Original Edition, Shanghai Literature, January 2022
"Short" theory
Li Weichao
Is this a virtual world of language explosion, or a real world where linguistic creativity is lacking?
In science fiction movies, we witness the green light emitted by the ghostly electronic tubes, the mysterious data spreading aimlessly, and the magical lens language metaphor contains a cyberspace of infinite possibilities and uncertainties, where everything in reality is no longer reliable, leaving only endless circulating data and never-ending data processing.
The writing, language, and information of any epoch cannot be separated from the existence of materiality: books, bodies, and computers, but each medium corresponds differently to matter: printed words and books, body and language, information and computers. Among them, books and bodies have a one-to-one relationship that is difficult to modify, which Lacan calls "presence/absence", while information and computers belong to pattern randomization, which completely changes Lacan's designation of the relationship between signifiers and signifiers. The cyberspace of the data matrix is filled with all the information on Earth that interacts and is closely related, and its digital data, and human language is wrapped up in it, gushing and not knowing where to go.
Instinctively aware of the crisis of literature and language created by Cyberspace, or for many complex reasons, since 2018, Shanghai Literature has launched a "short story" special edition, which is different from the usual "short story". Coincidentally, in the current literary journals, "Writers" set up "golden short stories", "Novel Selections" opened "micro-novels", and the editors of literary journals seem to be carefully adding more distinct restrictions and labels to "short stories". Naturally, the question that arises is, what is the purpose of the editors? Since there are already conventions for short stories, small stories, and miniature novels, why should we change to "short stories"? How short does it count as short?
Instead of asking these questions that have no standard answers, even if it doesn't make much sense to try to get an answer, it is better to jump out of the box and discuss literary stylistic issues in a different way, such as what does "short" mean for novels? Does "short" offer a different artistic look?
Short Technique: The Reversal of the Dialogue Subject and imagination
Throughout the past five years, the "Short Stories" column of Shanghai Literature has been published in the length of 4,000 words, pursuing the characteristics of elitism and literature. The writers involved in the special edition are all purely literary professional novelists, who are not satisfied with telling an eye-catching story quickly, but have made novel attempts at narrative techniques in the length of the short story.
In recent years, the young Shuang Xuetao has attracted the common attention of the literary, intellectual and mass cultural production fields. When discussing Shuang Xuetao's masterpiece "Moses on the Plain", scholar Liu Yan said that the writer was inspired by the film "Crimes In the Northeast", which made the suspense narrative gain new narrative vitality in the novel and excavated the "buried dialogue subject". From the academic standpoint of his own social and historical criticism, Liu Yan gave Shuang Xuetao a high praise for writing northeast China: "As a professional novelist, Shuang Xuetao is an organic intellectual who has sacrificed and marginalized people in the history of the old industrial zone, and every novel he writes about the old industrial zone with a suspense narrative is a discursive exploration of the experience of marginal history, in these novels, every seemingly silent little person is a potential history writer." I agree with Liu Yan's analysis that perceiving the world and others is a valuable legacy of left-wing vision, and that Shuang Xuetao, a post-80s man, stepped out of the trap of writing about himself and his dreams, and he rarely wrote his memories and dreams autobiographically, not that he was detached from his own experience, but in novels set against experience and memory, he let many characters speak.
Setting up dialogue is a narrative feature of Shuang Xuetao's novels. Shuang Xuetao's "Holding the River" (2018, 1) insists on using dialogue to complete the narrative, and as always, creates the listening situation of the northeast story. The writer did not explain the identity of the man in "Baohe", of course, the man who talked to "I" in "Baohe" was unlikely to be a worker, he immediately smelled the smell of expensive Maotai in the breath of "I", when he appeared, he fell on the glacier in the cold winter night of Shenyang, "like a soldier knocked down by an oncoming bullet", when we almost have to accept the hint of sin and death in the Shuang Xuetao novel who is good at suspenseful narratives through this metaphor, thinking that he may be a corpse, the man is neither dead. Nor is it the drunkard who "pounces on the street" on Northeast Street, but the sad person who romantically embraces the glacier, and the short length limits the possibility of the novel developing a complex plot, but between the "I" after drinking and the man who fell on the Hun River, they quickly learned each other's past through dialogue, and soon gave birth to brotherly friendship, they "mourned" on the glacier together, mourning the lost lovers and love, and they pointed the emotional direction of the novel to the past, to a history that was collectively ignored and carried by individuals.
