As the critic He Ping said, a good literary era must not only have good authors and good works, but also have readers with good aesthetic appreciation. As a public welfare literary lecture for the public, the "Nanshi - Yilin Art and Literature Forum" has been held for a year and has been held for a total of 10 sessions, which is to cultivate readers with good aesthetic appreciation ability. The guest speaker of the eighth session was writer Su Tong, who had a conversation with He Ping on the theme of "Short Stories, Some Elements". Based on his own reading experience and life experience, Su Tong conducted an in-depth analysis of the relationship between literary reading and creation, and expounded the ideological connotation of his short story "Watermelon Boat" from multiple perspectives, pointing out that the effectiveness of the novel's language should be closely integrated with the text expression. He Ping believes that Su Tong's short story creation does not pre-set the narrative logic, but allows the text to grow independently, so as to create a masterpiece with a unique style.
Dialogue: Su Tong He Ping
1
Each writer's writing map has its own secrets, and this map is sometimes not entirely divided according to sensibility and reason.
He Ping: Generally speaking, a writer can be called a famous writer if he has one or two novels that everyone remembers, but Su Tong's masterpieces of this type can no longer be measured in single digits. We found that Su Tong's writing stage that attracted the most attention from researchers was concentrated in two ends: one was the 80s stage when he published "Mulberry Garden Remembrance", "Rice", "A Group of Wives and Concubines", "The Escape in 1934", "Flying Over My Hometown of Maple and Poplar"; One is the stage of winning important awards such as the Mao Dun Literature Award for "The Riverbank" and "The Yellow Bird". This end is fully "noticed", but the middle section is not paid enough attention. And this is exactly the stage when Su Tong turned from youth to middle-aged writing. To use an inappropriate analogy, this stage is equivalent to the "waist" of a writer's life. Su Tong is a writer with a strong "waist" strength. It is the strong "waist strength" that enables Su Tong not only to support novels such as "The Riverbank" and "The Yellow Sparrow", but also to establish his status as the best contemporary Chinese short story writer.
said that the waist strength of Su Tong's writing is also related to the topic selection of our graduate thesis. Observing Su Tong's entire writing, the decade from 1995 to 2004, when Su Tong was in his thirties and forties, was also the decade or so when he wrote the most important short stories. Not only that, but it was at this stage that he confirmed and confirmed his own stylistic outlook on fiction, including the title of today's dialogue, "Short Stories, Some Elements" (Editor's note: The title of the speech is also the title of the preface to "The Splendor of the Pillow: 10 Short Stories That Influenced Me" edited by Su Tong. ), in 1999. Su Tong's own collection of short stories, "Night Stories", is basically concentrated in this writing period, which shows that Su Tong also recognizes that this stage is at least the golden age of his own short stories.
Su Tong: When you talk about my short stories, I suddenly remembered that I wrote a preface to a collection of short stories published in Taiwan many years ago. That day, I was full of excitement, and I wrote a thousand words, and suddenly I wrote a sentence from a high place of interest, God, you will make me a master of short stories one day earlier! I wrote it casually, and I didn't realize it was naïve until I got the book and read the preface by myself. But times have changed, and I'd love to be told that I write short stories.
The second emotion is that you say that my "waist strength" is very strong. Unfortunately, I have a herniated lumbar spine (laughs). However, you can work hard in writing, after all, "waist strength" is the embodiment of a writer's "physique" in writing, a strength that supports the life of writing, or a continuous strength. You say my "waist" is the golden age of my short story writing. When it comes to short stories, my memories stretch back to my distant middle school days. For a long time, Suzhou No. 39 Middle School, where I studied, only had junior high school and no high school, and then there was a high school, and the teachers were not available, and the young teachers who graduated from high school around the age of 20 came to teach us after rapid training. I had a Chinese teacher who graduated from high school who particularly appreciated my compositions, and he would write annotations on each of my essays and draw red circles on the sentences I admired. The appreciation from my teachers in middle school gave me confidence in my literary talent.
