The Anonymous Writers Contest Asks: What Does an Author's Name Really Mean for a Work of Literature?

The conversation among Liang Wendao, Lu Nei, and Zhang Yueran is worth reading in full (though it's a bit long).

A writer's reputation seems naturally bound up with how the work gets judged. In early 2016 came one absurd piece of news: "J.K. Rowling, writing under a pen name, was rejected by a publisher and advised to 'take a writing class.'" But the snobbery of the literary world is not without reason — in most cases, a writer's fame is a guarantee of both word of mouth and sales.

In an age of relentless hype and marketing, it takes more courage to become an anonymous author. Especially anonymity so complete that all you have is a submission number.

The literary magazine Li (《鲤》), now ten years old, recently teamed up with Tencent's Dajia and the publishing house Imaginist to hold a literary competition full of suspense and play — the "Anonymous Writers Project" (official rules). Entrants include both top Chinese writers and young newcomers. The professional entrants were commissioned directly by the organizers; at the same time an open track was created for the public, with no limits on identity, age, or nationality. Submissions had to be Chinese-language short stories of 5,000 to 20,000 characters, on any subject, and previously unpublished in any book, periodical, or online outlet.

The contest runs in two stages, a preliminary round and a final round, and the whole process stays anonymous — entries are numbered only in the order they arrive. The final-round judges include the writers Su Tong, Ge Fei, and Bi Feiyu.

In early June, the Anonymous Writers Project held a launch event in Beijing on the theme "The Meaning of Anonymity," drawing nearly 300 readers. To preserve the mystery of anonymity, the organizers scattered masks of various writers across the seats — Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Hermann Hesse, Roberto Bolaño and others were among them — which made the event look more like a large masked ball for readers.

At the event, the writers Liang Wendao, Lu Nei, and Zhang Yueran, together with Yang Ruichun, deputy editor-in-chief of Tencent's Dajia, discussed anonymity and style in literature.

Q = questions from the moderator and the audience

The Meaning of Anonymity

Q: First, could Zhang Yueran tell us where the idea of anonymity came from? Does it have to do with problems you've run into in your own writing? At a time when mass media is generally sliding downmarket and everything is turning into entertainment, what was your starting point for holding a literary competition like this?

Zhang Yueran: Where the idea of anonymity first came from — it was probably a confusion of my own. As a writer, I often think about what kind of relationship there is between my name and what I actually write. I started writing in my early twenties, and I was lucky enough to become known young. For a long time I felt that name was a burden, because it brought a lot of misunderstanding. Everyone knows there was a so-called youth-literature boom back then; that's part of why I became known, but it also brought misunderstanding. People talked about the "three carriages" of youth literature — the other two carriages ran quite far in that direction, and I felt I was being pulled along with them. I often felt wronged, treated unfairly. A lot of people thought Zhang Yueran wrote youth literature, Zhang Yueran wrote internet literature, Zhang Yueran wrote all sorts of strange things. Over more than ten years I've slowly been correcting the misunderstandings this name brought, with a little success, I think. But at some point I suddenly realized that where I used to feel constrained by this name, now I seem to benefit from it instead. Having written for many years, I no longer get rejected. Any literary magazine, any publishing house, will give me very good support. Sometimes I doubt that — I wonder whether, if you separated what I write from this name, it would still be as trustworthy. That's an anxiety a writer should probably always carry.

I've also noticed many writers younger than me at work, and the resources often aren't distributed fairly; many of them have to take a much more roundabout path to get their work in front of readers. I wondered whether we could go back to a starting point where only the work is judged, not the writer. The short story is a particularly good form for that, because a novel demands a great deal of accumulation and a relatively rich store of experience and knowledge. The short story is a form that shows agility and wit especially clearly — why shouldn't a young writer do better in it than an established one? So we wanted to explore that question, to hide the names and see what happens. We don't know the outcome ourselves. Maybe things will spin out of control later, and all kinds of strange things will happen. But we very much hope people will watch this experiment with us, and see whether, once we take the names away, something we didn't expect occurs.

Q: How do Liang Wendao and Lu Nei view anonymity? What I want to ask is: how important do the two of you think the author actually is to a work?

Lu Nei: In the reading market, the author still matters. Readers usually pick by name; if you read a work without knowing whose it is, there's a lack of trust. The relationship a work forms with its readers is itself part of a literary movement. Reading an anonymous work is a bit like grading exam papers — there's something wrong with that. A work produces a response among readers precisely because a particular writer wrote it, and it takes time on top of that to establish the work's place in literary history. This is even more true in the publishing market — for a commercial writer, the name works like a shop sign. On the whole, I think this still matters.

