The Language As The "Content"

Gao Xingjian's novel "Soul Mountain" has broken restrictions on "say what" and "how to say". He tries to infuse with the auditory factors into visual arts, and endows the novel with the "musical" to set up a new narrative structure of a novel, through the change in the form of questions and answers, a cross between the monologue and the dialogue, the change in the speech rate and pace rhythm. Gao draws on extensively the experience of the traditional Chinese poetic expression, such as "Chuang Tse", "The Diamond Sutra", Zen and various forms of folk literature, he also has the large scale introduction of modern Western forms of artistic expression. Thus the novel has broke genre boundaries of the "novel", "drama", "prose" and "poetry", whereby he finds a way to express the modern spirit which is liquid. Gao tries to bridge the gap of the world-divided and the self-divided with the text form of music. He uses the "musical" structure to guide the "ego" in returning to the subject.The core of the structure of the music in "Soul Mountain" is " liquidity ". This power of the "liquidity" is from not only the logical strength of the process which is promoted by language and rhythm, but also the so-called philosophy of "The best of men is like water" in "The Tao te Ching". His pursuit of "voice" lets it return to the "literature" itself, and makes "speaking" of an "open" state. In which the "language" could reach, he makes full use of language, on the contrary, he comes to an accommodation with "language" through the action, sound, and even the "empty". He not only releases himself from the bonds of "language", but also is free themselves from being trapped in obsession of "breaking obsession". This pursuit makes him into the state of "perceptual understanding power", and then penetrates language forms into the person's living condition on the ontological level, thus carries out "the Enlightenment of Zen". Gao created the "empty" atmosphere in the "Soul Mountain" by the "voice" and "music". It eliminates the barrier of dualistic thinking, cancels the lines of the "say" and "listen". It wins the self-speaking space in the form of "echo" which is "saying to oneself. In general, Gao found a way to express the liquid modern spirit. He made the literature get back to the "ornament" itself. Through the "say", he broke the simple property of the tools of "language", and expanded the expression function of the Chinese language. He promoted the language form to the core of the narration, and constructed a deserted "Soul Mountain" world with the "musical". In the flow process of the language, he had completed the "Zen Breakfast" by himself.