On The Sense Of The Tragedy Of The Shen From The Text Of The Novel

Since New Era, the study on Shen Congwen has become a remarkable segment in the field of Chinese literature research. "Shen Congwen Phenomenon" is all about thoughts and culture in the 20th-century China, carrying unique color and connotations. It by no means follows that Shen Congwen Studies started from the 1970s or 80s. Research on Shen Congwen the man and his works has initiated as early as 1920s or 30s.Shen Congwen depicts a beautiful western Hunan world with mild and inornate language, bringing readers spiritual enjoyment. But he has shouldered too many tragic life experiences, which are inevitably given expression through his works. The preference for tragic representation is the very reflection of a writer's tragic consciousness. Shen employes the traditional way of tragic representation, i.e. "smiling to show pain". Behind the smile lies his profound tragic consciousness. For him, the sense of tragedy would be more heartquaking if temperately expressed. Thus the relaxing and jocular tease can be found everywhere in his works, with intense comic color but more tragic subjects rearwards. Through the tragedy, people not merely perceive characters' pessimism, disappointment and bitter suffering, which cause them to recognize the deterministic helplessness, but also realize that their disaster is concerned with the social and national misfortune.Shen Congwen's novelistic tragic consciousness divides into the deterministic tragic consciousness in novels about western Hunan, the social survival tragic consciousness of working people and the morbid human tragic consciousness in city novels. From the very beginning when Cuicui's mother died leaving behind the daughter to the end when Cuicui had to wait for an un expectable finale, it is in essence a fated tragedy in which the character failed grasping her own destiny; under the twofolded impact of feudal patriarchal relations and modern civilization, the working people in western Hunan lived a miserable life not only economically but also spiritually with the total loss of self and dignity; most of his city novels focus on exposing the various dissimilatory phenomena in people's life and describing the morbid cultural psychology and living conditions of the urban intellectuals, especially of professors, gentlemen, college students and other so-called elite in the urban society.Next is an analysis upon the characteristics of Shen Congwen's novelistic tragic consciousness. First, regarding the way of narration, Shen's novels seek to avoid incisive contradictions or conflicts and present the homopolarity between goodness and goodness. The dramatis personae in Shen's novels accept their tragic destiny helplessly or unconsciously, without active resistance or powerful spiritual surmounting. His tragedy usually contains no obvious intense contradictions or conflicts except those concerning goodness, humanity and intrinsic factors of the culture. Second, Shen pays great attention to fortuitousness rather than inevitability in the plot arrangement. He considers tragedy as "the life itself", being "contingent" and "unfortunate", and frequently insert swerving factors into the harmony and placid narration, which exhibits obvious emotionality from internal to external and promotes the plot development. Third, Shen's novels has an evident poetic tendency in the language, such as the melodious cadence in wording and phrasing, the elegant lyricism in rhythmic and affective syntactic patterns (e.g. reiterative sound, antithesis, parallelism), etc. The rhythm of poetic language agrees with the emotional characteristic in Shen's tragedy and add to it a natural flavour of pathos.Shen Congwen is a countryman who seeks knowledge and senses in the city and devotes himself to unfold the beauty of western Hunan and humanity. But the dual disappointment with both urban and rural residents' life style causes him to interpolate tragic characteristics when portraying the beautiful world, thereby engendering an elegiac sentiment which appears tranquil while actually interweaves turbulence and change. It is from these tragedies that the writer appeals to people's most genuine vitality and arouses their innermost enthusiam for life.