Another thing is that I first came into contact with short stories when I was in middle school. Once I went to the library to borrow a book, and the aunt at the library was curious about the reason why I borrowed the book, because it was a collection of foreign short stories. She was sure I wouldn't understand. I said to my aunt, "Auntie, how do you know I can't read it?" I borrowed the book and came back like a collection of short stories from Yugoslavia or some former Eastern European country. Our middle school was one of the first schools to be withdrawn from Suzhou high school qualifications, and the fact that there was such a book was undoubtedly a seed of literary enlightenment for me. Since then, what we have seen has begun to expand and open up different worlds. Therefore, in addition to the Chinese teacher, I am also very grateful to this library aunt for the literary enlightenment of my youth.
Let's talk about the third thing. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, I went to the Xinhua Bookstore in Suzhou, and the shelves of the Xinhua Bookstore at that time were empty, and there were no more than 100 kinds of books. One day, a very strange book appeared with a yellow cover, called "A Collection of Contemporary American Short Stories", which was as novel and attractive to me as a diorama at the time. Even though the price of the book was very expensive at the time, I didn't hesitate to buy it home. This book really opened up my history of literary reading, and the works of the selected writers established a whole new world of fiction for me. My real literary reading began with this collection of contemporary American short stories, including Carson McCullers's "Song of the Sad Café", Flannery O'Connor's "Good People Are Hard to Find", Faulkner's "Southern Gothic Novels", and his use of literary rhetoric to express thrillers, which are really fascinating.
The first novel that struck me was A Rose for Emily. This story is about an old girl who never knew love, and after the road of affection suddenly opened, love could not be contained. This old woman who lives in a small town in the southern part of the United States meets a road builder from the north, who proposes to her but breaks the contract because he can't stand the love. The people in the town were talking about the man and woman, and one day they found out that the young man was missing, but the old girl still lived in the house. It wasn't until one day that the old girl was found dead, and the man who had been poisoned by arsenic on the marriage bed was discovered. In other words, the old girl loved the young man, even though he was a corpse. One can imagine how much of a mysterious novel shocked me, a young man like me, who had not yet read serious literature, in the early years of China's reform and opening up. For the first time, I realized that a writer can write like this, express like this. To this day, this novel still has a profound impact on me.
Another one that left a deep impression on me was "Good People Are Hard to Find". It is about a family who goes on vacation and meets three escaped fugitives. The three escaped fugitives had nothing to do with this middle-class white man on vacation, but because they were seen, they had something to do with it. Writing about three generations from a very good Christian family and teaching three escaped fugitives a lesson, I was a teenager who was obviously at a loss for such a novel idea, and O'Connor's presentation was unexpected. The old lady has been educating her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, and granddaughter, and suddenly three escaped fugitives came, how to solve this coercion? The three escaped fugitives divided the family into three groups and shot them one by one, and their mercy consisted in dividing the family and slaughtering the whole family, but not letting the old man see his son and daughter die, not letting his son and daughter-in-law see the old man die, and not letting his son and daughter-in-law see their child die. O'Connor's writing scared me, and when I looked up the author's information, I found out that it was a female writer, a Catholic, and the novel was set in the southern United States, and later I realized that there was a sharp conflict between the south and the north of the United States, between blacks and whites, and O'Connor grew up in such an environment where the race had not yet integrated. Later writings by McCullers et al. provide additional perspectives. McCullers's "Song of the Sad Café" is actually in a sense a male perspective of "A Rose for Emily", that rose is a rose from a male perspective, it represents killing, love and death, all of which are extreme torture of human emotions and mental torture, so it is written so ruthlessly.
The American short stories that have had a great influence on me, and I just mentioned these three, have one thing in common: cruelty. The interrogation and dissection of human nature in these novels completes a kind of sharp cannon and blade-like bombardment, which is a "three-view" shattering for a 16-year-old boy. But I also learned from this that there is such an expression in literature, and novels can be written in this way. Most of the works I read before this describe good people and good deeds, but in real life, I often feel that this world is so terrifying, and in all fairness, I think it may exist, and I find that the world depicted in short stories can be like this. This appearance may be emotionally unacceptable, and it makes people subvert many aesthetic traditional concepts. But judging from the rational judgment of the other side, it may be a human situation, it may be human nature, it may be a relationship between people. This was my first experience of reading a short story, from a book that is still enshrined like a god in my study because it is enlightening to me.
