The Other Shore by Gao Xingjian Read Free Book Online Page B

of the kind of everyday happenings one finds in real life—an elderly couple, owners of an old farm in the country, is visited by a young couple whose relationship is as unstable as their older counterparts, and the uneventful plot revolves around their romantic entanglements which, like all of their lives, lead nowhere. Bernard is an old and famous painter. Increasingly weary of living, he is nonetheless afraid of loneliness and of growing old, and he tries to prove what remains of his virility by chasing after the young girls he employs as models. His companion Anne, a more sober and worldly type, has been an aspiring writer all her life, and she is equally obsessed with ageing and dying. To compensate for the lack of attention from Bernard, she flirts with their guest Daniel, a middle-aged writer. Daniel is at the end of his writing career—he has run out of things to write. A lost soul without any commitments, whether it is in ideology or love, he has nothing left in his life except his cynicism. Among this insipid bunch, Cecily, Daniel’s girlfriend, is like a breath of fresh air, even though her liveliness could easily have been contrived. An ordinary girl except for her attractiveness, she does not hesitate to use her charms to her advantage. She has no lofty goals but wishes to find a mate to provide her with food and a roof over her head. Towards the end of the play even she grows tired of her role as the femme fatale . Her outward liveliness can hardly contain the same death in spirit as that of the other characters.
    As with most of Gao Xingjian’s plays, Weekend Quartet is not made up of external actions but of the interior landscapes of the soul. It is a play about characters and also about their self-examinations: they are likened to musical instruments playing life’s sorrowful tunes. Unlike the other plays in this collection, its concerns are not so much existential in a philosophical sense as the fears and worries of ordinary living, the realities of how to accommodate oneself to the banalities of day-to-day living. There are no real crises but trivial conflicts and verbal squabbles which, as in a musical quartet, make up the changes in the mood of the play. Quartets 1 and 2 are expositions and complications, while Quartet 3 is made more sombre with the expose of the characters’ dark inner secrets, and the final Quartet is spirited and gay, ending with a game of disjointed words and phrases in an acceptance of life’s impossibility of meaning. It is as if the play has finally come to terms with life in exploring into the truth of man’s existence.
    While the characters are built up in the traditional manner, the audience, in a typical Gao Xingjian manner, also gets to know the truth of their private selves through their monologues, comprising dream sequences, hallucinations, and memory flashes. These lapses into the subconscious punctuate the realistic setting and situations and resonate with a disharmony that characterizes the world of the play. The characters’ self-examinations are unprovoked and are mostly unrelated to the action—as if the play willingly and deliberately suspends itself, forfeiting its illusion of reality and forcing the actors to neutralize their roles under the watchful eyes of the audience. During these monologues, the actors speak in the second or third person to carry out an “indifferent observation” of the characters they are portraying. Despite its realistic subject matter and characters, Weekend Quartet purposely flaunts its mechanical nature and achieves an artificiality which, coupled with the seemingly contradictory demand for real-life emotions, approximates the playwright’s concept of a modern dramatic performance.
     
    Annotation
    [0-1]Gao Xingjian 高行健, “Lun wenxue xiezuo”<論文學寫作>(On Writing Literature), in his Meiyou zhuyi《沒有主義》(None-ism) (Hong Kong: Cosmos Books Ltd., 1996), p. 57.
    [0-2]Gao Xingjian 高行健, “Lun wenxue