Soul Mountain: Chapter 2

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.

If Gao, embarking on a journal of spiritual authenticity, truly believes that narrative by its nature obscures reality–then why does this book exist?

That’s the puzzle of Chapter 2, and here’s my attempt at the solution: Soul Mountain is a book that breaks the spell. A series of incantations that work countermagic to free the reader from the spell they’re already under. Much of the book, as I understand, pulls directly from Gao’s real life experience. So why did he turn his experience into a work of fiction?

Chapter Summary

Halfway up Qionglai Mountain, the narrator encounters a retired Qiang¹ village head who sings and dances for him in the traditional style, tells him about mountain blackmagic, and introduces him to Grandpa Stone, a dead old man whose body, hut, and possessions are preserved by magic.

There’s also some exposition from the narrator’s past life as a literary scholar, but that’s about all that happens. The magic is really in how it’s told.

The Presentation

One of the things that sticks out most is the cinematic nature of the narrative in this chapter. Consider the cinematic description of the Qiang man’s shamanic turn:

He intones strings of incantations. It’s not slow and relaxed like when he is singing, but just nan-nan-na-na to a quick beat. I can’t understand it at all but I can feel the mystical pull of the words and a demonic, powerful atmosphere instantly permeates the room, the inside of which is black from smoke. The glow of the flames licking the iron pot of mutton stew makes his eyes glint. This is all starkly real.

The movie adaptation of Soul Mountain would start with this scene. Compare against the first chapter, where nothing much happens outside of the narrator’s head, where the details seem thought rather than felt; the narrator is unmoored and drifting. The world comes at the narrator in fragments: half-glimpsed figures, a bridge, a road sign, the feeling of movement without destination. Here, the room is black with smoke and the flames are licking the iron pot. This is all starkly real.

That idea of clear and present reality bookends Chapter 2, which begins with:

It is in the Qiang region halfway up Qionglai Mountain, in the border areas of the Qinghai-Tibetan highlands and the Sichuan basin, that I witness a vestige of early human civilization — the worship of fire. Fire, the bringer of civilization, has been worshipped by the early ancestors of human beings everywhere. It is sacred. The old man is sitting in front of the fire drinking liquor from a bowl. Before each sip he puts a finger into it and flicks some on the charcoals which splutter noisily and send out blue sparks. It is only then that I perceive that I too am real.

And ends like this:

Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative. Reality can’t be verified and doesn’t need to be, that can be left for the “reality-of-life” experts to debate. What is important is life. Reality is simply that I am sitting by the fire in this room which is black with grime and smoke and that I see the light of the fire dancing in his eyes. Reality is myself, reality is only the perception of this instant and it can’t be related to another person. All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream.

I’ll come back to the beauty of that last sentence, but for now notice the movement the chapter makes between these two passages: we begin with the narrator confirming his own existence through an act of witness–watching someone else’s authentic relationship with the ancient world–and we end with reality dissolving back into pure perception, unverifiable and incommunicable, handed off in the second person to you.

We start with fire, the bringer of civilization, sacred, worshipped by the earliest ancestors of human beings everywhere. Fire gave humans mastery over darkness, over nature, over the terror of the unknown. The light of fire breaks the darkness, but its shape and color and motion usher in meaning and continuity–storytelling, what animates the world through the thoroughly real illusion of motion.

One of my core visual experiences is Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the Chauvet Cave paintings. The way the firelight made those thirty-thousand-year-old images move; bison legs multiplied in visual cacophony, lions in fierce procession. The paintings were made for firelight, which has the power to bring ochre on stone to life. Gao’s narrator, in a smoke-blackened room in the Qiang mountains, is similarly animated to life.

Seemingly despite himself, Gao resists the idea that anything can convey authentic meaning. He suggests that once you try to do anything with personal experience, its essence evaporates. The moment you turn it into narrative you’ve already lost what made it real. It’s a version of the Flower Sermon: the Buddha holds up a flower, Mahakashyapa smiles, and the transmission happens in that flash of direct communion, without words. That’s the narrator staring into the fire. But here he is, none the less, writing a novel about it.

The Cultural Revolution

The first chapter made subtle references to the Cultural Revolution; this chapter calls it out by name. The Qiang man tells how the traditional songs were deemed “dirty” and replaced by the Sayings of Mao Zedong.²

When the Red Guard came for Gao Xingjian he burned a suitcase full of manuscripts and was never the less sent to the rural labor camps. Soul Mountain was written in the 1980s, when China was attempting to distance itself from the Cultural Revolution’s worst excesses. Eventually allowed to return to literary work, Gao found that even the relative liberalization of the early 1980s had hard limits. His plays were dismissed and ridiculed in state media; in 1983 he was swept up in the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign. He left Beijing for the southwestern hinterland rather than face another stint at a labor camp, and that journey became the backbone of this novel.

