Soul Mountain Research Articles

Without End: New and Selected Poems (review)

who he is. Margarethe returns to her homeland, and the exüed protagonist is left to meditate on the horrendous epoch he has managed to survive. The author's reconstructed self, conjured from memory, becomes the story. This is Gao's second novel to appear in EngUsh, and the second seamless translation from Mabel Lee. As in Soul Mountain, which introduced Gao to the American pubUc, the author works within the framework of a twisting, fractured narrative . The novel can't quite be caUed plotless; throughout it there are a number of sustained affatis, sexual and poUtical. There are recurring characters and settings, but death, isolation or insanity seem the only possible resolutions for citizens existing under the Communist regime. The fates of these characters expose the OrweUian machinery of revolution and counterrevolution, an endless cycle of purges and confessions. Gao's resistance to building a sustained plot may turn off American readers who enjoy fast-paced narratives , but it is a conscious decision that reflects the fractured state of being during Cultural Revolution: friend betraying friend, neighbor spying on neighbor, coworker turning in coworker. The novel isn't humorless, though. The narrator, in many ways a jester figure, a Chinese Huck Finn in a political picaresque, avoids a IUe of manual labor. FinaUy, the "you" and "he" merge and converse: "You say [that] the you and he in the book are not of any great significance. . . . He says, you are reaUy good at detaching yourself!" Even with such postmodern flourishes , Gao considers himseU a reatist. The book avoids cumbersome streams of italicized thought or trivial meanderings of consciousness. The action is fragmented but clearly presented. Gao muses and contemplates the word-games of his life. At heart, though, he honors language too highly to taint the book with self-indulgent rambtings. He finds himself "autographing" his own book to a reader with the note, "Language is a miracle that allows people to communicate." Although he doubts the miracle, observing that people often fail to communicate, he refuses to lose faith. One Man's Bible, along with all of Gao's books, has been banned from publication in mainland China. (BS) Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003, 287 pp., $15 Long known internationally as one of the leading poet-activists of the Nowa FaIa (or the Polish New Wave), Adam Zagajewski has become increasingly popular recently m this country as well. Indeed, when the New Yorker needed a poem in September 2001 to complete its famous black issue (the first to foUow the terrorist attack), Alice Quinn chose Zagajewski's eerily resonant "Try to Praise the Mutilated World." This poem, the only one to appear in that issue of the magazine, struck an emotional chord with many readers, prompting writer Agnieszka Tennant to call Zagajewski "the poet who helped America heal." Without End:NewandSelectedPoems, which was nominated for a National The Missouri Review · 187 Book Critics Circle Award, contains "Mutilated World" and numerous other examples of Zagajewski's more recent work. Gone is the angry edge of Zagajewski's early activist days, when his poems gamed fame for a kind of naked honesty, an uncanny abUity to expose poUtical and social subterfuge and the falsity of "official language." Most of the poems in this coUection instead demonstrate a continuing growth in Zagajewski toward the meditative lyric, the constant questioning of the biographical-existential role of the protagonist of lyric poetry, and a praise for Ufe viewed in its changeabUity, its pulsation, its ambiguity. Indeed, though perhaps not surprisingly considering his long exUe from Poland, Zagajewski's most successful poems here are told in the voice of a traveler-protagonist, a social outsider writing invariably from within a tram or plane, hurriedly, observing the world outside as best he can. Poems such as "The Churches of France," "To Go to Lvov," "Over America," and the exceUent "Watching Shoah in a Hotel Room in America" work as poetic snapshots, capturing perfectly (as strangers have a tendency to do) both the unexplored hypocrisy and the forgotten beauty of the society surrounding him. Less successful, to my ears at least, are "That Force" and "The World's...

Conversations with Gao Xingjian: The First “Chinese” Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Gao Xingjian on 12 October 2000 surprised not only the Chinese-reading public but also the rest of the world. No Chinese writer had ever won the prize since its inception in 1901, so there were mounting expectations that an author from China might be named. The veteran novelist Ba Jin and the exiled contemporary poet Bei Dao were frequent suggestions, but Gao's name was rarely mentioned. There had also been rumours concerning Taiwanese writers. Beyond the field of Chinese literature specialists, amongst whom he was known primarily as a playwright and not as a novelist, Gao was largely unknown, or rather he was little known to Anglophone readers, for in France and Sweden his novel Lingshan (Soul Mountain) had been published and acclaimed in the mid-1990s. Naturally, being translated into Swedish made his works more accessible to those who judge the Nobel nominees, but several other Chinese writers had been similarly translated into Swedish, notably by Gao's translator Goran Malmqvist, and many more have been rendered into English and French, languages which present no obstacle to the judges, the Swedish Academy.

In Search of the Chinese Soul in the Mountains of the SouthSoul Mountain. Gao Xingjian , Mabel Lee

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssaysIn Search of the Chinese Soul in the Mountains of the South Soul Mountain. Gao Xingjian , Mabel Lee Kam LouieKam Louie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 45Jan., 2001 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3182376 Views: 26Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 2001 The China JournalPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Timothy Hoye Styles of Truth in Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2009).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1457831

Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and His Novel Soul Mountain

In her article, "Nobel Laureate 2000 Gao Xingjian and his Novel Soul Mountain," Mabel Lee introduces Gao Xingjian, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature of 2000. Lee is the translator of several of Gao's works from the Chinese into English, including the Nobel's main text of reference, Soul Mountain (first published in Chinese in 1990). Lee's article combines descriptions of Gao's biographical background and its relevance to his work and writing with a brief analysis of literary aspects of Gao's work based on tenets of the comparative literary and cultural studies approach. As is evident in Gao's texts, Lee explains that Gao refuses to enter political and ideological debates in or with his texts and that Gao, consequently, argues vehemently against the inroads on the individual in modern times wreaked by tyrannical politics, mob action, religious fundamentalism, and crass commercialism. For Gao the creation and production of literature represents the solitary act of the individual and thus the return to the author, in theory and practice. In the history of literature, of significance is the fact that this is the first time the Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to an author on the basis of a body of work written in the Chinese language.