, 5.

6. Wang 5.

7. For an informative study of the main features of traditional Chinese theater available in English, see Tao-Ching Hsu, The Chinese Conception of the Theater (Seattle: The U of Washington P, 1985). Hsu's work is especially helpful in the context of this essay for its comparative perspective which treats as well other theatrical conventions such as the Greek, the Elizabethan, and the Japanese.

8. Xingjian Gao, “Guanyu yanshude jianyi yu shuoming” [“Suggestion and Explanation for the Production of Wildman”], Shiyue [October] 2 (1985): 169.

9. Gao 169.

10. The quotations of the Chinese text in this essay are from Xingjian Gao, Yeren [Wildman], in Shiyuan 2 (1985): 142-68. The translations are mine unless indicated otherwise.

11. Julian Baum, “Peking's Wildman Jolts Theater Goers,” The Christian Science Monitor 24 June 1985: 9.

12. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove P, 1958) 48.

13. Artaud 58.

14. Artaud 36.

15. Artaud 90.

16. Artaud 90.

17. This quotation is cited from Bruno Roubicek's English translation of Wildman 245.

18. Artaud 91.

19. Leonard Cabell Pronko, Theater East and West: Perspectives Toward a Total Theater (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 15.

20. Artaud 83.

21. Artaud 70.

22. For a recent study in English in the primitive Chinese theater as religious ritual, see Qiuyu Yu's “Some observations on the Aesthetics of Primitive Chinese Theater,” Asian Theater Journal 6.1 (Spring 1989): 12-30. Drawing examples from various types of exorcistic performance (nuoxi), which are still more popular than film and TV programs in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Yu argues that in primitive Chinese performance, the aesthetic and ritual experience are very difficult to separate and that “ancient Chinese ritual performance to a great degree reflected the principal aspects of ancient Chinese society—ritual performance actually had become a rich social ceremony” (15).

23. Gao, “Yeren yu wo” [“The Wildman and I”], Xiju dianying bao [Drama and Film Newspaper] 12 May 1985: 2.

24. For an early account of Brecht and China, see Antony Tatlow's Brechts chinesische Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). For a recent study of Brecht's reception in China, see Adrian Hsia, “The Reception of Bertolt Brecht in China and Its Impact on Chinese Drama,” Brecht and East Asian Theater, eds. Antony Tatlow and Tak-wai Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1982) 47-64.

25. Ulrich Weisstein, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory: Survey and Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968) 29.

26. A number of important earlier essays on the notion of literary influence have been collected in Influx: Essays on Literary History, ed. Ronald Primeau (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat P, 1977). For some recent—and sharply polemical—observations that seek to defend the traditional claims of “influence study,” see Anna Balakian, “Literary Theory and Comparative Literature,” Toward a Theory of Comparative Literature, ed. and intro. Mario J. Valdes, Proc. of the XIth International Comparative Literature Congress, 20-24 August 1985 (New York; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Paris: Lang, 1990) 3:17-24. Balakian observes that “the word ‘influence’ has become a bad word, been confused with ‘imitation,’ and has even been viewed as a threat to ethnocentrism. It has been replaced by the theoreticians with the concept of ‘intertextuality,’ which is random, idiosyncratic, resulting in a free play of inter-referentiality which displays the virtuosity of the critic-manipulator rather than the fruits of scholarly research in the form of deep-sea plunging into literary works. The current theoretical version of influence study has become a major feature of what could be called ‘aleatory criticism’” (18).

27. For an informative survey of the recent scholarship in Chinese-Western comparative literature, see Cecile Chu-Chin Sun, “Problems of Perspective in Chinese-Western Comparative Literature Studies,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 13.4 (1986): 531-48. For Sun, there are two common types of Chinese-Western comparative literature writings in the past twenty years which failed to recognize “1) what comparative literature is about and 2) the unique role of Chinese-Western comparative literature in the field” (533). The “myopic” school of comparison, for example, is “characterized by an over-emphasis on surface and random aspects of the works compared. The cultural contexts and literary conventions are seldom taken into account, in order to render the similarities tenable. The main purpose of this type of comparison is to claim that, after all, Chinese literature is not all that different from Western literatures” (533). The “hypermetropic” school, according to Sun, primarily applies Western theories to Chinese literature, “often in a wholesale fashion” (533). Sun believes that the “danger of this kind of approach lies in its undue confidence about the universal applicability of Western theory at the expense of the distinctive (and frequently intractable) features of Chinese literature” (542). Insightful and well-documented, Sun's article focuses on the lyric, and to a much lesser degree, the narrative, without touching on the issues of Chinese-Western dramatic studies, which in many ways remain the stepchild of comparative studies of Chinese and Western culture.

