Bev Kunkel
Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain
 
 

Gao Xingjian’s great longing for inner peace and freedom coupled
with his desire to creatively express his own reality launches him on a secret
and solitary journey into the districts of Qiang, Miao and Yi located at the
furthermost edges of the Han Chinese civilization where he explores
ancient traditions and activities with deep curiosity and wonder and as if
seen through the eyes of many others. Xingjian intuitively embraces the
artist, writer, poet, philosopher, historian and archeologist within himself
thus providing a multifaceted and composite eye from which to tell his story.
His beloved and sacred Soul Mountain autobiographically chronicles his
travels as he successfully finds his way through the wilderness, lighting the
magical fire of all fires that expresses his uniquely burning spirit and puts
into context the life he is ultimately experiencing in written form.
Gao Xingjian is a masterful storyteller but the significance of Soul
Mountain will be lost unless one begins to understand his world and the
political climate within which he expressed his ideas and longings. Gao
Xingjian entered the world on January 4, 1940 in the tethered and torn
China just before its invasion by the Japanese. Dramatic and sweeping
changes take place within China in the aftermath of the civil war that ensues
between the Communists and Nationalists Parties. With the victorious defeat
of the Nationalists the People’s Republic of China quickly emerges and
painstakingly determines how to unify and rebuild a country of 600 million
people. It was within this precarious and uncertain environment that Gao
Xingjian thrived and therein completed his formal education graduating in
1962 from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute with a major in French.

For nearly a decade, beginning in 1966, the whole country was actively
caught up in and held captive by the Cultural Revolution. This "revolution"
was a struggle initiated by Mao Zedong against those who would willingly
follow policies in opposition to his own.

The Cultural Revolution cast in its wake a dark shadow throughout
China that nearly culminated in civil war and successfully succeeded in
pitting the Chinese people against one another. The people did everything
they could to protect themselves. In the name of self preservation they
resorted to attacking others including family and friends. The main targets
were bureaucrats, intellectuals, experts and people of influence and
especially those with foreign connections. Over 100 million people were
victimized in this way and the loss of lives during this political nightmare
numbered into the tens of thousands. During this fiendish period of time
that the "self" was erased from individual thought and creativity. Nearly
everything remotely related to being human was cauterized or repressed and
exchanged for the mandated socialism of distorted reality. None-the-less
Gao Xingjian wrote hundreds of poems, prose and plays during this period
knowing full well that they could never be published. He lived in constant
dread that his unpublished manuscripts would be found and used as evidence
proving that he ruthlessly defied the guidelines of conformity as set out by
the Chinese Communist Party. As it became increasingly more difficult to
hide his work he resorted to burning them rather than face the formidable
consequence of a terminal silence.

The reign of terror ended with the death of Mao Zedong in September
of 1976 and the arrest and removal from power of its most radical leaders
(The Gang of Four) the following September. The reconstruction of China
began anew and the idea of continuous revolution subsided and more liberal
policies were implemented. This opened the door for Gao Xingjian to
publish short stories, plays, critical essays and novels as well as participate
as a member in two writers’ delegations abroad traveling first to France in
1979 and then to Italy in 1980. By the early 1980s he had attained both
national and international recognition as a writer and critic for his
experimental writing of drama, fiction and theory. With the publication of
his book A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction in 1981 it
became clear that his writing was in opposition to the official exponents as
set out in the Chinese Communist Party guidelines. He was accused of
promoting the ideas of the modernist and decadent West and quickly found
himself caught in the quagmire of constant surveillance. Under the heavy
shadow of criticism and suspicion Xingjian made his successful debut as a
playwright in 1982 with the staged performance of Absolute Signal at the

Beijing People’s Arts Theatre. Then in 1983 his play Bus Stop was banned
from performance and he was identified as one of the targets of "the oppose
spiritual pollution" campaign and banned from publishing period. To make
matters even worse Xingjian is told that he has lung cancer during a routine
health exam. Resigning himself to the reality of an early death and
overwhelmed by the possibility of incarceration at the infamous prison
farm located in the province of Qinghai he learns that he has been falsely
diagnosed. As his body surges with joyous relief at having avoided deaths
ugly embrace his revitalized hope of life ignites into immediate action and
decisive flight from Beijing. Advanced royalties from an up and coming
book provide the financial means for his escape and temporary exile in the
wilderness of rural China.

And so Gao Xingjian’s journey begins. As he travels through the
historical districts of rural China and explores several nature preserves he
gives thoughtful consideration to the relationship between the individual and
nature. He investigates both the Daoist and Buddhist ways of life via little
excursions to temple and institutional sites. He quickly comes to the
realization that he misses the warmth of human interaction and society
despite the troubled states of mind it inspires. An essay by Bev Kunkel.

History indicates that when people are isolated and deprived of
sensory stimulus and social interchange they immediately begin to
hallucinate and lose touch with reality. To remove a man or woman
from community is to deprive them of their humanity. When deprived of a
we the solitary I is devoid of a standard by which to measure perception,
incapacitated in the making judgment, incapable of delineating what is
within from without, disabled from discerning the objective from the
subjective as well as indeterminate in separating reality from illusion.

Obviously aware of the above facts Xingjian ingeniously devises a twofold
plan of action utilizing his gift of storytelling to help him combat the
loneliness of exile all the while reaching toward the treasured goal of
creative self expression through literary experimentation.

The unusual and mysterious "others" that Gao Xingjian so eloquently
creates for companionship become the main characters of Soul Mountain.
Springing from the core of the "self" they are reflected in the singular tense
pronouns of "I", "she", "he", and "you" and their anonymous stories become
Gao Xingjian literary reaction and response to the dehumanizing strategy
engineered by the Communist Party as a way to control the masses through
erasure and sacrifice of the self by forced social conformity.