Soul Mountain

Nobel Prize-winning Chinese author Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain (2000) is the nonlinear story of an unnamed narrator who ventures into the heart of rural China to find the legendary, elusive Lingshan (Soul Mountain). The novel is at least partly inspired by Xingjian's own travels, interspersed with both real and imagined characters, snippets of folklore, and various fantasies and fictional episodes.

The novel opens as the narrator arrives in a remote mountain town in the south of China. He has come from his home in Beijing after an extremely troubling experience. Doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer, the same disease that claimed his father's life, and he started to panic. However, after another series of examinations and x-rays, he learned that he is actually fine. He does not have cancer and will live a long and healthy life. With a new determination to experience life and adventure, he sets out to the furthest reaches of China to live along the Yangtze River with the poor and marginalized. During his travels, he hears about a mystical place called Soul Mountain and grows determined to one day find it.

In the meantime, he gains an intimate, firsthand account of rural Chinese life. He wanders through woodlands and wildlife preserves. He gets to know local residents wherever he goes, finding out about their lives and their relationships to the land. He tours parks with forest rangers and archaeologists, devoting entire chapters to the natural wonders of China's flora and fauna. He meets with elderly sages, absorbing their wisdom. Moreover, wherever he goes, he learns wild and fantastical stories that fuel the hearts and imaginations of the rural Chinese.



Eventually, he makes his way to Jiangxi, where he grew up. This stirs memories of his childhood, namely reminiscences of his late mother and grandmother. Nevertheless, like all of the narrator's travels, he soon moves on to the next adventure.

Though he largely visits only remote areas, the narrator does occasionally go to larger cities. There, he finds that people recognize him. The narrator reveals himself to be a writer of some renown and something of a celebrity among the more culturally refined. During his brief stops in bigger cities, he allows himself to enjoy the appreciation and hospitality of his admirers.

At one point on his journey, the narrator meets a nurse only referred to as She. The tone of his story transforms from an introspective inner voyage to a meditation on the beauties and complexities of sensual pleasures. He and She engage in a romantic relationship, but it is clear that She is a troubled soul. She frequently has outbursts of anger, fear, and anxiety. Her multifaceted persona leaves the reader to deduce if She is one single woman, or a combination of many different women, or simply no woman at all—just a figment of the narrator's fantasies.



Through it all, the narrator continues his quest to find Soul Mountain. Finally, he reaches a mountaintop monastery, where he meets an elderly, pure-line Taoist who refuses to answer any of his questions. The Taoist allows the narrator to stay at the monastery for as long as he'd like, and the old man does pass along one bit of wisdom. He tells the narrator that he can stay or he can keep searching, but he will ultimately have to return to a normal life among normal people. That, the old man says, is the narrator's tragedy.

This revelation compels the narrator to reflect on his life and what he has learned throughout his travels. He asks himself what it is he is searching for, and if it is some sort of meaning, then what, ultimately, is meaning? In the end, he—and, by extension, all of us—can only ever really search for the "I" of who we are, and it only ever leads to one realization: that we are "small and insignificant like a grain of sand." As the old man said, that is our tragedy.

However, it is our gift, too, and one that we must find on our own journey, whether that means traveling into the heart in our chest or into the heart of our country—or both. By the end of the novel, in 1980s Beijing, the author has evolved into someone akin to the old man he met at the monastery. People visit the narrator and ask him questions, but he supplies no answers. In the novel's closing scene, he is atop a snowy mountain—the longed-for Soul Mountain, perhaps—engaged in conversation with God. God informs him that there are no miracles in this life. The narrator—still seeking his "I," after all this time—asks God what, then, is there left to seek if no miracles exist.



God does not answer.