Liang Wendao: For writers like the two of you, I think the question of the name means something different than it does for someone who does criticism or media work. From a critic's point of view, whether a writer's name is there matters a great deal, because it supplies a lot of evidence — it's a whole coordinate system. A simple example: Philip Roth, who died recently. Say you don't know his work, you hear today that he's a very important contemporary American writer, you want to read one of his books, and you happen to pick one from his last ten years. You might be disappointed — so long-winded, not much good. If the name is hidden, you'd think at once, what a terrible book. If I tell you it's Philip Roth, you'll think, a master wrote it this way, there must be something deeper here. Push it further: since his late work ran into difficulty, you might swing the other way and decide not to read anything from his later years at all, judging it bad before you've read it. For the market and for critics, whether the name is there is very important evidence.

Blind judging of this kind reminds me of wine, where there's blind tasting too. The most famous case is the Judgment of Paris in 1976. An English wine merchant had opened a wine shop in Paris and wanted to promote wines he'd recently discovered from the Napa Valley in California. He came up with this trick: put Californian wines side by side with French wines, ten bottles each, twenty in all, and hide every label. The glasses were even made of opaque glass to hide the color. Judging was purely by smell and taste, to decide which wine was best. He gathered a group of well-known figures in French wine circles — some sommeliers at restaurants, some famous wine critics, real professionals. Then everyone judged. Beforehand the critics all assumed France would win in a landslide, no question about it. While drinking they'd say, "Look at this terrible wine, you can tell right away it's Californian," and then over another glass, "Ah, finally back to France." In fact they had it exactly backward: the wine they called terrible came from a famous French estate, and the glass that finally made them feel at home really was Californian. The blind tasting ended with California wines winning across the board, in both whites and reds. The critics turned on the spot and said, "No, no, this can't be right, do it again" — but of course you can't do it again. It became a very famous incident. I know it in such detail not only because I love food and drink, but because it explains a lot about how criticism works. A great deal of the time, what we base our judgments on really is the label. Why does a wine's label matter? Because it seems to contain a stretch of history, a particular style, a particular meaning. When we judge a wine we go by its past performance, deciding where this vintage stands among all the ones the estate has made over the years. And because the wine comes from a piece of land — Bordeaux, say, or Burgundy — we compare it with other wines from the same region. We know who the winemaker is, so we can ask whether his earlier vintages have any connection to this one. Judged that way, the whole depth of background comes through. That's why knowing the name matters.

But what does blind tasting do? It strips away every point of entry these critics are best at, all of it. I can no longer discuss how this estate has performed over the years, what its relationship is to the estate next door, what the weather was like there this year — I know none of it. I can only judge it purely as a wine: its taste, its aroma, its style, the wine on its own terms. And that's when we find that maybe an unknown newcomer — a Californian wine, say — strikes us as stunning, dazzling.

What I want to say is that a comparison like this may indeed look fairer when it's anonymous, but at the same time it forecloses the possibility of judging other things. What you emphasize is the other elements of the work being judged — the language, the style, the structure, textual analysis, say — while the author's intention, the so-called historical background, the era and so on stop mattering entirely. Yet those things may matter in another context when we discuss literature. That's how I see it: whatever kind of competition this anonymous writers' contest turns out to be, we're probably emphasizing one particular face of literature — a face that, in the non-anonymous state, may well have been overlooked in the past.

What Exactly Is Style?

Q: For Lu Nei — Lu Xiaolu is the protagonist of many of your novels, and elements like his years as a boarding-school teenager and the derelict factory are unforgettable. Do you still write inside this "Lu Nei style" today? And for Zhang Yueran — you became famous young and gave youth literature some of its most popular works, but your writing now looks very different from that period. Beyond subject matter, we can also see a change in style; why the urgency to shed your earlier style? Yesterday, when I was discussing today's event with the three of you, Liang Wendao raised a question: does a style that can be clearly identified have aesthetic value in itself? Is having a style a good thing? Could the three of you talk about writers, works, and the question of style?

Lu Nei: I just saw the magazine — it's out now — and I flipped through it roughly, and I couldn't pick out anyone's distinct style. When I write for something like this I don't bring out what I'm best at either; otherwise, would that count as judging me or not judging me? So I switch to a different style.

