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of pronouns the linguistic structure of Soul Mountain, a work that he describes as a “long soliloquy” in which the pronouns keep changing in a “flow of language.” The third-person she is the male subject’s thoughts regarding the opposite sex. Gao has asserted that the purest spirit of Chinese culture is embodied in Daoism and Chan Buddhism, and that this is demonstrated by their clever play with language. In acknowledging the insights he has gained from Zhuangzi and the Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, Gao stated that though his perceptions are those of a person living in modern times, it is this particular spirit of Chinese culture that he seeks to recapture in modern language. He also stated that although he is intent on writing something fresh and innovative, he rejects the modernist stance of trampling on literary antecedents and the uncritical negation of tradition. He acknowledged that he has gained insights from Pu Songling (1640–1715), Shi Nai’an (c. 1296–1371), Cao Xueqin (c. 1715–1763), Liu E (1857–1909), Tolstoy (1828–1867), Chekov (1860–1904), Proust (1871–1992), Kafka (1883–1924), and Joyce (1882–1941), as well as from some French nouveau roman writers, but stated categorically that this does not stop him from searching for his own mode of narration. In fact, he categorically rejected theories of fiction on the grounds that he knows of no “good” writer who has benefited from theorists. For him, they only formulate models and create fashions. He further argued that the notions of plot and characterisation are merely popularly agreed-upon concepts, and that the structure of fiction is spontaneous and the unique creation of the author. In other words, his novel Soul Mountain does not conform to the traditional practices either of China or of the West.
Based on Gao Xingjian’s three trips along the Yangtze in 1983 and 1984 (the longest of which covered 15,000 kilometres), Soul Mountain incorporates Chinese indigenous narrative traditions into a modern Chinese novel that is informed by modern Western literary novels in its concern for tracking the psychological activities of the protagonist, who is none other than the author himself. His sustained use of pronouns in this 563-page autobiographical novel has no antecedent in Chinese