On June 29th, the new book sharing meeting of "Silent Details: Where the Novel "Reads" was held at Keyi Bookstore in Nanjing. Writer Bi Feiyu, critic He Tongbin, and associate professor Ye Zi of the School of Literature of Nanjing University walked together with writers and editors to exchange views on topics such as novel reading, the differences between writers and scholars' reading styles, and creative writing from the perspective of disciplines.
The book "Silent Details" is derived from the teaching materials of creative writing taught by professors at China Normal University, and is divided into five themes: the crazy image of artistic women, the unintentional sin of childhood, the narrative of fools, the narrative of animals, and memory and amnesia. Due to space limitations, only the first three parts were selected when the book was written.
With many years of experience in literary creation and editing, starting from the text of novels, from Bi Feiyu, Su Tong, A Lai, to Jelinek, McEwan, Faulkner, and then to the movies "Black Swan", "Hunting", "Forrest Gump", etc., he shuttles back and forth in a variety of art forms. Experts believe that such a book that combines the thinking of writers, scholars and subject education has an enlightening effect on creative writing that is in full swing at the moment.
Reading novels, writers and scholars have very different ways
In He Tongbin's view, there is a very big difference between the close reading of texts in academic schools and the close reading of texts in writers. Combine Bi Feiyu's "Novel Lesson", Wang Anyi's "The World of the Mind", Yan Lianke's "Discovery Novels", Pamuk's "Naive or Sentimental Novelists", Calvino's "Why We Read the Classics", and Bloom's How to Read? Why Read", Gao Yuanbao's "Novels Say Small", etc., will find that novelists and scholars lead us into novels in completely different ways.
"Scholars talk about novels presuppose a lot of thinking outside of novels, and they usually put the work into three frameworks—the framework of literary history, the framework of writers' creative history, and the framework of theory—to form a scholar's world of fiction, which extends to a lot of things that you can't feel when you read novels, and inevitably what Sontag called 'over-interpretation'." He Tongbin said. And "Novel Lesson" basically has only one thinking, that is, novel thinking, such as talking about details, and will treat it in the whole novel, which is very dynamic and holistic. Theories are also used in "Novel Lessons", but they are usually not elaborated, or rather, they are not particularly fashionable theories prepared in advance, but some ideas that must be used in the interpretation of novels, which are very natural and referential. The interpretation of modern and contemporary masterpieces such as Lu Xun's "Hometown" and Wang Zengqi's "Ordination" in "Novel Lesson" constitutes a "very serious provocation" to scholars majoring in modern and contemporary literature, which cannot be replaced.
In He Tongbin's view, "Silent Details" is more complicated, it does not completely guard the thinking of a novelist, but superimposes the thinking of women, editors, and scholars, which is related to the cross-border identity of walking, thereby increasing the difference and richness of the text, and will play more of a role in promoting literary education.
Fiction thinking, which varies from novelist to novelist
Speaking of novel thinking, Bi Feiyu shared his experience teaching Hemingway's "Killer" to students at NTU. The plot of this novel is particularly simple - two hitmen are hired to come to a small restaurant, tie up the buddy cook, talk about murder plans, and wait for the boxer to appear. Nick, the young man, rushes to the boxer's apartment to report the news, only to see that the boxer is indifferent to the impending death and waits to be caught.
Bi Feiyu said that how to write the inner collapse of a heavyweight boxer who was hunted down, Hemingway showed his precision as a novelist and a boxer at the same time.
