Elizabeth Barret Browning

The poetry of the Victorian Age is rich that produced two great poets Tennyson and Browning. There are minor poets whose contribution to literature is equally notable. Among them, Elizabeth Barrett Browning rightly occupies a central position.

It was the publication of Mrs. Browning’s “The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838)” that brought her literary reputation. After that, her ill health and the shock of her brother’s death made her broke down and was confined to the four walls of her room.

As she recovered slightly, she published “Poems” some of them were impulsive but favored by the public. One of such poems was “The Cry of the Children” which voiced the protest of humanity against the evil of child labor. This poem appealed the populace most and she became so much popular that her fame name was placed beside Tennyson and Browning. So mush so, when Wordsworth died, she was considered for the poet laureate but finally, this title was given to Tennyson.

Around 1845, she met Browning and they fell in love, eloped and married. The romance of their love is beautifully reflected in her “Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)”. It has become the inspiring collection of love poems every student of literature would like to enjoy!

For the fifteen years, they lived very happy life. In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett published a novel in verse, “Aurora Leigh”. The hero of the novel is a social reformer which suggests Browning and the heroine is enthusiastic which suggest Elizabeth herself. The social and moral ideals of the novel reminds of the Dickens and George Eliot.

Her two poems “Last Poems” and “Poems before Congress” were published just after her death in 1861.

Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books (1704), a prose satire by Jonathan Swift written in 1697 when he was residing with Sir W. Tempe, and published in1704.

The Battle of the Books is a simple mock-heroic account of a battle among the books resting in the King’s Library at St. James’s Palace. The battle itself is a satirical allegory on an intellectual debate that had been ranging in England since 1692, sometimes called the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. In theory, the battle concerned the relative value of the intellectual accomplishment of antiquity, as compared to the “progress” that had been made in many fields of human knowledge since the Renaissance.

Tempe had written an essay on the comparative merits of ‘Ancient and Modern Learning’. This subject was somewhat controversial in Paris which involved an uncritical praise of the spurious Epistle of Phalaris that Tempe had drawn on himself the censure of William Wanton and Bentley. Swift in his The Battle of the Books treats the whole question with satirical humor.

The ‘Battle’ originates from a request by the moderns that the ancients shall evaluate the higher of the two peaks of Parnassus which they have hitherto occupied, the books that are advocates of the moderns take up the matter, but before the actual encounter, a dispute arises between a spider living in the corner of the library and a bee that has got entangled in the spider’s web.

Aesop sumps up the dispute: the spider is like the moderns who spin their scholastic lore out of their own entrails; the bee is like the ancients who go to nature for their honey. Aesop’s commentary rouses the books to fury and they join battle. The ancients, under the patronage of Pallas are led by Homer, Pindar, Euclid, Aristotle, and Plato, with Sir W. Tempe commanding the allies, the moderns by Milton, Dryden, Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon and others with the support of Momus and the malignant deity, criticism. The fight is conducted with great spirit. Aristotle aims an arrow at Bacon but it hits Descartes, Homer overthrows Gondibert. Virgil encounters his translator Dryden. On the whole, the ancients have the advantage, but a parley ensues and the tale leaves the issue undecided.

Home And Exile: Chinua Achebe

In 1958 Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, the novel that helped usher in a new wave of African literature. Until that point literature concerning African had been written by European colonials, and was rife with derogatory depictions of African people and their varied cultures. With the contributions of Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola, and Chinua Achebe, amongst others, there came a rebellion of sorts - the African novel, going against “an age-old practice: the colonization of one people’s story by another.”

Ibsen's Ghosts

INTRODUCTION

First of all, it is necessary for us to know the condition of realism dramas before trying to comment or criticize them. Basically, realism dramas are not different in many ways compared to dramas today. We can even say that realism dramas are the pioneer of modern drama.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Romantic outlook had been modified considerably, for the belief in man’s idealistic nature had received many setbacks. For example, after the downfall of Napoleon around 1815, most European countries had reinstated political conditions more oppressive than those of the eighteenth century. The deals of liberty, equality, and fraternity now seemed doomed. Furthermore, the general misery of a large part of humanity was being emphasized by the industrial Revolution, as a result of which workers were pouring into urban centers where living conditions were daily more inadequate. Crime and poverty were prevalent (Brockett, 19- : 287).