Su tong
I started writing my short stories after I read this collection of contemporary American short stories. Scar literature was prevalent at the time, and my first writing was a kind of "parody", using some of the literary sensations I gained from reading this book, imitating the way scar literature was written at the time, and writing my first novel in high school. At that time, I wanted to vote for "People's Literature", but I knew that I would definitely not be able to reach it, and I also felt that our provincial publications in Jiangsu Province could not reach it, so I voted for "Suzhou Daily" at that time. Because our family and my uncle's house are near the river in Suzhou, our house is on the river, and my uncle's house is near the street, and everyone in our family has to go through my uncle's house to go home. One day when my cousin saw that it was my letter, she didn't know what the newspaper letter meant, but she knew that it was my letter, and the letter was so thick, so she was very nervous, and told my father that there seemed to be a situation that had written such a thick letter and was returned. Then I opened it and saw that it was "lead retreat". In that era, the most devastating word heard by a literary youth, and the biggest blow when he was draining his heart, was called "lead rejection", that is, the rejection letter with uniform lead printing. Dropping out means failing an exam, and the editor doesn't need to write you a polite letter by hand. When I received the rejection, I quickly dealt with it because I felt ashamed. It was the first time in my life that I wrote a short story and it ended in failure. Looking back now, it had to fail, or I would be so proud of what I would be now, and the middle school students would be able to make their mark.
My real path to the short story is actually an early one that I can't look back on. My generation of writers later sat down and talked about their writing experiences, dodging and hiding, lest others know what your original published short story was about. I managed to publish three short stories during my college years, which I made myself private, even though I was paid for it at the time. Because at that time, out of 40 children in the Chinese department, more than 35 must have been writing, and there were very few who did not. One of my classmates was even in a bit of a hurry. One day, I saw a particularly good prose in our blackboard newspaper, written by a classmate in our class, but I didn't expect him to be so hidden, how could he write so well, so good that we were dumbfounded. Everyone went to learn from the scriptures, why did they hide themselves so deeply? This classmate said no way, you are all writing, I don't write alone, it seems that I am a weirdo, so I had to copy one. He was a smart man, he came from the steppe, and he wrote another essay about the steppe, who could tell. This incident originally hit me for two days, but then the truth came out, and I didn't suffer any blow. This was the literary ethos of our time, and I wrote my first three short stories in the era when writing was all the rage.
After this era, I have always thought that my love for short stories was slow. In 1984, I graduated from university and was assigned to work in Nanjing. "Mulberry Garden" was written in 1984, the novel is more than 4,000 words, from this "Mulberry Garden" starts, I thought I found a correct direction of writing, but the result is that this "correct" direction of writing was rejected by various literary publications. So I traveled around the country with this 4,000-word novel, and I sent it back and again, and I always felt that this novel was my most important short story, and it was different from others. It was rejected because it was different from others, but it was just like that, and I went to many places that I hadn't been to. It is also thanks to the fact that at that time, manuscripts were sent free of charge, and the writers sent them to publications, and the postage was paid in total. Once mailed to Beijing, the editor-in-chief of "Beijing Literature" at that time was called Lin Jinlan, who was also a very famous short story writer back then, almost as famous as Wang Zengqi, and the two of them had a good personal relationship. It was the most popular literary base at that time, so his "power" was very great. Li Tuo was working as an editor at Beijing Literature at the time, and he was flipping through a bunch of manuscripts one day. Those experienced editors will know it with a single click. Later, when I became an editor, I realized that editors really don't need to read every page carefully, this profession is like a wine connoisseur and a connoisseur, just rely on the nose to smell all kinds of aromas, turn a few pages to know whether the work is worth watching, at a glance I feel that there is a play, and then pick it up and read it carefully. My article "Mulberry Garden Memorial", he flipped through it and picked it up again and sat there to read it, so he selected it and published it.
Considered my first short story in the true sense of the word, it was discovered this way, which is kind of fun to say, but lucky. The novel was written in 1984 and was not published in Beijing Literature until February 1987. At the same time, "Flying Over My Maple Poplar Hometown", which I wrote in 1986, was also published in the second issue of Shanghai Literature that year. There is also a novel that I wrote before "Mulberry Garden", when I felt that my consciousness of short stories was a little awakened, "Blackface Jialin". It just so happened that three short stories I had written in the space of four years, after roaming around the country, suddenly came to me at the same time and were published at the same time, so February 1987 was a commemorative month for me, which meant that I didn't have to worry about receiving rejections in the future, and all the doors were opened from then on, and it was. Since then, the self-esteem that was about to collapse has been repaired, so today's "waist" is relatively strong, which is very similar to 1987.
