A picaresque infinity

In the Soul Mountain, the proliferation and an aesthetics of pronouns explores the many possibilities of the self in a narrative cosmos of selfhood. It is in counterpoint to the repressive control of identity and the self in totalitarian regimes, says A. V. ASHOK.

IN awarding the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature to Gao Xingjian, the Swedish Academy hailed his novel Soul Mountain as "one of those singular literary creations that seem impossible to compare with anything but themselves." The genesis of Soul Mountain is an indispensable dimension of its meaning. After the dark night of Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-76), during which he had to burn many of his manuscripts for fear of arrest, Gao made a successful debut as a playwright with "Absolute Signal" (1982) in the apparently liberal climate of the post-Mao China of Deng Xiaopeng.

But in 1981, Gao's theoretical book A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Fiction had made him a marked "modernist" artist and brought him under "surveillance." In 1983, Gao's Beckettian play "Bus Stop" was indicted by the Communist authorities as "the most pernicious play since the establishment of the People's Republic" and cancelled after a few performances. A group of people waiting for 10 years for a bus that does not come at a bus stop that also turns out to be not a bus stop at all became a metaphor for the Chinese people stranded and beguiled by the illusory promise of the Cultural Revolution.

Alongside this setback, Gao was diagnosed as terminally ill with lung cancer. Six weeks later, when Gao, in his own way, was already preparing for his tryst with imminent death, this diagnosis was withdrawn. Though "reborn," Gao was alarmed by rumors that he was to be despatched to one of the prison farms of Qinghai. In what was a "great escape," Gao fled Beijing to the mountains and forests of Sichuan in the far south-west and incognito travelled all the way along the Yangtze River to the east coast, crossing eight provinces and seven nature reserves in an epic journey of 15,000 kilometres from July to November, 1983. This odyssey of wandering in freedom and solitude metamorphosed as the massive quest narrative of Soul Mountain. Completed in exile in Paris in 1989, Lingshan/ Soul Mountain was published in 1990 in Taipei. Translated into Swedish in 1992 by Goran Malmqvist and into French in 1995 by Noel and Lillane Dutrait, Lingshan has been translated into English as Soul Mountain by Mabel Lee, who had also written a series of critically influential articles on Gao's achievement. Soul Mountain was published in Australia in July 2000 and released at a function in Sydney in the presence of Gao.

Written in suffering as an antidote to repressive Communist control of the identity of the self and the meaning of life, Soul Mountain was not only an expression of freedom but more importantly, the very writing of Soul Mountain was an experience of freedom for Gao. It is an enactment in words of the existential exhilaration of a surge of life that accompanies a narrow escape from death and is a narrative exuberance of freedom in the form of a picaresque polyphony of a variety of other modes of being, feeling and thought that is the antithesis of monologic meaning and ideological life in a Communist state. Soul Mountain enshrines the consolation of freedom in writing for the suffering self in its struggle against the bondage of totalitarian politics and evokes reverence for the courage of the literary imagination to be a feat of freedom and truth that overcomes the chains and lies of history.

Soul Mountain is a monumental soliloquy of the self with a quaint storytelling arrangement. To "alleviate" loneliness, the "I" of the novel, who is a naturalist, anthropologist, ethnologist and storyteller all rolled into one, splits into "you" to have at least an imaginary "partner" to talk to on his prolonged research expedition. "I" soliloquises with stories of his travels to fabulous places and his encounters with all sorts of people and the stories they tell him. "You" is a "reflection" of "I" and in turn creates "she" because "you... also cannot bear the loneliness" and endlessly tells fables and legends to "she" who listens to "you" to overcome her own loneliness and who also tells stories. Eventually, "she can't go a step further with you" and "walks off". Almost simultaneously "you and I merge" and "there is a need to step back to create space. That space is he." This contract of talking pronouns ("So you talk with her, just like I talk with you") swells into a storytelling spree. The countless soliloquies and dialogues of these first person, second person and third person pronouns conjure a narrative cosmos of selfhood. Gao's opposition to the capitulation of the self to the collective is so stern and his devotion to the inviolability of the self is so total that Soul Mountain is out of bounds to the collective even in its rudimentary and innocent form of the plural pronoun "we". The romance of the "I" in Soul Mountain offsets the tragedy of the constriction of self in collectivised societies.