In the face of such political and economic conditions the Romanticist’s emphasis upon the ideal seemed both too vague and too impractical. Many came to argue that dreams must be abandoned for a systematic inquiry into actual condition and for solutions based upon discoverable facts. Observation, prediction, and control of society became the new goals (Brockett, 19- : 287).

Among the major influences on the new though was Auguste Comte (1798-1857), whose philosophy came to be called positivism. Comte argued that sociology is the highest form of science and that all knowledge should ultimately be used for the improvement of society. He states that the key to knowledge lies in precise observation and experimentation, since all events must be understood in terms of natural cause and effect (Brockett, 19- : 287).

Positivism attracted a large following and was soon reenforced by Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin’s doctrines may be divided into two main theses: (1) all forms of life have developed gradually from a common ancestry; and (2) the evolution of species is explained by the “survival of the fittest” (Brockett, 19- : 288).

Darwin’s theories have several significant implications. First, heredity and environment are made the determinants of existence. Second, heredity and environment become explanations for all character traits and actions. Furthermore, since behavior is determined by factors beyond the individual’s control, he cannot be blamed for it. Third, Darwin’s theses cast considerable doubt upon the existence of God as traditionally conceived. Fourth, Darwin’s theories strengthened the idea of progress. Fifth, man is reduced to the status of a natural object (Brockett, 19- : 288).

Ibsen is supposed to be much influenced by Darwin’s theories. The first and second impacts as mentioned above, implicitly, drawn in his works during the second period of his career. These impacts are represented in many ways. The characters of Ghosts, which was first performed in 1881, is a good example of how characters who create a social reality at the age of Ibsen, put in practice.

THE SUMMARY OF GHOSTS

Ghosts tells a story about a young man named Osvald Alving. He was a son of The Alvings. He just came from his long life abroad, in France. His father, Mr. Alving, was just died. He wanted to follow the ceremony was taken place by his mother, Mrs. Helena Alving, in order to give the least honor for his husband. In his coming, Osvald decided not to live abroad in France for longer. He wanted to stay with his mother and their servant.

Osvald’s willing scorned Mrs. Alving. She was the only one who encouraged Osvald to go abroad. Her reason was unique. She trusted that it was not good for young Osvald kept staying at his own home. This is due to her husband, Mr. Alving who was a heartbreaker, was suffered from syphilis. She didn’t want young Osvald inherited her husband’s illness. So that she encouraged young Osvald to go abroad and lived in France. Young Osvald didn’t know his mother’s really reason in encouraging him to go abroad since he was about seven years old. He just followed what her wanted him to do.

Osvald even had not been so long staying at home when finally he felt in love with their servant, Regine Engstrad. Mrs. Alving was shocked knowing this. Both Osvald and Regine didn’t know a secret. Indeed, Regine was Osvald’s stepsister. Mr. Alving had an affair with Regine’s mother who was their servant as well. Mrs. Alving worried the same thing occurred to his husband would be repeated to her son. Like father like son.

Mrs. Alving’s worry was increased at the time she knew that Osvald, who wasn’t a heartbreaker as his father was, suffered from syphilis as well. It was supposed to be inherited-sin. Firstly, Osvald blamed himself, he was angry to himself, and thought that it was all due to his carelessness. But finally, he made up his mind that it was an inherited-sin as well.

Osvald finally found that he didn’t have any hope to live for longer. Knowing Regine, who was supposed to be his joy of life, indeed, was his stepsister, and despair of syphilis, Osvald wanted to end his own life. He asked his mother to injure him Morphine tablets in over-doses. It wasn’t clear his mother realized his willing to suicide or not. That’s the end.

ANALYSIS

From the summary above, it is now become clear that Ibsen was much influenced by Darwin’s theories. He was strongly agreed that heredity and environment are made the determinants of existence. Heredity and environment, then, become explanations for all character traits and actions. Furthermore, since behavior is determined by factors beyond the individual’s control, he cannot be blamed for it.

This, then, become the concept of modern drama that is however a man survive against the heredity and environment, it doesn’t change anything. Everything is determined by social reality. This is completely different from the concept of previous works, of course. As it has told above that characterization of Ghosts obviously described the society at the age of Ibsen. The question then may arise: what kind of characters who create such social reality at the age of Ibsen so he came to that concept? To analyze it, let’s see each of the character.

