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'Soul Mountain' Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee

A Chinese traveler seeks meaning of life

Sunday, February 25, 2001

By John Freeman

	Soul Mountain By Gao Xingjian, translated by Mabel Lee HarperCollins $27.00

In 1983, two things happened to dissident Chinese writer Gao Xingjian that forever changed his life:

A routine visit to his doctor revealed he had terminal lung cancer. Then, as X-rays two weeks later showed, the tumor had mysteriously disappeared.

Gao re-entered his old life overjoyed, yet suddenly conscious of how stifling and hypocritical his literary world was. Aggravating his unease were rumors that the Chinese government planned to send him to a worker camp in a remote province.

He wisely fled Beijing for the cover of the ancient forests and mountains in the Sichuan area of southwest China. In five months, he traveled nearly 10,000 miles, tracing the Yangtze River from its source to the coastline.

His journey, begun as an escape from potential peril, became an exploration of life’s meaning. His novel tells the fascinating and exasperatingly elliptical story of that trip, as Gao searched for inner peace.

A tapestry of travel notes, memoir, fabulist stories and legends of the Qiang, Miao and Yi people, the book can be labeled a novel only in the loosest sense. The closest American counterpart might be Thoreau’s “Walden.” Like that work, Gao’s novel lacks plot, character and forward momentum.

What it does depict, however, is a rich portrait of the opinions and spiritual life of its author. Much like Thoreau, Gao is an environmentalist, believes in civil disobedience and is a deeply curious thinker. He rambles, inventing scenes and embellishing on whatever subject comes to mind. While his thoughts meander, Gao stays true to his goal -- the essence of life.

Away from the city’s hustle and bustle, he wanders from town to town, moving toward more isolated, rural parts of China. On a train, a passenger tells him of a place called “Soul Mountain,” reported to be one of the country’s most spectacular sites. In each village he visits, Gao inquires about the mountain, getting varied and often contradictory answers.

As he continues his trek, he learns about his country’s people along the way. He catalogs local customs with an anthropologist’s eye, noting how differently people observe faith -- or lack it -- in a divinity.

As his journey stretches on, Gao realizes that Soul Mountain is less an actual place than a state of mind. Among the august beauty of China’s metasequoia trees and the people who live in their shade, he recognizes how inconsequential is the self. In nature, he discovers the freedom of a cosmic unity.

His country awoke to this truth in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, when legions of young Chinese artists, writers, and activists protested -- valiantly and in vain -- the strictures of the government. Seen in this context, the novel is a relic of an age when an oppressive government caged the personal liberties of its best and brightest.

Dredging gems from the book can be at once refreshing and tedious. Translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee, “Soul Mountain” shows Gao’s inconsistency as a writer.

Some passages, such as those that sing the virtues of nature, resonate with Gao’s humble awe.

In other sections, however, Xingjian is less eloquent, offering such truisms as “Reality exists only through personal experience, and it must be personal experience.”

In the novel’s closing pages, Gao defends his scattered approach to a make-believe critic. Like the best Chinese literature before him, he claims his writing will be modeled only after itself. It will reflect the paucity of knowledge in the world, rather than fabricate a tidy circumference for it.

“It would be just like a story, with parts told from beginning to end and parts from end to beginning ...conclusions or fragments which aren’t followed up, parts which are developed but aren’t completed.”

A better description of this profound and elaborate, vexing book cannot be had.

John Freeman is a free-lance writer who lives in New York.