For the most part, to Gao's protagonist the Party is a nightmare and the rest of the world inexplicable. He records that his mother was found drowned in a river, causes unknown but under-nourishment suspected. He himself goes to inspect the famous Yellow River and finds only a muddy sludge enclosed by concrete embankments. Was this where Chinese civilization originated, he asks. Had those who sung its praises ever seen it, or had they just made it all up? There doesn't seem to be any redeeming feature to China, whichever way he turns.
In these circumstances, women's bodies become a kind of refuge from terrifying ideological abstractions. Basic and unambiguous, they function as reassuring the central character of his humanity despite the horrors and ugliness around him.
Historically, books about the oppression and heroism of ordinary people have tended to be vigorous stories with strong characters and dramatic events. Famous examples of the genre are Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Emile Zola's Germinal. But One Man's Bible isn't at all like these. Here the main character looks inwards, not outwards. His other characters are mainly the women he sleeps with, not fellow dissidents. The Cultural Revolution is something terrible he has to hide his head from. The people as a whole are mostly perceived as a pack of mindless dogs, and he can only escape by disguising himself temporarily as one of them.
Seen in this light, Gao Xingjian epitomizes the modern plight of the independent-minded individual under a tyrannical regime which is able to use the malleability of the people themselves as an instrument of its policies.
As such he may be entered in literary history as "significant."
Nevertheless, an autobiographical narrative cannot masquerade as a novel. In real life there are loose ends, things which happen that the individual never understands. But the reader of a work of fiction demands to have ambiguities sorted out, to have loose ends tied up, and for the story to assume some kind of form, however amorphous. This Gao Xingjian appears unable, or unwilling, to do.
Parts of this novel are mildly effective, and the book is an improvement on Soul Mountain in one respect at least -- it's nowhere obscure. But there's no way One Man's Bible is going to be a pleasure to read. The best Gao can hope for is that the work will be judged as symbolic of its era without being in any way enjoyable -- hardly an enviable fate. The book was, incidentally, first published in Chinese here in Taiwan, in 1999.
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