1. Osvald Alving

It is not necessary to explain, twice, that Ibsen is a playwright who often shows that free will, at the end story, finally must have defeated by the social reality. Or, according to Taine, Ibsen is a playwright who put his character in inferior position against the milieu. Osvald is such the character. Osvald is described as a brave, dynamic youth. This is shown when Osvald saw his mother was talking with Pastor Meanders. Osvald didn’t like Pastor Meanders. Osvald didn’t agree at all with Pastor Meanders’ view. Moreover, he bravely against him. His particular reason in against the man in such manner is his stereotype to him. That he lived in France, Osvald truly knew the man didn’t like it at all. Given this, the man called him ‘a prodigal son’

Osvald adored beauty, loved glory, and particularly freedom. He stayed in France for so long and became a part of France artists’ enlightenment. This is shown by his choice of work which he fond of in France: painting.

Osvald is typically a youth who is brought up by modernity. He is a rational man. Simply this is drawn when he was sick, he went to the doctor. Osvald even couldn’t understand why a doctor who is known as a rational creature suspected that his illness, syphilis, was an inherit-sin.

At that time, Osvald’s belief in rationalism was tested. Osvald’s, who was first didn’t know –even it could be- didn’t care about his father’s past, at the time he knew it, he questioned himself about the truth of inherit-sin. He almost assured himself that it’s true: his illness was an inherit sin.

Unfortunately, at the end of the story, Osvald finally was defeated by the social reality. What a rational he was, he couldn’t avoid the fate that he was suffered from syphilis.

Thus, according to Ibsen, Osvald spirit to keep alive was killed, murdered by a fact that he must have been defeated by his fate. By syphilis which he inherited of his father.

2. Mrs. Helene Alving

Mrs. Alving is completely different from Osvald. Mrs. Alving didn’t live in spirit of beauty and freedom. On the contrary, Mrs. Alving was totally conscious what a putrid environment around her and her family.

But among the putrid environment, she chose to avoid it rather than against it. Owe to Freud’s words, she has a good self-defense-mechanism. She married, according to Pastor Manders indirect satire, a ‘loose man’, but she didn’t give up. She kept survive and she had never said anything to show it off. Her purpose was only to bring Osvald up without any bad influences of his father and not let Osvald touch a penny of his father’s wealth.

Unluckily, behind her consciousness of the environment, basically, Mrs. Alving is a defeated woman. Although she didn’t fond of her husband behavior, she even could do nothing when at last Regine, her stepdaughter, must stay with her. She even protected her from Pastor Manders when she though that a danger was threatening Regene.

The other evidence of Mrs. Alving’s defeat can also be seen at the end of the story. She had tried to separate Osvald from his father’s bad influences. But finally she failed. Osvald was suffered from syphilis, even he wanted to suicide. She even could take a decision when her son was dealing with the agony.

Thus, this is the irony. Although Mrs. Alving didn’t live in a “freedom of illusion” as the way Osvald did, she could do nothing. That she knew what a putrid the social reality around her is, it didn’t help her to win. She was defeated –and she must have been the most tragic character in this Ibsen’s Ghosts, it wasn’t Osvald.

3. Pastor Manders

As the way Ibsen used to do with his religious character, he located him as hypocrite man. In one side, Pastor Manders is described as a pastor who kept the orthodoxy and moral values. Almost each of his words described what a moralist that he is. He talked about the papers of deeds, his Sunday activity that was denied by Osvald impolitely, the behavior should be done, etc.

But, on the contrary, he loved Regine and tried to blur the fact that Regine is Osvald’s stepsister. This fact is never shown in the plays. But it is not difficult to be concluded since it is known that Pastor Manders is Jacob Engstrad’s ally.

Being Jacob Engstrad’s Ally, Pastor Manders was also involved in settling Regine in The Alving’s house. In this case, his purpose is quite different from Engstrad’s. He, indeed, loved Regine. This is only illustrated implicitly when he supported Jabob to get Regine home.

Pastor Manders is a materialistic man, as well. This fact is only shown implicitly. He strongly encouraged Mrs. Alving to have insurance for The Orphanage. It can’t be denied that he was disappointed when fire decayed The Orphanage. As much as possible he argued when Engstrad attacked him for his despair not getting insurance from the blamed Orphanage.

Given this, simply it can be said that Manders is a hypocrite. He is one part of putrid society, who finally defeated people like Osvald and his mother.

4. Jacob Engstrad

Jacob Engstrad is Manders’ ally. It means that he is the other man who created a putrid society who around Osvald. Engstrad was described as a poor carpenter, a wretch, who finally saw a probability of having money. He asked Regine to be adopted as the exchange for Mr. Alving’s debt to him.