The effective dialogue of the novel means that the relationship between the characters progresses harmoniously, and the broken dialogue represents the estrangement of the character relationship. "I have the soul of the Soviet Union, Xiaoliu, Shenyang is St. Petersburg, and it is at the same latitude as destruction." This is Ban Yu, another "Tiexi novelist", Shuang Xuetao bid farewell to Leningrad, and Ban Yu called it Petersburg after the farewell. The short story Labyrinth (2019, 1) also has a short back-and-forth dialogue, but the dialogue quickly becomes a woman's speech, a man's silence and psychological description, and in the second half of the novel, in the process of the man's murder of the woman, the novel completely cancels the dialogue and becomes the man's wandering whispers and crazy solos. Musical "Labyrinth" is a Bob Dylan-esque folk rock ( Folk Rock " ) , with succinct and poetic folk lyrics and intense rock beats , the narrative of the novel becomes folk rock lyrics , and the wind through the woods in the northeast is playing for him and singing for him. Ban Yu's narrator, like Bob Dylan, sings to his lover, sings about his irreparable love for women, sings his farewell to collective memory. The corpses of lovers wrapped in wires and the labyrinth of factories are a representation of history. Although in the narrative time of the novel, the factory is still a hundred thousand people factory, But Ban Yu let the factory become a ruin early, and the sound of manipulating the machine is no longer real, like the "faint sound" in the ears of the ghost, for men, the factory is a place of execution, but also a cemetery, and is his own funerary product. Before being buried by history, the man who killed himself took the lead in using the knife and refused to reconcile, he chose destruction and abandoned the salvation of absolute history.
The unexpected ending, once the privilege of the short story represented by Maupassant. However, when using the word "inversion" today, I must realize that "reversal" is no longer the prerogative of the narrative of the novel, but the love of online information and internet carnival, the curious "eating melon" mentality and the intoxication of "cheap justice", so that the internet audience has an expectant vision of any explosive news to "reverse" and listen to the next decomposition. The appearance of the reversal has to be one hundred and eighty degrees, black and white are reversed, and there is no opposition. This acceptance of expectations has affected the narrative logic of mass culture, and scholar Mao Jian has ridiculed the various routines of domestic drama screenwriters, including the "reversal" of the plot.
If Maupassantian fiction reversals are difficult to create potency but tend to fall into clichés, Kafka-esque imagination and fiction give the short story the privilege of creating contrasting plots. Zhu Yue's "Leaving the Hometown" (2018, 1) is similar to Liu Cixin's "Village Teacher", creating a jaw-dropping and bizarre reversal, the protagonist of the novel is the same as the common out-of-town characters in contemporary novels, but he leaves the countryside, not from the village to the city, but is suddenly teleported to a distant space. The rationality of the "reversal" set by Zhu Yue has been in people's common sense understanding of Chinese society, and the reality has supported the rationality of Zhu Yue's fictional plot with amazing personal wealth and huge income differences, so the reversal of "Leaving Hometown" is an attempt to rely on imagination to open up another space. The reversal of the novel must also rely on the writer's ability to imagine, fiction, and narrate, otherwise, it will be another copy of the routine.
Short expansion: intertextuality, repetition and allusions
The tacit understanding of summoning readers is an important premise for the existence of the short story. The reader's imagination and perception have become a necessary supplement to the "shortness" of the novel, which is the "white" of counting white as black, and thousands of lifes that are omitted and unspoken are plumped up in front of the reader's eyes. Without the reader's addition, even a short novel would be futile nonsense. As a result, writers of short stories use a variety of ways to try to expand the space of meaning outside of language.
