Literature Nobel for French Chinese-writer

STOCKHOLM, OCT. 12. The dissident novelist and playwright, Mr. Gao Xingjian, who fled his native China after his play was banned, won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for his writings about the struggle for individuality in mass culture.

The Swedish Academy cited Mr. Gao (60), for his ``bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity.'' Mr. Gao survived the upheaval of Mao Tse-tung's 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. He became a leading cultural figure in China but had to leave in 1987. He settled in Paris the following year as a political refugee. He was the first Chinese writer to receive the prestigious literature prize in its 100-year history.

``In the writing of Gao Xingjian, literature is born anew from the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses,'' the Academy said in its citation. ``He is a perspicacious skeptic who makes no claim to be able to explain the world. He asserts that he has found freedom only in writing.'' The writer and playwright, born in eastern China, went on a 10-month walking tour in the central Sichuan province to avoid harassment after his play ``The Other Shore'' was banned in 1986 and left China the next year.

His novel ``Soul Mountain'' reflected that journey with several narratives by different protagonists. ``With his unrestrained use of personal pronouns, Gao creates lightning shifts of perspective and compels the reader to question all confidences,'' the Academy said of the novel. Mr. Gao joined the dissident chorus when he quit the Chinese Communist Party after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and published the play ``Fugitives'' that took place against the background of the slayings in Beijing.

The Communist regime declared him persona non grata and banned all his works. Mr. Chen Maiping, who teaches Chinese at the University of Stockholm and is a friend of Mr. Gao's, said he was anxious to phone him. ``I'm going to congratulate him and tell him to take it easy. He's shy and doesn't handle media very well,'' Mr. Chen said. ``He has a good sense of humor and can tell many funny stories.''

The prize this year is worth 9 million kronor ($ 915,000). The literature award - usually the first - was the fifth and last Nobel prize unveiled in Stockholm this week. The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named on Friday in Oslo, Norway. ``It was nice to be able to surprise everybody,'' Mr. Horace Engdahl, head of the Academy, said, denying any geographical or political consideration in making the choice.

``Gao Xingjian is a great writer, a renewer of both prose and drama ... he is a writer who has universal knowledge to offer readers all over the world,'' Mr. Engdahl said. Mr Guenter Grass of Germany won last year's prize as one of the most prominent authors to emerge from a group of young intellectuals who set out to revive German literature after the Nazi era. The physics prize was shared by the American Mr. Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, Mr. Herbert Kroemer, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, and Mr. Zhores Alferov, of the A.F. Ioffe Physico- Technico Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. This year's chemistry prize went to Mr. Alan Heeger, of the University of California-Santa Barbara, Mr. Alan MacDiarmid, of the University of Pennsylvania and Mr. Hideki Shirakawa, of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, for their discovery that plastic could be modified to conduct electricity.

The medicine prize recognized Mr. Arvid Carlsson, a professor emiritus of the University of Goteborg in Sweden, Mr. Paul Greengard, of Rockefeller University in New York, and Mr. Eric Kandel, an Austrian-born U.S. citizen with Columbia University in New York, for discoveries about how messages are transmitted between brain cells, leading to treatments of Parkinson's disease and depression.

The Nobel Prizes are funded by a trust set up in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. Nobel said the literature prize should recognise an author whose work moves in an ``ideal direction'' without specifying exactly what he meant. The Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf will present the prizes as always on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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