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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 tothink 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