Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 393 Leaving Sorrow to the Readers

Half a month after Harvest published "The Last Lesson", the turmoil outside of literature gradually subsided.

In this storm:

Zhang Chao's creative ability has once again been recognized by both readers and the industry. Even though his conception of the "future" has caused considerable controversy, it is still considered a possible reality.

Harvest Magazine achieved the highest single-issue sales since its founding, even surpassing the issue that published the first volume of Ordinary World, and also boosted the number of pre-orders for the "Special Issue on Long Stories";
Although Youth Magazine was once suspected of having a "rift" with Zhang Chao, a photo of Zhang Chao eating hot pot meat with others on Weibo broke the rumor and accidentally opened a precedent for sharing daily life on Weibo.
Readers who are already parents reflected on whether they were pushing their children too hard, and then quietly loosened the reins;
The children among the readers felt the concern of Zhang Chao, a role model, for their growth and were moved;
Zhang Chao's teachers, such as Yu Hua and Su Tong, were frequently invited by the media to talk about their views on "The Last Lesson";

As the leading science fiction writer in China, Liu Cixin has attracted much attention. His interpretation articles have been reprinted by many newspapers and magazines, which has brought him some unexpected pocket money.
Penguin, Alibaba and other companies have begun to seriously study the feasibility of realizing those scenes in Zhang Chao's novels that are closely related to life...

Thus, a world in which only Xin Dongfang and Lao Yu were injured was achieved.

After being silent for half a month, the literary criticism community finally published the first professional book review on "The Last Lesson" in "China Reading Newspaper": "The Last Lesson" - Salvaging the Sunken Ship of Humanity in the Accelerated Era.

[Zhang Chao's short story "The Last Lesson" narrates the various aspects of future life with a cold realistic touch, and dissects the problems of the contemporary Chinese educational ecology from the perspective of "tomorrow".

At the same time, he also uses the protagonist and his own mirror image to deeply reflect on the alienation of human nature under the acceleration of the times. This work is not only a breakthrough in the boundaries of traditional realist literature, but also a precise questioning of the spiritual dilemma of the current society. Its literary value and humanistic depth are worth in-depth discussion. 】

[“The Last Lesson” adopts a double-line nested polyphonic structure: one clue focuses on Jiangcheng teacher Zhang Chao’s last lesson within the system, and the other describes his ups and downs after he entered the education and training industry.

This structure is not a simple comparison between the past and the present, but rather an intertextual relationship between individual destiny and the tide of the times through the dislocation of time and space and the flow of consciousness.

Zhang Chao's language is full of precise granularity, such as the metaphor of "chalk dust falling on the edge of the podium like a miniature avalanche", which not only presents the subtle tremors of the physical world, but also metaphorically represents the collapse of knowledge transfer.

This microscopic capture of everyday details enables the text to achieve a delicate balance between documentary and symbolism, continuing the experimental nature of avant-garde literature without falling into the trap of obscurity.

[More profound is the dissection of the spiritual dilemma of the middle class. Zhang Chao juxtaposes the process of the degeneration of teachers and the collective anxiety of the parent group: the former sells the dignity of knowledge driven by profit, while the latter falls into an education arms race to resist the panic of "class fall".

This two-way alienation exposes the comprehensive erosion of humanistic values ​​by instrumental rationality in an era of material abundance. The core image of "volume" in the novel is not only a metaphor for the fierce social competition, but also implies the state of human nature being forced to curl up under the pressure of survival.

The conclusion at the end of the article is also very powerful:
The value of The Last Lesson lies not only in its diagnosis of social ills, but also in the fact that it preserves a spiritual archive for the accelerated era in a literary way. In this sense, the novel continues Lu Xun's realistic tradition of "revealing the suffering" and expands the boundaries of literature with the experimental nature of future narratives.

It reminds us that true literature is never a yes-man of the times, but a salvager of the sunken ship of humanity, salvaging those spiritual qualities that are about to disappear in the turbulence of social development.

The article is certainly well-written, but what is even more shocking is that its author is Bai Ye, a famous literary critic who had a "battle" with Zhang Chao two years ago.