The first sentence of Soul Mountain is suffused with the intertextual pathos of allusion to a bus and a bus stop:

The old bus is a city reject. After shaking in it for twelve hours on the potholed highway since early morning, you arrive in this mountain county town in the south. In the bus station, which is littered with ice-block wrappers and sugar cane scraps, you stand with your backpack and a bag and look around for a while.

When the novel opens, an anonymous someone alights full of doubts about his/her whereabouts at an unnamed town as a stage in a curious journey to Lingshan:

You can't explain why you're here. It happened that you were on a train and this person mentioned a place called Lingshan... You asked him where he was going.

"Lingshan."

"What?"

"Lingshan, ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain."

You'd been to lots of places, visited lots of famous mountains, but had never heard of this place.

Carrying only a sketch of the route to Lingshan on a cigarette box, "you" is in need of some sign to be assured that "you're on the right track and haven't been tricked into making this long excursion." What only seemed a casual use of "you" as an objective reference to oneself ceases when the reader is transfixed by this intriguing sentence in chapter two: "While you search for Lingshan, I wander along the Yangtze River looking for this sort of reality." It now dawns on the reader that some narrative mischief of perspectival pronouns is afoot. In a spell of introspection, "I" wonders:

I don't know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self... If you concentrate on looking at yourself, you will find that your self will gradually separate from the self you are familiar with and multiply into many stratling forms.

"I" scattering itself into "you", "she" and "he" is whimsical as it is a sign of the freedom of the self to do whatever it wants with itself. The dispersion of "I" into "you", "she" and "he" is also philosopical as it is a distancing/objectifying technique that contributes to the self-understanding of "I". The narrative aesthetics of pronouns as characters imaginatively supports the theme of freedom and the self.

Soul Mountain is a cornucopia of stories. Tender, wild and grotesque stories about the strange ways and sad destinies of men and women proliferate in picaresque infinity and generate a dizzy sense of the unfathomable enigma of human fate. There are memorable people that "I" encounters on his expedition like the Qiang retired village head, the old botanist, the forest ranger devoted to keeping watch over the eerie mountain at Lingyan, the young woman who works at the cultural office reading room, the doctor-turned-monk, "I's" maternal grandmother, the young Daoist nun of the Palace of Supreme Purity and the Wild Man of Shennongjia. There are unforgettable characters in the stories that "you" tells like the Second Master's bandit wife, the young woman from the city who jumped into the river, Mamei, and the zhuhuapo. People, places and things in the stories, of "you" and "I" are all steeped in an endlessness of meaning. To cite just one example: "You" tells the story of a grave robber's "great- grandfather's great-grandfather's great-grandfather"; a giant sequoia is "a solitary remnant of the ice age a million years ago"; walking down a road in Wuyizhen, "you" tells "she": "In the Ming Dynasty five hundred years ago, no, even a few decades ago, to walk along this road at night you had to carry a lantern."

Soul Mountain is a prodigious narrative act of self-realisation that extends from "primitive chaos" without "top bottom left right distance sequence" to the politics of the Cultural Revolution. Even "you" and "I" are implicated in an evolutionary emergence out of the primordial aduality of Fuxi and Nuwa: "At that time the individual did not exist. There was not an awareness of a distinction between 'I' and 'you'. The birth of I derived from fear of death, and only afterwards an entity which was not I came to constitute you." Through the story of "you" and "she", "I" explores the bliss and menace of sexuality in episodes and stream of consciousness of pure romance, erotic ecstasy and macabre horror. In a voice richly textured with the mystery of time and space and with a mind of insatiable curiosity to know people and their customs, practices, traditions and beliefs, and a heart of solidarity with trees, flowers, birds and animals, "I" through his stories contemplates the sheer vastness of human significance. The picaresque self of Soul Mountain, freely realising the unfinalisable diversity and depth of human experience and meaning, represents the actualisation of the potential for self-knowledge repressed in the muzzled mind in closed societies.