The narrator’s brief self-exposition in Chapter 2 describes his old life as more concerned with “stringing together life’s manifestations” than with life itself. As a writer working within the institutions of Communist China, even after the Cultural Revolution, Gao would have been expected to produce work within the framework of Marxist literary theory and socialist realism: art in service of the revolution, literature as faithful representation of correct social reality.³ In Chapter 2 he writes:

In those contaminated surroundings I was taught that life was the source of literature, that literature had to be faithful to life, faithful to real life. My mistake was that I had alienated myself from life and ended up turning my back on real life. Life is not the same as manifestations of life. Real life, or in other words the basic substance of life, should be the former and not the latter. I had gone against real life because I was simply stringing together life’s manifestations, so of course I wasn’t able to accurately portray life and in the end only succeeded in distorting reality.

Despite the cultural context however, I don’t think Soul Mountain is merely a response to the Cultural Revolution. “Stringing together life’s manifestations” serves as a counterpoint against any attempt at narrative, in service of the state or not–including the one I am reading now. Gao’s narrator is out to undermine nothing less than the entire enterprise of turning experience into story, selecting and arranging the ten thousand things of a life into something that looks like meaning. The worst traps don’t look like traps, they look like enlightenment.

The Demon Wall

Another biographical detail: Gao had been misdiagnosed with terminal lung cancer. He spent some period of time believing he was going to die. Then his doctor discovered the mistake; there was no cancer. As the narrator describes:

Death was playing a joke on me but now that I’ve escaped the demon wall, I am secretly rejoicing. Life for me once again has a wonderful freshness. I should have left those contaminated surroundings long ago and returned to nature to look for this authentic life.

Reprieve from certain death jolts him back to life and breaks the spell of mountain blackmagic, which we learn about in Chapter 2:

A victim of mountain blackmagic won’t be able to find his way out of the mountains. They are like the “demon walls” I heard about as a child: when a person has been travelling for some time at night in the mountains, a wall, a cliff or a deep river appears right in front of him, so that he can’t go any further. If the spell isn’t broken and the person’s feet don’t move forward, even if he keeps walking, he stays exactly where he started off. Only at daybreak does he discover that he has been going around in circles. That’s not so bad, the worst is when a person is led into a blind alley — that means death.

If you’ve seen The Blair Witch Project or ever gotten truly lost in the woods, you know this feeling. You walk and walk and it seems like you’re going in circles, but you can’t tell where you’ve been and where you haven’t, because every part of the forest looks the same. Eventually something insurmountable blocks your path, and you have to turn around and retrace your steps. The demon wall keeps you walking in circles forever.

The parallel to the narrator’s old life is immediate and close. You put your energy and effort into something for years, thinking it’s what you’re supposed to do–the job, the manuscripts, the career, the books piled everywhere–and it looks like progress, it feels like movement, but you’re covering the same ground. Only at daybreak, when the light finally shines upon you, do you discover you’ve been going around in circles. For Gao that something was a mistaken cancer diagnosis. Death tapped him on the shoulder but didn’t take him, and the walls came down.

But the stakes are worse than merely walking in circles forever. The blind alley means death. In Chinese the likely phrase behind Mabel Lee’s “blind alley” is 死路–dead road–which, unlike the English-language idiom, implies a fearsome finality.⁴ I read that as spiritual death: not just a life going nowhere, but a life so thoroughly captured by false reality that the soul is extinguished. The narrator came close and was only saved because death was playing a joke.

Grandpa Stone

Having established the stakes as nothing less than spiritual life and death, existence and illusion, the narrator finds himself in a smoky hut in the presence of something ancient and real. And what does the ancient and real do? Mostly, it fucks with him. I can’t end this post without quoting my favorite exchange in its entirety:

“Is there an old hunter who knows about this sort of magic and can take me hunting with him?” I ask. “Grandpa Stone would be the best,” he says after thinking about it. “How can I find him?” I ask right away. “He’s in Grandpa Stone’s Hut.” “Where’s this Grandpa Stone’s Hut?” “Go another twenty li on to Silver Mine Gully then follow the creek right up to the end. There you’ll find a stone hut.” “Is that the name of the place or do you mean the hut of Grandpa Stone?” He says it’s the name of the place, that there’s in fact a stone hut, and that Grandpa Stone lives there. “Can you take me to him?” I ask. “He’s dead. He lay down on his bed and died in his sleep. He was too old, he lived to well over ninety, some even say well over a hundred. In any case, nobody’s sure about his age.”

The surreal and absurd humor of the entire situation recalls a Zen koan or something out of Kafka. The narrator goes on to ask for further details about Grandpa Stone, to which the Qiang man mostly responds with hearsay and uncertainty, and the narrator suspects the man is simply avoiding showing or telling him anything real–a hindrance to our narrator who, on a journey with mortal stakes, has entered a space where he takes magic and myth very seriously. Earnestly seeking the guide who can show him real life, he is directed to a dead man in a hut (named after him) that no one dares to visit, whose age nobody is sure of, whose body is preserved by magic, whose rifle never misses and nobody dares take. It’s like god has one of those dollar bills on a retractable wire.

But isn’t this precisely what the narrator should expect? He knows that:

Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.

