Una lettura ‘bachtiniana’ dell’opera critica di Gao Xingjian

The polymorphous oeuvre of the artist Gao Xingjian 高行健 – born in China (1940), French citizen since 1998, now fully bilingual and bicultural – witnesses the devoted longing for a broader expressive richness in language, resulting from the elaboration of his primary linguistic and cultural awareness, and of another linguistic and cultural heritage, that has been consciously chosen and assimilated. This article examines one aspect of literary creation, that is the Sinophone critical oeuvre, through the essay Ziyou yu wenxue 〈自由與文學〉(2014). By observing the thematic and linguistic profiles we will discover that: firstly, there is a complementary plurality of languages, a tension towards a stratification of discourses and codes drawing from different – diatopically and diachronically speaking – linguistic and cultural systems, revealed by an intertextual and transcultural reading; secondly, in this essay characterized by heteroglossia – as a Bakhtinian concept (Bakhtin 1979) – the ontological clash arising from a plural linguistic and cultural awareness can often be solved by an intra-textual dialogic dimension.