Making Peace with Your Own Monsters Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible

Making Peace with Your Own Monsters: Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible
In Gao’s second English-translated novel, One Man’s Bible, he wittingly combined a novelistic counterpoint technique with Chinese travel documentation. The former technique is what Milan Kundera used to label as a rhythmic movement between story, vision, and mode of essays (Pollack, 2007).
The novel is centered on the character’s fragmented memory sequences affected by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Though the narrator remained unnamed, it is clear that it is Gao himself. His narrative often leaps from past to present, vividly navigating the unnamed narrator’s relationships with Margarethe and Sylvie. The former is a German Jew woman who is fluent in Chinese. The latter, on the other hand, is a French artist who does not adhere to any political stand.
Gao portrayed China under Mao’s rule as a world full of mob killings, revenge, and youthful fervor. To remain humane during this time, a person’s only option is to be denounced. Gao in this novel is a university-educated intellectual. He had an affair with a woman married to a prominent military official named Lin. Gao, later on, became the Red Army faction leader. During this time, he investigated a case involving his father. It was said that his father sold a gun he owned and was sent to a “cadre school” where he was “reformed.”
Gao is very similar to Kundera, in the sense that they both detected totalitarian impulses in the government’s effort to politicize people’s everyday lives. While reading Gao’s novel, you cannot help but think of every person locked up in China or other country’s prison system. These people may have been quietly keeping tabs of the days that turned into months and years. They may have been thinking of the times when they were free men --- the time before they were sentenced to prison because they dared to speak their own minds.
While getting immersed into Gao’s autobiographical novel, you cannot help but keep your thoughts with anonymous activists silently moving on with their tranquil agitation or biding their time as hapless political prisoners of the state. The state promised those who have less in life to have more in law, but how can they persecute those who decide to have a different opinion? How can the state simply kill those who exercise their freedom to speak their minds?
Each line of the novel speaks of so much repressed bitterness and grief that it is almost difficult for the reader to accompany Gao as he walks down memory lane. This “memory lane” is filled with wreckage and horrors of the narrator’s past. ...