One Man’s Bible

by Gao Xingjian

  Wang: Have you been back to China since you left? Do you plan to go back to China, or would you like to? And if you do go back to China, do you have any idea what you will find there?

  Gao: Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

  Translating Gao

  Mabel Lee on Gao Xingjian

  The essay that follows is based on Gao Xingjian’s writings and on Mabel Lee’s conversations with Mr. Gao during the 1990s.

  Writer, dramatist, critic, and artist Gao Xingjian was born in China (Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province) on 4 January 1940 during the Japanese invasion. His father was a senior employee of the Bank of China. As the bank retreated from place to place before the enemy advance the family library remained intact, travelling with bank property under armed escort. From early childhood Gao grew up reading his way through that sizeable collection of Chinese literature and a small number of volumes on Western literature and art. His love for the theatre also began in the early years of his life when his mother became a performer in a patriotic national salvation theatre group. It was also his mother who insisted that he keep a diary and who got him in the habit of writing. This practice later grew into an addiction for linguistic expression of his rich imagination and intense curiosity about life.

  While his parents were preoccupied with surviving in war-torn China and then with diligently remaking themselves into citizens of New China (established in 1949), Gao succeeded in providing a solid literary education for himself through his own readings. At the same time he developed a passion for oil painting. It was his ambition to enroll in an art college so that he would one day be able to paint like the European masters. (It was only in 1979, however, when he saw the works of the masters in the museums of Europe, that he realized his aspirations were unachievable. He turned to Chinese ink paintings, with considerable success—from 1987, he supported himself in Paris through the sales of these works.)

  On completing high school Gao enrolled at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing, where he majored in French literature. He graduated in 1962 and was assigned to work as a French translator and editor in the Foreign Languages Press. It was a stroke of good fortune for Gao’s later career that he had studied at the Institute, for as more and more books were banned, he was able to access French editions. In fact, he voraciously read his way through the shelves of books in the libraries of both the Institute and then his workplace before all books in foreign languages were banned during the course of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

  As a young adult, Gao Xingjian was already a writer with an obsessive desire for self-expression. However, he was aware that what he wrote was clearly at odds with Mao Zedong’s directive that literature and the arts must “serve the masses.” During the Cultural Revolution, when stringent measures were imposed on writers, he knew that his writings were highly problematical, and that there was no possibility of his having them published. As a compulsive writer he in effect wrote for himself. He was author, reader, and critic of his works; this is a stance he still resolutely adheres to in all of his writings. Even while undergoing “re-education” and living the life of a peasant in the 1970s, he continued to write but took the precaution of wrapping his manuscripts in plastic and burying them in the earth floor under the heavy water vat in his hut. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

  When the Cultural Revolution ended and China emerged from decades of isolation, there was a general liberalization in all areas of cultural life, albeit with intermittent cycles of repression. Gao’s unique literary background saw his immediate rise to prominence as a leader of the avant-garde movement in literature. From 1980 to 1987, he published short stories, novellas, plays, and critical essays, including A Preliminary Discussion on the Art of Modern Fiction (1981); a novella, A Pigeon Called Red Beak (1985); Collected Plays of Gao Xingjian (1985); and In Search of a Modern Form of Dramatic Representation (1987). In the same period, his translations of Eugene Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve and Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, as well as essays on Marcel Proust, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Sartre, Camus, and the Polish playwrights Grotowski and Kantor were also published. These works established Gao’s literary credentials amongst writers, academics, and ordinary thinking people in China.

  While circumspect and exercising considerable self-censorship, Gao’s writings nevertheless brought him under the scrutiny of the authorities. His writings clearly promoted freedom of expression, not just for the writer but also for the characters in and the readers of his fiction—and in the case of his plays, for the audience and the actors. His single-minded pursuit of these goals for the individual was a fierce reaction to the insidious yet gross distortions of human thinking and behavior he had witnessed, even in himself, during the Cultural Revolution. A Preliminary Discussion on the Art of Modern Fiction (1980-82), written in a gentle and suggestive, largely academic tone, effectively challenged the literary traditions established by Mao Zedong that had been in force and institutionally entrenched over several decades. Despite Gao’s exercise of self-censorship, the book was banned after the 1982 edition. By that time the work had been avidly read by many and continued to be passed surreptitiously amongst members of literary and art circles.

  The staging of Gao Xingjian’s play Absolute Signal at the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing in 1982 marked the beginning of the experimental theatre movement. But it was his bold departure from New China’s established traditions and practices in his play Bus Stop that created wild and enthusiastic acclaim when it was staged in 1983. The ambiguity and absence of any clear messages challenged the audience to think for themselves and this in itself was seditious. The authorities were decidedly unimpressed and banned further performances of this “most pernicious play since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.” It was rumored that as the author he would be sent to a prison farm in Qinghai Province. He did not wait to be sent and, taking an advance royalty for a proposed novel, headed for the remote forests of Sichuan Province in southwest China.

