The second novel of Gao Xingjian and first published in Taipei in 1999, One Man’s Bible is often considered as a companion to Gao’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Soul Mountain (Ling shan). As autobiographical as Soul Mountain, One Man’s Bible covers the narrator’s earlier past during the Cultural Revolution and the more recent exiled life in the west, in between which Soul Mountain is set. It continues the search the narrator embarks on in the previous book for the meaning of existence. One Man’s Bible also adopts the narrative technique characteristic of Gao’s writing, which is to employ multiple pronouns to “create a sense of distance and provide a broader psychological space for the character.” The “I” in Soul Mountain is projected into “I,” “you,” “he” and “she” to indicate the self which is fragmented and lost like the culture, history, and natural resources in southwest China and which struggles for wholeness in the pilgrimage to Soul Mountain. However, the “I” in One Man’s Bible is implied, reflecting on “you,” the present, and “he,” the past, and producing a sense of progression towards an exile identity.
The novel develops along two lines: one is the current life of “you,” the alter ego of the author, as a Chinese exile and a dramatist and novelist travelling all over the world, and the other is the past life of “he” in China during and shortly after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). “He” is created by “you” in his memories and interrogation of the past brought up by a conversation with Margarethe, a German Jewish woman, at a hotel room in Hong Kong on the eve of its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. While Margarethe, half Jewish and born in Italy, insists on immersing herself in her personal memories and pains as well as those of the whole Jewish race, “you” seeks a clear break with his past and China by forgetting. However, the past is buried yet never forgotten, and it is gradually laid bare as seen in the different roles “he” plays during the Cultural Revolution: a victim, the leader of a rebel faction, and an observer withdrawn from the maddening crowd. His opera singer mother drowns as a result of the fatigue working at a re-education camp; his bank clerk father tries to commit suicide under the political pressure; and “he” himself constantly faces the threat of being persecuted for various reasons, such as his writing and his involvement in a rebel faction. Being the leader of a rebel faction is, in fact, a strategy to protect himself and people sought after by other factions. Gradually coming to understand the frantic reality, “he” tactfully detaches himself and finally volunteers to go to the less tumultuous countryside under the pretext of following Mao’s call to be re-educated by peasants.
While individual thinking and writing is precisely what the Cultural Revolution intends to eradicate in its demand for extreme conformity to Mao Zedong, it is the means by which “he” manages his precarious existence. Unlike other entities in existence, which many people are reduced to in the Cultural Revolution, the existence of one’s being, as too frequently asserted by the narrator, can be affirmed by the consciousness of the self and the preservation of an inner voice. This awareness also provides the self with the freedom that can transcend the imposed restrictions. It is this sense of being that explains the title of the book, One Man’s Bible―“you are your own God and follower.” Besides an obvious denial of Mao once revered as God and his sayings as the Bible, the title is also an erection of one’s subjectivity in defiance of any form of ideological liaison or enforcement, in other words, a subjectivity “without ‘isms’.”
Together with Soul Mountain, One Man’s Bible is a book of “out of China.” The fleeing that takes the narrator to the remote areas of China in Soul Mountain is now thousands of miles further. His suffocated life in China is replaced by a life floating over the world, bearing the lightness of living from one hotel room to another and belonging nowhere.
However, the narrator’s belief in freedom as a solitary existence that “takes no account of other and has no need for acceptance by other” leans towards egoism. One expression of this is his objectivization of women, indicated by his constant use of “use” (more prevalent in the Chinese original than the English translation) when referring to sexual intercourse with a woman. A number of female characters, Chinese and westerners, young girls and more mature women, appear in the novel, who seem more than ready to give themselves away for being “used.” Their existence, to the narrator, lies in the sensuous yet repetitive details of their body and coupling. Even Margarethe presents herself, sometimes masochistically, as a body inviting “use,” and her claim on the Jewish history and suffering seems rather insubstantial other than to serve the purpose of prompting the narrator to recall his past. Although it might be explained by the narrator’s philosophy of the individual’s absolute independence and integrity, these brief encounters read disturbingly in its unmistakable male chauvinistic tone.
Some western critics have pointed out the difficulty to follow Gao’s modernistic non-linear narrative if the reader is unfamiliar with the Chinese culture and history. Unlike many (auto)biographies and novels set in the Cultural Revolution, which are written by Chinese emigrants in English for western audiences and have won popularity in the western market, One Man’s Bible is written in Chinese even though Mabel Lee generally renders it faithfully. More important, Gao is conscious of the present lens through which the past is examined. Unlike “the wound literature” (shanghen wenxue), categorically referring to the writings about the Cultural Revolution published in China mainly in the 1980s, Gao, an exile in the west, has the “freedom of expression and expressive freedom.” Gao’s belief in literature as an individual voice that will flee if not fall silent leads to what he terms as “cold literature”: “literature that will flee in order to survive” and “that refuses to be strangled by society in its quest for spiritual salvation.” In this sense, One Man’s Bible is not to be read solely as an account and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution, but a close examination of existential dilemma and human psyche. Ironically, despite Gao’s refusal of the Chinese label and his declaration of being “tired of the debate over literature and politics,” the disputes over his winning the Nobel Prize and the reading of his works still point to the country of his origin and the inevitable relation between literature and politics.
高行健 《一个人的圣经》－－请勿转贴
You finished the whole book?
I tried but I cann't. I haven't meet anyone who can finish even half of this book.
It's not about what he wrote. He seems living forever in that era. A damaged good. In that sense, I would say that One Man's Bible served very well as an account and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution.
I tried but I cann't. I haven't meet anyone who can finish even half of this book.
It's not about what he wrote. He seems living forever in that era. A damaged good. In that sense, I would say that One Man's Bible served very well as an account and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution.