On Shen Congwen's Meditation on Life and Pursuit of Abstraction

From the late 1930s to the 1940s,the meditation on life and pursuit of abstraction continually appeared in Shen Congwen's works.The fragile and finite human lives aroused Shen Congwen's meditation,and he maintained that human beings must possess the consciousness of fancy or ideal,seek for the philosophy of life,establish the godhood of life and search for the beauty of abstraction in the artistic creation,thus to make limited life tend to be infinite.Shen Congwen tried to use Chinese characters to recount or describe the abstract form of sensual,specific beauty in illusion.His experimental work,Record on Watching Rainbowhad the pioneering significance in the history of modern Chinese novels.On the other hand,however,this kind of pursuit of abstraction caused the romantic aesthetic criterion of Natural State,which formerly existed in his works and was in accord with Rousseau,to be interfered with and dispelled.