How Shen Congwen became a “Believer in Music”

This chapter analyzes the experimental literary pursuits of Shen Congwen from the perspective of “musical-auditory description” and “painterly-visual description.” It explores the significance of this struggle of Shen’s in the 1940s and the nature of the changes that occurred during his time in Kunming. The musical and audible elements won a victory, and the painterly and visual elements were abandoned. The chapter describes the anthology Nightmares of Seven Colors through the cues of “musical/auditory” and “pictorial/graphical” factors. In “Green Nightmare,” for example, the narrator, exhausted from “having been contemplating at such length,” yearns for “a bit of good music, Bach or Mozart,” wishing for a “rest” in the embrace of music. The chapter deals with some issues related to Chinese modern literature throughout the 1940s. Many researchers have pointed out that Shen’s pursuit of “the Abstract” was not unique to him in the 1940s, but was a general aspect of literary experimentation at the time.