What the moderator just described is what I'd call elements — I'm willing to write about chemical plants, I'm willing to write about the south. Those are elements, not entirely a matter of style. My linguistic style is important, and it can be picked out strongly. But personally I think the elements of fiction and linguistic style overlap and can also be pulled apart. You can use one kind of language — especially in short fiction, which has many paradigms — to carry different elements, or use a different linguistic style to shift familiar elements into something else. Once you transform them that way the work often becomes unrecognizable, because writing can vary a great deal. I think it's the same for a painter: look at Picasso's early paintings, all very realistic, you can't tell they're Picasso. You only know they're the young Picasso because someone tells you. Later he changed and became something recognizable.

Liang Wendao's wine-tasting story reminds me of the violinist in the subway — they really did put a very famous violin master in a subway station to play, and nobody recognized him as a master; people took him for a busker. If I write about chemical plants again, I'll definitely take a different route, or I might not write about chemical plants at all, might change everything.

Zhang Yueran: Speaking for myself, I'm very willing to break with my earlier self, or make a clean break with my earlier style. But I think that however much a writer wants to break with an earlier style, it can never be complete — it's never as decisive as you imagine, because it's the same person, the same soul, and the thousand threads between the two can't be cut. Without that kind of firm resolve, it's very hard for a writer — for me, at least — to make a really large shift away from an earlier style. About ten years ago, when I finished a novel, I decided to make a very big shift. That change took years, and I felt it was thorough, but when I put the work out a lot of people could still find plenty of elements from before in it. For many writers, style in their early years is like a city wall: to establish your own kingdom you have to build walls, and to make your style solid the wall keeps getting higher, better built. Once a writer matures, that style can turn into a constraint, and then they're busy tearing the wall down. They think, I want to see how wide my territory can be, I want to go places I've never been — and so it becomes a process of demolition. Maybe every writer goes through these two stages. I wonder what Wendao thinks.

Liang Wendao: I often can't define clearly what style even means. Style seems to be a kind of constraint — sometimes one you put on yourself, sometimes one imposed by the language you use, sometimes one imposed by your era, by the society you live in. That's why we can easily tell that a piece of rhymed prose is a Han-dynasty fu and couldn't be a Song-dynasty ci, without even reading it closely; that's a collective style belonging to an era and a region. Then there's the individual writer's style, which, as Yueran just said, is like a city wall, but is also a weapon, at least at the start. What's fun about this competition is that if the established writers taking part deliberately hide their own style, or avoid the style they habitually use, isn't that a bit like running a race with one leg tied — refusing to use the thing you're good at? That does happen. But what I want to ask is: when did style start being praised so highly? We often stress that certain writers have a style, that some of them are stylists — you read a line and you know it's theirs, no one else could have written it. Some are very strongly marked: Proust, Borges. Among Chinese writers, Mu Xin, Mo Yan — nobody else can pass for them. Why does this signature style get praised so highly? I'm curious about that. Maybe it's because we now believe artists, writers included, should express some form of their own selfhood, should leave their own name, their signature, on the work, and that this is what makes a great, good creator. They shouldn't be faceless, shouldn't repeat what others have done; they should innovate, have their own register, sing in their own voice. So we praise style in very positive terms, and put great weight on a writer having a distinctive one.

On the other hand style is also a kind of freedom. It's both a constraint and a freedom. By freedom I mean that style isn't necessarily as mysterious as it looks; it's something you can choose, something you can set out to create, not something forced on you because you have to express yourself. It isn't like that. There's a French writer, Raymond Queneau, who wrote a very entertaining book called Exercises in Style (《风格练习》): he took a fragmentary story so simple it barely has a plot and wrote it 99 times, each time in a different style — one of them in the style of an official letter. He was showing that one person can produce dozens of styles. The fun part is that we recognize a style more easily than we recognize a person: with 99 pieces on the same subject in different styles, we can name the style of each one without even looking at the title.

Another example. In the questionnaire I named Beckett as a writer I love. Beckett later wrote entirely in French. Why French instead of his native language? Because French was a language he learned later, and he felt that writing in French finally let him have no style. Beckett's writing reached a dry, hard, minimal state, all plot stripped away, pushed nearly to the limit, the language almost at a bottleneck. But can you call that having no style? Precisely because he pursued having no style it became conspicuous — you see something that styleless and you know at once it must be Beckett. So style is a very complicated idea. Sometimes we say a style can be hidden, as if a writer can choose freely. At other times we feel style is a strong expression of an artist's or a writer's self, or true self, something that shouldn't be discarded, that should keep developing.

