Dmitri's Reviews > Soul Mountain

Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Prize winner, was born in 1940 Jiangnan, south of the lower Yangtze, during wartime China. He studied in the People's Republic, graduating from Beijing University in 1962 with a French foreign language degree. He became a well known writer by 1980 shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1983 he was misdiagnosed with lung cancer and faced deportation to a labor camp for falling afoul of Central Party censorship. His response was to go on a 9000 mile trek to wild Sichuan and back to the coast. In 1987 he defected to France, and published this 1990 book.

Gao imbeds in his reminiscence of backroad travel issues of loneliness and the relationship of the individual to family, friends, partners and a greater collective society. He reflects the problem of relationships as an inherent power struggle. Traditional Confucian values resulted in autocracy within the family as well as the empire. One of the few means of escape would be to join a Buddhist monastery, itself another form of group restriction. After the communist revolution of 1949 self sacrifice to the national project became entrenched and ideological repression was enforced by modern methods.

Gao meets a traveler on a train who tells of Soul Mountain, a wilderness area where mountain people live, in the foothills of Tibet. He finds a compound where bandits had holed up, abducting Red Army girls on the Long March. At a reserve for giant panda bears he stays with people who protect them against poachers. He rents a room in the village and falls in love with a young woman. They watch dragon dancers at the temple and he invents stories for her amusement. She is enigmatic, disappearing and reappearing, at times seductive, at times suicidal. He tells ghost tales to woo her into bed.

Gao weaves in characters from the village, a fortune teller, a grave robber, caretaker of the family temple, shaman widow. He departs for Soul Mountain with his feminine counterpart. He speaks of various ethnic groups, Yi, Bai and Miao, and their customs. He tells of recent political persecutions and cultural destruction. Ecology has a role, in the Three Gorges Dam, draining of lakes for farmland and habitat ruin. Gao has university connections and meets with archaeologists and botanists while a refugee. He follows the Yangtze from Guizhou to Jiangxi in a country on the cusp of change.

Gao encounters a wide range of folk religion and Daoism on the way. He is influenced by the Buddhist concept of the self as illusory and source of man's misery. The location of Soul Mountain remains a mystery. He takes refuge at a ranger station and learns of a 'five-step' deadly snake, a Buddhist metaphor for the five precepts, rules to abstain from killing, stealing, rape, lies and drugs. He climbs misty mountains and has visions of lost monasteries. The stories told are funny and frightening and he finds he knows nothing.

Gao divides himself into separate personas (You, I, He and She) to dispel loneliness on his solitary journey. The year spent alone leads to his realization that the need for social interaction outweighs the constraints imposed by society. Through visits to Buddhist monasteries and Daoist retreats he decides an ascetic life is not the answer. He recreates his personal past and the world of China during his lifetime, using storytelling to describe the people he had known. His stream of consciousness is unsettling as he switches from past to present and floats between reality and fantasy.

Gao wrote in a complex collage of classical and vernacular writing. It is certain this book would be better read in the language it was written. The tonal aspect of Chinese is often employed to draw associations between words. His work here seems allusive and poetic, never quite declaring its full intent. Begun in China in 1982, shortly before his health scare and mountain retreat, it was finished in Paris in 1989. Writers in China have used allegory and symbolism to evade censorship which may account for the elusive imagery. With all this in mind it is still not an easy book to fully grasp.