The Western Regions Generation of “Storied Matter”: Narrative Agency of Nonhuman Life in Hong Ke’s Novels
Existing scholarship on Hong Ke (1962–2018) has largely operated within the frameworks of “Western spirit,” “poetic narrative,” “Silk Road culture,” or “reflection on modernity.” The profusion of animals, plants, and natural elements in his fiction has consequently been reduced to symbolic signs or cultural backdrop. Drawing on the concepts of “storied matter” and “narrative agency” from material ecocriticism, together with Donna Haraway’s theory of “companion species,” this paper re-reads Hong Ke’s four novels: The Rider Going West, The Great River, Urho, and Tree of Life. Hong Ke’s Western Regions writing does not treat nonhuman life as background or metaphor for human stories. It lets horses, bears, sheep, cattle, trees, and rivers possess their own journeys, desires, emotions, and expressive capacities. They form companionate relationships with human characters and manifest an indigenous form of “storied matter” through material cycles of death and growth, and of animal, plant, and earth. Rooted in the animistic traditions of the multi-ethnic Western Regions, Hong Ke’s writing offers a literary paradigm for reimagining human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. It can be regarded as an indigenous practice of material ecocriticism that predates its Western theoretical nomenclature.
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