Soul Mountain Introduction and Chapter 1

A trip to Soul Mountain

Many years ago, I had wanted to just get out of society entirely, live an itinerant life, sleep on peoples’ couches or in the woods, just accept what came up. Eventually, I realized I was not going to do this, and so I settled for the idea of hiking the Appalachian Trail, which offered a similar experience, on a shorter timespan, with less risk of being stabbed or dying of hypothermia.

It’s hard to set aside six months of your life to do something that is entirely unproductive, and that type of thing only ever gets harder as life drags on. So I settled for four days on the Maryland section of the trail. Even then I was hemming and hawing over whether I was going to do it. But it was the end of the summer, work was about to get busy, I’d foolishly opted into a demanding career development class that was starting the next month, and I didn’t want to wait another year. So I took two days off of work, told my wife she was stuck with the child until I came back, weighed my pack and tested my gear the night before leaving¹, and set out, unsure of what to expect but exactly sure of where I was going, the trail being more or less a straight line.

Days spent on the trail are unproductive in the economic sense, but my trip was wildly productive by other measures. As part of my weight-dropping shakedown, I parted with a lot of items I would otherwise have liked to bring–books, extra clothes, extra food, binoculars. Things I kept: a stove and my aeropress (hot meals and coffee are part of what kept me going), a first-aid kit full of moleskin patches (I used to mock my wife for filling the first aid kit with these as opposed to actual first aid supplies; by the end of the trip they were all gone), and a pocket notebook in a leather portfolio. The notebook ended up being not quite big enough for my thoughts. The first day or so, my mind was so active that I had to intensely memorize every thought I felt worth writing down, because otherwise I would have spent my day writing rather than walking. My head was just full of the chatter of stray thoughts and ideas. Reading my journal over, I notice that at some point my writing shifted, that I had become more quiet and focused. I didn’t have the energy to waste thinking and writing about things that weren’t important; yet somehow my observations and feelings also got more general, abstract, hard to pin down, every phrase overloaded and pivoting across multiple dimensions of meaning. I really felt like I was going somewhere and experiencing something the way you don’t normally feel in your day to day life. If you’re like most people, you spend every day going places and experiencing things, but you don’t really feel like you’re on a journey, even if you are. On the trail, with nothing to do every day except for make it to the next campground in once piece, I really felt the journey. Reading Soul Mountain, I get the sense that it may have been written from a similar place.

Soul Mountain is the acclaimed novel by Gao Xingjian, one of the works for which he won the nobel prize in 2000. The book was written in the 1980s between the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests, and published in 1990, but not published in English until 2000.

I first encountered Soul Mountain a couple months after my trail experience, and unlike when I was on the trail I felt quite lost. For a prize-winning book written by an acclaimed author, who himself is no stranger to literary criticism, there appears to be little criticism and analysis available, especially for the purpose of guiding the English language reader. So, for the purpose of filling a void, I have taken it upon myself to write my way through Soul Mountain, as I did those 41 miles on the Appalachian Trail in a dry September years ago.

Summary of Chapter 1

The first chapter of Soul Mountain is easy enough, enjoyable reading, but the book gets more difficult later on, as there’s little sense of direct meaning or continuity. But I’m convinced that the meaning and continuity are there, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

Gao’s unnamed narrator arrives on a bus in a rural Chinese town, walks around, observes the locals, gets his bearings. That’s about it.

But he knows where he’s going! He relates a story from earlier in his trip, when a stranger on the train told him about Lingshan, or Soul Mountain, and drew him a map on the back of a cigarette box. And so right from the outside, we know, and the narrator knows, where is going and how he’s going to get there. Or do we?

Throughout the chapter, the narrator reflects on the idea of being a perpetual stranger. As the narrator settles down at an inn for the night, his silence interrupted by men shouting in the next room. He goes and tells them to be quiet, assuming they are up to no good, which would justify his demand. Instead, it appears they’re just playing cards, and he suddenly finds himself very uncomfortable, as if he has just walked into something he’ll never understand, and returns to his room.

