After pouring water for them, Zhou Yan sat on the sofa and asked with a smile, "Teacher Su, where did you stay when you came to Yanjing this time?"
"I stayed in the guest house of Yanjing Normal University. People don’t know." Su Tong said.
"I know that all the troops are at Hongsheng Hotel." Yu Hua said.
Zhou Yan nodded and asked, "Who else will arrive today?"
"There is another Han Shaogong who will arrive today."
Zhou Yan nodded, "Okay, I'll go and tell the canteen later."
Today Zhou Yan did not plan to take them out to eat, but asked the canteen to prepare a table.
After the studio’s canteen was moved to the new building, the space became much larger. In addition to the lobby, there were also two private rooms, each of which could accommodate up to a dozen people for meals.
Kong Chao and the others are good at cooking, and the ingredients in the canteen are very good. Zhou Yan simply ran out without Su Tong.
"Teacher Su, let's fight in the cafeteria tonight." Zhou Yan said to Su Tong with a smile.
Su Tong smiled and waved her hand, "I didn't come to Yanjing to eat. It doesn't matter what I eat when I can see you. The cafeteria is also very good."
He didn't think much about it, thinking that Zhou Yan said he wanted to eat in the cafeteria, just a simple meal.
Of course, what he said was not polite. Eating in the canteen was nothing to him.
Yu Hua and Shi Tiesheng smiled and said nothing. They knew that although they were in the cafeteria, it was definitely no worse than outside restaurants.
A few people chatted for a while, and then Yu Hua asked Su Tong, "Have you made any new works recently?"
Su Tong nodded, "There is a novel, the first draft has been published."
Hearing what Su Tong said, Zhou Yan and the others became interested.
“A long or short story?” Yu Hua asked.
“A long story.”
“Oh, a long story.” Shi Tiesheng was a little surprised.
Su Tong actually writes very few novels. Over the years, he has only written one novel, which is his debut novel "Mi".
Except for "Mi", they haven't published another feature in so many years.
And his short stories are very prolific, with several short stories published basically every year.
In this regard, 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 it. He should be talking about "Bodhisattva Man".
"Bodhisattva Man" is one of Su Tong's few full-length novels - of course, "few" is only relative to the number of his short stories, but actually compared to Yu Hua's novels In terms of the number of novels, Su Tong's novels are already quite large, but Su Tong's novels were all written in the middle period, and he rarely wrote novels in the early and later stages.
This "Bodhisattva Barbarian" tells the story from the perspective of an undead. The protagonist "I" is a soul, so Su Tong said this is 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 him, "Actually, I brought the manuscripts of the novel."
Shi Tiesheng looked surprised, " You came to Yanjing for a meeting, and you still have to bring the manuscript?”
The first draft has just been completed and needs to be revised later. Actually, I don’t have to do much for this meeting. Instead of wasting time, I might as well I brought the manuscript with me, and I can revise it if 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 it 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 little.”
"You should have brought them all." Yu Hua unceremoniously took the manuscript from Su Tong's hand, "It's only one third, and I don't even want to read it."
He said no. I am willing to read, but my actions are very honest. I have already opened the manuscript and read it carefully.
Su Tong pursed her lips and smiled, but said nothing. Once someone read the manuscript, everyone else fell into a tacit understanding that required no words.
After a while, Yu Hua read the first page and gave the first page of the manuscript to Shi Tiesheng on his right.
Those who meet each other have their share, which is also their tacit understanding with each other.
Shi Tiesheng naturally took the page of manuscript and read it carefully.
After a while, Shi Tiesheng finished reading the page of the manuscript and handed it to Zhou Yan on his right.
After Zhou Yan read it, he returned the manuscript to Yu Hua and asked Yu Hua to put it behind him.
In this way, the three of them started a cycle.
It’s just that this cycle is not very smooth, because Zhou Yan reads the manuscript very quickly. After he got the manuscript from Shi Tiesheng, he quickly read it. Shi Tiesheng hadn’t finished reading the manuscript yet. He We had to wait for Shi Tiesheng.
And Shi Tiesheng read the manuscript faster than Yu Hua. Shi Tiesheng had to wait for Yu Hua after reading the manuscript.
In the end, Shi Tiesheng suggested, "How about we change the direction and let Zhou Yan look at the one in front first. I will be second and Yu Hua will be third." It is reasonable for Shi Tiesheng to shoot this way, because it is like this Once you arrive, people behind you don’t have to wait for those 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. No one needed to wait for others to finish reading.
Although there was only one-third of the manuscript, it still contained tens of thousands of words, and it was still a manuscript, which greatly affected the reading speed, so it took Zhou Yan more than forty minutes to finish reading the manuscript.
However, after he read the manuscript, Shi Tiesheng still had a dozen pages of manuscript that he had not read, and Yu Hua also had a dozen pages of manuscript that he had not read.
Zhou Yan and Su Tong looked at each other and smiled. They raised their teacups and touched them, then quietly waited for Yu Hua and Shi Tiesheng to read the manuscript.
After another twenty minutes, Yu Hua finished reading the final manuscript.
Yu Hua carefully organized the manuscript and sent it back to Su Tong, "Interesting."
His evaluation was very brief, but Su Tong was quite satisfied. He knew Yu Hua's speaking style.
Shi Tiesheng followed up and said, "I have actually thought about a similar story before, about what I will see and hear after I die, but the angle is not as interesting as yours. The key is I can’t write.”
“Why can’t I write?” 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 experience of attending funerals, most of the people who attended the funeral, It is difficult to maintain respect for the deceased, let alone real love. When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I attended the funeral of a clan uncle. He regained his appearance. The two brothers yelled at each other because of the gift money. If there weren't too many people at the scene, they would have beaten each other."