Each writer's writing map has its own secrets, and the drawing of this map is sometimes not entirely divided according to sensibility and reason, because each writer's writing is controlled by the monster in his head, which is arranged in the form of a short story, and at that moment, the head will be filled with short stories, and it will come out; Sometimes it's a novella, and by the time I wrote Rice, I thought it should be long. Therefore, the way of writing these three forms of fiction has formed my creative consciousness, which has contributed to the fact that I was able to complete a lot of works in the eighties and nineties.
Of course, I envy my youth, and now I can't imagine how I can finish a novel in eight months. I wrote "M" for eight months. "My Imperial Career" was originally very short, and I wrote it for about half a year. It doesn't seem to be able to be so fast now, and in 10 years, I haven't written this long story in my hand. This is off-topic. By the 1990s, my sense of self-awareness in writing was really starting to become clear. Let's talk about some of the objective reasons for the large amount of writing output at that time. Because at that time, there was a "Ming Pao Weekly" in Hong Kong that asked me to write a manuscript and told me the manuscript fee, which scared me, what did it mean in those days? I wrote a short story and asked me to give me 8,000 yuan, which was a huge amount of money back then. So, I would like to thank Ming Pao Weekly. My short stories are almost 8,000 words long, and it has to do with the number of words in Ming Pao Weekly. My short stories were published twice in half a month, and I made a lot of money. In short, the high output of works in the 1990s and the manageable length of short stories had something to do with Ming Pao Weekly's request.
It was during this process that I began to compare myself with the master of the short story in my mind. I don't think Faulkner was, but I think Borges and Chekhov are masters, and Chekhov is the first. Why did I put Chekhov in the first place? It's hard for me to imagine living to be in his 40s and have more than a dozen volumes of his complete collection of short stories. He only lived to be in his 40s, and he couldn't start writing at the age of 8. You think, he spent more than ten or twenty years writing a dozen volumes, and he also had many theatrical works. One of the takeaways I got from Chekhov is that before you read his "The Death of a Little Civil Servant" and "Chameleon", the difference between his works and his works can be very large, and some of them are very problematic. He probably paid the highest of any writer of his generation, and he wrote a large number of works, probably five pieces of garbage, and the sixth was a diamond. Because he is a good writer, a good writer writes works by chance. So when I face a novelist like Chekhov, I often tell myself that I don't have to be so demanding, Chekhov has such a big problem, let's write a little more. And then there is Chekhov who inspired me to fight with myself, a writer has several areas, like a football player, generally there is a position, but the position of the greatest player is not constrained. Fiction also has this indefiniteness, and I never felt like I had to write anything.
Five-volume book of Su Tong's short story chronicles
So, among my early short stories, there was a series of more dangling maple poplar hometowns that suddenly appeared. In fact, when I was a child, my parents took me back once, and it lasted only three days, when I was eight years old. Therefore, the real hometown is more than a shadow for me. A maple poplar country series, where all experiences are based on a short homecoming experience, with very limited memories. My hometown is in Yangzhong, and I have lived in Suzhou since I was a child. I followed my uncle and grandmother from Suzhou to visit relatives. My grandmother was still living there at the time. When I was eight years old, I went back for the first time, and on the day I went back, there was a lot of fog on the river, and occasionally finless porpoises leaped out of the fog. Everything was faint in the fog. My father's hometown happened to be in the same village as my uncle's, and I followed my uncle home, in fact, to my grandmother's house. When I walked to a bridge, when the sun was shining, I could see an old lady in the village making tofu through a ditch. Then my uncle asked me if I knew the old lady, and I said no, and he said, "That's your grandmother." I was very impressed at that moment. I cherished the memory of my first trip back to my hometown that year, and later I named it the home of the maple poplar tree in my writing, because of the faint, floating feeling. But I cherish this floating, foggy feeling. I don't know much about my hometown, but I wrote a series of stories about the hometown of the maple poplar trees in this tone.
