Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 332 The imperial edict has arrived!
When Shuang Xuetao and Xu Ruiya walked out of the hotel, they were still in a daze. Shuang Xuetao squeezed the notebook in his hand and felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds.

Although he didn't understand why Zhang Chao asserted that the K1 reader would not be legally sold in China within a few years, why Zhang Chao asked the IT department to "pre-develop" a universal reader software now, why he wanted to bring in Qidian.com, and why Zhang Chao was sure that mobile phones would be the most mainstream reading medium in the future...

But history has proven that it was right to listen to him.

As for why Zhang Chao wanted to name this software "Biquge" at first, but then denied it with a look of regret, and finally just gave it a simple code name like "Chaoxi Reading", it is not important.

Today’s content is enough to keep everyone busy until next year.

Zhang Chao stood by the window of the hotel, looking at the scattered sunlight floating on the surface of the Huangpu River outside the window, and the glass curtain wall reflecting spots of light like broken gold.

He didn't actually leave Shanghai, he just changed hotels.

He had no desire to attend the award ceremony of the "New Concept Essay Contest" in the afternoon, so he found an excuse to avoid it - the representative of Amazon, why not meet him at any time?
All of Zhang Chao's ideas have been written on the blackboard. As for how the reporters and contestants on the scene interpret them, he doesn't really care.

Since his rebirth, Zhang Chao’s mentality has undergone many changes, from enjoying his youth, to enjoying his wealth, and then to having a sense of mission in literature... Zhang Chao once asked himself, now that he could completely "play with life", why did he still insist on creating the literary works that he expected in his heart?
In a way, writing is a painful thing, which is very similar to how Elon Musk described his entrepreneurial experience - "chewing glass and staring into the abyss." - It's just that humans are such stupid and stubborn creatures...

Of course, this "Iron Man" of Silicon Valley has not yet reached the peak, and this sentence has not yet come out of his mouth.

After contacting Amazon today and explaining the subsequent development route of "Tide Culture" to Shuang Xuetao and others, Zhang Chao's long work handover of "Tide Culture" finally came to an end.

Next, we can start preparing for what Professor Iizuka Yoshio mentioned...

Just when Zhang Chao was distracted, his cell phone suddenly rang. He picked it up and saw that it was his teacher Yu Hua.

"I heard you returned to Yanjing?"

"Not yet, what's up?"

"Do you have any other plans in the middle of next month? Are you in the country?"

"...There are no special arrangements. They should be in the country."

"Oh, that's good. The Writers Association is going to hold a seminar on your creation in the next ten days. I hope you can attend this time."

"...Can I... not participate?"

"You could do it before, but you'd better attend this time, or I wouldn't be the one calling you."

"Okay... okay. But can you please tell me which work it is? I can prepare myself for it."

"It's mainly your novel 'Boy and Meteor' - of course it's hard to say whether this is one or three novels."

"Oh... okay. But why so sudden?"

"Search online for yourself, and then buy a few copies of Literary Review. The discussion about your work has become the focus of recent literary theory circles. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say!"

After hanging up the phone, Zhang Chao felt a tingling sensation on his scalp. He really didn't like participating in this kind of activities - when he first became famous, it was one thing to sit on the lawn of Yanda University and discuss literature with other college students who loved literature; it was another thing to sit in a conference room, under the gaze of a group of middle-aged and elderly people, and listen to them praise his works.

However, since teacher Yu Hua said so, Zhang Chao certainly couldn't refuse.

Zhang Chao was also confused as to why the domestic literary critics were suddenly interested in his works. After the "Zhang Bai dispute" last year, his relationship with the domestic critics had completely hit rock bottom, and invitations to various literary seminars and symposiums had basically disappeared.

Although my recent works have been selling well over the past year, few domestic literary research scholars have shown interest in them. Except for a long review by a critic named "Shi'an" around the Chinese New Year titled "Using the 'Long 90s' as a Starting Point to Examine the Generational Perspective of the Post-80s Generation - Taking Zhang Chao's Works as an Example", there have been very few research articles on my works.

Full of doubts, Zhang Chao began to search for relevant information on the Internet and went to a bookstore to buy several literary criticism magazines. Only then did he discover that the story of "The Boy and the Meteor" had indeed been the "focus of attention" of the domestic literary criticism circle in the past month.

For example, this article "Analysis of the Experimental Text of Zhang Chao's 'Youth·Meteor' from the Perspective of Literary Ontology"

"Zhang Chao's "Youth·Meteor" reconstructs the traditional children's literature paradigm with a unique "text proliferation" strategy. This work achieves a dual deconstruction of reading ethics and creative ontology through the juxtaposition of multi-dimensional narrative spaces."