Su Tong said, "Actually, I have seen many similar situations. In this novel, the living people are not that good.”
"Yes, but your writing is quite interesting."
Zhou Yan said, "Teacher Su's narrative perspective this time is quite interesting."
"Narrative perspective? How do you say it?" Yu Hua asked.
“This is a very special internal perspective narrative.”
“Interior perspective...isn’t this the first-person perspective?”
Zhou Yan nodded, "It is indeed a first-person perspective, and first-person narration, most of the time, is an internal perspective. The so-called internal perspective means that the narrator is equal to the character. Theoretically speaking, in works of first-person narration, the narrator is also It is a character in the story, and the narrative perspective moves inside the work, becoming an internal focus narrative."
Hearing what Zhou Yan said, Yu Hua rolled his eyes, "Why do I feel that you are different from those. Critics are the same, making simple things so complicated. Isn't the first person the first person? Why do we say it is the internal perspective? "
"Didn't I say that most of the time, the first person is the first person? One-person narratives are all from an internal perspective, but that does not mean that 'I' is not necessarily a character in the novel. For example, if I want to write a story now, the protagonist is my grandfather, and I am using the first-person perspective. Well, although this novel is written in the first person, it is from an external perspective, which is smaller than the characters. This means that what I can know is actually very limited. I can only talk about what my grandfather told me, or what it is. The stories I heard about my grandfather from other places cannot enter the consciousness of any character."
Yu Hua could probably understand what Zhou Yan meant, but he still felt that Zhou Yan had misunderstood the narrative method. It's too complicated.
“Is this division necessary?”
Zhou Yan smiled and said nothing, just picked up the tea cup and took a sip.
Su Tong said, "It is very necessary. If there is no such thing, how should we study literature?"
"If we just complicate the problem, then the study of literature will not be the same. What’s the point?”
Su Tong waved his hand, “Literary research is not to teach people to write good novels, but to study literature itself. I have always believed that the study of literature is historical and unified. , serves sociological research, and literary research is also a part of sociological research. Changes in literature can express the changing direction of humanities history to a great extent. You can say that literary research is meaningless, but I think literary research is meaningless. It’s necessary.”
This is a roundabout way of saying it, but it sounds a little bit reasonable.
After all, Su Tong graduated from the Chinese Department of Yan Normal University, and his attitude towards literary research was completely different from that of Yu Hua. He was also very able to understand what Zhou Yan just said.
This is not the first time that Zhou Yan has shown his knowledge in literary research. When they first met at Zhao Jiping's house, Zhou Yan made a critical review of "Wives and Concubines" and proposed a very interesting literary theory. Knowledge point "auditory space".
When Zhou Yan mentioned "auditory space", Su Tong was quite surprised. After all, most people didn't know this kind of thing at all, and even students in the Chinese Department might not be able to understand it.
This time Zhou Yan talked about the narrative perspective again, which once again made Su Tong feel that Zhou Yan graduated from the Chinese Department rather than the Music Department.
"Tell me more, from the perspective of literary research." Yu Hua said to Zhou Yan.
Zhou Yan smiled, "Why I say that the internal perspective of this novel is very special is because 'I' has become a soul. Internal focus narrative has two characteristics. First, as a narrator and role, this character is not only a narrator but also a character. He can participate in the process of events and describe and evaluate it to the readers without leaving the environment of the work. Secondly, his perspective as a narrator is limited by his character's identity and he cannot describe content that the character himself does not know, which results in the subjectivity of the narrative. "< br>
“However, when we study various first-person narrative works, we will find that the position of this narrative perspective is actually different in different works. This is usually due to the role of the narrator The characters have different positions in the story. Some narrators are the protagonists of the story, such as in Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman", in which it is 'I' who is about to be eaten. Some are only minor characters, such as in Lu Xun's "Hometown". The protagonist is Runtu, and 'I' is just Runtu's friend."
"In Teacher Su's novel, 'I' should be a main character, because the subsequent stories are closely related to 'I'. . But because 'my' behavior has no impact on the story being told, it will produce a sense of powerlessness and sadness."
Yu Hua couldn't help but nodded, "I have to say, you said it. It's really interesting. But one thing is that you just said that literary research cannot 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 they can achieve the same thing. "
Zhou Yan shook his head, "In fact, it's unlikely. A good novelist can write a subtle narrative perspective without having to understand these theories. , the beginning is the first person within the first person, which suddenly separates the story in time and space. Before this, have you understood the narrative perspective? "
"No, it's just that I think it's more comfortable to write this way."
"That's right. When novelists create, they rarely follow theories, but rather rely on their feelings. Sometimes, theory tells the story Too much will affect creation."
"But I don't think you will be affected much. Your theory is very solid and your novels are good. There is also Su Tong, he is at Yan Normal University. After several years of literary theory, haven’t you written novels so well?”
Su Tong said, “Zhou Yan is right. I wrote novels because I didn’t know how to write novels before I entered the Chinese Department. I started creating. Basically, none of the students in our class were engaged in the writing industry. For a while, I felt that I couldn’t write novels because I learned too much theoretical knowledge. For example, I wrote novels during that time. , you have to spend a long time thinking about which person to use, and then which person to put the perspective on. The final result is that the novel can't be started."
"You have to say that. , I can understand, this is probably why those critics don’t write novels. Perhaps when they write novels, they are not thinking about constructing the world, but about literary theory knowledge.”
"Well, that's true." (End of Chapter)