Likewise, once style disappears, or stops being emphasized, we sometimes find a writer even harder to understand. Take Eileen Chang. The style of her early work is recognizable at a glance. If today you handed Little Reunions (《小团圆》), or any of her late work, to a reader who knows her early work, without saying who wrote it, I guarantee they wouldn't recognize it as Eileen Chang. So when we look at a writer's work, does that style matter or not?

Zhang Yueran: I want to ask Lu Nei — what Wendao just described, do you think those are elements or style?

Lu Nei: I was reading a book by James Wood the other day, and he says that in music someone composes, and what the composer makes is a piece, but the performer can play it in different styles. That made me think a writer has a double identity, both composer and performer, able to play the thing out in different styles. That's interesting, but it's hard to say a piece of writing can be delivered that improvisationally, so in that sense the writer is less free than the performer. A writer probably occupies an ambiguous position between the two.

Take a way of writing like Beckett's, which involves a switch of language. There's a writer, D.H. Lawrence, called a master of English literature, but once he's translated into Chinese much of his appeal is gone, his linguistic style is probably gone. In that sense, when Chinese writers are translated abroad their own linguistic style is at the mercy of the translator; a bad translator and it's simply gone. But is there still some possibility — I once put this in a rather crude way — of understanding a writer's style across translation? Dostoevsky, for instance, has been translated by different Chinese translators, and we can still see what Dostoevsky is like. Beckett has compressed his whole text to such a degree that however it's translated into Chinese I can still recognize it: this feels like Beckett. What about Eileen Chang's Little Reunions? If you actually run into an imitation of Eileen Chang — there are canonical writers many people imitate in language and even in subject matter — someone who imitates really well might not be distinguishable, and reading it anonymously you might not be able to tell either, which is why there are so many forgeries around. You can't settle it through the study of linguistic style; you'd have to discuss it the way scholars do, going behind the work to the author, as you suggested, to say that this one isn't genuine, this one looks fake.

Zhang Yueran: I can still tell Little Reunions was written by Eileen Chang — it's a bit easier than The Rice-Sprout Song and those. The problem Wendao raises about Eileen Chang may also be a confusion writers face: early on she was sheltered by that style, and once she abandoned it her readers refused to accept the change. Take Lust, Caution — before the film, a lot of readers wouldn't have called it one of her outstanding novels, because it doesn't have those beautiful touches of hers in it. Once a style becomes especially strong, abandoning it carries exactly that risk. But I think we should ask on what level we're discussing style. What we just said about Eileen Chang is really about linguistic style. If a writer's style is expressed only at that level, or mostly at that level, I don't think that should be a writer's highest aim. Between one work and another there should be something deeper in common, something more hidden, left for the people who can truly read the work to find — the thread of continuity. A writer who spends many years circling and thinking through certain questions: when readers find that thread, it must be a very happy discovery.

Style has many levels. Some shallow-level things — whether you call them style or elements — are optional, or can be thrown away. But at the deepest level, the questions a writer keeps thinking about must be continuous, must have something in common. Philip Roth, as we said, is very typical: many of his concerns run continuously through the work. Many writers are called stylists, but once they're translated into Chinese we have no idea what was good about the prose. What we lose is style at the level of prose, but at a deeper level we can still read a writer's distinctive style of soul. The intensity of that style of soul is where the appeal lies for me, and that level is reserved for readers who may spend many years with a writer, keeping them company for a long time.

Liang Wendao: Now I'm a bit confused again, and I don't know whether I've misunderstood you. You seem to be saying — let me use the crude split between surface and depth — that we shouldn't attend only to the surface style of the prose or the language, but to some meaning about the writer's existence: a meaning that is the intention an author has poured into the work, with the writing as the vehicle and the instrument for expressing it. And because an author pours that intention in, it isn't expressed only within a single work; sometimes it shows across several works, even across a whole writing life, as with Philip Roth. Here's the problem. If we stress authorial intention this way, then whether the author is alive or dead we can still be sure that, when we read a work, the author exists as a function of the text, and that we can piece together a structure of intention operating in that way. If that structure of intention matters — matters so much that it extends beyond one work, across several, and we have to trace its continuity — then this author shouldn't be anonymous. In other words, if I read an anonymous Philip Roth novel today, I have no way of grasping the continuous, developing relationship between this book and what he wrote before. If what we're doing today is anonymity, then this is exactly the side we're killing off; it's this side that gets hidden, while the so-called surface side gets amplified. Never mind anonymous writers — the funny thing is that even with the name hidden we can of course still discuss, from the text itself, what a story is trying to say, what its intention is; for a writer we don't know, whose name is missing, we can still discuss what they want to express. The problem is that the presence or absence of the name still makes a difference. If I know a story was written by Lu Nei, or by Yueran, I'll say: how does this relate to what Yueran has written before, what are Lu Nei's constant preoccupations, what is this story saying within that. Take that away and I can still discuss the work's intention or meaning, but more often what we end up attending to may be the story's so-called stylistic or formal performance. Could that be what's happening?