"To make this clear, I called a student over, and when he came, I 'snapped' my fist out (of course I didn't hit him), and he turned around. Hemingway is a boxer, he often boxes, when he punches, it is impossible to look at the opponent's knees or abdomen, he looks at the other party's eyes, two boxers face each other, failure must be experienced by another thing, that is, the back, if one party's back is exposed, it means defeat. So Hemingway wrote that Andresen was lying there, and when he heard the news that someone was chasing him, he leaned over and left his back to the young man who came to deliver the letter. If this novel hadn't been written by Hemingway, he wouldn't necessarily have put Andresen in bed, he might have been standing there, or some other way of breaking down. If Proust had written it, he wouldn't have written it that way. As someone with asthma who lies down forever, he had no idea what his gaze and back meant. But for Hemingway, the greatest precision lies here. ”
In Bi Feiyu's view, whether the novel is well written, accurate or inaccurate is related to the text, but it cannot be completely attributed to the text, it is also related to the writer, "For Hemingway, his accuracy is Hemingway; For Bi Feiyu, his accuracy is Bi Feiyu's. ”
What and how creative writing teaches
After creative writing became a secondary discipline, the construction of related disciplines is in full swing, and many colleges and universities have opened this major. I found that although some colleges and universities are intensively carrying out the teaching of various types of writing, such as comedy, science fiction, reasoning, etc., the teachers themselves do not write, but ask students to learn and write some paragraphs or stalks. As a result, the graduation works handed in are very "floating" and have a lot of bugs. "As a veteran editor who has worked in Harvest for 14 years, I can see at a glance the confusion of perspective and imagery, and I will give up the manuscript when I see the first page."
What creative writing teaches, and it's clear to walk around that, is to teach them solid realism in penmanship. She said that at the beginning, the students were more reluctant to read Flaubert, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, but after insisting on reading for a semester, they gained a lot, "They told me that we now understand the greatness of Chekhov." In the past three years, the teachers have just participated in the blind evaluation of creative writing at China Normal University, and the teachers have a high evaluation of the students' works, believing that some of the works are better than those published in the magazine, "They do know where to introduce environmental descriptions, where to have misalignment, and where there should be a coexistence of joy and cruelty." ”
What is realism? For example, Alice Munroe has a short story "The Bear Comes from the Other Side of the Mountain", which is about a husband and wife who taught at a university when he was young, and cheated on female students many times, and then the wife lost her memory and fell in love with someone else, and at the end the wife remembered her husband again, and the wife hugged her husband and said, "You can just walk away and abandon me", and the husband hugged his wife and kissed her scalp. Here, Monroe writes, his wife's skin or breath emits a strange smell, "like the smell of a stalk that has not been watered for days." "You can imagine the sour smell of flowers and branches not changing the water for a week, which is the cruelty of realism, and this is what I want students to 'read'."
Creative Writing from a Disciplinary Perspective
"I often ask myself if I can teach creative writing, because it's not the same as those who have been in a war and those who haven't." Ye Zi said that words such as "a long novel needs to be covered with mud and sand" can only be told by those who have written a long novel. As a literary researcher, although I can understand the meaning of this sentence, it is difficult to teach students by hand, but I can do it by walking. As far as writing is concerned, it is a huge leap from not being able to write to being able to write; From not being able to write to being able to write, it is also a huge leap. Creative writing is already a huge success if it can turn a person who is afraid of writing into a person who is not afraid of writing.
Ye Zi particularly empathizes with the book "Silent Details", the first chapter of the book talks about three female characters who are crazy about art: Xiao Yanqiu in Bi Feiyu's "Tsing Yi", and the female ballet dancer in Jelinek's "The Piano Teacher" and "Black Swan", "The wonderful thing about this book is not only the greatness of the details that the nose sticks to the picture, but also traces the roots of literary history." ”
After creative writing was recognized as a second-level discipline, He Tongbin was worried that it was its tendency to be "disciplinary". For example, in addition to submitting a literary work, the graduation project must also add a self-explanatory essay. "Essays are indispensable, and that's the problem of disciplinarization. Literature can be taught, there is no doubt about it, the key is how to teach? Teaching problems according to disciplinary thinking, and the development of the discipline will be limited if it is not based on disciplinary thinking, so it is very contradictory. He Tongbin said that literary editors, including himself, have a general feeling that the writing ability of young writers is declining, and novels, which are an important dimension of the conceptual world, are also declining, "As Yan Lianke said, a great literary era has passed", in the era of heavy media, everyone is watching online texts and watching short videos, and novels are becoming a tradition, and how to establish a connection with tradition may be maintained by walking books like "Silent Details" or through such literary education. This is a very important part.
Modern Express/Hyundai+ reporter Chen Xi
(Photo courtesy of the publisher)