However, as I mentioned earlier, a writer is not willing to settle for a tune, just like some players on the football field, who are not willing to settle for a position and have to try. So in the 1990s, when I was writing short stories, I was writing more about the Toon Tree Street Boys series, and later this series extended to other works. My role model is like Chekhov, from his early writing of simple and beautiful children's stories, to transcribing "The Death of a Civil Servant" and "Chameleon", he had to pinpoint reality and paint group portraits for society, and then to the lyricism of the middle and late periods, that is, he was very unwilling to have only one face. His literary world is like Sichuan's changing face, and a writer's conscious consciousness is the "changing face" consciousness of flipping and self-flipping. Around the 1990s, there was a most extreme shock, when people think of Borges, they think of refinement, elegance and imagination. But if you read it all, you'll find that he writes about the cruelty of violence, and you'll be shocked. For example, the story of "The Third Party". Both brothers fell in love with a dusty woman, and the elder brother found that his younger brother loved her to the point of exhausting his family property, and the two were jealous and couldn't find a solution. Why do I say Borges writes about the cruelty of violence? The solution to this problem is to kill the woman, choosing such an unconventional approach, but writing the killing as normal. We couldn't imagine Borges writing something so brutal, and that was what made it an attraction to me.
2
People often think of the short story as a kind of imprisonment because of the limitations of the number of words, the framework of the story, and the way of thinking. Instead, I was able to perceive a stronger sense of freedom from it.
He Ping: I used to be particularly interested in the ability to control the number of words in Su Tong's short stories, and even hosted one of the "Ideals of the Short Story Master" of "Huacheng Concern", inviting Yi Zhou, Hellergena, Sonam Cairang, and Zhou Wanjing to write short stories with a specified number of words, according to the length of Su Tong's many 5 to 8,000 words. Today I finally figured out why Su Tong had a stage and why most of the short stories were so consistent in length. I remember counting the word counts of all the short stories in your "Nighttime Tales" before I did that feature. also counted Mo Yan's, and also counted the Cheever collection made by Yilin Publishing House. Of course, the number of words in a translated novel is different from the number of words in our Chinese writing. I feel very strange when I count the number of words in Su Tong's short stories, almost all of the short stories in the nineties are eight or nine thousand words, which is very stable, and after 2000, the number of words has basically reached more than 10,000.
Su Tong: Because I didn't continue to write for Ming Pao Weekly. (laughs)
He Ping: I think it's a very interesting topic. Does the word count of a novel affect its structure and thinking? If we look at it now, we may have to rethink it.
Su Tong shared his personal reading history with us. This one is particularly important. What a writer reads at the beginning may determine the direction of future writing, just like reading the beginning of a novel, where to start, the direction of the narrative will begin. If Su Tong was not exposed to "Contemporary American Short Stories" as a teenager, not O'Connor, McCullers, Faulkner, etc., which he just talked about, then where would Su Tong's literary path develop? The second thing, which I think is also important. In addition to what he had just said about his reading, he also talked about his writing. He began his writing as a parody of scar literature, which was particularly popular at the time. We can imagine that if Su Tong's novel had been submitted to "Suzhou Daily" at that time and succeeded, perhaps Su Tong would have been the starting point of a small scar literary writer. The road to writing was smooth at first, but it's hard to say whether the road will continue to be the way it is now. Here, a problem can be found: do not blindly believe what contemporaries are writing, but look at it and emulate.
This means that most of you here, what you read, what you wrote, I am afraid that you have taken a detour. Most of us, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, don't necessarily have the chance to come across a work like "A Collection of Contemporary American Short Stories." Now, we have access to a lot of published works, and it's not necessarily a good thing. In addition, whether the novels selected in the current middle school Chinese textbooks take into account the achievements of Chinese and foreign novels since modern times. Of course, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that if you are a conscious reader and writer, sooner or later you may come across the "Collection of Contemporary American Short Stories" that you have destined for. Compared with Su Tong's literary enlightenment and early reading, I first read "The Legend of New Children's Heroes", "Red Rock", "Red Sun" and so on.