Zhang Yueran: I'm not saying we should roll out the idea of anonymity on a large scale. As Wendao said at the start, this is one way of observing literature, and we have many ways. The way we were just discussing comes up when we talk about a writer's style, and I do think there are marks of style at many levels. For me the deeper marks are more compelling. Why can so many surface things change? Because they have to be adjusted to fit particular content; a lot of it is formal. If the formal things and the surface style don't get adjusted, that can be a huge constraint on a writer, making it impossible to explore a new subject — like trying to compete at a sports meet in a kimono, you just can't do it. What I mean is that style at the kimono level can often be taken off, but you can't swap out the person wearing it.

There's another possibility: semi-anonymity. Take the example of a very famous Italian writer today, Elena Ferrante. There's an Italian woman writer called Ferrante; she's a real person, but no one has ever seen her, and no one knows whether she's one person or whether there might be several people behind her. We know nothing about her life, we don't even know her gender. And yet she's an extremely famous woman writer on the international literary scene. Does that count as semi-anonymity? She has in fact broken through a lot of boundaries. Imagine one possibility in a case like hers: if this writer died one day, there'd be no need to announce her death, she could simply go on existing, and the person behind her could be swapped out — a very different kind of existence. How do you see an existence like Ferrante's? Is it anonymous, in your terms, or not?

Liang Wendao: I don't think she counts as anonymous, at least not completely. Complete anonymity would of course be best served by having no name at all; then I'd lose any point of reference. But she's already extremely anonymous, even though people have tried to unmask her and some claim to have worked out who she is. Her novels still make you feel this author's presence, because the several books she's written all feel autobiographical — and that's what makes it interesting. When we say a novel feels autobiographical there's usually an assumption built in: I already know who the writer is, her background, where she grew up. Lu Nei always writes about chemical plants, and I know his own experience is in there. But if I have no idea who the writer is, on what basis can I say her novel feels autobiographical? And yet Ferrante's novels give you a strong sense of being autobiographical. So we can say that in this sense an autobiographical quality is itself a writing style, rather than something that follows from knowing who the novelist is and seeing that what she writes is what happened to her. It isn't that. I often describe autobiography as really just a style. She writes in such a strongly autobiographical style that, anonymous as she is, that author's presence still comes through. As a book, a written text — for me to understand this text today, to understand this book, to make sense of this novel, the deduction, interpretation, and inference I have to do usually assumes an author behind it. This work has a very strong author behind it, unlike the Homeric epics, where I could tell you this wasn't written by one person and you'd believe me, because the way that epic was composed makes you feel it needn't be one person's work — a whole team of writers could plausibly have made it. But Ferrante's novels give you a strong feeling that one person wrote this; there's a very strong authorial style right there.

Zhang Yueran: Could we be getting it wrong, the way the wine tasters did?

Liang Wendao: Very possibly. Because what's being judged here isn't good or bad; it's whether an author exists, whether an author with a strong style is present — and that you can actually assess.

Zhang Yueran: To me that looks like a form of semi-anonymity: there's a writing career but no personal biography. We can still compare Ferrante's various books, and the Philip Roth problem you raised still applies — we'll discuss how her writing changed over these five years compared with the five before, we'll discuss the current work in light of the earlier work. We just don't know that other, personal layer. In the writing of literary history, the person counts for a good deal.

Liang Wendao: But that raises another problem. If we're not attending to a writer's personal life as a living human being, but to their identity as the author of a run, or a set, of works, then what we're calling anonymity today actually hides two different things. If you keep only the latter kind of name, is that semi-anonymity, or how anonymous is it? Does it count as anonymous at all? Take an example: Lu Nei likes Blanchot. In French literary circles Blanchot had a nickname, "the man with no face," because he never showed himself. To this day only one photograph of him has surfaced, and even that one is hard to confirm. He never met the editor he worked with for decades; everything went by letter. Nobody knew what this man did, where he lived, what kind of life he led, what kind of personality he had. He dealt with people only through his writing. But he'd tell everyone that this book was written by Blanchot — he wrote poetry, novels, criticism as well. Does someone like that count as anonymous?