  While he was singled out for attack as campaigns against “the spiritual pollution of the decadent West” raged in Beijing, Gao wandered for five months in the Chinese hinterland until the more liberal faction regained power in Beijing. To avoid detection by the authorities, he traveled on the margins of conventional society, observing diverse human responses to socialized existence and to the natural environment and reflecting on the rationale for various human traditions and practices. That journey—covering 15,000 kilometers (from Beijing to Sichuan and then following the Yangtze from its source down to the coast)—provided the physical setting for his epic novel Soul Mountain. Superimposed on that setting is the artistic portrayal of his psychological experiences (thoughts, emotions, perceptions, insights, and memories) during this period. Soul Mountain, although autobiographical fiction, reveals more of the author Gao than would have been possible to document in any meticulous and rigorous biographical account.

  Around the time Bus Stop was banned, Gao had been wrongly diagnosed with lung cancer, the disease that had recently killed his father. Although a follow-up X-ray confirmed that a wrong diagnosis had been made, he had confronted death for more than two weeks while waiting for the results of the second test. Then, having won his reprieve from death, he was as if a “reborn” human being, a “fundamentalist” as a human being. He was determined to take full control of his own faculties for thinking, feeling, and action, and it was
with great determination that he committed his life to artistic creation. This is the background to his writing of Soul Mountain. He had begun to formulate ideas for the novel in 1982, made copious notes during his five-month journey in 1983, and took the completed manuscript with him when he left China in 1987. By September 1989 he had finalized his revisions and in 1990, the novel was published by Lianjing Publishing House in Taipei.

  Gao’s creative and critical writings during the 1980s are of historical significance. In the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution, Gao was the first to introduce to the Chinese literary and academic world the developments that had taken place in world literary theory and practice, and to re-introduce and to re-assess China’s rich literary heritage in the light of modern times. It should be borne in mind that Mao Zedong’s guidelines for literature established in Yan’an in 1942 had been progressively enforced in China, reaching its heights during the “anti-culture” movement known as the Cultural Revolution. In Mao’s program for the arts and literature, both Chinese and Western literary traditions were negated and literature and the arts were to serve the masses. Significantly, this meant that the individual as author, reader, and fictional characters was divested of psychological, intellectual, and physical autonomy.

  When Gao began to construct the theoretical framework of Soul Mountain, he had envisioned that it would be a long novel that would incorporate his years of pondering on fiction as a modern genre. Although he was forced to burn his own writings during the Cultural Revolution, this did not deter him from continuing to think about literary creation. For him, fiction is storytelling, a product of reality and the imagination, and he is intent on telling his story and the stories of others in a compelling way in the context of present times. Soul Mountain is a complex exploration in narrative techniques and narrative language that fuses the artistic sensibilities of an author who is playwright, artist, and master storyteller, and an author who has a deep knowledge of both Chinese and Western literature.

  The most notable feature of the novel is that the characters are unnamed: they are pronouns (“I,” “you,” “she,” and “he”). Plural forms of pronouns are not employed, because for Gao having another person representing the thinking and emotions of the individual self is anathema. The narrator “I” experiences loneliness on his journey and creates “you” so that he will have someone to talk with. “You” being the reflection of “I” also experiences loneliness and creates “she.” The chapters with “you” and “she” explore the author’s psychological self and primitive instincts. The pronouns all tell stories about themselves and their friends and listen to the stories of the many people they encounter on the journey to Lingshan or Soul Mountain. When in 1987 the opportunity arose for Gao to travel to Germany, he took with him his most precious belonging, the manuscript of the novel; by the end of that year he had taken up residence in Paris. Ten years later, in 1997, he became a French citizen.

  Since his settling in France, little of Gao Xingjian’s works were published in China, the last being the reprinting of his play Fleeing—set in Beijing in the early hours of 4 June 1989. Gao had been commissioned by an American theatre company to write a play “about China,” but when changes were requested so that the students would be portrayed as heroic figures, he withdrew the play. It was subsequently published in the overseas Chinese literary journal Today in early 1990, then reprinted in China as evidence of a “pornographic work” by “an unpatriotic, reactionary, anti-party writer.” Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.