Wang Meng skillfully performed his narrative skills to calmly let the novel open in silence: "The gentle Mediterranean Sea cannot be rejected, the blue-purple waves weave a pattern of stubbornness and hopelessness and calmness, and the snow-white waves extinguish a fleeting smile." This is Wang Meng's Mediterranean Fantasia (2019, 1), which begins with a nineteenth-century European classic realist novel, "The Woman with the Puppy", Chekhov's Yalta sea surface is also a lilac color, soft and warm. The natural depiction of the subjective lyrical temperament makes me wonder if this is the poetic memory of Wang Meng, who traveled around the Mediterranean on a cruise ship a few years ago. The novel soon invited "I", and an elderly author began to lyrically: "Thinking of time and space, life and exclamation are always moving and changing like this, passing away, and I am in tears." But the old-age author does not allow himself to be like an ordinary tourist, stopping at touching the scene and issuing a superficial sigh. He skillfully used the modernist narrative, bluntly saying that he wanted to invite a "thirty-nine-year-old ape-hearted beauty" to appear as the heroine of his novel, and Wang Meng directly observed and described an elderly beauty as an elderly narrator, which in any case took some ethical risks, so Wang Meng's strategy was to use a playful narrative tone. The protagonist of the modernist novel is not any character, but the narrative language of the writer, D. H. Lawrence declares that he does not care about the characters in the novel, that any perceptible life in the world is the tip of the iceberg of the self, that the novelist wants to explore the self is far deeper than the self that is known, so that the novel characters "are like fountains spraying or like moonlight or like the sea stirring up storms, and their silence is the silence of evil rocks." Wang Meng's playful language wrapped around the heroine to decorate her with flashy clothes, narration into her dreams, but not really into her heart, that is the novel's attitude to middle-class life, external and incomprehensible. "Another Piece" after "Mediterranean Fantasia" is a collage of supplementary texts, in order to form a difference with the modernist narrative, Wang Meng snuggled a heroine who appears under the realist literary narrative, who enters the inner world of "her" in an omniscient and all-powerful way, summoning trust and empathy for the characters and narrators. With different genre styles and narrative modes to create the same character, from the outside to the inside, from joke to sympathy, the collage form of the short story has a representational meaning.
Zong Pu's Who Are You? (2018, 1) Seemingly simple, the old man forgets the lover who has been with him for life, after all, one of the well-known symptoms of Alzheimer's disease is the fading and loss of important memories, but a deep subtlety wanders in her novel narrative. As far as possible, she gives "forgetting" a deep, delicate, and moving connotation, and those unforgettable promises that are suddenly forgotten are like Zhuang Sheng's desire to discern the philosophy of life that has been forgotten. "Who are you?" Who are you? "Who are you?" Who are you? In a novel of more than a thousand words, Zong Pu repeats the above three-word question eight times, which makes the question quickly echo in the reader's mind, strongly experiencing the fragile and sentimental emotions of the characters, and I can't help but wonder whether Zong Pu's repetition constitutes a response to the classic bridge section that Hemingway once created. In the famous short story "White Elephant Mountains", the girl sitting with her Spanish lover waiting for the train to Madrid says seven "please" in a row, and the repetition of the mysterious tough guy novelist attracts the persistent attention and explanatory interest of the commentators, and the commentators believe that the seven repetitions accurately and powerfully convey the despair and pain of the girl in the face of the selfish middle-aged lover. Zong Pu's repetition may only constitute an artistic coincidence with Hemingway, and I don't think this is her intentional "homage", but the repeated calls and staggered questions confirm the role of carefully designed repetition in the short story, and a certain emotion is constantly reinforced in repetition.
Taking "short" as the premise, one way to increase the content content is to borrow ready-made allusions, allusions accumulate a thick historical memory, the artistic processing of predecessors, the familiarity of the recipient, allusions naturally carry a huge pre-knowledge system, and Chinese classical poetry regards the use of classics as an important means to expand the connotation of the text. It is well known that the knowledgeable Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated by the charm of literary allusions, and he liked to use elements in his short stories that referred to the classic imagery of European and Russian literature and to parody the creations of previous writers. Harold Bloom's "law" spares Nabokov's ritualisms and focuses on the vulgarity of symbolism, because superb short stories cannot tolerate traces of unnatural fabrication, and short stories do not have enough space for crappy symbols to cover their traces.
