1990: Starting from Baojia Street

After pouring them some water, Zhou Yan sat on the sofa and asked with a smile, "Teacher Su, where are you staying in Yanjing this time?"

"I live in the guesthouse of Yanshi University. I don't know about other people." Su Tong said.

"I know that most of the troops are at Hongsheng Hotel." Yu Hua said.

Zhou Yan nodded and asked, "Who else will be here today?"

"There will also be another young Han Gong arriving today."

Zhou Yan nodded, "Okay, I'll go tell the cafeteria later."

Today Zhou Yan did not plan to take them out to eat, but asked the cafeteria to prepare a table.

After the studio's cafeteria moved to the new building, the space became much larger. In addition to the hall, there are two private rooms, each of which can accommodate up to a dozen people for meals.

Kong Chao and his friends are good cooks, and the ingredients in the cafeteria are very good, so Zhou Yan simply stopped taking Su Tong out.

"Teacher Su, let's have a meal in the cafeteria tonight." Zhou Yan said to Su Tong with a smile.

Su Tong smiled and waved her hands, "I didn't come to Yanjing just to eat. As long as I can see you, it doesn't matter what I eat. The cafeteria is pretty good."

He didn't think much about it and thought that when Zhou Yan said he wanted to eat in the cafeteria, he meant it was just a simple meal.

Of course, he wasn't just being polite; eating in the cafeteria was nothing to him.

Yu Hua and Shi Tiesheng just smiled but said nothing. They knew that even though it was in the cafeteria, it was definitely not worse than the restaurants outside.

They chatted for a while, and then Yu Hua asked Su Tong, "Do you have any new works recently?"

Su Tong nodded, "Yes, there is a novel, and the first draft is out."

After hearing what Su Tong said, Zhou Yan and the others became interested.

"Long or short story?" Yu Hua asked.

"Long."

"Oh, a long novel." Shi Tiesheng was a little surprised.

Su Tong actually wrote very few long novels. Over the years, he has only written one long novel, which is his debut novel "Rice".

Apart from "Rice", they haven't published any long novels in all these years.

He is very prolific in writing short stories, publishing several every year.

In this respect, he and Yu Hua are two completely different types of writers.

"What kind of story?" Yu Hua asked.

"A ghost story."

As soon as Su Tong told the ghost story, Zhou Yan remembered that he was talking about "Bodhisattva Man".

"Bodhisattva Man" is one of Su Tong's few novels - of course, "few" is only relative to the number of his short stories. In fact, compared with the number of Yu Hua's novels, Su Tong's novels are already quite a lot, but Su Tong's novels were all written in the middle period. He rarely wrote novels in the early and late periods.

This "Bodhisattva Man" is narrated from the perspective of a ghost. The protagonist "I" is a soul, so Su Tong said it was a ghost story.

"A ghost story?" Yu Hua asked curiously, "What kind of ghost story is it? Is it scary?"

"It's not scary." Su Tong paused, then took out a pile of manuscripts from the backpack next to her, "Actually, I brought the manuscript of the novel."

Shi Tiesheng looked surprised, "You came to Yanjing for a meeting, and you actually have to bring the manuscript with you?"

The first draft has just been completed and needs to be revised later. Actually, I don’t have to do a lot of things for this meeting. Instead of wasting time, I might as well bring the manuscript and revise it when I have time.

"Are all the manuscripts here?" Yu Hua asked. He saw that the manuscript in Su Tong's hand was not very thick and did not look like the length of a complete novel.

"This is the first third. After all, there are only five days, so I only brought this much."

"You should have brought everything." Yu Hua took the manuscript from Su Tong without hesitation, "It's only one-third. I don't even want to read it."

He said that he didn't want to read it, but his actions were very honest. He had already opened the manuscript and was reading it carefully.

Su Tong smiled and didn't say anything. Once someone read the manuscript, the others fell into a tacit understanding that didn't require any words.

After a while, Yu Hua finished reading the first page and gave the first page of the manuscript to Shi Tiesheng on his right.

Everyone who sees it will have a share, and this is also the tacit understanding between them.