Thoughts and Observations

• The narrator is one of those people who visits a new place and looks down on tourists and locals alike with a sort of cool detached curiosity, which shows through his observations. I’m guessing part of the journey will be about losing this sort of ironic distance from place.
• The novel, or at least the first chapter, is written in the second person, with the narrator referring to himself as you. Is this more cool detachment? Or is his internal storyteller so strong that it dominates the narrative? Or is the experience presented this way to convey a sense of the depersonalized and universal? In any case, the result is and unstable balance between the protagonist, the narrator and the reader.
• Lingshan is introduced as both a real geographical place and a mythological destination, with the narrator (who at one point claimed to have never heard of Lingshan) citing references in ancient texts including the Classic of the Mountains and Seas² and the Zen Buddhist “Flower Sermon” story of Mahakashyapa.³
• The chapter is full of sights, sounds, smells. Sensory details — food, headscarves, telephone poles — serve to as contrast to and ground against the mythological undertow.
• The narrator describes a bean curd dish that “disappeared for quite some years”–a quiet elegy for Cultural Revolution erasure of traditional life, and an acknowledgment that political forces will follow you to the end of the world.
• The chapter ends with the narrator reflecting on the conventional middle-aged life path. I’ll admit to feeling a bit called out here, which I can only believe is the point. Gao writes:

Today, you can’t know what traumas tomorrow will bring. You’ve learnt through experience everything you need to know. What else are you looking for? When a man gets to middle age shouldn’t he look for a peaceful and stable existence, find a not-too-demanding sort of a job, stay in a mediocre position, become a husband and a father, set up a comfortable home, put money in the bank and add to it every month so there’ll be something for old age and a little left over for the next generation?

What else are you looking for? Is this a rhetorical question or is it looking for an answer? The ambiguous narrative style would suggest both. There’s a sort of hostility to that question. What else are you looking for? Why can’t you be happy with what you’ve got? Why do you beat on, boat against the current? Actually giving an answer can be a sort of liberation. I hope there’s an answer.

• The card game seems at first like a strange tangent to end on, but it’s clearly signalling that the narrator is a sort of permanent outsider who will never completely understand the places he visits. Isn’t that how everything is, in a way, unless you’re a person who never ventures beyond the familiar?
• The dedication stone on a stone bridge, placed in 1983, is read by the narrator as the beginning of tourism. There’s a lot of narration about the value of discovering a place before it becomes commoditized, while also feeling apprehensive about the irreconcilable strangeness of places that have not been built for the benefit of outsiders. I may have given the impression above that the narrator thinks he’s too cool for school, and perhaps he does, but there’s a lot of careful though on this subject.
• The journey’s origin is arbitrary and capricious. I had to wonder where the narrator thought he was going, before he decided to embark for Lingshan.

Thematic musings

The idea that surfaces as you (see what I did there? sift through this first chapter is that of the familiar vs the strange. The perspective is second person, present-tense. Who’s telling the story? Who is this happening to? When is it happening (now)? The narrator observes a woman wearing a headscarf in a particular way that “dates back generations.” He then contemplates how much the words for an unmarried young woman differ in the north vs the south of China.

Similarly, the bean curd dish eaten from the stall across the stone bridge is both strange and familiar. Familiar in the sense that it is part of a cherished tradition, but strange to see now, it having “disappeared for quite some years.” Thus, the passage of time, in addition to new places, can make the familiar strange and vice versa.

China, a huge and diverse county that somehow shares a unified culture and history, must be a place where the strange and the familiar are permanently juxtaposed. I’ve been to China once, and, being a foreigner, everything felt foreign. The idea that even native Chinese often feel like strangers in their own county is somehow comforting despite its inherent tension. And it’s the same in many large countries, of course, and not just as a result of history and geography. It’s not uncommon to feel like a stranger while sitting at home and watching TV.

When you’re permanently a stranger, when can you be at home? At the end of the chapter, the narrator attempts to make himself at home, in a room he paid for, while a mysterious (to him), raucous card game interrupts. After failing to gain basic ontological access to the card game situation, the narrator returns to his room, where he must seal himself off from his surroundings, with a mosquito net, before he can go to sleep.

We all engage in similar mediation with the world. Our information and even sensory perception increasingly comes through digital filters. We look at the world through a screen, narrated by someone we don’t know. We’ve replaced the voices in our head with a collective screaming into the void. I’m not bringing this all up to lament the state of contemporary life, but only to point out that a book about navigating the strange vs the familiar, and trying to find oneself in a world that feels constantly inaccessible, may be more relevant than ever.