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employ different linguistic forms, they remain testimonies to human existence, and the writings of Li Bai (701–762) and Cao Xueqin continue to evoke feelings in the people of today.
Gao Xingjian was resolute in his quest to capture the music inherent in the tonal nature of the Chinese language in his writing, and the language of his novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible virtually pulsate with poetry. Inspired by European developments in fiction as a genre in modern times, Gao was equally determined to depict the psychology of his characters; in fact, in these two companion novels he was intent on exploring his own psychology, and both novels are structured by the changing of the pronoun. Women of course occur in these novels, but they are never the focus, and he views the women in the novels as composite fictional representations of women he has encountered in life. There is no attempt to explore the psychology of the women; only vague suggestions appear. However, he has used the psychological magic of changing pronouns in a number of plays that do focus on the psychology of women, and he is helped in this genre by the fact that female performers can be used. As a male writer, he is keenly aware that he can provide only a man’s view of a woman’s thought processes. Whereas Gao is able to use the pronouns you or he to distance himself as the author and to examine a man’s psychology, even if the man happens to be himself, to use you to depict a woman’s inner world would be too close to the male author. In his play Sheng si jie (1990; tr. Between Life and Death, 1999), by ingeniously creating distance between himself as the male author and the woman depicted, he boldly took up the challenge of writing about a woman’s psychology. A female performer acts the role of the woman, but she preserves her status as a performer throughout. A female dancer performs the woman’s different psychological states, and a male performer acts the roles of the man, a ghost, and an old man. It is only “the female performer acting the role of the woman” who speaks throughout the whole play, and she refers to the woman in the role that she plays as she, saying of the woman, “she says,” “she thinks,” she feels,” and so on.