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and implicitly evaluating, and so tends to transcend the immediacy of the moment. On the other hand, the “she,” as the reification of “I” and the object of narration, can only aspire to the physicality of experience, the world of suffering and emotion. Thus the “I” plays the role of a “cold” and detached observer, but the irony is that it cannot be without the impassioned “she” and her worldliness.
    The shift in narrative mode underlines the horror because of the need for objectification, but the play is more than the story of a fallen woman and her search for salvation. It is an examination of the dark secrets of a woman’s inner world haunted by fears of rejection, ageing, death and the final judgement, and even of life itself, leading up to the impossibility of absolution despite her hysterical protestations. Narrated in the third person, these fears are given full expression, free from self-pity which tends to be inhibiting and selective. Apart from the psychological exigencies, the narrative situation eventuates in a split of the character, creating tension between the narrating “I” and the experiencing “she.” In light of Gao Xingjian’s idea of the neutral actor, the actress playing Woman, by positioning herself in an in-between space, can be in and out of her role in the course of performance. She addresses the character she is portraying as “she,” and thus carries out a “disinterested observation” of her own performance in the same way that the two big black eyes observe Woman’s actions. As the writer says in the postscript: “The narrator in the play, i.e., Woman, should not be regarded the same as a character. She is both in and out of the character, but still preserving her status as an actress.” At times she appears to share the character’s emotional torments, but mostly she is with the audience, on the outside looking in.
    The playwright also requires that the props in the play, the coat-hanger, the building blocks, the jewellery box and the dismembered mannequin, etc. are to be “enlivened,” regarded as living characters, in their encounters with Woman. As in traditional Chinese theatre, the props are the bases and extensions of the performance process. For example, Man turns into a coat-hanger after he has been strangled by Woman; the building blocks are a reminder of Woman’s memories; and the jewellery box represents the grave in which Woman buries herself and her past. Together with the other on-stage but non-speaking actors—the actress who performs the various psychological manifestations of Woman and the actor who plays Man, the ghost, the clown and the Old Man—the props as “living” characters combine to create a “psychological arena” where the drama of Woman’s consciousness is revealed and played out, not only within the heroine herself but also among the various performing roles.
     
    Dialogue and Rebuttal 對話與反詰 (Duihua yu fanjie) ( 1992 )
    Gao Xingjian appears to have a love-hate relationship with language. He has said that he wants to enhance the expressiveness of the Chinese language, yet he also condemns the ascendancy of language in modern drama, which he says has deprived the stage of its theatricality. With Dialogue and Rebuttal he claims to have made a determined effort to destroy language [0-39] and to cast doubts on its meaning-generating functions. [0-40] The play is made up of a series of dialogues between a man and a woman, generically known as Man and Woman, two strangers who have just had a brief sexual encounter. In the aftermath of their physical contact, they shut themselves out from each other in the ensuing conversation, refusing to engage in any meaningful communication. Woman flaunts her sexuality and laments her plight as a woman, but her fear of ageing and dying fails to arouse any sympathetic response in Man. Man is only interested in gratifying his prurient curiosity, as when he listens with relish to