Writer Chen Cun wanted to rewrite the allusion to the Bible's Adam and Eve, so he had the short story "The First Apple" (2018, 1). "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Chen Cun began to parody. This is the most famous opening statement of God, who created heaven and earth, opened time with a solemn and magnificent gesture, and demarcated the eternal starting point of all stories. Chen Cun's antiquity novel reveals the immortal ancestors of mankind, who have sprung up popular words learned from human descendants- face value, sameness, and eating melons, vaguely overlapping the shadows of Chang'e, who is tired of the crow's fried sauce noodles, and the shadow of Yi, who is embarrassed by the crow's fried sauce noodles, or the solidified imagination of countless resentful women about The Reifer is imposed on Eve. The Bible is God's genesis, not the human story, God established order from chaos, and the story begins with a calm order, and the sudden chaos breaks the order, and the reconstruction of order becomes the narrative driving force of the story. Parodying such a solemn and magnificent classic, Chen Cun's intention is undoubtedly subversion - he alone intercepted the "story" of Adam and Eve, starting with order, the snake of temptation came out of the hole, and order was destroyed, so that the human world began a cycle of chaos and order subversion. The three apples of the web paragraphs seem to be a little redundant to conclude the novel, of course, the novelists are probably a bit obsessive-compulsive, from beginning to end must maintain the consistency of the postmodern collage style, the intention of the novel has been made clear: the ancestors of mankind did not need the temptation of external forces, desire and depravity were rooted in their hearts. So, at first, time begins, men and women are already in chaos, creating more and more chaos, and the story begins, and the Garden of Eden is already the land of desire. Turning the biblical scriptures so upside down, I guess Chen Cun is not a believer in God.
Short condition: Each word is just right
"Every word is appropriate" is the literary pursuit of the French literary giant Flaubert, in fact, he did a good implementation of this purpose and created the semantics of French literature, his novels in the French grammar and temporal design to the extreme, not only spawned posterity sweat cattle research results, but also made Borges, Proust and other rising language masters worship admired. Needless to say, if the "shortness" of the novel can be established, its premise must also be the accuracy and precision of the novel's narrative.
"Or putonghua level 1 test questions, after the test, there is a license, teach Hong Kong people Mandarin, five hundred yuan a bell." This is a clip from Zhou Jieru's novel about the bus, and she uses a sentence to indicate that the heroine's identity is a mainland woman who has moved to Hong Kong, she should have engaged in a similar profession, and she hears from the accent of the practitioner that she is a Hong Konger who learns Mandarin, so that she can make a tendentious and intimate judgment. Next, she was originally disturbed by the voice of the woman on the bus, but after getting off the bus, the woman stared at her from the window, and the heroine Kelly was still in her heart and bowed her head. Such an action explains the personality of a woman who is "socially afraid". Why was she so cowardly? Is it the personality that has always been there? Or is it a psychosocial illness caused by cultural differences in moving from the mainland to Hong Kong, or living in the United States (Zhou Jieru, A Trip, 2022, 1)? Whether in Hong Kong or the United States, the dialogue in the novel is narrated indiscriminately in Chinese, however, the writer expresses a kind of unconfidence and even psychological panic through the subtle movements of the characters and, of course, the melancholy narrative voice.
"Short" has also become a sample measure of a writer's language. Writers with a different style of language can easily magnify the flaws of language in the length of short stories, turning the clear short story into a lengthy and wordy, and making Poe's "reading short stories in one breath" a tedious and unfinished task. Literary, avant-garde details are easy to expose childishness or clumsiness, such as "a million details falling on the floor" (Chen Si'an, Emotional Life, 2021, 1), and writers discard them on the ground like poetic sentences and images, showing no senseless artistic charm, only invalid trivialities. Terry Eagleton once pointed to the risk of "parataxis" in English narratives, imitating the parallel arrangement of sentences at the beginning of the Gospel of John without deliberately creating superimposed or subordinate relationships between them, while the flat lines resemble scattered ashes.
