Dangerous Liaisons

He says he is not a fighter--or rather, the narrator says it; he's "an onlooker," someone who steps aside, "frail," "not the savior of the world," not a "prophet," speaking only to himself, living "his own insignificant life," "the epitome of ordinariness," and not even a dissident after all this. If the world is the will to power and we ourselves are this will, as Nietzsche puts it, what are we to make of the will not to have power? To somehow not extend whatever it is--idea, point of view, ethos. Is it to be believed? Is it denial, and if so, of what?

It is a position of leadership that the young narrator of Gao Xingjian's novel, One Man's Bible, briefly seizes during the early, most terrible and confusing period of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing. He takes the floor at a meeting of a rebel faction to speak decisively against certain Red Guards and end a stalemate. An ambiguous impulse, we learn, but overnight he is a leader drawn further in. He is looked up to as a writer employed in a Communist Party editorial office, but he is more at risk than he knows. This would seem to be 1967, when Mao Zedong's radical purification purges had unofficially unleashed wholesale violence against "intellectuals," party members, any or all of those targeted in antisocialist categories that were accepted unquestioningly by that time.

In the streets, thousands were beaten to death, driven to suicide, in homicidal rage of the young against their elders. But not against Mao, revered by millions of "youngsters, waving the...little red book," who would assemble hours ahead of time in Tiananmen Square to see him pass by in his jeep, "hot tears streaming down their faces...shouting 'long live'.... [t]hen... [going] home to smash...everything that was old--...schools...temples..." At explosive meetings behind closed doors we hear the narrator excoriate those who used blacklists to drive the discredited to their deaths. Yet his power has raised his profile. He is about to come under investigation. He has long known that party policy contaminates the truth. Every night posters go up attacking someone new.

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