Speaking of 1984, when Su Tong consciously wrote, it is also very important. For example, we generally do research based on public publications. So, I now ask a question, if we discuss the 1984 Chinese novel, should we discuss Su Tong? Do you want to discuss Su Tong's "Mulberry Garden Remembrance"? Now, many of our studies observe the starting point of Su Tong's writing, which is obviously the one he published publicly, but not particularly valued. "Mulberry Garden Remembrance" will not appear in Su Tong's literary pedigree until February 1987. What if we turn the clock back to 1984 and put "Remembrance of the Mulberry Garden" in 1984 as a contemporary Chinese novel? When our literary history discusses Chinese literature in 1984, Su Tong is basically invisible. Talking about Su Tong basically started with the pioneer special number of "Harvest". Su Tong just talked about a short story and talked about a key word "cruelty". Su Tong's novels have their own tonality, or body temperature. Just now, Su Tong was talking about the cruelty of these American writers, Faulkner has Faulkner's cruelty, and O'Connor has O'Connor's cruelty. Then Su Tong's short stories also have their own cruelty, such as "Crazy Mother on the Bridge", first Shaoxing's grandmother snatched the crazy mother's expensive brooch, and then Cui Wenqin and Li Tailor unbuttoned the buttons on the crazy mother's cheongsam and replaced them with pins; For example, in "Watermelon Boat", at the end, Fuzo's mother went to find Fuzo's watermelon boat that had a murder; For example, in "Cihu", a girl from the countryside Gu Caisleeve was persuaded by the intellectual youth to decide to run away from marriage and go to the city, the educated youth imagined the poetry and distance in the city, but the colorful sleeves ran to the city, and finally returned to the starting point, to live with a seizure patient. What kind of things she experienced in the city, Su Tong didn't say it directly. A lot of our writers write short stories with preset frameworks. Su Tong's short stories seem to be written from the beginning of the first sentence and slowly grow on their own. His narrative starts from the first paragraph, the first sentence of the novel, and the narrative logic slowly grows from within. Therefore, Su Tong's narrative is particularly interesting, not according to a preset thing, but according to the novel itself. The writing of novels is in chronological order, and it is impossible to start with the last paragraph, so Su Tong completes a short story, which is the completion of such a world in his novel. Naturally becoming a master of the short story. To a certain extent, Su Tong writes short stories, and Su Tong becomes the king of his own world. It's important to be able to create your own worlds and have full control over scheduling, no matter how big or small.
Just now, Su Tong was repeatedly saying the word "suddenly". "Suddenly" is not an O. Henry-esque ending, this is not called suddenness, this is called reversal. The kind of "suddenness" that Su Tong talked about is the deviation, loss of control and accident of the narrative, and after reading the novel, you feel that the narrative of this novel has to be like this. For example, "The Crazy Mother on the Bridge" I just talked about. A person stands on the bridge every day, wearing a cheongsam, and is dressed exaggeratedly in a special era. Today's girls are beautiful when they wear cheongsam, and wearing cheongsam in that special era is a very special person. It is difficult to predict which direction this novel will develop, and the plot in the middle includes the Shaoxing grandmother taking away the valuable brooch, and Su Tong does not say what the consequences of taking the brooch will be. Su Tong's novel, if you don't finish it, is not satisfied. And after reading it, I reviewed it again, and it was a different feeling. Therefore, "short stories, some elements", in fact, this title should be restricted, called "Su Tong's short stories, some elements".
Let's move on. Yu Hua was interviewed by a writer in The Paris Review a while ago. Yu Hua also opened a bibliography, recommending 15 short stories and 11 novellas. Compare it with Su Tong's previous selection of "10 short stories that influenced me". You all chose Maupassant's "Ball of Sheep's Fat" and Singer's "The Fool Jimper".
Su Tong: We didn't know each other, but we were really close, and we crashed strangely.
He Ping
Su Tong is a writer with a strong "waist" strength. It is the strong "waist strength" that enables Su Tong not only to support novels such as "The Riverbank" and "The Yellow Sparrow", but also to establish his status as the best contemporary Chinese short story writer.