Regarding the short story, Mr. Lu Xun has a famous judgment: "Only for a moment, but you can still borrow a glimpse of the whole leopard, to convey the spirit at a glance, and to use a few moments to know all kinds of styles, all kinds of authors, all kinds of people and things and things written, and get a lot of money." And convenient, easy to achieve, clever... These reasons are still out there. Mao Dun has also made a similar footnote, and the short story can "intercept a life to describe, and the whole cause of life is seen." In line with the above expectations, Zhang Yiwei's "Drunken Taiping" (2019, 1) is a good text demonstration. In the short scale, the female writer shows the ability to balance the characters and props in the pen, she will not be entangled in a specific detail, will not wrap the narrative in a fixed scene, she does not prefer to set up a lot of dialogue to explain the storyline or shape the character of the character, Zhang Yiwei is good at a narrative mode from this to the other, suspicious of the mother's love affair overseas, turning around is the father's affair; the previous sentence is grandma's hope for her grandchildren, the following is the bad news that the teenager dropped out of school; a new mobile phone, It can lead to the girlfriend of the teenager online love, his relationship with his mother who works in the UK to support his family, the way the mother communicates with his father who has not been seen for more than a decade, and the black lover of the mother who is far away in The UK. In addition, women work alone overseas to support the whole family, P2P financial scams in villages and towns, the Internet age has narrowed or estranged the relationship between people and many other words, and Zhang Yiwei, who is calm and unhurried, maintains a sense of rhythm, and people and things move freely in her pen. It is conceivable how the novelist maintains a keen sense of the relationship in life, she knows that there is no one thing, no one is isolated, the novel is originally a life of two, two, three, three things. The joy wrapped in a funeral has already spied the information of a family, a village and even some eras, and the charm of the novel's "short" is included.
Short Genes: The Ghost of Zhi Wei and the Allegory of Suspense
Chinese short stories have their own heritage and context. According to Lu Xun's view, the Six Dynasties ZhiWei "Zhang Huang ghost god, called the Taoist spirit", when people believe that people and ghosts are real beings, narration is troublesome, fiction is also like realism, realism is also like fiction. With this cultural gene, Chinese short novels have always been a bit ghostly. When it came to the Tang legend, the atmosphere also changed, and Lu Xun quoted the Ming Dynasty man Hu Yinglin as saying, "To the Tang people are curious, pretending to send a pen", that is to say, the Tang Dynasty people already have the consciousness of modern so-called "fiction". Sansan's "Visitor" (2022, 1) is not a Zhiwei, quite similar to the Sui and Tang legends that Lu Xun said--the words are gorgeous, vivid, and the plot is tortuous. The novel opens with an idyllic, nostalgic family interior, with the odd uncle suddenly breaking in, as if the red-haired woman and the bearded guest of "The Legend of the Bearded Guest" appear. In the narrative of ordinary life scenes, the uncle performs strange tricks, expelling the "visitors" of hades who are demanding their lives, and saving "me" and many passengers on the ship. Sansan is well versed in the narrative method of legendary stories, ordinary and trivial details, creating a sense of reality and realism in the scene, while putting strange people and things into life scenes to strengthen the legend of the novel. Bloom summed up good short stories, "Reality becomes grotesque, and illusions become unsettling ordinariness." The mystery of the novel is not only the main storyline of saving people on the ship, the hidden mystery lies in the fate and identity of "I", the story time explained in the novel is that occurred in 1996, the uncle of the divine power wanted to say and sentenced the fate of "my" short life, so now the "I" who write the novel to look back at the past is human evil? Ghosts?
In order to surprise and win, the short stories in the Shanghai Literature column are full of stories of sin and strange and grotesque nonsense. In fact, in the post-Cold War era, the suspense narrative suspends the ideographic practice of hegemonic symbols and becomes the key to re-allegorizing history. Since "Concession" and "Bureau Point", Xiao Bai is an artist who specializes in fictional situations and creating suspenseful narratives, "a liar, an old man", in his own words. Postmodernism has arrived, and the real view of narrative is originally fiction that can be equated with documentary. In the post-Cold War narrative, spies, agents, and private investigators are prophets who wander in the cracks of cultural politics, and their perspectives have replaced the media and our eyes, and we prefer to trust the narrator in the underground and in the shadows, just as in the short story "Transparency", the figure of Snowden, who seems to have nothing to do with the plot, will flash rapidly, and we need him as much as the novelist.
