One Man's Bible Read Free Page A

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 MaoZedong 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