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BOOKS
Miracle
on the Mountain
Nobel
laureate Gao Xingjian's story triumphs over the dogma
By
S. Prasannarajan
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SOUL
MOUNTAIN
By Gao Xingjian
Tr by Mabel Lee
HarperCollins
Price: $13.95
Pages: 510
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Even
Chinese novelists are not supposed to write like this: "Ah... this
dense palpable darkness, primordial chaos, no sky, no ground, no space,
no time, no existence and no non-existence; non-existence exists so there
is non-existence of existence; non-existence of existence exists so there
is non-existence of non-existence..." And the Swedish Academy is
not supposed to give away the Prize to writers who write like this. But
it has happened. Gao Xingjian, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has
emerged, his soul bared and his history tattered, from the 18th floor
anonymity of a Paris suburb to declare his existence as an exile from
the most sophisticated gulag of the Orient. Another manifestation of the
Stockholm Syndrome in aesthetics-a monumental obscurity brought to life
(and fame) by political correctness? The shudder of scepticism from the
salons of high literature was legitimate, going by the Academy record
in choosing the winner. Now, here is the winner's soul in English, for
the first time, and in it you see the scars of a private war between the
script of survival and the plot of control.
It's a strange
novel of traveller's revelations, inhabited by characters who are not
usually found in the social text of communism. The three avatars of the
storyteller-You, I and He-are chroniclers of the same story that requires
the distance of objectivity, the intimacy of subjectivity and the faith
of observation. Gao begins his journey not like Jesus to Golgotha, but
like Hans Castrop to the Magic Mountain. And if Soul Mountain rhymes with
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the first few pages make it less than
accidental, and you begin to agree with the critic who puts Gao's work
in the "school of bronchio-topographical fiction". For, you
learn from Chapter 12 that the narrator took this trip to the mountain
after being wrongly diagnosed with lung cancer (an autobiographical truth),
that a book had miraculously restored his life.
And it's
miracle all the way to Lingshan (Soul Mountain). Suddenly, Gao's journey
becomes less Mannish and more magical, almost like Alphonse van Worden's
journey through the haunted Sierra Morena in Jan Potocki's The Manuscript
Found in Saragossa, an all-time classic. Though, in the place of Potocki's
cabbalists and satanists and geometers and wandering Jews we have wild
men and Buddhist nuns and Daoist priests and Qichun snakes-and unedited
versions of eroticism and ethnography, history and mythology, and, of
course, the paraphrased pretence of communism. And this explanation from
Gao:"Fiction is ... the same as life and does not have an ultimate
goal."
That may
be why Lingshan is eternally elusive, salvation is never absolute. And
the traveller comes full circle, the mountain ceases to be the miracle.
Back in Beijing, he sees God-in a small green frog. "He is talking
to me with his eyes by opening and closing them. When God talks to humans
He doesn't want humans to hear His voice." And there is a meaning
in His blinking eyes: "There are no miracles. God is saying this,
saying this to this insatiable human being, me." For Gao, novelist,
painter, playwright, critic, it's a strange thing to say. He is a castaway
from communism's wildest shores, a refugee from a land where God is not
a small green frog but a big red doddering dragon, where magic is allowed
only on a computer screen, where one-dimensional men are preferred to
versatile sorcerers. The triumph of Soul Mountain is the triumph of story
over dogma. Thank the small green God, the storyteller is still alive.
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