ABSTRACT
One of the most important Chinese novelists of the 1930s, Lao She (pseudonym of Shu Qingchun, 1899–1966) presents us with a double image. While we now remember him best as the writer of Camel Xiangzi (1937), a heartrending portrait of a rickshaw puller’s degradation in a society devoid of justice and rationality, his fame was first built on a series of farcical novels like The Philosophy of Lao Zhang (1925) and Divorce (1933), which won him the nickname “king of laughter.” To regard Lao She as a humanitarian realist is certainly justified, but in so doing we overlook his comic talents and make him merely a good practitioner of the kind of “orthodox” realism initiated by writers like Lu Xun. In fact, what truly distinguishes Lao She from other modern Chinese writers is not so much his mimetic exposure of social abuses as his exaggeration of them in terms of both farcical and melodramatic discourses—discourses deriving their powers from excessive display of laughter or tears, dramatic reversal or parade of moral/intellectual values, and, most importantly, compulsion to defy the sanctioned mode of representation.
