Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation By Gao Xingjian

otherwise they will be nothing more than propaganda or preaching. And what is even more interesting is that the thoughts articulated in the novel must, through a character’s experiences, transform feelings into a thought process that is tinged with the protagonist’s sentiments, and it is in this way that the novelist presents the thinking of living people and not abstract theories.

Soul Mountain deals with the animal and human elements concealed in exorcist masks, the psychological basis for curses and shaman art, the internal dynamics of storytelling, and the formation of linguistic consciousness, all of which transcend the general boundaries of fiction. However, with the help of this understanding of narrative language it was possible to introduce and accommodate them in the book.

In my other novel, One Man’s Bible, the he chapters and you chapters alternate, weaving together the memories of the same character and his situation at present and dispensing with the subject I. This was not just because of the special structure of the novel but also because when it came to writing about the red terror of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, the individual’s self had been strangled by the totalitarian dictatorship. In this dialogue between you, who had luckily survived, and he of the past, time sequence is not a concern, and fragmented memories could come and go in an instant, giving great flexibility to the writing. The pronoun-based structure made it possible to avoid lengthy narration of the protagonist’s complicated experiences in China’s grotesque social situation, and immediately allowed you of the present and he of the past to engage in dialogue. Poetic chapters and prose chapters are placed alongside one another, enabling readers to emerge for a respite occasionally from those suffocating times.

On the other hand, in my short story “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather,” the first-person narrator, I, sinks from the present into memories, evoking all sorts of associations that are undifferentiated from dream and inducing the inner mind to talk in dream. I becomes two,