Settling Regine in The Osvalds’ home, he also got money from Regine’s salary. It can be concluded that Engstrad is a character who is fond of profit from other people misery, nonetheless, he still loved her stepdaughter.

5. Regine Engstrad

Regine Engstrad is a “neutral” character. She is described as an innocent girl and doesn’t know anything about so many mysteries around her. She lived in her own world, separated, without she knew that there were many people organized her life.

In the other words, she is a victim, like Osvald and his mother were. The distinction is that, Regine is neither a girl like Osvald, who is very enthusiastic in running her life, nor his mother, who is very conscious of her environment. She is an ordinary, innocent girl and damn right to be a reality victim.

CONCLUSION

From the discussion above, we can see such characters who create the social reality at the age of Ibsen. A man’s struggle against his environment is supposed to be nothing. For whatever reason, he must have defeated. The owner of the authority that deserves to determine the result of a man’s struggle is social reality. So Ibsen came to the concept that however a man survives against the heredity and environment, it doesn’t change anything. Everything is determined by social reality.

Ibsen has also made his character complex personalities by showing both good and bad aspects of each. None is perfect, but none is villainous. This complexity makes each role challenging to actors, and requires subtlety in playing (Brockett, 19- : 294).

Furthermore, the supporters of realism suggested, if audiences did not like the pictures of contemporary life being shown on the stage, they should strive to change the society which had fur-fearless in his treatment of what he saw around him (Brockett, 19- : 289).

For the realist, then, change was the watchdog. Realism sought to strip away the façade of sentimental escapism pervading the theatre and to objectively examine and present man as he is. Understanding replaced moralizing; science replacing metaphysics. These were plays of ideas, not action; of criticizing tradition instead of perpetuating it. Realism propounded “art for truth’s sake,” not “art for the art’s sake” (Small, Norman M., 19- : 333).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brockett, Oscar G.,The Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd edition ( )

Small, Norman M., The Making of Drama, (Boston: Holbrook Press, 19- )

Gao Xingjian and "Soul Mountain" : Ambivalent Storytelling

Review by Robert Nagle , Houston, Texas, September 2002.

This review is a little special: it’s about a book I heard completely while driving around in my car. I recently returned to my home town, Houston, a city where people spend unbearable amounts of time in the solitude of their cars, driving from work to home and work again. In Houston waiting in traffic is synonymous with living. One passes through neighborhoods in air-conditioned comfort, cursing the red lights and slow-moving cars. The purpose of Houston life, it seems, is to wander around without having to feel the breeze or notice the trees, people or shops. The only interruption to the routine are the weekly visits to the gas station, where the traveler parks, inserts his debit card into the machine and pumps gas into his tank Then, if he is lucky, he can leave as quickly as he came, merging into the grumbling fog of traffic.

Gao Xingjian’s novel, Soul Mountain, is about a similar wandering. It is about a man, an intellectual, a writer, an anthropologist, whose mission is to collect folk culture all around him. In reality, he just wanders around, traveling wherever fate sends him. He is in search of something, some answer, some mythical place he calls “Soul Mountain.” In his heart he knows it does not really exist, but that does not make his pursuit any less worthwhile. His motivation is little more than pretext; he wants to find interesting people and learn about local legends. He wants to meet pretty women. But most of all, he wants the trip to help him make sense of his past tribulations.

The novel is not particularly thrilling or amazing, nor is the plot gripping. There are occasional poetic flourishes, a few self-conscious narrative interludes and several vivid characters. And, oh, yes, several sex scenes, some prurient, some detached. As I hear various tales in my car, I feel restless and uncertain about where the book (and I) are traveling. At a red light at Wilcrest and Richmond Avenue, I am listening to an intensely passionate description of sexual intercourse. On Bissonet and I-59, I am hearing several men debate the existence of the legendary “Wild Man.” While stuck in morning Westheimer traffic, I learn that our protagonist is about to die of lung cancer. But wait. It was a mistake, a misdiagnosis. But wait — I have arrived at the 51 story office building, location of my temp job for the day. I park in an underground garage, walking through a tunnel to the building elevator–never once being exposed to the searing Houston heat.

