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time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to an author on the basis of a body of works written in the Chinese language. Of further significance is that Gao is an exile writer who now writes in two languages. He represents that underrated yet increasingly frequent writer and artist who is “in-between”—that is, in-between the still reigning paradigm of national literatures and cultures, both in theory and practice. Thus, the critical evaluation and assessment of his work is a priori best performed in the comparative literary and cultural studies mode.
     
    About Mabel Lee
    Mabel Lee is Honorary Associate Professor in the School of European, Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies at the University of Sydney, where she was a member of the academic staff from 1966 to 2000. Lee has published on Chinese and on comparative literature. For a review article of Lee’s recent work, see XiaoyiZhou, “East and West Comparative Literature and Culture: A Review Article of New Work by Lee and Collected Volumes by Lee and Syrokomla-Stefanowska” in CLCWeb 2.3 (2000).
    Professor Lee visited Gao Xingjian in Paris in 1993, and not long thereafter began to translate Gao’s work and to publish research papers on his writings. Lee translated into English Gao Xingjian’s novels Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible , both published worldwide by HarperCollins (Sydney, New York, London) in 2000 and 2002, respectively.
    Professor Lee is co-editor of the University of Sydney East Asian and World Literature series and serves on the advisory board of CLCWeb .
    E-mail: [email protected].
     
    A slightly different version of this essay was published as “Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and His Novel Soul Mountain ” by Purdue University Press in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal 2.3 (2000)—http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu.

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    It was not that he didn’t remember he once had another sort of life. But, like the old yellowing photograph at home, which he did not burn, it was sad to think about, and far away, like another world that had disappeared forever. In his Beijing home, confiscated by the police, he had a family photo left by his dead father: it was a happy gathering, and everyone in the big family was present. His grandfather who was still alive at the time, his hair completely white, was reclined in a rocking chair, paralyzed and unable to speak. He, the eldest son and eldest grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, was squashed between his grandparents. He was wearing slit trousers that showed his little dick, and he had on his head an American-style boat-shaped cap. At the time, the eight-year War of Resistance against the Japanese had just ended, and the Civil War had not properly started. The photograph had been taken on a bright summer day in front of the round gateway in the garden, which was full of golden chrysanthemums and purple-red cockscombs. That was what he recalled of the garden, but the photo was water-stained and had turned a grayish yellow. Behind the round gateway was a two-story, English-style building with a winding walkway below and a balustrade upstairs. It was the big house he had lived in. He recalled that there were thirteen people in the photograph—an unlucky number—his parents, his paternal uncles and aunts, and also the wife of one of the uncles. Now, apart from an aunt in America and himself, all of them and the big house had vanished from this world.
    While still in China, he had revisited the old city, looking for the old courtyard compound at the back of the bank where his father had once worked. He found only a few cheaply built cement residential buildings that would have been constructed a good number of years earlier. He asked people coming in and out if such a courtyard used to be there, but no one could say for sure. He remembered that at the rear gate of the courtyard, below the stone steps, there was a lake. At Duanwu