One of the highlights of Xiao Bai's participation in short stories is how to create a clever "scam" in the "short". The private detective in "Transparent" (2019, 1) is the son of "Agent Xu Xiangbi", coincidentally, like his novella "Agent Xu Xiangbi", Xiao Bai still does not forget to let her husband set up a trap for his wife in this short "bureau", "mantis catching cicadas, yellow birds in the back" is an eternal and effective narrative structure for the secret agent story, there is a bureau outside, there is truth outside, each person in the bureau seems to have the secrets and small pieces of puzzles unknown to others, and all the characters will hold the puzzle pieces in one place. Only then will the picture of the world be fully revealed. "Transparency" successfully completed the task of creating a "game in the middle", the interesting paradox was born, "short" is a successful showmanship for Xiao Bai, at the same time, the danger of self-reflexiveness is exposed, if such a short length is enough to complete the story structure, then in a longer space, what else does the writer have to provide for the novel?
Shen Dacheng's "A Neutral Event" (2018, 1) exudes an eccentric literary temperament, reminiscent of Haruki Murakami' translation by Lin Shaohua, whose novels have a fresh and sophisticated narrative language and a weak and weak character subject temperament. In Shen Dacheng's nameless town, people present a state of postmodernism familiar to literary readers, and self-centered people are alienated from foreign objects and aimlessly "waste time". In that small town, the natural law of autumn when a leaf falls has been upgraded to a spectacle called "Leaf News". The gorgeous and extravagant "Leaf News" scene came as promised - "All the leaves have fallen, all, every one." They agreed to throw away the branches in a millisecond and all fell off. The dark clouds of the leaves suddenly overwhelmed, and the roar of the ears grinded, and the infinite number of fragments that were equal to each other and did not highlight a key point poured into the eyes at the same time. "The reason for the outbreak of Ye Xun is explained in the novel, a large number of birds fell into the city," the dust gathered into a mushroom cloud, but more like a large jellyfish floating in the sky, the jellyfish one by one, swimming thinner and thinner, and also disappeared" - this has to be reminiscent of the scene of the locust plague in reality, and perhaps the magical shadow of García Márquez, the accidental death of countless birds at the time of Ursuna's death, which is a side expression of the plague. With such a grand and imaginative visual picture in two acts, Shen Dacheng reveals the exquisite craftsmanship of scene description and the gorgeous imagination of the end of the world disaster, and the generation that grew up in the era of visual culture reads similar descriptions, and it is likely that it will be associated with the disaster picture of Hollywood "blockbusters". However, while admiring the poetic description of Shen Dacheng's disaster scene, I felt slightly uneasy, is we already numb to the familiarity of the disaster scene? Just as we have shielded ourselves from suffering with a specific cultural psychological mechanism, Dai Jinhua said in a lecture on November 26, 2021, "I see, but I don't really see, I see but I can't really recognize, I recognize but can't relate to our lives, which is the dilemma of cultural expression in our time." If the heterogeneity of nature is a "neutral event", it also shows the cultural dilemma of our time.
A man and a woman in Emma's Late Night Gaze (2020, 1) both seem to have some kind of special function, seeing the story of the dead man in front of and behind him. Late at night, when you look into the distance, you can see the world of the supernatural.
Xiao Wan put the water cup on the terrace, slowly raised his right hand, and pointed to the sea in front of him with some hesitation. After a while, she raised her hand again and pointed to the sea farther away. The surface of the sea was pitch black, only wave after wave, slowly swooping from the darkness to the shore, rolling up a vague white line, and disappearing in an instant. In the distance, there are boats passing by, and if there is no light, it is like a shooting star.
Meteors, it seems to be the souls of the dead. The boy who saw the above picture suddenly felt afraid, "Not that he himself is afraid, but that he has a child in his heart, and it is this child who is afraid." Perhaps influenced by the lens language of Japanese novels or movies, Emma uses a romantic and fresh environment to set off the mysterious and mysterious plot, the writer's original intention is good, but in the actual completion process, perhaps because the writer's narrative is loose, recalling the boy's memory and the girl's experience using a juxtaposition one by one, this prose culture narrative method dilutes the mystery and uncertainty contained in the character guessing behavior itself. In fact, any juxtaposition between "such as" is tantamount to decomposing a theme on each juxtaposition sentence, and the decomposition is weakened—rather than superimposing progressive narrative power, which instead dilutes the mystery of romance.