After the "Zhang Bai dispute", Bai Ye sadly resigned from the position of president of the "Chinese Literary Criticism Society", concentrated on his teaching work, and even declined many invitations to literature-related activities. He seemed to be ready to retire to the mountains before reaching retirement age.

Who knew that the old man would be so quiet and yet his first move would be such a powerful one.

What could be more dramatic than a former "enemy" letting go of their grudges and even helping you? So for a while, Bai Ye stole the limelight from everyone else, including Yu Hua and Su Tong, two of Zhang Chao's teachers, because of his righteous statement in front of the media:
"My evaluation of The Last Lesson is entirely based on the work, not on Zhang Chao as a person, and has nothing to do with the relationship between Zhang Chao and me."

"Zhang Chao has not contacted me, and I have not contacted Zhang Chao."

“I finished reading The Last Lesson in one night, thought about it for a week, and wrote it in another week. I think it is the best piece I have written in recent years.”

"The manuscript fee is 1,250.72 yuan, and I didn't receive a penny of anything else."

"Good works should be praised... Zhang Chao's previous works? They weren't bad, we just had some differences in aesthetics!"

"I emphasize again that as a professional literary critic, I have no 'prejudice' towards any work, and all my evaluations are made with an impartial heart."

……

It should be said that Bai Ye's comeback has given great confidence and encouragement to the literary criticism community. After all, the turmoil two years ago shook the foundation of this profession. In the Chinese departments of various universities, the number of students taking graduate exams for literary criticism has decreased significantly.

Since Bai Ye’s work was a good example, everyone was eager to express their opinions. The most eye-catching one was titled “Parody, Subversion, Reconstruction – On How “The Last Lesson” Can Make the Future Shine into Reality.”

The author of this article is named "Shi'an". Compared with Bai Ye, his views have more literary depth:

[Zhang Chao's "The Last Lesson" deconstructs the boundaries of traditional realistic literature with a pioneering style. Through parody and subversion of Daudet's classic of the same name, he constructs a text that combines future allegory with realistic criticism.

This work not only reshapes the paradigm of "future narrative" with the courage of literary experiment, but also penetrates the fog of the times with a stern gaze, questioning the ups and downs of human nature in the overlap of fiction and reality. 】

The novel is based on the narrative framework of Daudet's "The Last Lesson", but it dispels the tragic grandeur of "The Last Lesson" with an anti-sublime attitude. Mr. Hamel's patriotic declaration is replaced by Zhang Chao's resignation farce, and the solemnity of the classroom collapses amid the students' indifference and the teacher's self-admiration.

This parody is not a simple deconstruction game, but a disenchantment of the sacredness of education through the intertextuality of classic texts. When the protagonist imagines that students will remember their "last lesson" with tears like little Franz, reality shatters the fantasy with paper airplanes folded from test papers - this absurd gap is a metaphor for the dilemma of contemporary education.

【Zhang Chao creatively refined the common word "volume" into a literary image, accurately capturing the collective unconsciousness of the middle class in the panic of falling into the social class. When parent Lin Xia stared at the "parent group" on his mobile phone late at night, the mortgage figures and the child's grades on the screen turned into a concrete mental cage——

This narrative strategy of transforming abstract anxiety into visual oppression makes the future vision a reflection of the current predicament. The novel depicts the mental symptoms of the times in the ambiguous area between "not yet happened" and "happening" with almost pathological precision. Here, I must emphasize again Zhang Chao's creative use of the word "volume"! The dividing line between a genius writer and a mediocre writer is that a genius writer can expand the boundaries of human language.

In this regard, there is no distinction between popular literature and serious literature. It represents a writer's contribution to his own national language. As Confucius said, "If you don't know poetry, you can't speak." When the word "juan" gradually becomes part of people's daily spoken language, the work "The Last Lesson" is destined to be remembered. 】

[Subverting in parody, recreating in subversion, the novel ultimately arrives at not a pessimistic prediction of the future, but a persistent questioning of the possibilities of human nature - just like the figure in a white shirt looking up at the sky at the fire scene, there is always hope for rebirth and reconstruction above the ruins.]

It was only then that everyone discovered that this "Shi'an" was the author of the previous article "Taking the "Long 90s" as the starting point to examine the generational perspective of the "Post-80s" generation - taking Zhang Chao's works as an example."