28. In his essay “On Dramatic Theories,” Gao Xingjian surveyed the major dramatic traditions in the West, including those of Brecht and Artaud. Exploring the reasons why in recent years Chinese audiences have increasingly lost their interest in modern Chinese drama, Gao pointed out that the predominant Ibsenique tradition of social plays on the present Chinese stage has given too much emphasis to dramatic dialogue. For him, the Ibsenique tradition should be enhanced, if not replaced, by other dramatic traditions such as those of Brecht, Artaud, Chekhov, Gorky, and especially the classical Chinese theater, which employed singing, acting, dancing, and speaking in order to provide its audiences with theatrical experiences rather than mere concepts and ideas. See Xingjian Gao, “Lun xiju guan” [“On Dramatic Theories”], Xijujie [The Dramatic Circle] 1 (1983): 27-34.

29. By “misunderstanding”—in quotation marks—I mean a view of a text or a cultural event by a “received” community that differs in important ways from the view of that same phenomenon in the community of its own “origins.” I do not mean to suggest the preexistence of an epistemologically grounded “proper” or “correct” understanding of the text to which a “misunderstanding” can be applied.

30. Pronko 35.

31. For a recent study in Western scholarship on the receptions of this Yuan drama in the West, see, for example, A. Owen Aldridge's chapter “Voltaire and the Mirage of China,” The Reemergence of World Literature: A Study of Asia and the West (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1986) 141-66. Aldridge's conclusions are telling in the light of the present study: “Voltaire's source was a translation of 1731 by a French Jesuit, Joseph Henri Premare, which was later included in a famous compilation by another Jesuit, Jean Baptiste Du Halde, under the title Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'empire de la Chine et de la tartarie chinoise (1735). Among the essential ingredients of the original Chinese work were song and music, but these were completely eliminated from Premare's translation and from Voltaire's adaptation as well. Since Voltaire's neoclassical drama departed from both the form and the substance of his Chinese source, one would be justified in asking whether his work should really be considered as an example of the penetration of Chinese culture. Should it instead be dismissed as mere Chinoiserie? The answer is that Voltaire himself understood a great deal more about Chinese civilization than his play reveals, but that he was prevented by the prevailing taste of the times from closely following his model” (145).

32. Xiheng Fan, “Chong zhaoshi gu'er dao zhongguo gu'er—shang” [“From The Orphan of Chao to Orphelin de la Chine (Part I)”], Zhongguo bijiao wenxue [Comparative Literature in China] 4 (1987): 159-95.

33. Pronko 37.

34. Pronko 56.

35. For more information on the paradoxical relationship between Brecht and Mei Lanfang's theories of theater, see William Huizhu Sun, “Mei Lanfang, Stanislavsky and Brecht on China's Stage and Their Aesthetic Significance,” Drama in the People's Republic of China, eds. Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras SUNY P, 1987) 137-50. For a more general article on the reception of Mei Lanfang's performance in the Soviet Union in 1935 on the part of European theater artists such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Craig, Brecht, Eisenstein, Piscator, Tairov and Tretiakov, see George Banu's “Mei Lanfang: A Case Against and a Model for the Occidental Stage,” trans. Ella L. Wiswell and June V. Gibson, Asian Theater Journal 3.2 (Fall 1986): 153-78. See also Zuolin Huang, “A Supplement to Brecht's ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,’” Brecht and East Asian Theater, eds. Antony Tatlow and Tak-wai Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1982) 96-110.

36. Gao, “Guanyu yanshude jianyi yu shuoming,” 169