He Ping: Among the 15 short stories Yu Hua selected this time, 9 of them are the same as the "10 short stories that influenced me" he selected before. And it has also expanded, from 10 to 15. He swapped out the novels of the only Chinese author. He originally chose Lu Xun's "Kong Yiji", and now it has been replaced by your "Watermelon Boat". "Watermelon Boat" is one of the longer novels in your short story, reaching 19,000 words. The length of a short story is not a word count, it is actually related to the narrative density, rhythm, speed and trajectory of the novel.
Su Tong: Let's digress a bit, my favorite American scholar Harold Brom has made a very crude, but very effective categorization of short stories. He said that all the short stories in the world were either Chekhovian or Borgesian. I've been wondering what is the difference between the way these two types of short story writers construct reality? I want to make a metaphor for this classification, for example, if we say that reality is a tank, then the traditional Chekhovian style, including realism, is to describe the water level lowering inch by inch until there is a crack in the bottom of the barrel, and in the hands of Borges and Kafka, he turns the tank upside down and tells you directly, look, this tank has a hole, how it will leak, whether it is worth filling with water. The responsibilities and premises of these two types of literature are separated, so they happen to form the two general styles of the history of the short story that we have now. I think it makes perfect sense, rough is rough, but there's a lot of stuff that gets to the point. This is my understanding of the way in which the short story takes on the outline of life.
Speaking of "Sheep Fat Ball" just now, why does Yu Hua like it too, and I like it too? When Maupassant was alive, his reputation actually surpassed that of his teacher, because he had a large number of short stories. "Sheep Fat Ball" is actually a small novella, writing about war, writing about flight, people from all walks of life meet on the way to escape, and Sheep Fat Ball automatically distributes all her food to the officers and nobles who look down on her. He wrote about a virgin who appeared in the shelter against the background of the war, and wrote the brightest human light so naturally and so realistically, and also portrayed the faces of all the people in the carriage clearly. This is Maupassant's natural choice, and the spiritual volume has actually surpassed that of ordinary short stories, and I guess the reason for Yu Hua's choice is the same.
Singer was a Polish-Jew, an American writer who was a marginal man with a language barrier, and it was not easy to translate and publish them in the United States, so his short stories were very few, the most important ones such as "Spinoza on Market Street," which appeared in the "Collection of Contemporary American Short Stories," about a small-town impoverished philosopher. Why did I choose "Jim Pell the Fool" in one of the "Ten Short Stories That Influenced Me"? It is very difficult to write about fools, and "Fool Jim Pele" is not essentially written about a person with mental problems, what we think of as a real fool is a simple, kind, childlike character. His kindness will be exploited and even humiliated by his wife, and his forbearance and love will be reciprocated in the opposite way, but he still trusts the world to the extreme. Once, everyone wanted to play tricks on him, so they told him that the sun had gone down in the village of Torpin next door. He said the sun had gone down and I was going to take a look. And they said, fools, does the sun go down, they don't understand this. He said very aggrievedly, it doesn't matter if you take a look. Innocence, kindness and ignorance are so blended that this imperfect fool character has originality.
People often think of the short story as a kind of imprisonment because of the limitations of the number of words, the framework of the story, and the way of thinking. Instead, I was able to perceive a stronger sense of freedom and write freely in the blanks no matter what. The first half of "Watermelon Boat" is actually written about an accident, for a watermelon is raw or cooked, and a bloodshed is caused between the residents on the street and the farmers from the countryside because of watermelons. This is really the background of my life as a child. Because, when we were young, we didn't have any fruits, and it was very expensive to ship fruits to Suzhou, and we couldn't afford them. So what do you eat? It's watermelon. In the summer, even the waterways and canals from Zhejiang and northern Jiangsu in our vicinity are shipped to Suzhou with boatloads of watermelons. Housewives will inquire about the watermelon boat in the summer, because it can be eaten by children, and the biggest advantage is that it can be put away. If a watermelon is left untouched, it can be left there for a good summer, and it will not rot. So when I was a child, in the summer, my mother would buy a lot of watermelons and put them under the bed, because at that time, it would not rot without pesticides. So every year housewives are waiting for the watermelon boat to come, and the children are waiting for the watermelon boat to come. As soon as the watermelon boat comes, it will stop at the small pier next to the bridge, and you can see if the watermelon boat is not there. The story is very simple, in fact, there is an aunt who bought a raw watermelon and wanted to exchange it for a ripe one. In the process, there was a quarrel with the melon seller. This aunt's son had a short temper and cut down the melon seller. The boat was borrowed and had to be returned. Something had happened to the original person, the mother of the dead melon farmer, and she had to return the boat. So the main body of the second half of the story is a mother, a half-blind old lady. But what happened to that watermelon boat, who cares about that boat? And the boat drifted about, and it drifted to the dock. The boat was made of wood, and it was stolen home by a fool in the street. The old man found that the boat had no oar, so he went to look for the oar, and then the good Samaritans in the street helped the old man find it, and finally found it, and got the boat out and loaded the oar. Then the old lady's mission was accomplished. She felt that she was a sinner, because after her son died, a village smashed people's houses to pieces, and she still felt guilty for the death of her son. So, the people in the street brought her back a boat, and she was very grateful. After getting the boat out from the boatman at the docks, she was looking for the people she was thanking for, and faintly sensing a certain crowd, she knelt down and kowtowed to them. But her eyes were not good, and the sun was shining, and she knelt directly on a pool of blood, it was her son's blood, and then she left. "Watermelon Boat" is such a story. I was very happy when I wrote it, but I did worry that it didn't fit the delicate structure. In fact, I wanted to make such an attempt.
