Escape and Nostalgia: the Drifting and Homeless Complex in Rou Shi's Novels

Wandering is not only spiritual and cultural, but it is also a form of life experience. To the modern people, it has a sense of drifting, a sense of remoteness and loneliness. Since the May 4th Movement and the transformation of traditional culture, modern Chinese intellectuals suddenly found themselves culturally homeless. Spiritual wandering becomes a popular literary topic for some writers. Rou Shi is one of them. In Rou Shi's novels, spiritual wandering results from his age, and his personal sufferings further deepens his strong sense of being a spiritual loafer.In the modern society, harmony between man and his surroundings is gone. People are frequently haunted by feelings of nameless anxieties, loneliness and spiritual vacillation. Drifting, as a way of verbal representation, typifies the call on the modern people for a spiritual homeland and questioning the existing life and appealing to the return of a better and ideal dwelling. In modern novels, drifting goes in two directions: as a way to extricate him/her from a materialized predicament; and as a way to free him/her from spiritual disturbances.Rou Shi creates a series of "spiritual travelers in wilderness", of which most are spiritually harried and their downtoearth miserable predicament is vividly depicted. Through his characters, such as Xiao Jianqiu (the confused and vacillated) and Aunt Chun Bao (the desperate and helpless), Rou Shi, shows us that the sense of drifting is profoundly lodged in the innermost part of his heart and is an alienated part of his life.Rou Shi is concerned with the tension between soul and outward action of the characters at the shifting point of new and old cultures. Those spiritual loafers, dithering in dejection but still strongminded, are characterized as a psychological "escapeandnostalgia" type, represented in the pattern of "fleeinghomeandreturn". Home and native land, in the mind of the loafers, is still a sweet memory and imagined perfection. The return to the homeland means that they are endowed with a second chance to escape. Their rejection of marriage means their having a second chance to resume their love. In their spiritual world, the loafers value love over everything else, but the mobility and flexibility of a wandering life inevitably frustrate them in perpetuating their marriage in real life. The conflict between constantly delayed love and the marriage in real life will forever remain unsolved in the life journey of the loafers.In Rou Shi novels, drifting is an embodiment of a spiritual pilgrimage of the young intellectuals during the May 4th movement. Along with the involvement of the author in wide social activities, this spiritual wandering in Rou Shi's later works slows down and the drifting images gradually give way to those that are ready to be involved. This emerging trend foretells the direction of the spiritual wanderings of Modern Chinese literature.