Shi Tiesheng naturally took the page of manuscript and read it carefully.

After a while, Shi Tiesheng finished reading that page of manuscript and handed it to Zhou Yan on his right.

After reading it, Zhou Yan returned the manuscript to Yu Hua and asked Yu Hua to put it aside.

In this way, the three of them began a cycle.

However, this cycle was not very smooth, because Zhou Yan read the manuscript very quickly. After he got the manuscript from Shi Tiesheng, he finished reading it very quickly. Before Shi Tiesheng had finished reading the manuscript, he had to wait for Shi Tiesheng.

However, Shi Tiesheng reads the manuscript faster than Yu Hua, so after reading the manuscript, Shi Tiesheng has to wait for Yu Hua.

Finally, it was Shi Tiesheng who suggested, "How about we change the direction and let Zhou Yan look at the front first, I'll be second, and Yu Hua third." It was reasonable for Shi Tiesheng to shoot like this, because in this way, the people behind wouldn't have to wait for the people in front.

Although Yu Hua was reluctant, he finally agreed.

After Zhou Yan got the manuscript, the communication between the three of them immediately became much smoother, and no one needed to wait for others to finish reading.

Although it was only one-third of the manuscript, it still had tens of thousands of words and it was handwritten, which greatly affected the reading speed, so it took Zhou Yan more than 40 minutes to finish reading the manuscript.

However, after he finished reading the manuscript, Shi Tiesheng still had more than ten pages of the manuscript to read, and Yu Hua also had more than ten pages of the manuscript to read.

Zhou Yan and Su Tong smiled at each other, raised their teacups and clinked them together, then waited quietly for Yu Hua and Shi Tiesheng to read the manuscript.

Another twenty minutes passed before Yu Hua finished reading the final manuscript.

Yu Hua carefully sorted out the manuscript and handed it back to Su Tong, "Interesting."

His evaluation was very brief, but Su Tong was already quite satisfied, because he knew Yu Hua's speaking style.

Shi Tiesheng immediately spoke up, "I've actually thought of a similar story before, which is about what I'll see and hear after I die, but the angle I approach it from isn't as interesting as yours, and the key is that I can't continue writing it."

"Why can't you continue writing?" Su Tong asked.

"Because I always think the worst of people." Shi Tiesheng frowned. "I haven't attended a funeral for a long time, but based on my previous experiences, most people who attend funerals find it difficult to respect the deceased, let alone show real love. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I attended the funeral of an uncle of my clan. There was a lot of crying at the scene, which was quite moving, but once a certain part was over, people returned to their normal ways. Two brothers cursed each other over who should get the gift money, and if there weren't so many people at the scene, they would have wanted to hit each other."

Su Tong sighed, "In fact, I have seen many similar situations. In my novel, the living people are not doing well either."

“That’s true, but what you wrote is quite interesting.”

Zhou Yan said, "Teacher Su's narrative perspective this time is quite interesting."

"Narrative perspective? How do you say that?" Yu Hua asked.

“This is a very special insider perspective.”

"Internal perspective...isn't this the first-person perspective?"

Zhou Yan nodded, "It is indeed a first-person perspective, and first-person narration is mostly an internal perspective. The so-called internal perspective means that the narrator is equal to the character. Theoretically speaking, in a first-person narrative, the narrator is also a character in the story. Therefore, the narrative perspective moves into the interior of the work, becoming an internal focus narrative."

Hearing what Zhou Yan said, Yu Hua rolled his eyes. "Why do I feel like you are the same as those critics, making simple things so complicated. Isn't the first person the first person? Why do you say it is an internal perspective?"

"Didn't I say that most of the time, first-person narration is from an internal perspective, but that doesn't mean it's always from an internal perspective. 'I' is not necessarily a character in the novel. For example, if I'm writing a story now, the protagonist is my grandfather, and I use the first-person pronoun "I", then, although this novel is in the first person, it is from an external perspective. The external perspective is smaller than the character, which means that what I can know is actually very limited. I can only talk about the things my grandfather told me, or the stories about my grandfather that I heard from other places, and I can't enter the consciousness of any character."