Short stories, I feel like there are a lot of elements, a lot of them have just been mentioned. There are a lot of people who will say that the language of the short story is very important. When you start to style, the first sentence is very important. I think it's not just the first sentence that's important, it's the first five sentences that are important, and the first ten sentences are all important. And short stories, everyone always thinks how delicate they are, but when you have a certain experience and a certain amount of text experience, you find that you don't want to think about this. Because in such a small space as a short story, you can't build a palace, you can only build the best pavilion. So, all your time and energy is spent on constructing a pavilion, it's not a palace, there's no doubt about it.
When it comes to short stories, everyone likes to emphasize language and words, emphasizing the choice of words and sentences, don't pay too much attention to this. In the most natural language, a short story is a boat, you just want it to go down the river, language can disappear into the river, it can be without a trace. Some students feel that the language created by the teacher is very hard and exquisite, and I will pay attention to it, and I say that I should not pick on it. Some sentences look beautiful on their own, but they don't work in fiction. But as Zhang Ailing said, "low to the dust, out of the dust blooms", this kind of it works. The text itself is likely to dominate, and even if it shines, the product of artificial synthesis is fake, not from the life of the writer himself. Your story is from the first to the last, from this building, no one will say that that corner of the pavilion is too beautiful, you only say this pavilion, no one says this pillar.
He Ping: Many people say that novelists can only write novels, not tell them. But in fact, really good writers write and speak in fact, they are creating. For example, Su Tong was repeatedly talking about human nature just now. Jim Pell, Su Tong he used one word to say, full, can smell his body odor. He said that after reading Gimpel, he was so full that people could smell him.
We have a lot of students, and many of them must be literature lovers and writers. Su Tong has been a judge of the Blancpain Literary Award, an award for young people's literature, and has read many works by young writers. Can you tell us about your impressions of young people's writing?
Raymond Carver
Su Tong: In the 80s and 90s, writing was in a state of mass noise. Today, both young people and our creative writing teachers are almost all completing academic writing. I would like to borrow from the author of The New Yorker. The authors of "The New Yorker", in addition to the ceiling Alice Monroe, and my favorite writers Cheever and Carver, the advantage of these writers is basically to put up a banner of their own. This is easy to attract some enthusiastic young people to follow, because their works are easy to copy, especially Carver's ruthlessness and skinnyness, which will be very fascinating and easy to imitate. At the height of Carver's brilliance, a large group of small Carver can be seen in The New Yorker. Similarly, there are a few Cheevers Jr. in his delicate depiction of middle-class American life.
He Ping: This is a very realistic question. Because, in fact, today's literary enthusiasts often pursue the operability of writing, and their writing often has their own toolboxes and databases. Here, creative writing tends to turn into a template that follows a certain template.
(This article is a dialogue between writer Su Tong and critic He Ping at the eighth issue of the "Nanshi-Yilin" Art and Literature Forum, originally titled "Short Stories, Some Elements", based on on-site shorthand, abridged)
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