Gao Xingjian: One Man's Bible

By PAT BASKETT

Two years after the publication of Soul Mountain in English and his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gao and his translator Mabel Lee have produced that work's twin. It continues the resolve he made 20 years ago to commit himself to the creative expression of his own reality and is, like the first, a form of fictionalised autobiography in which the self is narrator and protagonist.

Using "you" and "he" alternately, Gao relives the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution - from the safety of his new life in Hong Kong and Paris and the arms of various lovers. The distance from those events is both temporal and personal: in looking back, Gao examines himself and tries to create what he calls pure narration. Just what he means by this is contentious.

He writes (substitute I for the second and third-person pronouns): "You do not play the role of judge, and you should not regard him as a victim. In this way, the fervour and the suffering that are destructive to art make way for observation and examination. Of interest is ... the process of this inquiry."

Think not, therefore, of Wild Swans. This is the work of an intellectual - one of those French existentialists we thought had died with Sartre, and his bible could well be Camus' The Outsider. In referring to the book's title he says of himself: "You are your own God and follower."

Pivotal to Camus' thought is the myth of Sysephus (in which a man rolls a rock up a hill only to have it roll back just as he reaches the top), and at the heart of Gao's narration is the story of a man who is teased into climbing on to a large rock by a joker who refuses to let him off until he becomes the joker's follower and both die a futile death.

The influence of existentialism is credible since Gao graduated in French from the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages in 1962 and was instrumental in introducing European writers to Chinese intellectuals in the early 1980s.

But if that post-World War II band were annoying with their self-absorption, so also is Gao. The problem is compounded for the reader by the distancing device he uses to separate himself from his (own) character.

We are left not knowing where to turn, what to believe. This is particularly so in his (un-existentialist) attitude to women who are consistently portrayed as sex objects.

There are pages of tedium in this book (mostly in the repetitive nature of his encounters with women) but at the end, the sum is greater than many of its parts.

* HarperCollins, $34.95

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.