Short realization: Solve the fun with deliberate imbalance
Shi Shuqing is a master of landscape creation, his sensibility inherited from the tradition of Chinese vernacular literature, in the rural scenery and character scenes he creates with words, everything comes to life, as in the present. The "sacrifice" of a horse with a missing ear called "Single Ear" completes the shortness of "Single Ear" (2022, 1), if "Single Ear" is not killed by adulterous men, the story will probably have to grow out like "White Deer Plain" to the boundless plains. Kill "One Ear" and the novel ends. But this is only the end of the end, but the story and life - our experience alone can estimate, the irrational repetition, entanglement, emotions between men and women, far from over, the novel leaves us with memories and imagination, life is talk or trouble. "The story doesn't really end, because as long as a person lives, there can be no concrete and definite conclusion about a trouble, a hope, or a dream." Nabokov said something similar, while he was reading Chekhov.
Similar to "One Ear", the plot setting and narrative tone of some novels have the gene of growing into a larger length, taking Zhang Huiwen's "The Way of Rejection" (2020, 1) as an example, the core of her novel story is an ancient motif of a young girl's single love master, her extra delicate detail description and melancholy emotional tone, making the memory she narrates extra heavy, emotional and thick, suppressed in the novel about the character action, psychological presentation, several difficult to resolve, heavy narrative if you want to abruptly achieve "short", In the end, there is some incongruity. The male teacher who was in love invited out the girlfriend with red clothes and black hair, and completed the gentlemanly demeanor of the "way of rejecting", this ending can not be described as unreasonable, but Zhang Huiwen did too well in the first half of the novel, laying out too strong emotions, nowhere to delay the emotions have not been released, so "polite" the end, showing the imbalance of structure, you only hope that the story is longer, more complicated. Once writing is turned on, the reconstructed narrative grows almost instinctively into a systematic order that resists the rules and control of writing.
In this sense, Shi Shuqing's sacrificial cattle and Zhang Huiwen's unbalanced emotions raise a question for the novel, how should the short story deliberately set the ending, and in general, how should the novel end? How is the tension between form and content adjusted? Hemingway's zero-degree ending is an open-ended ending of the modern novel, anything is possible, inviting the reader to complete the imagination of the ending together, but he is not necessarily the most clever, and the deliberate imbalance can be the highlight of the novel's narrative technique: the abrupt polite ending carries incomparable emotions, the death of an animal, the blade suspended above the character's head, can it bear all the hormones and irrationality of the male and female protagonists for the master? maybe. not necessarily. At the end of the novel, what is left is not relief and comfort, but restless uneasiness and lingering questions, and we can't help but ask, can things really end here? Where will those non-mainstream, irrational, and in any case unstoppable emotions be placed? As he perused his beloved short stories, Bloom said, "Short stories are not allegories or proverbs, and therefore cannot be fragments; we ask them to give pleasure to solutions". But he also admitted that "the short story will only hurt us once and only once, and it will be different from the long novel, which can hurt us with many feelings, with many sorrows and joys." But in fact Chekhov and a few of his rivals were indeed able to give us a lot of feelings with their short stories."
