Mythological Approach to Oe Kenzaburo and Gao Xingjian's Novels---Myth-making in 'The Silent Cry' and 'Soul Mountain'

Oe Kenzaburo and Gao Xingjian are two significant Asian writers in contemporary literary world. Not only because of their achievement as Nobel Prize laureates, but also because of their commitment to the creation of "myth" in modern time, a "modern myth" which surpasses the limit of literature to become a cultural exertion, a story of resistance against the existing ideology within their specific social contexts.;The tendency of "return to myth" in the works of Oe and Gao made their novels, specifically The Silent Cry and Soul Mountain to become a meaning system by displacing the archetypal motifs in Japanese and Chinese ancient mythology to a modern situation. This refers the reader to a familiar analogy in order to guide the reader to accept and believe what the writers said is true.;Although living with different social and cultural background, the two writers, Oe and Gao came to the same scheme; to re-write the history of their time and to reconstitute a projective identity by the myth-making in their novels.;My study aims to feature the concept of "archetype" or "archetypal structure", the basic cluster of myth in Oe and Gao's novels, in order to discern the final determination of the two writers in terms of their search on the expressive power of language and their strategy of their myth-making. By applying Frye's theory, I would like to explore the hidden ideological significance behind Oe and Gao's novels.