“The text implants the quantum entanglement state of magical narrative in the soil of realism. The wizard’s Nuo dance scene (“the red ribbon whips the air like a whip”) and the details of Wei Xiaoliang’s roasted sweet potatoes (“the burnt skin cracks and the golden flesh”) form an observer effect: when readers focus on folk elements, the text presents magical realism characteristics; when they focus on the dilemma of survival, it collapses into a cruel story.

This Schrodinger-like literary attribute breaks the stereotype of Yang Hongying's children's literature and creates a literary superposition state of "both on this shore and on the other shore."

Zhang Chao turned the page when he saw this. As a liberal arts student, he could not stand the use of such specious scientific terms to explain novels. It seemed profound, but in fact it deviated from the narrator's original intention and could not be clearly interpreted by readers. It was truly an elitist arrogance and a disaster for literary criticism.

So he turned to another criticism, "On the Narrative Experiment and Textual Reconstruction of Zhang Chao's Novel "Star Chaser""——

“The “triple text structure” constructed by Zhang Chao in Star Chaser is essentially a thorough deconstruction of the linear narrative tradition. By embedding the same narrative core into three modes: fairy tale, realistic legend and experimental text, the author realizes the ideal form of what Roland Barthes called “writable text”—readers are no longer passive recipients, but are forced to actively participate in the production of meaning in the metaphor system of the “fairy tale version of The Child Who Exiled a Falling Star”, the rural texture of the “realistic version of Boy Meteor” and the meta-narrative maze of the “complete version of Star Chaser”.”

“This “tributary-mainstream” circular narrative model echoes the philosophy of time in Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, but is more localized: the ritualized scene of the witch’s Nuo dance is both a centrifugal force of the narrative (giving rise to branch lines such as the legend of the witch and the metaphor of the firefly) and a centripetal force (gathering the fragmented narrative into the collective unconscious through the fire and the sound of drums).”

Zhang Chao was quite satisfied with this review. When writing the story of "Boy Meteor", he did introduce Roland Barthes's two opposing concepts of "readable" text and "writable" text.

The former refers to works that conform to traditional codes and modes of comprehensibility. The latter refers to experimental works, which we do not know how to read and can only write these texts while reading.

However, this skill was not formed by Zhang Chao's deliberate mystification or showing off, but was gradually formed through day-to-day communication with the children of Shilei Village.

Therefore, if we want to solve the "mystery" of Zhang Chao's creation of this novel, we must essentially abandon or eliminate the traditional idea of ​​"author-centeredness" in the evaluation process, and never focus on restoring the author's thoughts and intentions - just like this story, although Zhang Chao is the "main creator", the entire creative process refers to the opinions of many children. So Zhang Chao is providing readers with those positive and creative characters, rather than instilling his own pre-set humanity into readers.

In this process, Zhang Chao provided readers with three complete stories, but he also personally handed the scalpel for deconstructing these three stories to the readers.

However, Roland Barthes's "writable text" is almost an idealized concept of creation. Although it has been proposed for half a century, no literary work matches or corresponds to it.

James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" may be the closest work, but he used the infinite possibilities of "language" by mixing a large number of different languages, variant phrases, abbreviated phrases, self-made words, metaphorical words in the narrative... allowing readers to constantly participate in the construction of the semantics of the work.

However, this way of writing also creates an extremely high threshold for reading. Only if you are proficient in multiple languages ​​like the author and have extensive knowledge of ancient and modern times can you get this kind of constructed joy from reading.

To the extent that the notes section of the Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake has become a kind of spectacle - it occupies a larger space than the original text and is almost like an academic paper with excessive citations.

……

“So you adopted the method of ‘split-line narrative’, with Wei Xiaoliang’s main line of searching for Teacher Zhang, and then continuously derived branch lines such as Wu Nuo culture, rural medical difficulties, and natural philosophical speculation.

Then let these branches continue to intersect, interweave, and even subvert and reconstruct, thus forming a structure that constantly cycles and moves forward. "

In the large conference room on the second floor of Luyuan Academy in Yenching, under the banner of "Symposium on the Creative Achievements and Creative Experiences of Young Writer Zhang Chao", a literary critic in his fifties said.

There were more than 50 participants sitting in the conference room. The seminar was chaired by Zou Guangming, vice president of Lu Academy and secretary-general of the Writers Association Secretariat.

As the focal figure, Zhang Chao was standing right next to Zou Guangming, listening to everyone's discussion. Although he showed no expression on the surface, he felt "like sitting on pins and needles", "like a thorn in the back", and "like a fishbone stuck in the throat" in his heart.

“The magic of this novel is that each branch contains all the elements of the main plot, but presents differentiated evolution at the level of details. And it is not only the readers who participate in constructing the meaning of this novel, but also the editors of the publishing house.

