I think when we communicate we mostly hear ourselves: a reader’s log of Soul Mountain. by risa
I’ve noticed that when I’m talking with someone it seems like they need to say what they are saying in a few different ways before I get close to understanding them. It’s as though we all speak different languages. With each new detail my interlocutor adds, each metaphor and similie they use to describe this new idea-thing they are offering me, my mind throws up a guesswork portrait. This mathematical drawing takes place at great speeds in all our brains, and our mental machines are great, I’m not complaining, but still; our oral communication is miserably incomplete.
Speaking aloud makes for a kind of alchemy between us. I become an improviser. I try to balance my knowledge of certain scripts against the possibility that I might be wrong, or that my interlocuter might have some entirely new bit of knowledge that will send my careful, youthful theories for a ride. Oral communication can elicit an open juggling from interactants, but instead it often just seems to startle and irritate us back into our caves. By ‘caves’ I mean the strange way I sometimes hood my eyes, and retreat into a kind of self-encircled darkness. I’m easily distracted by a tone of voice or a sexy flip of hair; or I’m silenced by the challenge of new ideas; or I hand over a kind of subtle control because I fear being disliked, or wrong, or misunderstood. And in those moments of divided focus the other person’s actual words disapear.
I’m reading a book now, Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian, which, according to the introduction written by translater Mabel Lee, is about the “devastation of the self by the urge for the warmth and security of an other, in other words by socialized life.” According to her, Soul Mountain is a novel about the fluctuations of control in the self, and the changing relationship between the indivdual, the collective, and the shape of knowledge they agree to.
The existence of an other resolves the problem of loneliness but brings with it anxieties for the individual, for inherent in any relationship is, inevitably, some kind of power struggle. This is the existential dilemma confronting the individual, in relationships with parents, partners, families, friends and larger collective groups. Human history abounds with cases of the individual being induced by force or ideological persuasion to submit to the power of the collective; the surrender of the self to the collective eventually becomes habit, norm, convention and tradition, and this phenomenon is not unique to any one culture.
Novels offer something different then the challenging immediacy of oral interaction. They elicit a different, but overlapping, range of potential power dynamics. The reactions they produce can be disseminated further then any oral communication. Novels are made up of incredibly long chains of logic. When they are successful, novels unfold complete other worlds- whole ways of looking at the infinite details involved in being alive on this planet. Novels require long stretches of your time, and over those ticking pages authors stitch and spread language, hoping to leave a path that’ll make your brain sing. For Italo Calvino the “canon” of great literature is like an evolving coral architecture: it is a heaping list of books that have set a critical mass of readers’ minds spinning.
This is why the Blooker prize seems a particularly interesting idea. Blooker prizes the best in novels written in the strange hybrid space of blogs, where time moves so much faster then in traditional media, but where it’s also possible to draft ideas slowly over time. Publishing on the web, with it’s deep digital dimensions, makes an increasingly textured space between self and other. It operates with a unique relationship to time, and as such allows the written word- be it code or literature- to engage our brains and our other complex machines in exponential ways.
Roland Barthes wrote that the first time we read a book we read ourselves. When I read a great novel, or begin communication with a new person, it feels like I walk into the text and paint old and new ideas, in response to the author’s words, all over the insides of my eyes. Sometimes I can catch glimpses of the author’s real message and intention- the other’s complete ‘other’ness. But mostly I read and laughingly converse in great swallowing lumps. And then I need to read the whole thing again, and then again, to see the unexpected complexity and deft intention that’s in there.
I imagine that novels which emerge out of blogging will eventually be so time-and-’other’-tested that they’ll speak to our contemporary collective realities in whole new ways.
But for now I’m reading Soul Mountain, apparently a Nobel-prize-winning exploration of an individuality that’s devastated by certain kinds of collective culture.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
October 15th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
I noticed in an emailed Haiku from Michael today that I’m not the only one leaning toward this big thick fiction called Soul Mountain:
“no books have arrived
I hope it will not take long
stimulation lacks
Tolstoy and Conrad
Rogue Nation and Soul Mountain
each one is lonely
Nobel laureates
the list continues to grow
attainable goals
mountains are epic
tranquil life of Malinké
not unknown to me
missing the dudes here
seemingly reciprocal
inspiration key”
I wish I could teleport a copy to you, Michael. For now all I can do is tell you that today I’ve stayed inside reading because it’s been pouring rain. From the french doors I can see the trees that have turned red and the wet black road. Elran came home and fell asleep on my arm where I was reading, and I fell asleep too and outside where the road had been there was the damp green mountains of Longshan.
The best bits so far:
“Going ththrough the gloomy linden and maple groves, mountain birds trill in the nearby flowering catalpa bushes so there’s no sense of loneliness. Then at an altitude of two thosand seven or eight hundred metres we come to the conifer belt – patches of scattered light gradually appear and giant black hemlocks soar up, their branches arched like open umbrellas. However, at a height of thirty or forty metres they are surpassed by grey-brown dragon spruce which soar to heights of fifty or sixty metres and are majestic with their peaked crowns of grey-green new leaves. There is no longer any undergrowth and it’s possible to see quite a distance. In between the thick spruce and hemlock trunks are some round alpine azaleas. They are about four metres high and covered in masses of moist red flowers. The branches bow with the weight and, as if unable to cope with this abundance of beauty, scatter huge flowers beneath to quietly display their enduring beauty. This unadorned speldour and beauty in nature fills me with another sort of indescribable sadness. It is a sadness which is purely mine and not something inherent in nature.”(p59)
The way the narrator insistently uses old words like beauty shakes their staleness away. He does this all the time, as though walking and wondering and being often alone has built up in him a desire to speak forcefully of what is beautiful and what he feels. This part reminded me of you, Mike, needing inspiration. It begins with an old naturalist speaking to the narrator in the panda reserve where they are both staying:
“”In my lifetime,” he continues, I’ve barely escaped with my life a few times but not from the claws of wild animals. Once I was captured by bandits who demanded one gold bar as ransom, thinking I was the offspring of some wealthy family. They had no way of knowing I was a poor student in the mountains doing research and that even the watch I was wearing had been borrowed from a friend. The next time was during a Japanese air raid. A bomb fell onto the house I was living in. It smashed the roof and sent tiles flying everywhere but it didn’t explode. Another time was later on when an accusation was brought against me and I was labeled a rightest and sent to a prison farm. Those were difficult times, there was nothing to eat, my body bloated up with beri-beri and I almost died. Young man, nature is not frightening, it is people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he’s capable of manufactoring almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”
He’s the only person in the camp I can have a conversation with, maybe it’s because we’re both from the world of hustle and bustle. The others are in the mountains all year long, they have grown silent like the trees, and seldom speak. A few days later he went down the mountain to go home. It’s frustrating not being ableto engage the others in conversation. “(p49-50)
October 18th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
More on Soul Mountain:
I am 150 pages or so in, and it’s the kind of book that hangs all around your head when you’re not reading it. I don’t feel like a travller in China or anything, it’s more the way the pronouns shift that’s been affecting me. In my own writing I’ve tried lots of times to tell a story from other vantage points. To draw the reader into and out of the narrator’s perspective and experience. There are lots of tactics, but Gao Xingjian has resolved this in the clearest and loveliest way I think I’ve even seen. He moves fluidly between ‘you’ and ‘I’. So sometimes you, the reader, are grammatically complicit with everyone of his steps and words and memories:
“Why is there such lack of sympathy between people? She says she can’t understand why she is saying all this.
You ask her to go on talking.
She says she can’t understand why, it’s as if flood gates have opened and she can’t stop talking.
You say she is doing very well.”