Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 176 No matter how long the night is, there will be dawn.
[This is an old notebook, with a rough yellowish brown paper cover full of stains. The top half is printed with the four characters "Work Notes" in red official script; the small characters at the bottom are mostly soaked by the dark brown tea stains, and there are two small holes burned by cigarette ash, so it is impossible to see what the characters are. A middle-aged woman tied it tightly to the top of a bundle of old books with a plastic rope, and a deep "X" was also strangled...]

[Compared to old books, I prefer to collect old notes. Books always have traces to follow, and you can often know the general content by looking at the title. But notes are different. They are a person's life that has been cut out and pieced together...]

[95.2.3 Zhengzhou Cotton Textile Road renovation worker Liu Kai 94.6-9]

【95.2.19收32元5角支5元5角寄100元】

【95.4.4 Bijie Xiaoba collects pigs 95.3】

……

【95.7.11 Liu Jun, a laborer at the Qianxi construction site, 94.1-5】

[95.10.30 Xiaojuan’s birthday, $50]

[The handwriting is large, sloppy and powerful, it should be a man. The content is intermittent, sometimes it can be recorded continuously for more than a month, and sometimes it will be interrupted for 1 months. So what he wrote is not a diary, but more like some kind of work notes. He seems to be looking for someone, because the name that appears almost every time is different...]

[I found the middle-aged woman again, hoping she could tell me something or sell me more notes. She has moved away, and the two northern rooms she once rented in the alley have been occupied by a newlywed couple. But there is always a shortage of old ladies with loud voices and bad mouths here. …]

[So, I heard Captain Cheng’s story for the first time amidst the mixed smell of stinky ditch and food…]

Late at night on the 3th floor of Building 16, East Courtyard, Zhongguancun North Street, Zhang Chao wrote the first chapter of "The Glory of Criminal Police" in front of the computer screen.

There are three "I"s in the novel. The first "I" is the narrator of the novel, a mediocre novelist who likes to collect old notes for inspiration. While walking in the alleys, he bought an old "work notebook" from a woman who was moving. The notebook records Captain Cheng's travels across the country, which aroused my interest.

In order to find out what the notes recorded, "I" went to the alley to find the woman, but heard the first version of the story from the old lady next door - how a poor woman was dragged down by her reckless and stubborn criminal police ex-husband for more than ten years, and raised her daughter with great difficulty. Finally, she got her reward and is now married to an honest old widower who owns a house outside the Fourth Ring Road.

I did not find the woman, so I could only collect the rest of the notes to find out the details of the story. However, the order in which I got the notes was different from the order of the notes themselves, so I supplemented the missing parts through my imagination, and on the other hand, these imagined contents were overturned again and again by the new notes.

Later, I saw the middle-aged woman's mobile phone number in a notebook, so I called her. After some persuasion, she finally agreed to meet me. From her mouth, I heard the second version of the story - how a heroic man was destroyed by sudden bad luck and his own stubbornness, and finally embarked on a meaningless journey to hunt down the murderer, which caused the family that had finally reunited to be broken again.

"I" felt that both the story of the old neighbor lady and the story of the middle-aged woman were too mediocre - so "I" decided to write a legendary story for Captain Cheng based on my understanding of him. In this story, Captain Cheng is no longer a sloppy middle-aged man whose edges have been smoothed by time and life. He is as meticulous as Sherlock Holmes and as skilled as 007. Thus, the second "I" in the novel - the legendary hero Captain Cheng - was born.

But this "I" is not "obedient". He often jumps out of the plot of the legendary story, questioning and mocking the "I" of the novelist. As a result, the novelist "I" has to overturn the already written plot again and again. In the constant imagination and rewriting, the "I" of the novelist and the "I" in the legendary story (Captain Cheng) gradually merged in identity. "I" began to blur the boundary between fiction and reality.

At this time, the third "I" appeared. He is the "Captain Cheng" in the real world. He learned from his ex-wife that "I" was looking for the notebook and narrating his story, so he took the initiative to find "I" and told the third version of the story - a man whose ideals, beliefs and reputation were destroyed by fate for half his life, and he had to leave his wife and daughter behind to reconstruct the meaning of his life.

But the novelist "I" is now in a greater state of confusion: Is what "Captain Cheng" in this real world says necessarily true? Or does he just want to use "me" to write down the most ideal story in his mind?

……

The novel is re-told over and over again, with one "I" after another, one "Captain Cheng" after another, and countless narrative lines that are either obvious or hidden, true or false, interweaving into a complex narrative maze. In Zhang Chao's mind, every retelling is actually true; every retelling actually contains hypocrisy.

In the novel “Crime Police Glory”, truth and fiction are not mutually exclusive. All the seemingly objective statements in the novel are contained in a very strong subjective emotion.

Zhang Chao tells readers all the possibilities and lets them choose what kind of image they have of Captain Cheng. Readers can even ignore every "I"'s statement of the story and use their imagination to create a "Captain Cheng" based on the records in the "Work Notes".

The scale of this novel is not large, and it is estimated to be about 13 to 15 words. However, the structure is the most complicated of all the novels Zhang Chao has written. In addition, apart from the story framework that comes from the stories told by Yu Zhandong and the TV series "The Third Brigade", there is no reading experience in the previous life to "reference", and it is very likely to fail if you are not careful. However, Zhang Chao is still willing to try his writing skills to control such "originality".

This is a threshold he must cross. After the "Zhang-Bai dispute", the literary criticism community has retreated to the boundaries they should have strictly adhered to, leaving more space for creators, but this also means that Zhang Chao must be more strict with himself, rather than indulge himself.

After literature has returned to the center of public attention, if you fail to produce qualified works, you will be the one who makes a fool of yourself in the end. And this time, there is no excuse for shirking responsibility.

However, as Zhang Chao's research on Wang Xiaobo's writing techniques in "Wanshou Temple" became more and more in-depth, he became more and more proficient in writing "The Glory of Criminal Police".

After typing the last punctuation mark of the first chapter, Zhang Chao looked out the window. The eastern sky was already turning pale, and there were rustling sounds of activity downstairs in the community.

Zhang Chao looked at the time and decided to go to sleep for a few hours. Today, he had an appointment to do something "big"...

(One update today. Three updates tomorrow.)
(End of this chapter)