Something Rich and Strange: Lyricism, Violence, and Woman in Shen Congwen’s Short Fiction

Shen Congwen (沈從文) has long been associated with the Chinese nativist tradition that relies on a lyrical language of memory to evoke the “lost paradise” of one’s innocent childhood and pristinely beautiful hometown. However, critics have discerned a darker side to Shen’s lyricism, namely, his fascination with the scenes and motifs of death. This paper is an effort to continue the discussion on the complexity of the lyrical mode in Shen’s writing, but from a different perspective. I observe that while Shen’s lyricism was influenced by traditional poetics of nature and stories of “the uncanny,” it was grounded in and shaped by the early-20thcentury Chinese experience of violence and death. Yet Shen’s lyricism is not just a therapeutic response to destruction and cruelty. One discerns in the writer’s works a lyrical tension derived from a paradoxical impulse to both keep the details of past brutality alive and (by doing so) to be rid of its haunting of the present. Shen’s lyricism is derived from his ability to strike a balance between his intimate knowledge of violence as an insider/soldier and his determined detachment as an outsider/writer. Such a dualistic approach allows him to resist the ideological a priori. In the second part of the paper I point out that the complexity of Shen’s lyricism is also reflected in its sexual and gender dimensions; that is, the tropes of death and woman form an important part of Shen’s lyricism. Here I question the gender implications of the aesthetic transfiguration of the deadly into eroticized female bodies in his writings. The fact that female bodies, deadly and sexualized, occupy the center of many of his stories qualifies the standard view of Shen’s lyricism of violence as being ideologically subversive.