He is sitting there trying to have a conversation about magic, when he already knows it is impossible for someone else to tell him about it in any way that would do him any good. The Qiang man cannot give him Grandpa Stone any more than the Buddha’s disciples could give each other the flower sermon. The knowledge only transmits in the moment of direct encounter, and you cannot arrange that moment in advance. All the Qiang man can do is point toward a dead man in a hut, and gesture vaguely in the direction of the mountain.

So, let’s ask the big question: Why does this book exist at all? If reality can only ever be subjective, if personal experience is corrupted the moment it becomes narrative, then what is this five hundred page novel doing? What are we doing here?

The novel has a fair amount of space remaining to justify itself, but I think it does so right here in Chapter 2, what that contradiction being the solution to itself. Gao, or his fictional stand-in, despite his stated skepticism about narrative, believes that art is the spell that breaks the demon wall. Not art that tells you something or leads you somewhere–that’s just a beautiful trap. On the other hand, art that disorients, that refuses to resolve, induces a state in the reader more liberating than any message. The Qiang man’s incantation is incomprehensible but we still feel it. Fifteen pages into Soul Mountain, we’re given a sign–and a warning–that all the trickery and misdirection, the narrative evasions, the dead ends and recursive humor are here to wake us from the circles we’re walking in. I appreciate the heads up.

The Pronouns

One more thing: the pronouns.

Departing from Chapter 1’s odd stylistic choice of second-person narrative, Chapter 2 is written in the first person. Whether the narrator of Chapter 2 is the same person as the narrator of Chapter 1 seems deliberately unclear. Given the warning we’ve received, I would suspect that finding the narrator is something we’ll have to do on our own.

The first occurrence of the first-person pronoun is the phrase I witness, which carries the weight of testimony, of being present at something that matters and being held accountable for having seen it. The second occurrence follows almost immediately: I perceive that I too am real.

Unlike Descartes in the west, who said I think, therefore I am,⁵ the narrator’s reality does not follow from the act of thought, but through the act of witness. The old man is real, and in watching his authentic relationship with the fire, the narrator, too, becomes real through the encounter. And Chapter 2 feels like a much more real encounter with the narrator than Chapter 1 did, which is maybe how the narrator earns the focus of the story.

You appears twice in the chapter. The first occurrence seems to address the narrator of the first chapter directly:

While you search for the route to Lingshan, I wander along the Yangtze River looking for this sort of reality.

This gives us geography:⁶ two narrators, two locations, two different orientations toward the same search. The “you” narrator turns inward, follows the route to the spiritual mountain, accepts his place as a perpetual stranger and that there are some things he’ll never understand. The “I” narrator turns outward, wanders into the world, looks for reality in smoke-filled rooms and conversations with old men, insists on real life.

A Swift-Flowing Stream

The second you comes at the end:

All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream.

In Ancient Greece, Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Similarly, Confucius stood by a stream and remarked, “It flows on like this, never ceasing, day or night.” Water imagery pervades the Chinese literary tradition, but really every tradition, because water, like fire, but also not like fire, is life.

The narrator of Soul Mountain says that reality cannot be related to another person. Then he addresses you directly and tells you what your heart is doing.

How does he know?

If you can read this, you are alive, and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream.

That’s the spell that breaks the spell.

Stray Observations and Musings

• So… is this a new character or the same?
• I’d love to know more about Qiang songs and oral tradition
• The Qiang man claims to be a “fun-loving person”. I wonder if there is any sort of cultural or linguistic connotation of that phrase?
• Out of nowehere, the narrator says the Qiang man is “unfortunately… past the age for romance.” I wonder why he says that? Is he projecting his own insecurities onto his companion?
• I seem to recall a later chapter from my first readthrough, where the narrator gets lost in the forest in the manner of mountain blackmagic.
• “Life for me once again has a wonderful freshness” (emphasis mine) - In reference to the story of how he was incorrectly diagnosed with lung cancer, only to find out later there was no cancer. Is “wonderful freshness” a Chinese phrase?
• The narrator talks about an oppressive smoke-filled room with “books piled everywhere.” Once again, I feel called out, as I write this in a room with books piled everywhere. It’s easy to get lost when there’s so much to read, and how do you know the reading will be worth it?
• “I believe in science but I also believe in fate”
• The narrator describes a 4-inch wooden statue of a man standing on his head. It’s a good luck charm for Qiang hunters. It reminds me of the Hanged Man tarot card. It was called “Wuchang Upside Down” and was collected by an anthropologist in Qiang in the 1930s. Is this a real statue? Who is Wuchang?
• The Qiang man says these statues are “old root”. What does that mean?
• “Is that the name of the place or do you mean the hut of Grandpa Stone?” - This sentence is especially hilarious to me, especially given the ambiguous use of place names generally in the book.
• There’s a rifle hanging on the wall inside Grandpa Stone’s hut. Is it Chekhov’s rifle? The man says, “it never misses its target, but nobody dares to go and take it.”
• Is reality really only oneself? Is this a false belief of the narrator? Are there maybe multiple ways to view reality, some subjective and some objective, some individual and some communal?
• “Once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative.” - does that make it less real? Does telling stories about ourselves–which is necessary to communicate our subjective reality–somehow make us less real? Do we sort of destroy ourselves through interaction with the world?