Shen Congwen’s Time Consciousness From "The Border Town"

A work is the result of a writer’s nurture and an important projection of the writer’s outlook on life,so the writer’s perception and reflection on time are bound to be reflected in his works.Shen Congwen,a countryman from Xiangxi,stood at the triple intersection of time for the individual,the nation and the state,which made his perception of time more sensitive than that of his contemporaries and his thinking about time more profound.This paper takes Shen Congwen’s masterpiece“The Border Town”as the object of study,starts from the perspective of time,analyzes and explores Shen’s time consciousness from two levels:content and form,and then understands the life and cultural thinking behind his hidden time consciousness.Everyone experiences and is familiar with time,but the generation of personal time consciousness is influenced by various factors.In the enclosed natural geographical space of Xiangxi,Shen’s perception of time relied mainly on the cyclical changes of natural rhythms.At the same time,traditional Chinese cultural concepts,influenced by agricultural civilization,also exhibit a distinct sense of cyclical time.Under the effect of these two aspects,Shen obeys a cyclic time consciousness.With the introduction of Western linear time,which brought enlightenment and rationality to China,it also helped Shen to build up a modern rational consciousness.These two completely different concepts of time not only influenced Shen’s life,but also his fiction writing.When he re-examines these two very different views of time with the spirit of modern rationality,he finds that they have their own advantages and disadvantages.He incorporates his reflections on the two very different time consciousnesses of the East and the West into his novel The Border Town,adding great aesthetic tension to the novel.Shen Congwen intentionally blurs the boundaries of time in The Border Town,constructing a world of“timelessness”.By writing about the life and death of the people in the small town of Chatong,he reveals the“normality”and“change”in the small town of Chatong,and uncovers the absurdity and impermanence of reality and history through the surface of time.The novel is a kind of time art,where Shen Congwen uses narrative art such as imagery,white space and other writing strategies such as the display of the characters’ subjective psychological time to advance the story and development of the plot.First,he refers to time with the help of imagery such as“water”and“dream”,thus forming a threefold contrast between the eternal flowing water and the impermanent fate,the beautiful dream of Cui Cui and the tragic reality,and the“dream of peachland”in Chatong and the violence of Xiangxi society.This highlights the smallness and helplessness of human beings in the face of the flowing time,which enhances the tragic aesthetic meaning of the novel.Secondly,Shen Congwen leaves endless room for interpretation of the novel through his white space on the narrative structure,characterization,storyline and characters’ language,which is condensed and delayed in time.Finally,through the recreation of Cui Cui and grandfather’s memories,the psychological time of the characters is highlighted,realizing the unity of the novel’s co-temporality and expressing Shen Congwen’s profound knowledge of human nature and life.In the novel“The Border Town”,Shen Conwen contrasts the vitality of the people of Chatong during special festivals with their constant fate of following the times.Shen Congwen tries to build an ideal world of“Peach Blossom Source”,but in his actual writing,he shows the consciousness of“Anti-Peach Blossom Source”.He is interested in the natural emotion and vitality of the small town of Chatong in the context of the festival time and space,but he also notices that this lazy time obscures the rational cognition of people,and maims the life and life of people.At the same time,modern civilization is also constantly impacting on Chatong’s self-conscious way of life,trying to replace people’s natural emotions with material benefits.Shen concentrates all these different times in the closed social space of Chatong,thus there is a twofold time gap:the conflict between the eternal moral consciousness and the natural nature of man,and the contradiction between traditional concepts and modern consciousness.This temporal gap leads to the intensification of various conflicts,which in turn leads to the frequent deaths and tragedies in The Border Town.Shen Congwen presents a swaying view of time in the The Border Town,which is fundamentally due to his humanistic spirit and historical rationality at work.His artistic vision and value orientation are twofold.While he celebrates the beauty of humanity and the innocence of life,he also sees the unstoppable momentum of the era of historical evolution,achieving a perfect unity of ideological and artistic connotations in the tension structure of humanistic spirit and historical rationality.And on the level of reality,modern people’s time is controlled by media,power and capital,bringing endless pain to human life and living.While technological progress has improved material life,it has not given a respite to the spiritual life of people.The small town of Chatong built in the style of“Peach Blossom Garden”by Shen Congwen is not only a beautiful place of solace for modern people,but also an important point for rebuilding a better life in the future.