Yu Hua could roughly understand what Zhou Yan meant, but he still felt that Zhou Yan had made the narrative style too complicated.

“Is it necessary to divide it this way?”

Zhou Yan smiled without saying anything, just picked up the teacup and took a sip.

Su Tong said, "It is very necessary. If there is no such thing, how should literature be studied?"

"What's the point of studying literature if it just makes things more complicated?"

Su Tong waved her hand. "Literature research is not to teach people how to write good novels, but to study literature itself. Research is historical and unified. I have always believed that literature research is to serve sociological research, and literature research is also a part of sociological research. Changes in literature can largely reflect the direction of changes in human history. You can say that literature research is meaningless, but I think it is necessary."

This statement is quite convoluted, but it sounds reasonable.

After all, Su Tong graduated from the Chinese Department of Yan Normal University, and his attitude towards literary research is completely different from Yu Hua's. He can also understand what Zhou Yan said just now.

This was not the first time that Zhou Yan demonstrated his knowledge in literary research. When they first met at Zhao Jiping's house, Zhou Yan had given a sharp review of "Wives and Concubines" and put forward a very interesting literary knowledge point "auditory space".

When Su Tong heard Zhou Yan mention "auditory space", she was quite surprised. After all, most people don't know about this kind of thing, and even students in the Chinese department may not understand it.

This time Zhou Yan talked about narrative perspective again, which once again made Su Tong feel that Zhou Yan seemed to have graduated from the Chinese Department rather than the Music Department.

"Tell me more about it, from the perspective of literary research." Yu Hua said to Zhou Yan.

Zhou Yan smiled and said, "Why do I say the internal perspective of this novel is very special? It's because 'I' has become a soul. Internal focus narration has two characteristics. First, as a narrator and a role, this character can not only participate in the process of events, but also describe and evaluate them to readers without leaving the work environment. Second, his perspective as a narrator is limited by his role identity, and he cannot narrate content that the character himself does not know, which leads to the subjectivity of the narration."

"However, when we study various works that use the first-person narrative method, we find that the position of the narrative perspective is actually different in different works. This is usually because the narrator's role in the story is different. Some narrators are the protagonists of the story, such as Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman", in which the one who is to be eaten is "I". Some narrators are just minor characters, such as Lu Xun's "Hometown", in which the protagonist is Runtu and "I" is just Runtu's friend."

"In Mr. Su's novel, 'I' should be a main character, because the subsequent stories are closely related to 'I'. But because 'I's behavior has no impact on the story being told, it will produce a sense of powerlessness and sadness."

Yu Hua couldn't help but nod. "I have to say, what you said is really interesting. But there is one thing. You just said that literary research can't teach people to write novels, but I feel that it can. If someone listens to your theory just now, they can also try to write novels from this perspective and achieve the same effect."

Zhou Yan shook his head. "In fact, it's unlikely. A good novelist doesn't need to understand these theories to write a wonderful narrative perspective. For example, your novel To Live begins with the first person within the first person, which instantly divides the story into layers in terms of time and space. Before that, have you ever understood the narrative perspective?"

"No, I just feel more comfortable writing this way."

"That's right. When a novelist is writing, he rarely follows theories. He relies more on his feelings. Sometimes, if he reads too much theory, it will affect his writing."

"But I don't think you're that affected. You have a solid theoretical foundation and you write good novels. And Su Tong, he studied literary theory at Yanshi University for several years, and he writes good novels, doesn't he?"

Su Tong said, "What Zhou Yan said is right. I wrote novels because I started writing before I entered the Chinese Department. And most of my classmates are not engaged in the writing industry. For a period of time, because I learned too much theoretical knowledge, I felt that I couldn't write novels well. For example, the narrative perspective. During that period, when I wrote novels, I had to spend a long time thinking about which person to use, and then thinking about which character to focus on. The final result was that I couldn't start writing the novel."

"If you put it that way, I can understand why critics don't write novels anymore. Maybe when they write novels, they don't think about constructing the world, but literary theory."

"Yes, that's true." (End of this chapter)