<nettime> list serv July 1 topics -- The World Novel; and, Soul Mountain (1990)

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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“Only if Xi Jinping sees, reads, and understands the new vision of La Joconde will an excellent peace be achieved,” said a.alpha.
“And if he does not?” asked a.digamma.
“The peace will be mediocre, average, above average, dismal, or non-existent” a.alpha answered.
“Then the planet will suffer accordingly” a.digamma said, not especially needing a reply.

 -- Page 1, paragraph 1 of The World Novel by Max Herman (2025)


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Soul Mountain, 1990, by Gao Xingjian.  Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000.

Compares to Dante:  You River, Mount Purgatory, bridges, Beatrice, fortune, the Mandate of Heaven.

Experience (Jingyan in Chinese) is central in both works.
Not one list srv member has read Soul Mountanin.
Not, one, ever.

Etc approx

examples from Soul Mountain:
Chapter 1, last paragraph (in the sense of acquired knowledge, like Paradiso 2)
"You've learnt through experience everything you need to know."
Chapter 2, last paragraph (in the sense of lived consciousness, like Paradiso 1)
"Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience."

Not to say Soul Mountain = Dante.
Some differences:  bridge of east and west
Some similarities:  bridge of west and east

More mentions of experience in Soul Mountain (beyond chapters 1 & 2)
50, 51, 52
(Single-line quotations here)
Ch. 5, "just take twenty or thirty paces and you'll be back in those ancient times."
Ch. 7, "Could it be... that you want to live again, to experience life again?"
Ch. 8, "What does this sort of experience mean to me?  If it's just to get away from the problems I was experiencing, there are easier ways."
Ch. 10, "But haven't I been waiting for this or that sort of miracle all my life?"
Ch. 12, "It was a sheer coincidence that I was reading 'The Book of Changes with Zhou Commentary.'"
Ch. 20, "In both cases they originate in the practices of ancestor worship and the observing of celestial phenomena."
Ch. 26, "But in my experience, it grows and grows but often not as you wish and moreover, mostly, contrary to what you wish."
Ch. 35, "I am never able to experience the warm intimacy of just being myself."
Ch. 37, "Could it be that within the space of five hundred years even the iron tiles have completely rusted away?"
Ch. 39, "I am a monster with a human mind and can find no refuge."
Ch. 42, "The problem is whether or not the present really exists and how the criteria are established."
Ch. 43, "I didn't expect to encounter someone like myself on top of the ridge."
Ch. 47, "Without holding anything back, he then tells me about his experience."
Ch. 50, "But where is the boundary between memory and wishful thinking?"
Ch. 51, "I may as well write a book on the human self without worrying whether it will be published."
Ch. 52, "it is impossible to disentangle imagination from experience."
Ch. 58, "To lose images is to lose space and to lose sound is to lose language."
Ch. 59, "The first book is the book born within us."
Ch. 61, "He has a rustic look and reminds me a little of Pierre in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace.'"
Ch. 61, "He was labelled a Rightist in 1957 and in 1958 was sent to a labour reform farm in Qinghai."
Ch. 63, "The Way gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, three gives birth to the myriad things."
Ch. 72, "about the fallibility of experience which is only a crutch about revolutionary fiction which smashes superstitious belief in literature about a revolution in fiction about revolutionizing fiction."
Ch. 75, "I am still seduced by the human world, I still haven't lived enough."
Ch. 80, "...a never before experienced limpidity, a totality of purity and freshness."

Whether or not I finished it yet.

End with the time it was written.
Last line of the book:  "Beijing and Paris, 1982-1989."


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