It is Zhou Jieru who gives the "short" meaning of the short story an independent meaning, and it can even be said that she makes the short story truly different from the traditional short story. The "black mirror" writing of the digital age reinforces the sense of text as an image, accompanied by the writing action of tapping the keyboard, the pattern of words flowing like water on the smooth screen, and Lacan's floating signifier gives way to the flickering signifier. Zhou Jieru's "Birthday Party" (2021, 1) adopts the digital format of the Internet, flat code words, flat sentences, flat collage of stories that happened around ten years ago, all the time spans, the so-called lovers' separation and entanglement, and the crossing is just a calm and waveless enter key. She makes the "short" form a representation of the cold and lackluster relationship between urban men and women. She could have written very long, slightly withdrawn delicacy and sensitivity, which is zhou Jieru's talent, she can indulge in the description of sensory details, using narrative, imagery and instantaneous feelings to construct the world, rather than thoughts or ideas. However, "A Trip" is extremely restrained, frugal language, short sentences, accurate details, is the writer's carefully selected narrative tone for the heroine of "social fear", careful, but has the sensitivity to the whole world. "Silence is an option." George Steiner said, "When the language of the city is full of barbarism and lies, nothing is more powerful than abandoning the poetry written." "On the city bus, everyone has headphones, headphones are barriers, and even if language makes a sound, it is an isolated silence for the world and others. It is better to be silent. "What Kelly thinks is that if this conversation is more than 10,000 words, no one wants to do it." The dialogue is also useless, compared with the dialogue in Shuang Xuetao's novel, which comes and goes, cooperates with tacit understanding, and advances rapidly, Zhou Jieru's character dialogue is always in the same place, and it is all an "awkward chat" that can be seen at a glance. So she quickly told men and women to shut up in time. With nothing to say and nothing to love, they eventually maintained their physical distance.
The novel ends quickly without nostalgia. Yes, Kelly didn't want to say anything more about the world. Zhou Jieru succinctly made us clear.
Short meaning: a magnifying glass
All the writers involved in the "short story" special edition, short stories or short stories are not the only genres they are good at and specialize in, and in the short pages that are not diluted by too long lengths, a writer's language ability, situation creation ability, rhythm control, emotional brewing, explosion and closure are magnified in equal proportions in the given share of reading expectations, so the short story constitutes the novelist's micro-sculpture work, and the "short" itself becomes a magnifying glass granted to the reader. Considering the flaws and advantages of the writer's talent, and the presentation of the basic elements of the novel can be micro-watched, the text must always be self-consistent, and the completion of the novel means the victory of resisting the reality of writing, and sometimes the victory of both sides.
For literary critics and readers, the short story means reviving the tradition of "slow reading" that Nietzsche declared nearly obliterated, and it provides introductory basic training in "slow reading." The reader is reminded of a high degree of vigilance, of narrative tone, atmosphere, speed, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, polysemy—and everything that Terry Eagleton reiterates as "form." Reminding the reader to listen and strive not to miss the voice of any of the characters, "the reader must deliberately slow down and begin to listen with his inner ear".
In either case, it is clear that the tools of language at their disposal are threatened, on the one hand, from the squeeze outside the language and from within the language, on the other hand, by the depravity of the language. But literature alone can overcome the barriers that divide private and public emotions.
Observing the "Short Stories" special edition of "Shanghai Literature", we can find some similar choices of writers, for example, in a short story of four thousand words, almost no one has completed the death of the protagonist and the main character; the anonymous characters or indirect characters with deep meaning are relatively rare; the time of the novel is mostly maintained in the current situation, there are few narratives with time spans, and the text of two or more novel narrative time is rare, and most writers choose to transcend the limits of the present time in the form of recollection Short stories are usually used by writers to deal with the specific problems of life, and most of these problems are trivial and light, lacking heavy, tragic, extreme, Upanishads, and it is difficult for writers to "heavy" tasks in short lengths. Of course, it is likely that the editor's choice caused this appearance, and it is likely that the writers only began to write with less solemn ease, and perhaps they also subconsciously resisted the explosive words. However, I will also think of what Nishikawa said in an interview not long ago that today's Chinese literature deals with too light issues.
On the other hand, in the sample of these short stories, we see two types of short stories in bloom's dichotomy, both Chekhov-Hemingway-style novels that "start suddenly and end briefly" and Kafka-Borges-style novels that "devote themselves to the apparition". We can also find a continuation of the tradition of short stories by Lu Xun, Zhao Shuli and Shen Congwen, whose texts inherit the style of irony, realism and lyricism, continue the tradition of short stories in new Chinese literature, and have more innovations and breakthroughs in narrative techniques. Almost every writer has realized that the meaning of the novel short is, of course, not in its small size, but in the long of the short opposition, and the small corresponds to the large.
One thing is for sure, only the best novelists can put more into the short story.
