--3 an inner
journey
This is
not a travelogue or a history, however. Chinese
social experience and history come across as
disorganized pastiche. GX provides little narrative
or conceptual continuity. While we go with the
narrator on a journey around China, he shows greater
interest in the complementary journey into his inner
self. He does not seem to be in search of the
connection between himself and a generic Chinese
spirit, despite the many pages devoted to the sights
and sounds of his native country. His search for
self-understanding, rather, takes sophisticated
literary form. This results, surely, from GX's keen
interest in the art of modern fiction and modern
forms of dramatic representation. (Titles of
published works on both topics appear in a useful
appendix.) We are entitled to think that the formal
strategies of the narrator's journey in search of
himself show us something about selfhood as it is
developing in the new era of globalization.
--4 selfhood
in the new global reality
It
helped me to think about Soul Mountain by
making an assumption about culture, even though the
assumption lacks the legitimacy of responsible
research. I assumed that a decade after the end of
the Cold War we are seeing the outlines of a new
globalized culture coming into sight. Voices in that
culture have had their nurture in a national
identity. But they bring their identity to a set of
shared attitudes that inform a discourse that no
single nationality owns. Some might say that this
discourse, though global in appearance, is mainly
American, undergirded by transnational corporations
managed in the American style. I would like to
believe this is not the case. The emerging global
culture, rather, is a weaving of threads with a
"multicultural" origin. The key to
multiculturalism as it arose in the past quarter of a
century was its rejection of hegemonic privilege for
any one culture, especially the dominant American
WASP culture. This putative globalized
culture-in-the-making has abundant historical
antecedents. But just as contemporary economic
globalization differs from previous periods of
international trade, so the culture I think I see
emerging differs from previous efforts to share ideas
and prize great works of art worldwide.
I
think the Nobel jurors have had that new idea of
globalized culture in mind when they have selected
writers such as GX. They showed it, I suggest, when
in 1988, for example, they chose the Egyptian writer
Naguib Mahfouz--their first Arab winner.
Anyway,
this working assumption allowed me to look through a
different optic at Soul Mountain. It enabled
me to move beyond any interest I may have had in
knowing what makes a Chinaman tick. Perhaps it helped
me to see GX opening a window on the way an
individual subject in the newly developing globalized
culture might think about being himself.
--5 a
question of East and West
Such a
global subject came to my mind after the narrator
talked with people about the huge Yangtze dam being
planned for the Three Gorges, which will destroy
immeasurably valuable Chinese material culture. He
said: "I am perpetually searching for meaning,
but what in fact is meaning? Can I stop people
from constructing this big dam as an epitaph for the
annihilation of their selves?" He decided that
he will limit himself to searching for his small
individual self. He then declared himself indifferent
even to the fate of his writing about himself.
"Hasn't enough culture been destroyed? Does
humankind need so much culture? And moreover, what is
culture?" (308) GX turned from a thoroughly
Chinese cultural situation and in a wink was thinking
about the cultural issue facing all humankind.
Perhaps in that small turn we can glimpse the new
sensibility about being in a globalized culture. In
Eastern fashion the narrator repudiated superficial
notions of Western progress; but he posed a
thoroughly Western question about the relationship
between self and culture.
--6 an
esthetic project
In GX's
hands, the narrator's quest for understanding the
self becomes an esthetic project, a quest for
artistic form. His book strives to be a novel even as
his narrator strives to know what he should know
about himself. In a robustly Western way, Soul
Mountain conflates content and form. Despite my
inability to grasp the complexity and nuance of the
Chinese experiences in the book, I as a Westerner
recognize a familiar artistic project going on. Yes,
GX is Chinese; but he is Chinese plus; he is one of
us. While I may not fully get his Chinese-ness, I am
able to see the connection he makes between that
Chinese-ness and the global discourse on self and
culture. I recognize his uses of form to probe his
interest in self.
