Snow in August Read Free

everything, but is not any one thing.” It developed out of Beijing opera and Western opera but was neither, a new theatre that one day would make its way onto the world stage (Chang 2002a: 11).
    With this in mind, what do we find in Snow in August that may help us better understand his idea of the theatre? The play is made up of three acts. The first two acts dramatize Huineng’s life and death and portray the hero in bold strokes; more importantly, they make visible the spirit of Zen, of which he is the embodiment and manifestation. As the audience is led through the various episodes of Huineng’s life, it appears that Gao Xingjian has abandoned the theatrical experiments of his previous plays and returned to a more traditional, language-based text. Meanwhile, Gao has also incorporated singing and comedic elements, which tend to loosen the plot. The play’s structure is thus made to appear free and casual, breaking away from a naturalistic presentation of Huineng’s life.
    Unlike Acts I and II which feature a conventional plot structure, Act III is characterized by free form. It describes in a rather episodic manner, among other things, the practices of various schools of Zen Buddhism more than two hundred years after the death of Huineng. If it can be said to have a storyline—a fire in a Buddhist temple, it is not well defined. In fact, except for the similarity in setting and the presence of the Zen masters, the relevance to Huineng’s story appears tenuous. Huineng passes away at the end of Act II, and for all practical purposes the story has ended when upon Huineng’s death the trees and the mountains in the vicinity suddenly turn white—hence the title “Snow in August.” So why Act III? What function does it serve? Gao has said that it is not necessary for a play to have a balanced or tightly knit plot, but despite having tried his hand at various dramatic forms, he still maintains that structural integrity is essential to any performance (Gao 1993: 187). A salient feature of Gao’s plays in the 1990s is what I would call his “sideshows,” which accompany and complement the main action. In Between Life and Death (1991), Woman’s monologue is punctuated by non-speaking segments performed by Man (Woman’s lover), a nun, a headless woman, and a man on stilts. In Dialogue and Rebuttal (1992), a monk is always present performing acrobatic tricks alongside the protagonists. These “sideshows” enrich the main action,sometimes providing commentary, sometimes serving as a stimulus for the audience to think and feel for themselves. In light of this, Act III of Snow in August is not so atypical, as it can be regarded as an expansion of the sideshow in many of Gao’s plays—a sideshow writ large.
    But then again, Act III is more than a sideshow: it is structurally and thematically more important. Hu Yao-heng proposes that Act III depicts an “atmosphere of desolation and absurdity,” and that as the people and the Zen masters are shown to be “shallow” in their understanding of Zen, Act III is a reflection of the period of decline of the Buddhist school founded by Huineng (Hu 2002: 25—26). My view is that the play ends on a positive note. If we say that Huineng’s story in the early part of the play expounds an understanding of Zen in abstract terms, then Act III is the actualisation of life as it should be lived, and if Acts I and II describe the spirit of a saintly patriarch, Act III is the embodiment of that spirit among the people in their everyday lives.
    Act III, made up of a number of short episodic sketches, is a kaleidoscope of human activities. First we find Singsong Girl and Writer singing a duet, in which she invokes the names of famous Zen masters, all of whom are Huineng’s disciples and their students. This signifies the passage of time—for instance, Caoshan Benji was the sixth generation disciple of Huineng—and that Zen Buddhism has spread far and wide in China in the span of 250