SOURCE: Mehegan, David. “The Man Who Can't Be ‘We.’” Boston Globe (7 March 2001): A17.

[In the following essay, Mehegan asserts that Gao acts as a spokesperson for individual freedoms through his works of drama and fiction.]

Standing alone at the podium, a slender Chinese man in a black suit spoke softly. All around and high above, the concave amphitheater at Harvard University was packed to overflowing with people, primarily Chinese, of all ages, hanging on his measured words. An interpreter stood at a microphone nearby.

The room was hot and airless, but Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel laureate for literature, was a kind of cool island. His short talk was on literature and freedom. The writer must break free, he said, of all constraints and external pressures: political, social, economic. “For a writer trapped by ideology,” he said, “it is hard to achieve freedom. I take a stand against ‘isms’ of any kind; I try to jump out of all frameworks.”

In the four months since he became the first Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Gao Xingjian's selection still makes waves. His works are banned in China and his receipt of the Nobel was denounced last month by a state-controlled newspaper as “ludicrous,” “disappointing,” and “a kind of joke played by the Swedish Academy on the Chinese people.” It's not only the government that scorns him. Some Chinese, writers and others, find his work difficult and obscure, and resent his refusal to be a spokesman for anti-Beijing elements. In a talk at a Hong Kong university in February, he angered local writers by refusing to criticize the government. His four-city American tour ended in Cambridge last week, and though most in the Harvard audience acclaimed him and lined up to take his picture and hand him books to sign, even there a few hostile voices were heard. Speaking Chinese and paraphrased by the interpreter, one young man vehemently complained that Gao was not chosen in honor of his works, but because he is a rebel—a slap to China.

Speaking of his epic novel, Soul Mountain, recently published in English, Gao said, “I asked that the words ‘us’ and ‘we’ not be used in the translation, since they do not appear in the original. I have an instinctive dislike of ‘we.’ I come from a China where ‘we’ has completely vanquished ‘I.’”

A more radical rejection of traditional Chinese thinking, some scholars say, would be hard to imagine. Gao, 60, is a rebel of sorts, as a writer. He is an odd sort of rebel—not a political spokesman such as Vaclav Havel or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Born in 1940, he majored in French at Beijing University. He also became a painter. Though modernist Western works were banned in China, he discovered they were available in French, so he immersed himself in Kafka, Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, Joyce, and Thomas Mann. In the 1960s, he wrote plays, poems, and fiction, but burned most of his manuscripts during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. He was denounced by his wife and sent to a “reeducation camp.”

A RETURN TO WRITING

In the late 1970s, Gao began to write again, and several of his plays were produced, including Absolute Signal, Bus Stop, and The Wild Man. He also published an influential short book on modernist fiction. He was gaining an audience, but in 1983 he ran afoul of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's “oppose spiritual pollution” campaign, and his works were blacklisted. (They still are, but Chinese writers are finding them on the Internet. That year he heard a rumor that he was about to be imprisoned, so he lit out for the territory: to the remote regions of western China, where he went on a 9,000-mile trek, following the Yangtze River from its source to its mouth. That long march through villages, to various mountaintops and river towns, provided the raw material for Gao's strange novel, Lingshan—Soul Mountain.

In 1987, he traveled to France and decided to stay, and began to write Soul Mountain, he says, “to dispel my inner loneliness.” It was published in Taiwan, and later in Europe, but drew little notice. Shocked by the violence of Tiananmen Square in 1989, he resigned from the Communist Party, gained refugee status, and moved into a small apartment in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, writing and eking out a living as a painter. In 1998 he became a French citizen.

Soul Mountain is incomparable—a sort of Chinese Canterbury Tales with one teller, or a Moby-Dick on land, except that at least Captain Ahab knew who he was and what he was looking for. The unnamed traveler of Soul Mountain is seeking self, hometown, memories of the past, spiritual enlightenment, romantic interludes, and the truth in lore and legend. The often-lyrical, dreamlike tale has no overarching narrative or clear sequence in time. Its most remarked upon feature is its strangely shifting narrative voice. Sometimes the traveler is “I,” sometimes “you.” Throughout, he retells folk tales of rural indigenous peoples: mostly bitter and violent, full of rape, suicide, betrayal, and grief.

FRAGMENTED SELF

There's a sadness in Soul Mountain that makes one think inevitably of the man who can't be “we.” The traveler can never connect. He climbs a mountain looking for a legendary Daoist monk, the last of the “Pure Unity Sect,” but ends up running away in terror after the hostile monk shuns him. And whenever the traveler connects erotically with a woman, he splits so that “she” and “you” relate, while another part of himself narrates. It comes to seem that the women are only projections of his fragmented self.

But these themes apparently represent Gao's aesthetic self more than his life. In person, he's affable, and a man with friends—he hoped to reconnect with a few in Boston—and is active in theater and art circles in France. “I am not a misanthrope,” he said with a smile during an interview in his Cambridge hotel. He sipped espresso and spoke of Soul Mountain and the writer's life through his book's translator, Mabel Lee.

“The book questions everything,” he says, “all the paradigms of existence—history, society, politics. It raises doubts about consciousness, self, even the ability of language to express the self. It emphasizes how difficult it is for human beings to connect with one another.”

Asked if he ever misses his cultural roots, Gao replies, “Homesickness is a drug for a writer. I have a continuous quest for new understanding and knowledge; this has made me write about China, but also about the West. If a writer cannot start something new, his life force is missing and he should give up writing. After I left China, I wrote 10 full-length plays, four of them in French.”

In his Nobel address, Gao had insisted that literature is apolitical—“purely a matter of the individual.” He spoke almost mystically of “cold literature,” which is indifferent to fashion, criticism, or the marketplace, and which “will flee to survive.” During the interview, he explained, “Cold literature confronts hot, passionate literature, which turns literature into political propaganda. It also confronts consumerist literature. It is using a dispassionate, neutral third eye to observe man and the environment.”

FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

For some Chinese, Gao's individuality is hard to swallow. “In the Chinese language,” explains Yaohua Shi, a professor of Chinese literature at UMass-Amherst who admires Gao's work, “one rarely uses the singular pronoun. In English we say ‘my country,’ but in Chinese we would say ‘our country.’ To call it ‘my country’ sounds presumptuous, as if it belongs to you.”

But in a sense Gao's China, the China of Soul Mountain, does belong to him. In a television interview last week, he said he did not wish to return, that China is within him.

Leo Lee, professor of Chinese literature at Harvard, says China's literary establishment has been obsessed with winning the Nobel Prize as a national achievement. “They blow it out of proportion,” Lee says: “two Japanese have won, one Indian has won—a Chinese must win the Nobel. When this was announced, everyone was surprised.” The choice of Gao, an expatriate with French citizenship, seemed to mock the dream.

But Gao resists the idea of being a national hero. In his Harvard talk, he said, “Nations are not the boundaries of culture, nor literature, nor a text. When we read a Western author, we do not think of what country he comes from, but of what moves us.”

Besides its ＄940,000 cash prize, the Nobel confers fame, and Soul Mountain, published in the United States by HarperCollins, is selling briskly. It soon will be available in a downloadable version from PerfectBound, HarperCollins's new international e-book imprint. Mabel Lee is busily translating Gao's second novel, One Man's Bible, which is concerned with the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.

In the interview, Gao said, “There is huge pressure on me since winning the prize. I have been totally unable to write or paint. All these interviews and invitations are a sort of task, a response to the enthusiasm that people have given me. I hope to continue writing next year, and paint as well. Saul Bellow once said that the Nobel Prize is the kiss of death. I don't want it to be so for me.”