Breaking the Spell
There’s a lot going on in Chapter 2 of Soul Mountain, and I’ve had a lot to write about it. In six short pages, Gao Xingjian unlocks the folk traditions of wester China; explains the central mechanism by which we are deceived and kept in place; bemoans the comfortable yet contaminated surroundings of the state-sanctioned scholar; and proposes that reality cannot be related to another person, that the moment personal experience becomes narrative it loses what makes it real, that all the stringing together of life’s manifestations that we call literature is a step away from real life. Following this indictment of literature itself, the chapter ends, but the book continues on for another five hundred pages.