在沈從文作品中，以都市為題材的小說份量幾乎與鄉土相當，「鄉土」與「都市」可說是沈從文同時擁有的兩副臉孔、兩種聲音，矛盾並存在他的作品裡。故本文從沈從文的北京生活和書寫入手，分析北京如何刺激並從而創造他的湘西想像。「會館」是沈從文初到北京的住處，後來遷到北大沙灘附近的「公寓」，而從「會館」到「公寓」正代表1920了年代知識份子形象的轉變，「會館」的書生變成了「公寓」的「浪人」。而身處在軍閥統治之下的北京，國家、道德倫理秩序皆發生了嚴重的危機，故沈從文的北京書寫充滿了虛無的無政府色彩，以酷語、色語和穢語，刻畫食色的慾望、情愛的過度消耗，和精神上的狂躁，也瓦解了國家話語的義正嚴詞。沈從文要從人的惡德和原欲中去找尋美，並將這種美的追求，投射到他回憶之中的湘西故鄉，以抒解現實之中的焦慮緊張。直到最後，他在有著帝國深厚傳統底蘊的北京，才終於找尋到一平衡「現實」與「幻念」的美，並以此作為一個二十世紀個人主義者的終極救贖。

Since Shen Congwen’s literary works thematize heavily on both the urban and the provincial areas, it may not be unfair to remark that “the urban” and “the provincial” become what Shen’s Janus-like feature is made of: the polarity and pairing of two faces and two voices in one person. This paper will study the way Beijing stirs and helps invent Shen’s “Xiang-Xi imaginary” by probing into Shen’s life and writing during his Beijing period. Upon his first arrival in Beijng, Shen found his stay at the “guildhall” only to move afterwards into the “apartment” near the beach of the Peking University. This movement symbolizes the image change of the intellectuals in the 1920s: a scholar in guildhall turns into a wanderer (or even a vagabond) in an apartment. Seriously affected by the bankruptcy of national order and moral integrity in Beijing under warlords’ regime, Shen’s “Beijing writing, ” while replete with anarchistic tones, has its language use in the detached, the dirty, and the erotic revolving around orexis, lust, love’s overconsumption, and spiritual agitation, thus questioning the selfsufficiency of the nation-state discourse. What Shen intends is none other than the search for beauty in people’s sickened hearts and raging libido. Only by overlapping this pursuit with the Xiang Xi homeland in Shen’s memory can Shen find a way to alleviate his anxiety for reality. In the final analysis, we may argue that only in the Beijing as is founded on a profound tradition of an old empire can Shen find the beauty that will put reality and illusion in balance. And Shen has little hesitation in taking this beauty to be an ultimate way of redeeming a 20th-century individualist.