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I I A S N E W S L E T T E R # 4 7 S p r i n g 0 0 8
P O R T R A I T
Bob van der Linden
Gao Xingjiang’s own life story provided the inspiration for his novels and
it certainly remains amazing. Born in 1940, he studied French in Beijing
and subsequently became a professional French and English translator
(of Samuel Beckett for example). His career as a writer began in the 1960s
but he burned all his early manuscripts at the height of the Cultural Revo-
lution (1966-1976) for fear that they could be used as evidence against
him and might make his life in the countryside (where he was sent for
‘re-education’ during the 1970s) even worse. As a member of the Chi-
nese Association of Writers, Gao visited Europe (Paris) for the first time
in 1979. One year later, he became a screenwriter and playwright for the
Beijing’s People’s Art Theatre and subsequently gained a reputation as
a pioneer of absurdist drama. Gao was the first to introduce the latest
developments in literary theory and practice to the Chinese public and
to redefine China’s literary heritage, so it was apposite to the times. His
public criticism of the Chinese government, however, brought him under
state scrutiny. Consequently, when he visited Europe again in 1987, he
decided to live in exile in Paris. He took French citizenship and sustained
himself successfully as a painter. Following the publication of his political
play about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Fugitives (1989), the Chinese
government banned his work (which ever since has been published in
Hong Kong and Taiwan).
A meditation on the human spirit
In 1983, Gao was arrested and faced being sent to a prison farm. His plans
to leave Beijing for southwest China became concrete following a misdiag-
nosis with lung cancer. Having confronted death, this experience left him
feeling reborn and he resolutely decided to live life to the full. He began
a 5-month journey from Beijing to Sichuan province and from there fol-
lowed the Yangtze-river to the coast. His flight became the basis for Soul
Mountain, which equally can be read as a meditation on the human spirit
confronted with societal oppression. As his English translator, Mabel Lee
(University of Sydney), writes in the introduction to the book:
The novel is full of melancholy for the past (stories from ancient Chinese
history, visits to temples, monasteries, archaeological sites etc.) as well as
for the ‘authentic’ and ‘exotic’ (‘dirty’ folks songs, rituals, shamans etc.),
which Gao finds particularly among the ethnic minority peoples. On the
whole, Soul Mountain deals with a world that, according to the author, was
much destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and will be even more so
in the near future, by, for example, the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze
and by the ever-growing presence of the Han Chinese who today are to be
found everywhere ‘there is money to be made’ (pp.242-3). Also revealing
in this context is Gao’s description of the few remaining pandas wander-
ing through southwest China’s ever shrinking forests wearing electronic
transmitters.
Somewhat confusingly, the characters in Gao’s novels are singular pro-
nouns. Thus in Soul Mountain the authorial self is dissected into ‘I’, ‘you’,
‘she’ and ‘he’, who together make up the protagonist, while in One Man’s
Bible ‘you’ stands for the contemporary exiled author and ‘he’ for the
author at the time of the Cultural Revolution. One Man’s Bible is located
in 1996 Hong Kong, where the protagonist (the author) is present for
the staging of one of his plays. The narrative, addressed to his current
German-Jewish lover, is a fictionalised account of the author’s youth and,
above all, of the Kafkaesque anxieties of the Cultural Revolution, during
which Gao played the three different roles of political activist, victim and
silent observer. Undeniably these experiences made him into the individu-
al writer he is. As he puts it himself:
The fate of the writer in exile
For Gao Xingjiang literature can only be the voice of the solitary individual
writing in exile, away from the harsh daily political reality:
During a recent visit to China, Bob van der Linden read Gao Xingjiang’s novels:
Soul Mountain (1990) and One Man’s Bible
(1999). In 2000, Gao was the first Chinese ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, few of the Chinese van der Linden
met knew of Gao’s existence and were surprised to hear that a Chinese had won this prestigious prize. In this essay he looks at
why Gao’s work is banned in a country which annually regrets the absence of Chinese among the Nobel Prize winners and, with
the 2008 Olympics just months away, is so eager for international recognition as a world civilisation and power.
Individuality, literature and censorship:
Gao Xingjiang and China
Soul Mountain is a literary response to the devastation of
the self of the individual by the primitive human urge for the
warmth and security of an other, or others, in other words by
socialized life. The existence of an other resolves the problem
of loneliness but brings with it anxieties for the individual,
for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some form of
power struggle. This is the existential dilemma confronting
the individual, in relationships with parents, partners,
family, friends and larger collective groups. Human history
abounds with cases of the individual being induced by force or
ideological persuasion to submit to the power of the collective;
the surrender of the self to the collective eventually becomes
habit, norm convention and tradition, and this phenomenon is
not unique to any one culture.
You absolutely refuse to be a sacrifice, refuse to be a
plaything or a sacrificial object for others, refuse to seek
compassion from others, refuse to repent, refuse to go mad
and trample everyone else to death. You look upon the
world with a mind that is the epitome of ordinariness,
and in exactly the same way you look at yourself. Nothing
inspires fear, amazement, disappointment, or wild
expectation, hence, you avoid frustration. If you want
to enjoy being upset, you get upset, then revert to this
supremely ordinary, smiling, and contented you (p. 198).