However, what is different from the last time is that this time the work is preceded by an introduction to the author "Shi'an", and everyone discovered that he is actually a young man who just graduated from the Chinese Department of university.

In other words, he was only a sophomore when he wrote the article "Taking the "Long 90s" as the starting point..."?

This is a bit unbelievable. You have to know that writing literary criticism is not just writing "reading notes", it requires deep theoretical knowledge and a vast amount of text accumulation. To some extent, it is even more difficult than a young writer like Zhang Chao who became famous at a young age.

After all, "genius writers" have been common since ancient times, but "genius critics" have been rare.

Therefore, it is amazing that a sophomore can write such an article; and the article he wrote now, "Parody, Subversion, Reconstruction...", further demonstrates his genius insight.

"It seems that everything has been a little different since Zhang Chao appeared..." It gradually became a whisper circulating within the literary circle.

Before Zhang Chao, Chinese literature had been in a low ebb for more than a decade. After the nationwide literary craze in the 1980s and the ebb tide, in the entire 1990s, except for the early death of Wang Xiaobo, China did not produce a single writer of landmark significance.

So much so that in the 21st century, the "old men" from the s and early s are still the ones taking the lead in major literary journals.

But after Zhang Chao emerged, he was not the only one making waves in the literary world, he also led a group of young people of similar age to start sprinting on the literary path. At the same time, major journals were more willing to publish their manuscripts.

At the same time, the literary market has shown a clear recovery, with a large number of young readers beginning to flock to both serious and genre literature.

They are either fans of Zhang Chao's books, or they are attracted by Zhang Chao's influence and are paying attention to a group of his peers in China who are quietly creating works, rather than the so-called "new literary forces" who are rebellious or pretentious.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Zhang Chao became their leader and the one who went the furthest among them.

Just as Shi An said in the article, Zhang Chao's works are even subtly changing people's concepts and expression habits - from school violence to housing anxiety, from homesickness to education concerns - he is like a skilled musician, constantly plucking the strings in people's hearts with his works.

Less than a month after the publication of "The Last Lesson", it became a normal practice for white-collar workers and students to use the word "roll" to tease each other.

Seeing colleagues still working overtime late at night: "Stop it, or I'll lose my job..."

Seeing classmates staying up late to practice questions: “You are going to kill us all!”

Seeing that his peers have lowered their prices, he said, “Aren’t you afraid of getting yourself killed?”

……

Even an editorial in the People's Daily was titled "To improve education, we must be wary of inefficient "involution"."

Zhang Chao himself was not too surprised by this. After all, he had witnessed how this word became popular in later generations and became a high-frequency word in people's daily expressions.

At this moment, he was sitting at his desk, with a compassionate look in his eyes, holding a bottle of black liquid with bubbles and white gas in his hand. Zhang Chao, who had almost reached the pinnacle of "writer", remembered the words - "In the trend of the times that meets your expectations, at the critical juncture, take the magic potion..."

He drank the black liquid in his hand without any hesitation...

Ten seconds later——

"Burp~~~~~~~~" Zhang Chao let out an extremely long burp, his eyes blurred, as if he had reached the peak of his life.

Is this the feeling of drinking a glass of iced cola after exercise? Even though this has been repeated for two weeks, he still enjoys this moment!
He lives a simple life in Shenzhen. He gets up at 9 am, eats rice noodle rolls outside the community, and then hikes to Lianhuashan Park or Tanglangshan Park.

At noon, I would just cook some simple meals for myself, or just eat at a restaurant; I would take a nap in the afternoon, and after getting up, I would go to a nearby court to play basketball for two hours with a group of college students and young people.

I come back, take a shower, rest, and go out for dinner. Then I play games and read novels until 10 o'clock in the evening, when I turn on the computer to write my own novel.

I wrote and revised until one o'clock in the morning and went to bed on time.

But in mid-June, a phone call broke his regular but boring life: "Zhang Chao, how could you let Youth Magazine publish that kind of poetry? This is a great harm to the readers!

How could you leave your readers with such intense sadness?"

(End of this chapter)