Soul Mountain is a pictorial delight and an atmospheric extravaganza. Remote villages connected by odd buses and trains are sites of forgotten wisdom and homes of mysterious shamans. Monasteries and temples of mystical enchantment signify a "realm of purity where there is an absence of self and lust." Outer forms become metaphors for inner states. Pictures of nature function as snapshots of consciousness. Exploring an ancient landscape of exotic mountains and huge trees, of moss, mist, darkness, rain and rivers, "I" is overwhelmed by the awesome reality of time and nature and is filled with an "indescribable sadness": "My passing through here, even my very existence, is ephemeral to the point of meaninglessness." Though a man with a "lust to express" and who compulsively feels the "need to find someone I can to talk to", "I" is "stripped of words" and reduced to "an inner silence" by the "unadorned splendour and beauty of nature." There is an epiphany of transcendence in the presence of an azalea:

Some distance away is a white azalea bush which stuns me with its stately beauty... Lush white flowers are scattered beneath the bush... This is pristine natural beauty. It is irrepressible, seeks no reward, and is without goal... I take deep breaths of the pure air of the forest, inhaling and exhaling is effortless and I feel the very depths of my soul being cleansed. The air penetrates to the sole of my feet, and my body and mind seem to enter nature's grand cycle.

There is the "terror" of being utterly lost in thick white mist: "I shout out but there is no reply. I shout out again but hear my own muffled trembling voice immediately vanish without even echoing... I run, shout out, suddenly lurching from one side to the other, I am deranged." There is also "primitive darkness" that extinguishes even "the outline of a body" and "It is as if I am somewhere observing the destination from which I have come." When stuck almost knee-deep in the slush of the bank of the "lonely lake" of Caohai cradled in the mountains with a boat only a few feet away that can make him "vanish into this lake and mountain scenery where lake and sky unite," "I" wonders: "Can this possibly be the primitive loneliness devoid of all meaning that I seek?"

The art of Soul Mountain is a landmark in the achievement of the narrative imagination in the 20th Century. Befitting an account of his search for emancipation, "I" fashions an unconventional artifice to compose a liberated narrative. An album of memories, a portfolio of portraits, a sketchbook of landscapes, a travel diary, a compendium of stories, a journal of philosophy, a notebook of a naturalist, the jottings of an anthropologist, a manual of esoteric wisdom, folksongs and chants, an autobiography therapeutically written at a critical threshold in life for the recovery of spirit and a private grail myth, Soul Mountain is a dazzling pastiche of genres. Like the magical pronouns and the picaresque stories, the multiform narrative of Soul Mountain is an emblem of freedom of meaning and limitless possibilities in an infinite world.

A novel about the self, Soul Mountain, like the self, is self- reflexive. Just when the reader is past 400 pages and tends to find it turning into a meandering tedium, the novel in a flash of uncanny metafictional clairvoyance duplicates the reader's distress and wonders whether it is only a disorganised and disconnected picaresque mess of "fragments without any sequence" utterly lacking a single "complete story" with "personalities" and not pronouns:

You have 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!

There are moments of introspection for both "I" and the novel. "I" muses:

But why have I come to this mountain?... What does this sort of experience mean to me?... Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytic thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means?

At Kuimen, "I" is overcome by a deep existential disquiet that simultaneously draws Soul Mountain into self-reflexivity:

In the quiet of night, listening to the faint lapping of the waves of the Yangtze, I ponder what I might do in the remaining years of my life... I am perpetually searching for meaning, but what in fact is meaning? Can I stop people from constructing this big dam...? ... I may as well write a book on the human self without worrying whether it will be published. But then of what consequence is that whether one book more, or one book less, is written? Hasn't enough culture been destroyed? Does humankind need so much culture? And moreover, what is culture?

Haunted by a nameless anguish and unsure of its cure, "I" talks about the painters Ba Da and Xu Wei who "couldn't hear the world" and "had no choice but to go mad." But the painter Gong Xian "didn't go mad" and "withdrew far away to a remote corner and immersed himself in a realm of pure dream" and created paintings of "pure isolation and serenity." What sort of solution to the sorrow of "I" is Soul Mountain? "I" defines Soul Mountain as his "karma" to secure "peace of mind" in "this vast unordered world" but affirms that "in the boundless world there are all sorts of mysteries external to you and me."

Reading Soul Mountain is the literary equivalent of finding our way through time and space to the summit of the soul and there in the immaculate freedom of eternity and infinity, proclaiming: "I know this is God."

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