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employ the Chinese language. Following the publication of his novel Soul Mountain, he wrote “Wenxue yu xuanxue: Guanyu Lingshan” (1991; tr. “Literature and Metaphysics: About Soul Mountain,” 2006), in which he stated that being “a product of Han Chinese culture,” he had wanted to write a novel and to write it in Chinese. However, he found that the Chinese written language had lost its musicality because it had become riddled with “undiluted Western morphology and syntax.” He attributed this deplorable state of the language to the linguists who had standardised the Chinese language by explaining it in terms of Western morphology and syntax, the writers who had unwittingly imitated poor translations of modern Western authors, and the literary critics who had promoted these poor translations as a “modern” literary style. To find an uncontaminated form of the language, Gao turned to oral folk literary traditions and practices, as well as to various local dialects. His search also took him to the writings of Feng Menglong (1574–1645) and Jin Shengtan (1608–1661), whom he declared “masters of language.” For him Feng Menglong used the living language in his writings, and Jin Shengtan made the dead language of books come to life. Gao further observed that read aloud, Jin Shengtan’s narrative language “resonated” and was “infused with movement and flowing rhythms.” This made him realise that sound is the “soul of language,” and he resolved to restore the musicality of the sounds and rhythms inherent in the tonal nature of the Chinese language in his writing. To this end, Gao devised the strategy of first drafting his chapters on a tape recorder while listening carefully, and only afterwards converting the sentences into written text.
In the same essay Gao also explained his unique fiction aesthetics, which is based on his analysis of the inherent nature of language. Stream of consciousness in Western literature begins with a subject, and as the writer captures the psychological processes of the subject, there is a resulting flow of language. From this, Gao suggested that the language of literature could be regarded as a “flow of language.” Significantly, he had observed that by changing the pronoun to you and he, he could endow the subject with different angles of perception, so Gao made this changing