Novel Annual Inventory: "Convergence" of Long Stories and "Divergence" of Short and Medium Stories

At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, various institutions and literary people have taken stock of the actual achievements of literary creation in the past year in the form of rankings, anthologies, annual reviews, etc., providing a path for readers to more conveniently enjoy the spiritual food created by writers. As readers, we should pay tribute to the hard-earners behind these inventory activities, and also analyze and grasp the results of these inventory according to our own reading experience.

In the annual rankings each year, the novel list has the most types and the highest attention. Because the main body of the organization selection is different, each list has its own selection tendency, and there are definitely differences in the selected works. Taking 2021 as an example, in the "Annual Good Novel of the Chinese Novel Society", "The Sixth Annual Gold List of Novels", "The 18th Annual Forum of Contemporary Novels Annual Top Five", "Harvest" Literary List", "Yangtze River Literary Review Ranking" and other lists, the top works are different, and most of the lists have their own "characteristic works". However, due to the small number of long novel candidate works compared to other genres, the overlap of the jury list, and the relative uniformity of the evaluation criteria for novels, the overlap of various lists is also quite high. Yu Hua's "Wencheng", Liu Zhenyun's "One Day and Three Autumns", Dongxi's "Echo", and Luo Weizhang's "Who Is Knocking" are four works, which are frequently selected for the above lists. In previous years, the Douban reading list and the "Asia Weekly" list, which are known for their distinctive styles, also appear in these novels.

Such a landscape with "sameness" in "different" is in line with the reality of the literary scene. Because no matter what kind of list, it corresponds to the novel creation scene in 2021, and it is all about the novels created by the writers in this year, and the eyes of critics are naturally mostly focused on the amazing works of those famous new works and newcomers. Of course, we must also realize that this "consensus" in the field of novels is only a "limited consensus" in the so-called "pure literary circle", or only the consensus of professional critics, and the reading lists of ordinary readers and the rankings selected by experts are not necessarily consistent. The works of many Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan writers and overseas Chinese writers frequently appear on the reader's reading list, but they are rarely concerned by professional critics. This is especially true in the field of online literature, where a large writing team and reading group, coupled with the intervention of various online platforms and capital, constitute a brand-new literary field that runs smoothly. In this regard, the China Writers Association Network Literature Center released the annual China Internet Literature Influence List, and the Chinese Novel Society added the "Online Novel" special project in the annual good novel selection, which are very timely and necessary measures. The field of literary creation is so vast, the power and vision of literary criticism need to be followed up in time, covering a variety of literary styles and literary styles.

The lack of "consensus" is particularly evident in the field of short and medium stories: in the lists selected by various literary organizations and literary magazine organizations, the selection of short and medium stories has been very different, and some writers have been selected for three lists at the same time, but three completely different works have been selected. If you compare it with the list of websites that focus on readers' interests such as Douban Reading, you will find that the face is very different. The "convergence" of long novels and the "convergence" of short and medium stories constitute the opposite landscape in the rankings. The reason for this may be that the publication of famous parent novels is "event-oriented", everyone attaches great importance to it, and a huge energy field is formed in full comment and discussion, and a certain consensus has been formed on the ideological and artistic value of the work. Now the publication of short and medium stories is often "quiet", unless adapted into film and television dramas in time, it is difficult to form a holistic social impact like works such as "Scars" and "Qiao Factory Director's Appointment" in the 1980s, and consensus is naturally not easy to produce. More importantly, in the face of these massive short and medium-length works, every reader and judge has only been exposed to a small part of it. How to gather the strength of the editors of various publications to select the really excellent short and medium stories of the year has become a proposition that needs to be pondered. However, we must also realize that the list is only a list, and many times, only once, and never included in the list are not the fundamental criteria for evaluating works. The only criterion is time, which is the reader who reads carefully in the long river of time.

Content source: Literature and Art Daily, February 14, 2022, 1st edition

WeChat Editor: Lv Yimeng

Second instance: Ren Jingjing

Third trial: Xu Jian

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