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Soul Mountain
Ari C. Dy, SJ
"You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it fiction!"
The above quotation sounds like a publisher rejecting a book project, taking the chance to lash out at an aspiring writer as well. In fact, the lines are Gao Xingjian's self-criticism of Soul Mountain (Lingshan), recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Gao knew that his unconventional style of writing fiction would elicit objections from general readers, if not from literary critics. He anticipates the objections by skillfully inserting a short chapter where he questions all our assumptions about what counts as fiction. Soul Mountain is supposed to be a novel, but it turns out to be everything a novel is not supposed to be.
It takes me a few days at most to finish a novel. Soul Mountain took me more than a month. In this autobiographical work, Gao elegantly portrays his journey of seven years, a journey that is at once physical and spiritual. Here is evidence once again that body and soul, matter and spirit are inextricable.
Gao Xingjian began writing Soul Mountain in Beijing, in 1982. He finished it in Paris in 1989. From the 60s to the 80s he was a prolific writer in China, but the Communist authorities would not let his works be published. They considered him a man whose ideas where too full of the decadent capitalist West. While fleeing one of Beijing's periodic political campaigns, Gao discovered that he had lung cancer. It was a wrong diagnosis but intimations of his own mortality had already affected him irrevocably. Amid rumors that he would be sent to a labor reform camp, he fled Beijing and traveled for ten months through southwest China, covering an area of 15,000 kilometers.
Gao's quest for his self is metaphorically represented by his quest for Lingshan (Mandarin Chinese for "soul mountain"), a mountain that he is not sure actually exists. On the way he encounters some of China's ethnic minorities and documents their customs and traditions. He visits temples and forests, and though he is attracted to the life of the recluse, he knows in his heart that his basic desire is still for human companionship. He then becomes philosophical and ponders what existence is like for a person who lives in solitude. Pieces of his past return to him, and his "ramblings" become the thoughts of any person who has ever lived.
Consider this. "You are always searching for your childhood and its' becoming an obsession. You want to visit each of the places you stayed during your childhood, the houses, courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory." This is a book to be read again.
Critics will long be talking about Gao's use of pronouns-I, you, she, he-all projections of his self. Other characters are not named. They remain anonymous conversation partners. The only people named in this novel are the historical personalities that Gao encounters on his journey. The great poets Qu Yuan and Li Bai come alive as Gao sees the rivers where they drowned.
It is not only history that comes alive in Soul Mountain. Gao also brings contemporary realities to bear on his musings, as when he mentions homes for the aged, cremation, and the ecological devastation being brought about by the ambitious Three Gorges Dam.
Gao Xingjian is now a French citizen and writes in both Chinese and French. When he won the Nobel Literature Prize, the Chinese government dismissed him as not being "truly Chinese." But Soul Mountain is unmistakably Chinese, and this only becomes apparent when one has gotten over unmet expectations and realizes that the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, always a source of pride for the Chinese, is inhabited by millions of individuals who yearn to express themselves as individuals. There comes a time when every Chinese has to see beyond his or her collective reality. Gao Xingjian has shown us the way.
Watch out for his second novel, Yige Ren de Shengjing (One Man's Bible), also being translated into English by Australia's Mabel Lee.
About the Author:
Ari C. Dy, SJ is from the Loyola House of Studies at the Ateneo de Manila University. He has just published his first book, Weaving A Dream: Reflections for Chinese-Filipino Catholics Today.
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