PURPOSEFUL FORMLESSNESS

After listening to the book-on-tape and flipping through the pages, I am still puzzled. It just doesn’t add up. It is formless. Parts are profound or poetic; parts seem like unfinished sketches or notes jotted to oneself. There is no progression, except perhaps an inward progression toward understanding. One Amazon critic reported being so frustrated by the aimlessness of the book that he went directly to the final chapter and started reading backwards, a motive that I certainly understand. If anything, this essayistic novel is thematically arranged. The novel flows in several random directions, hitting the occasional eddy (sex, Taoism, modernism), twirling about until the protagonist can grasp for the next character or incident to push the story forward again. The current is slow and steady, and the narrator is content to stay afloat, letting his unspecified and lackadaisical quest lead him where it may.

What is this novel anyway? It is not a typical Asian novel. What is it? Gao must have been influenced by the formal contrapuntal emphasis of his Parisian contemporary expatriate, Milan Kundera* . Kundera’s essayistic novels impose a rigorous strict structure on plot and characters. But Gao makes no attempt to organize the anecdotes, observations and encounters that populate the book, giving the whole enterprise the aimlessness of a travelogue. Gao is dealing with vague allegory (I am thinking of J.M. Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” or maybe Kadare). But although Gao’s protagonist is obsessed with describing legends and examining their significance, in fact the novel dwells on the mundane. In one chapter, his quest to arrive at a city to learn about its legends and spiritual thought is derailed by a bus driver who has decided to stop at a cafe and not resume the journey until tomorrow. The protagonist/writer, eager to be on his way, is frustrated. Although he manages eventually to find a ride, this little episode provides a humorous and familiar example of how everyone abides by different schedules and priorities and how the narrator’s lofty ambitions have no more cosmic significance than a bus driver’s desire to have a good long meal.

The protagonist is clearly aware of contemporary society’s problems (the novel alludes obliquely at times to the building of the Three Gorges Dam or the Cultural Revolution), but his observations are not littered with references to pop culture or political events in the way that American novels or weblogs seem to be nowadays. Instead the narrator describes his novel through hearsay; he records what people say about themselves and their beliefs and mythologies. In one scene, a woman begs the narrator to write a description of her dead girlfriend to evoke her memory. She tells a sordid story about how her girlfriend was denounced and imprisoned and how she tried vainly to track people who knew her close friend. The protagonist half-listens, feeling nauseous from the seafood the woman had been feeding him. He absorbs these kinds of stories without necessarily feeling nourished by them.

Most of the characters are haunted by something, a memory, an old love, a father that died, a mother that disappeared. Because characters make brief appearances in the novel, there is only enough time to sketch one central overriding concern: getting a daughter into college, finding a key, selling one’s calligraphy. The protagonist leaves the people in the same condition in which he found them. That is, in fact, the one complaint I have of this unsettling novel. We have traveled (or driven) long enough with the novel, but by the end, we are left wondering whether we’ve even made any headway.

BEAUTY OR EVIL

Early on it becomes clear that the novel’s central concern was victimization and sexual brutality. The protagonist encountered (and slept with) a large number of females. Some chapters are sparse exchanges between lovers about love and self and surrender. Others recount legends about zhuhuapo, the word for certain beautiful tempting women who often bring misfortune. Most of the time the protagonist relates the sexual encounters with little enthusiasm, treating them as little more than obligatory episodes in his quest.

Throughout the novel the protagonist relates his history of sexual encounters, hinting at having witnessed some unspeakable sexual victimization. He doesn’t seek out female companionship, but he makes no special effort to fend it off either. He is jaded. He remembers the fires of passion, but now the endless conversation about such matters seem nothing more than the vanity of a species unwilling to acknowledge the passing of time. His participation in these unions seem to implicate him in an endless cycle of pain and victimization. His middle age sensibility warns him not to cause pain or harm. It seems he can no longer enjoy the company of a woman. Yet he longs to regain oneness with the natural world he so lovingly describes. Sex offers the opportunity to erase boundaries between self and another person. But it also is a power game in which someone always loses. In one town, the protagonist makes the acquaintance of an inexperienced girl who throws herself before him. He is attracted not by her beauty, but by her naivety and ardor. But in the middle of sexual embrace, he realizes that to continue with her would be absolutely cruel. He didn’t love her; he had no intention of marrying her. In a town with traditional views on marriage, a woman who had lost her virginity would lose any hope of getting married, and the potential for pregnancy would jeopardize this girl’ social standing. He refuses to consummate the act, hurting the girl’s feelings, but knowing in his heart that he is performing a supreme act of kindness. Or is he? In either case, the girl would be hurt; by denying her the sexual attention she craves, he deals a blow to her confidence. He presumes that his careful avoidance of heartbreak will be in the girl’s best interest. But isn’t this just a rationalization for indifference?