  But literature and not politics is Gao’s primary commitment in life and he acknowledges that he lacks the expertise for politics. His Chinese publications since relocating to Paris in 1987 can only be described as prolific, but his publishers have been in Taipei and Hong Kong. His collection of short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, was published by Lianhe Literary Publishing House (Taipei, 1988) and both Soul Mountain and a second novel, One Man’s Bible (1999), were published by Lianjing in Taipei. From 1982 to 1999 his plays were performed in thirty-two theatres in countries ranging from China to the Ivory Coast, and in recent years he has directed and undertaken the choreography for his plays. In 1995 his plays The Other Shore (written in Beijing, 1987); Netherworld (first draft in Beijing, 1987; final draft in Paris, 1991); Story of the Classic of Mountains and Seas (written in Paris, 1989-1993); Fleeing (written in Paris, 1989); Between Life and Death (1993); and Dialogue and Rebuttal (Paris, 1992) were published in Chinese as a collection by Dijiao Publishing House in Taipei under the title Six Plays by Gao Xingjian. In 1996 his collected critical essays, cogently outlining his ideas on artistic creation, were published under the title Without Isms (Cosmos, Hong Kong).

  In Soul Mountain Gao Xingjian recalls that as a student he would recite a line of classical poetry written by the great modern Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936): “I offer my blood to the Yellow Emperor.” This line of poetry, written in 1902, had been appropriated by party ideologues to inspire the self-sacrifice of the individual for the masses and the nation. In Soul Mountain Gao notes that, regrettably for Chinese literature, Lu Xun had chosen the path of politics instead of literature. Lu Xun was painfully aware of the implications of his choice and he documents his ordeal in a series of prose-poems which were later published as a collection called Wild Grass, in 1927. He knew that this choice would leave him like “a corpse” of one who had “gouged out his own heart” and so he reverted to writing classical Chinese poems to ease his agony. More than half a century later, Gao Xingjian—no less of a cultural critic than Lu Xun, and a survivor of the Cultural Revolution—argues vehemently against tyrannical politics, mob action, the collective, religious fundamentalism, and crass commercialism because of the damage they wreak upon the individual. For both Lu Xun and Gao Xingjian, literary creation is the solitary act of the individual.

  On 12 October 2000, the Swedish Academy announced that Gao Xingjian had won the Nobel Prize for Literature “for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights, and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama.” Gao’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Case for Literature,” is available online in Chinese, English, French, and Swedish at www.nobel.se. The Swedish Academy described Gao’s novel Soul Mountain as “one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves.”

  Of significance is the fact that this is the first time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to an author on the basis of a body of works written in the Chinese language. Of further significance is that Gao is an exile writer who now writes in two languages. He represents that underrated yet increasingly frequent writer and artist who is “in-between”—that is, in-between the still reigning paradigm of national literatures and cultures, both in theory and practice. Thus, the critical evaluation and assessment of his work is a priori best performed in the comparative literary and cultural studies mode.

  About Mabel Lee

  Mabel Lee is Honorary Associate Professor in the School of European, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies at the University of Sydney, where she was a member of the academic staff from 1966 to 2000. Lee has published on Chinese and on comparative literature. For a review article of Lee’s recent work, see Xiaoyi Zhou, “East and West Comparative Literature and Culture: A Review Article of New Work by Lee and Collected Volumes by Lee and Syrokomla-Stefanowska” in CLCWeb 2.3 (2000).

  Professor Lee visited Gao Xingjian in Paris in 1993, and not long thereafter began to translate Gao’s work and to publish research papers on his writings. Lee translated into English Gao Xingjian’s novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible, both published worldwide by HarperCollins (Sydney, New York, London) in 2000 and 2002, respectively.

  Professor Lee is co-editor of the University of Sy
dney East Asian and World Literature series and serves on the advisory board of CLCWeb.

  E-mail: mabel.lee@asia.usyd.edu.au.

  A slightly different version of this essay was published as “Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and His Novel Soul Mountain” by Purdue University Press in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.3 (2000)—http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu.

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  It was not that he didn’t remember he once had another sort of life. But, like the old yellowing photograph at home, which he did not burn, it was sad to think about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared forever. In his Beijing home, confiscated by the police, he had a family photo left by his dead father: it was a happy gathering, and everyone in the big family was present. His grandfather who was still alive at the time, his hair completely white, was reclined in a rocking chair, paralyzed and unable to speak. He, the eldest son and eldest grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, was squashed between his grandparents. He was wearing slit trousers that showed his little dick, and he had on his head an American-style boat-shaped cap. At the time, the eight-year War of Resistance against the Japanese had just ended, and the Civil War had not properly started. The photograph had been taken on a bright summer day in front of the round gateway in the garden, which was full of golden chrysanthemums and purple-red cockscombs. That was what he recalled of the garden, but the photo was water-stained and had turned a grayish yellow. Behind the round gateway was a two-story, English-style building with a winding walkway below and a balustrade upstairs. It was the big house he had lived in. He recalled that there were thirteen people in the photograph—an unlucky number—his parents, his paternal uncles and aunts, and also the wife of one of the uncles. Now, apart from an aunt in America and himself, all of them and the big house had vanished from this world.