A World Of Love, Hatred, Sadness And Suffering

"Folklore", an immemorial traditional topic, is the core word in Shen Congwen's works of western Hunan, which has been studied by Shen Congwen researchers over a long time. Shen Congwen is a controversial and avant-garde writer, who has received the most humiliations and experienced the most ups and downs. Researchers of Shen Congwen have made great achievements by conducting continuous studies of his works from such different angles as literature, ecology, psychology, philosophy and so on, pointing out the aspect of Shen Congwen as a pioneer. This article aims to reveal Shen Congwen's literature and philosophy thinking, by exploring his works from the ethnology angle, with Diaojiaolou culture (the typical style of houses projecting over water) and the dragon boat culture as the zero point, and then carrying on the peripheral radiation.Diaojiaolou culture unfolded the sad and suffering history of the western Hunan minorities, manifesting their unyielding survival will, and showing their nature in the primary condition. Through Diaojiaolou culture, Shen Congwen sighed out the national survival difficulty, and approved the simple and honorable personality. The Western Hunan Dragon Boat culture demonstrated the western Hunan minorities' deep love to their people, their spirit of furiously striving for success, marching forward courageously, as well as their life vigor, which enabled western Hunan to become the Holy Land in Shen Congwen's dreams, forming the sharp contrast with the degenerating metropolis civilization.However, in the advancement of modernization, these good human natures were dismembered gradually by modern civilization; the western Hunan faced with the destiny which was about to collapse. This caused Shen Congwen's deep anxiety, and he realized that only when the tradition and the modern were combined, and the backward western Hunan underwent the promotion of the modern civilization, could people in western Hunan truly maintain their perfect human nature. He further realized that, if such a piece of land as pure as western Hunan experienced the huge human nature fission, the entire Chinese nation would undergo the distortion of personality. Thereupon, Shen Congwen proposed the conception of reconstructing the Chinese nation by supplementing the tradition with the modern, the metropolis and village union, letting the Chinese nation have both the traditional morality and the modern civilization, and then deserving its position in the world.