Exile’s Home as a Domain of Power in Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain

Abstract

With the key objective to contest the grand narrative of Chinese home as a seat of Confucian order and harmony, this paper intends to explore home as a tyrannical site in the novel Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, the Chinese self-exile writer in France. That Gao’s fiction deals with political oppression in the country under Mao’s rule is a truism. However, the fact that home at personal level plays an equally oppressive role has so far been overlooked in critical debates. Aiming to fill this gap in literature, this study highlights the tyranny that home exerts over individuals to “subjectify” and “territorialize” them to its set norms. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of power and subjectivity, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “de-territorialization” of the subject, I argue that where home as a “regime of power” is oppressive, there it is also counter-productive; particularly so for an artist in whom it triggers an urge to dislocate or “de-territorialize.” Deploying critical and Foucauldian discourse analyses as tools to analyze data mainly from Gao’s first novel Soul Mountain, this study is directed toward attaining a power-resistant subjective autonomy, an area generally neglected in Asian cultures.