When the editors worked overnight to disassemble the three independent versions, they actually constructed another "meta-narrative", a "meta-narrative" that neither the author nor the reader participated in. The openness of this text exceeded everyone's imagination. "

Another critic said. This critic was not very old, probably in his 30s, with a bookish look on his face, and was very elegant and easy-going.

“The value of this work does not lie in solving a specific problem in children’s literature, but in the fact that it creates uncertainty in the text and forces readers to face the random flow of literature itself. What we see is not only the fantastic journey of a rural boy, but also a fable of the continuous rebirth of literature in the process of deconstructing itself.”

"Wei Xiaoliang's obsession with meteor showers in the novel is exactly the contemporary echo of the questioning of the times by young people during the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Zhang Chao uses the metaphor of 'meteor-life' to interpret the youth enlightenment of Chinese young people that has not been completed for a hundred years. This attempt to graft the rural narrative of "The Grass House" with the avant-garde narrative of contemporary literature has opened up a unique path in the field of children's literature."

……

At the beginning, Zhang Chao could still barely hear it, but in less than 30 minutes, his ears were filled with the sound of "Aba Aba".

In order to avoid falling asleep on the spot, he had to raise his hand and start speaking when a critic finished speaking.

"First of all, teachers, my work is not as mysterious as you say... excellent. I sat here and listened to you all the afternoon, like listening to you dissecting a bird - you clearly separated the feathers, bones, and muscles, but at first, I just heard it chirping beautifully in the woods.

The creation of this work was completely accidental. In fact, when I wrote this story, I was like an old farmer in the mountains planting sweet potatoes - burying the sprouted tubers in the soil, and after a few spring rains, the vines will crawl everywhere by themselves.

You mentioned "branch narrative" and "meta-narrative". Of course, I understand these techniques and have used them. But in this work, they are the forks in the road that Wei Xiaoliang took when he climbed the mountain. What child would not get lost in the wild a few times? "

The crowd laughed. Compared with everyone else's interpretation, Zhang Chao's self-explanation seemed very light.

"At that time in Shilei Village, I squatted by the fire and told them stories. A dozen children surrounded me and talked at once: 'Liang Xiaoyang was brought into the cave by fireflies!' 'The nails of the witch should be red, like blood!' In the firelight, their eyes were brighter than the stars in winter. I suddenly realized that this story cannot be engraved on a stone tablet, but on the old tree at the entrance of the village - the branches and leaves sway in the direction of the wind."

This was the first time that everyone heard Zhang Chao personally talk about the creation process of this work, so they all listened very carefully. Although Zhang Chao made an introduction at the beginning, it was just a polite remark and was far less valuable than it is now.

Zhang Chao took a sip of water and continued, "As for the three versions... When my teacher corrected my essays, he always said, 'The ending should be like a weight pressing down the basket.' But I have lived in Shilei Village for a long time and often helped them carry their loads. I found that if the front basket was filled with corn and the back basket was filled with firewood, it was enough to walk steadily. Why did I need a weight?
Telling a story can make people gather around the fire in the cold winter, listen to you and then go to sleep. There is no need to give it so much meaning. "

This statement made everyone feel a little awkward, after all, they were the ones who were constantly giving meaning to Zhang Chao's work.

Zhang Chao also talked about some details of the writing process: "The manuscripts that were later submitted to the publishing house were actually drafts that the children and I worked on together. The three versions that the editors came up with were like putting stream water into three clay pots - some people tasted the sweetness, while others tasted the fishy smell, but the stream itself continued to flow in the mountains."

Finally, he concluded: "After all, I am just a writer, which is a craft, just like barbering, butchering pigs, repairing shoes, and driving tractors. I am just a craftsman.

Writing a book is similar to herding cattle. You drive the cattle up the hillside, and it is up to them to decide which calf eats the milk vetch or which old cow likes to scratch the itch tree. All I can do is replace the whip with a bamboo flute and play a little tune to make the cattle walk more freely.

……

Thanks to Zhang Chao's "continuous efforts", the seminar finally ended one hour earlier than the scheduled time. After all, there are not many authors like him who don't like to hear praises.

After everyone left, Zhang Chao took the opportunity to quietly ask Zou Guangming, "President Zou, what's going on? Why are you suddenly interested in my work?"

Zou Guangming asked in surprise: "Didn't Yu Hua tell you?"

Zhang Chao shook his head.

Zou Guangming then explained, "Ma Yueran will visit China next month. He specifically asked to meet you and said that you are a rare genius in literary history! The work he read most recently was your Star Chaser."

Zhang Chao suddenly realized that it was this gentleman who had issued an imperial decree!

(End of this chapter)