The only people who seem to play the game well are those who treat it as just that: a game. A promiscuous woman has a fling with him without any illusions about love or marriage. She does it because it is natural. Is there anything wrong with that? She says no, and after a night of passion, the protagonist recounts the lovemaking not with passion or a sense of the woman’s beauty. He merely recounts their conversation about how such a lifestyle could be justified. Clearly he is past the point of being able to enjoy such encounters. After meeting another young attractive woman, he finds the thought of passion to be more painful than pleasurable. He writes:

I would rather drift here and there without leaving traces. There are so many people in this big wide world and so many places to visit but there is nowhere for me to put down roots, to have a small refuge, to live a simple life. I always encounter the same sort of neighbors, say the same sort of things, good morning or hello and once again am embroiled in endless daily trivia. Even before this becomes solidly entrenched, I will already have tired of it all. I know there is no cure for me.”

In one of the book’s oddest chapters, the protagonist hears the story of a group of youngsters who had sex parties and a girl who was executed for the corrupting influence she had on other girls. The sentence is of course unjust, and the girl is deserving of pity. But the protagonist seems shocked less by the sentence than the fact that the girl organized these parties freely, without any background of victimization or exploitation. For him, it raises the question whether sexual activity was really a power game where one person always trumped another. Here was an individual who turned promiscuity into a personal choice and seemed not to have injured anyone, physically or psychologically. Yet, she is condemned and ultimately destroyed. In another episode with an attractive girl certainly too young for him, they have an innocent talk on a mountain trip, and he agrees to take a picture. The girl gives him her home address in another city and invites him for a friendly visit. But after the encounter, which the protagonist describes very objectively, he never develops the photos or bothers to keep the girl’s address. Later, when he wonders “whether or not one day I’ll have all this film made into print…(or) whether she will look as stunningly beautiful in the photo,” he reveals that his appreciation of beauty has not faded, even as he tries to suppress it. “I can only recoil when confronted by beauty or evil,” he says.

NATURE VS. BUREAUCRATS

Although Gao’s sensibility is far too cerebral to concern himself with political concerns, he laments the loss of privacy, spontaneity and freedom in a society controlled by bureaucrats and officials. Characters don’t rail against communism; they rail against the loss of spontaneity in life caused by their political system. In one scene, when townspeople cheer on a singer to perform some songs, an official breaks the show up because nobody had obtained the right permits. This official turned out to be the singer’s son. These officials are petty and bothersome, but certainly not worth fearing. Gao’s novel is truly apolitical, but he views regulation and officialism as encroaching on the natural world and even personal relationships. In one story, he tells of how elderly people with political blemishes in their past were banished to inferior retirement homes, “homes for the “solitary aged” while others stayed at “homes for the venerable aged.” Later on, after the Party admitted its excesses of the period, all retired people went to a “home for the aged,” leading one to wonder whether the current system was in fact an improvement over the old system. When a relative inquires about a parent who had died in a home for the “solitary aged,” he discovers that the paperwork had disappeared and that barely a record existed of her incarceration. The system is both impersonal and inefficient; the book is littered with incidents of people being harmed, either directly or indirectly by zealous officials. For Gao, officials are harmful because they try to impose artificial order on the world around them. Even when the governing bodies try to amend its impunities against the natural world or society, it fails. For a while he follows a band of biologists trying to study the panda’s natural habitat, a rather absurd undertaking, given that the pandas are practically extinct anyway and the habitat has changed so irrevocably. Why bother, the protagonist asks a skeptical old man. The man replies:

“it’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance–people need to deceive themselves. We’re preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the chance for survival and yet on the other hand we’re charging ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself. Look at the Min River you came along on your way in here, the forests on both sides have been stripped bare. The Min River has turned into a black muddy river but the Yangtze is much worse yet they are going to block off the river and construct a dam in the Three Gorges! Of course, it’s romantic to indulge in wild fantasy, but the place lies on a geological fault and has many documented records of landslides throughout history. Needless to say, blocking off the river and putting up a dam will destroy the entire ecology…when people assault nature like this nature inevitably takes revenge!”