--7 formal
issue: multiple selves
GX
famously creates in Soul Mountain a
"polyphony of narrating selves," as the
jacket copy says. The first-person narrator acquires
a "you" and a "she" and then a
"he." This mix of voices talking to one
another suggests that GX's fictional persona differs
fundamentally from the deep-structured,
individualistic modernist self. He links these
multiple selves to the simple need to alleviate
loneliness, a fitting objective for a nomad alone on
the road. It is worth hearing GX's explanation
first-hand:
You
know that this loneliness of mine is incurable, that
no-one can save me and that I can only talk with
myself as the partner of my conversation.
In
this soliloquy you are the object of what I relate, a
myself who listens intently to me--you are simply my
shadow.
...I
let you create a she, because you are like me and
also cannot bear the loneliness and have to find a
partner for your conversation. (312)
Through
these discrete imagined personae the narrator strives
to "affirm" himself "in this vast
unordered world." (313) Something here resonates
with the postmodern construction of self on a flat
surface lacking depth. GX's pronouns attain something
of the bizarre quality of body piercing. A person can
choose to take on a shape of her own and discard that
when the social atmosphere changes. The individual in
the new globalized culture is coming to look like a
private argument about the social surroundings.
Indeed, GX's "she" typically sustains a
verbal sparring match with "I" or
"he" or "you."
--8 formal
issue: fiction for amusement
The
formal strategy of multiplying the self of the
narrator with pronouns does not lead GX to any
satisfying conclusions about the journey of life.
Fiction of this sort, the narrator observes, "is
the same as life and does not have an ultimate
goal." (315) And his decisions about the loose
form of his novel similarly fail to make a
philosophical affirmation. Instead, its "slapped
together" (453) form seems to say that life
lacks an explainable structure. The nomadic
novel--reminiscent of the Spanish
picaresque--represents the only meaning of life that
GX seems willing to espouse:
[Life
is] just like this hornet's nest. It's a pity to
abandon it, yet if one tries to remove it one will
encounter a stinging attack. Best to leave it just
hanging there so that it can be admired. At this
point in your thinking, your feet become lighter, it
is fine wherever your feet take you, as long as there
are sights to see. (245)
In an
entire brief chapter (number 72, pp. 452-455), GX
turns his novel directly on itself and asks whether
it is in fact a novel. "You" and
"he" have a real critical go at it. The
book has no complete story; but it has many stories.
It has no protagonist; but it has its talkative
pronouns. It is imitating Western modernism; but it
is like Eastern gazettes, romances, and the like,
which traditionally qualify as fiction. Whatever the
book is, GX returns to the main reason he is writing
it--to amuse himself, to avoid loneliness. The
omnibus nature of fiction finally overwhelms the
narrator in a two-page tour de force touching on just
about every trait ever attributed to fiction (454-5)
and resolving nothing. Toward the end of the book, he
says, "I don't understand the meaning of these
reflections." (480)
GX's
sophistication as a Western critical thinker on
fiction in the end remains rooted in an Eastern
freedom from categories--categories of literary
thought and of human purpose as well. He finds it
better to assert the ultimate importance of walking
out in search of the mountain than to imprison
himself in a form of writing--or a philosophy of
life--that is merely arbitrary and unfaithful to the
radical reality of human experience.
--9 the price
of freedom
GX pays
a dear price for his formal freedom. "Shanghai
vixen," a regular reviewer of Chinese books on
Amazon.com, called the book on 25 July 2001 a
"significant work but a tedious read." She
reported from China that friends who read the
original Chinese version praised the book. She said
its "many unusual literary devices work very
cleverly in the original Chinese, but are awkward in
the translation." She did not blame the
translator for this but the "linguistic
discrepancy" between Chinese and English.
That
sounds believable. Often I could sense a significance
pulsing under an episode only to feel it eluding me.
A globalized culture, it seems, will not succeed
completely in incorporating an artifact from a
national trove, even when the artifact itself strives
to transcend its origin. The irreducible difference
of languages resists the impulse of globalization to
create a completely shared culture for the world. To
have any hope of reaching Soul Mountain, learn
to read Lingshan in the original Taipei
edition of 1990.
END
index: an
essay in 9 hypertext jumps
28 August 2001 Copyright © 2001 Richard P.
Richter
