Original Text
My fellow townsman Wang Puling's servant, Lü Fengning, had a peculiar fondness for eating snakes. Whenever he obtained a small snake, he would swallow it whole like a scallion. For larger snakes, he would slice them into inch-long pieces with a knife, then scoop them up with his hands and chew them with a crisp crunching sound, blood and slime smearing his cheeks. Moreover, his sense of smell was exceptionally keen; once, detecting the scent of a snake through a wall, he rushed outside and indeed caught a snake over a foot long. At the time, lacking a blade, he first bit off the snake's head while its tail writhed and twisted at the corner of his mouth.
Commentary
Eating snake meat is not news, but eating a live raw snake is indeed news. Wang Puling's servant, Lü Fengning, was not only a connoisseur of snake meat but also had his own unique methods and variations in consuming it. Observe how he ate small snakes: "he swallowed them whole, as if eating a scallion"; for large snakes, "he cut them inch by inch with a knife, then gathered and ate them, crunching loudly, with blood and juice smearing his chin." Occasionally, when no knife was available, it did not hinder his meal; "he first bit off the head, while the tail still writhed at the corner of his mouth." From the standpoint of animal protectors, this might seem bloody and cruel, but through Pu Songling's linguistic expression, the act of eating snakes becomes quite artistic and performative.
In the chapter "The Secret of Nourishing Life" from Zhuangzi, there is a story of a cook named Ding who dismembers an ox. Dismembering an ox involves cutting it into eight large pieces, a bloody and gruesome task, yet under Zhuangzi's pen, the butcher Ding is portrayed as supremely skilled, his art reaching a sublime level, almost becoming an artist. By the same reasoning, could it be that Lü Fengning, the snake-eater in "The Snake Addiction," is also depicted by Pu Songling as a gourmet and artistic performer of snake-eating?