The sexual violence alluded to throughout the book is another such assault on nature. It suggests disturbance, an inability to reconcile opposing forces in the natural world. According to one legend, young girls who had been raped or treated badly would dive suicidally into the river far below. This violent, eerie reunion with the natural world was alluring not only to the townspeople, but even the protagonist’s girlfriend, who liked to imagine jumping.

THE STORYTELLER’S DISCOMFORT

So where does the novelist come in? What should he do? The protagonist (and author) is not quite sure. His ostensible function is to collect cultural history from the regions. He was a storyteller, historian, photographer, social scientist, ecologist and anthropologist all wrapped up into one. Is he merely cataloging human experience? Or sifting through life for examples of beauty and epiphanies? His ostensible purpose is to collect legends and folk songs (and by the way, even the Communist Party couldn’t find fault with that). Behind this straightforward task lies uncertainty about what the writer should be doing with the half-truths that are called legends. If told and retold enough times, these legends attain the status of a “social truth.” The Wild Man (one of the legends retold in the novel) may be a myth, but hearing it so many times makes one no longer so sure. In a society where official versions of events are repeated over and over, to relegate the writer’s role to that of “legend collector” is essentially to render him irrelevant. Gao doesn’t seem interested in the political dimensions of this. The protagonist just wants to explore and take pictures and record. Still, the novel is more than that. Interspersed between descriptions of his travel, the reader will find stream-of-consciousness ruminations on the storytelling art, a sign that the writer is uncomfortable with just collecting the stories of other people. The novel records bedtime conversations with ex-lovers who are always questioning his motives, interpretations and attitudes. The feminine voice, often unnamed and unseen, is hypercritical, knowing, skeptical, needy and eager to unmask the narrator’s illusions. Indeed, quite often the stories are told in indirect discourse while the narrator is doing something else. He often, for example, tells stories about old lovers while in bed with another. In such a case, a story is a rude distraction for the current woman he is sleeping with. When stories of the past flow freely from the protagonist’s tongue during such private moments, it is a sign that the narrator is uncomfortable with how events are initially understood by people. Only after an event has faded into people’s memories can a storyteller find the discipline and structure and distance to shed light into what the episode was really about.

The legends, while artfully told, often reveal the narrator’s uncertainties about his role in capturing stories. He recounts a fascinating legend of a Grand Marshall from the Jin Dynasty who secretly watches a beautiful nun in the bathtub. As it turns out, the woman has cut open her stomach to expose her entrails and has begun scrubbing them in the same way she scrubbed the rest of her limbs. After she is finished, she sews up her stomach and proceeds with her routine tasks. After telling the story in a dramatic and convincing way, the narrator says:

This story is a political warning.

You say if the ending of the story is changed it could become a morality tale to warn people against lechery and lust. The story could also be turned into a religious tale to exhort people to convert to Buddhism. The story can also serve as a philosophy for getting on in society –to teach the morally superior man that each day he should investigate his own personal conduct, or that human life is suffering, or that suffering in life derives from the self. Or the story could be developed with numerous intricate and complex theories. It all depends on how the storyteller tells it. The Grand Marshall protagonist of the story has a name and surname so a great deal of textual research, examining historical texts and old books, could be carried out. But as you are not a historian, don’t have political aspirations, and certainly neither wish to become an expert in Buddhism, nor to preach religion, nor to become a paragon of virtue, what appeals to you is the superb purity of the story. Any explanation is irrelevant, you simply wanted to retell it in the spoken language.

So what is this bland pronouncement about? Is it just the usual complaint about interpretation? Is it warning people about the dangers of manipulating stories for other purposes? Is it merely professing neutrality about the storytelling art itself? No one could say for sure. In this passage, like many others, the author/protagonist is revealing his personal struggle about the nature of his art in the modern world. No one will deny that storytelling is good for its own sake, but a writer who writes with this belief will find his creative works littered with self-conscious musings, autobiographical ruminations and infusions of allegorical significance into the stories he retells. Does Gao decry this? Should the novelists instead be stripping away such personal touches just to focus on the story? Soul Mountain, as imperfect as it is, stands as an example of how easy it is for the author to become the story he tells and how difficult it is to separate the art of storytelling from the desire to explore ideas, personal emotions and metaphysical meditations.

Cultural Materialism

Cultural Materialism established itself permanently in the field of literary studies in the mid 1980s. Some imp books in this field are

1. Radical Tragedy: Jonathan Dollimore

2. The Subject of Tragedy: Catherine Belsey

3. Alternative Shakespeares

4. Political Shakespeare: Alan Sinfield