"Harvest" WeChat special article | short story "Kennel" creation talk: "Bolaño" challenge (Chen Ge)

Chen Ge, born in 1993 in Jinhua, Zhejiang, holds a Ph.D. in the College of Literature, Beijing Normal University. He has published short stories in magazines such as People's Literature, Shanghai Literature, and Writers.

The creation of the short story "Kennel"

The "Bolaño" challenge

Chen Ge

In mid-September 2021, I read one of Bolaño's novellas, "Distant Stars," and I loved it. Later, I swiped his related push on WeChat and saw an article called "Twelve Suggestions for Polanio to Create Short Stories". The first one is amazing: "Don't write just one at a time." If you only write one story at a time, there's a good chance you'll be writing the same story until you die. The second is: "It is best to write three or five at a time, and if you have the energy, it is no problem to write nine or fifteen." "And I'm a very slow writer, and my way of writing is that for a while, doing nothing, just focusing on writing a novel until it's done. Seeing Bolaño's suggestion,—— for me, it was more like a "challenge" ,—— I was tempted to give it a try. It was just about to be National Day, and I gave myself the task of completing one or even two novels (three to five thousand words, as expected) in ten days, starting on October 1. Due to the "urgency" of this task, I quickly typed the first line: During the two years I studied in Germany, I lived lawlessly... At this time, I only had a more hanging image of a female international student in my mind.

Writing three elements, the characters have; time, I want to set before the epidemic, for the protagonist to save the trouble of wearing a mask; the location, I decided to set in Berlin. In 2018, I spent a week in Berlin and the city impressed me deeply. They are very environmentally friendly, there are a lot of organic food supermarkets, and most of the restaurants have a special vegetarian section. I've also met people who are extremely vegetarian and who even refuse all animal products, such as belts and bags, and they don't want to hurt animals for their own pleasure. But at the same time, I also saw that they hurt themselves without pity, eating potatoes and frozen pizzas, smoking and drinking all day long, taking drugs, smoking marijuana, and "spending" weekends at music festivals, clubs and parties. I have a feeling that Berlin still has not fully recovered from the trauma of war, including World War II and the Cold War, and I can feel that their young people still have a very strong sense of disillusionment, which makes them look like angels on the one hand and devils on the other. And both of these aspects are quite a big culture shock for me. Max is in a way anthropomorphic of Berlin, and the interaction between the protagonist and Max is based on my feelings for Berlin. Eric and Paula are the extreme forms of Max, and Wang Shihao is the extreme form of the protagonist; Wang Shihao is the very "Chinese" part of the protagonist's bones, which she cannot change, cannot get rid of, and even needs to rely on when she goes to a foreign land.

Brian is the dramatic conflict of the novel. He's the kind of person I hate the most, or a collection of some of the qualities I hate the most. They use their power, wealth, and social status to bully and coerce those who are weaker than them. Knowledge, civilization, and art are actually sugar-coated traps in their hands. When I identified two scenes, the "kennel" with Max at its core and the "Victorian Palace" with Brian at its core, the next thing I did was to constantly strengthen their contrast. "A gentleman is indifferent to his relatives, and a villain is willing to die." Brian is disgusting, and the "kennel" represents my ideal of human friendship.

It took me twenty-eight days to complete the novel, far beyond the original time limit, and I was back to the original way of writing. So my desire now is still to be able to try a "challenge" of Bolaño, is it possible to write several novels at the same time?

Finally, I want to frankly say that I have some regrets about this novel. For example, Max and Eric help the protagonist teach Brian the heavy "martial arts", I write it badly, a bit of a fist embroidery, put it on TV is estimated to be scolded. And its logic is still "the prince defeats the dragon, saves the princess", at the critical moment, the woman still relies on the man, why can't I design the protagonist to rely on his own strength to punish Brian? There is still little interaction between female characters, Paula's image is thin, and the female writer Herta Miller is a tool person. Male characters, both positive and negative, are clearly fuller and more impressive than female characters. I have to reflect on all this, and I hope that there will be a good performance in the future works.

February 9, 2022

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2022-2 Harvest Catalogue

Novel

Xuan Papaya Villa / Su Yi Gua

novelette

Beauty /Zhang Huiwen

Half-baked man / Wang Zhanhei

short story

I thought I was human/Ding Xiaoning

Kennel/Chan each

Shadow Womb / Li Hao

A sea of dust drops

Eat meat/Wang Binbin

Fiction class

What literature gives us/Yu Hua

Mountains and rivers fall asleep

Gu Dao/Wang Jianbing

Bright stars

Yu Xiang: She recognizes the direction of the Destiny Wind Banner / Xiao Hai

Uchiha New Work/Uchiha