Lu Nei: That's a hard one to answer. But what you said about the autobiographical writer is interesting, because Ferrante writes a lot of philosophical material — her novels aren't as good as her philosophical writing, to my mind. Works with an autobiographical quality interest me, because the point of this competition is to put relatively famous writers together with young newcomers — not necessarily newcomers — and have them compete. As for the overall paradigm of the short story, or whether one is well written: people often say the short story demands perfection, but I don't think such a thing exists. Once you get into postmodernism, once someone like Beckett turns up, it becomes very hard to define what a "perfect" short story is; every school has its own standard of perfection. Technically speaking, if today I write a perfect Beckett-style story and tomorrow a perfect Balzac-style one, there's no telling which is higher. But the autobiographical quality you mentioned strikes me as especially fun and interesting inside this competition. Often it's young writers, young authors, or even people who've never written before who produce something genuinely interesting and new. It's not that established writers can't write that way — they've already used it up. How else would they have become established? They've already handed that material over, already traded it for their reputation; ask them to write it again and they may not be able to.

A Decade of an Independent Literary Journal: Then and Now

Q: 2018 marks ten years of Li, and those ten years haven't been easy. Journals inside the state system keep raising their pay rates and running all kinds of competitions these days. I'd like to hear how the three of you see independent literary journals in this era — what should they ideally look like, and what paths are open to them?

Zhang Yueran: Let me share a small story first. Around 2013 Wendao recommended Li on his program Eight Minutes with Books (《开卷八分钟》) — the issue called Eloping with Books, about reading. Wendao made a point of telling everyone, happily, that he'd found a new writer in it, someone who wrote really well, and that writer's name was Lu Nei. I was reminded of that just now; it's nice that Wendao can see this new writer's growth today.

Liang Wendao: Which just shows how little I knew.

Lu Nei: Which just shows how fast I grew.

Liang Wendao: In that 2013 program I introduced more than Li — there were two other independent literary journals launched at almost the same time. Both have since folded, and only Li is still alive. Every magazine, every journal, has its own fate, and the reason sometimes has to do with how the people running it think, with the goals you set yourselves. What Li has done is, in my view, very hard to do. Of course there were goals, a vision, ideals at the start, but you didn't make unrealistic demands of yourselves, so you could go steadily. It's not like the magazines whose first-issue manifesto says "our goal is world peace" — those usually don't get a second issue. Working out a direction you can actually walk down, step by step, on your own: that's what matters.

Second, being an independent literary journal is particularly meaningful in China. Not every country draws such a sharp line between independent and official, or cares about it so much. In China especially, anything run by the state is rated higher and holds higher status; in another country people might not want anything to do with a state-run operation. Here, if it's official it counts as something; if it's independent it barely counts. In that sense there's a particular significance to it, because we all know that today's official literary system, or the state-run literary journals, of course have great advantages, real benefits, a long history behind them. But precisely for that reason they're bound to carry some constraints. I find it hard to imagine an official literary journal holding an event like this one, or running the kind of special features Li has run over the years; that's not their way of operating, not their concept. Even if you imagine a new generation of editor taking over an official journal today and pushing hard to innovate and revive it, they still couldn't pull off something like this. In China, official journals hold a surprisingly authoritative status, and — no surprise — are bound by it. So independent journals have more possibilities. My only regret is that there are far too few literary journals like Li today. China is such a huge country; how can there be so few independent literary journals? That's a genuinely strange thing.

Zhang Yueran: From my point of view, the first important thing is to treat this as a small undertaking. We may badly want to build literature into something big, but we should have the self-knowledge to see how marginal, how niche, literature is. If we insist on scaling up, insist on selling a story, insist on finding investment to turn it into something huge, that will certainly damage what we set out to do. I also very much want to bring back literature's quality of play. Literature really can bring us a lot of joy, but these days when we talk about literature it seems to wear the face of a periodical: every column fixed, the group of contributors gradually fixed too, everything done inside a very large, very rigid set of rules, like filling in a form. That drains the life out of it. As a magazine, I hope it can always stay lively, and bring readers more enjoyment. We'll go on trying more interesting experiments.

Coming From Anonymity, Returning to Anonymity?

Q: You've organized this literary showdown, and in November you'll announce which writers made it and which didn't — writers nobody has heard of, unknown names, a John Doe or a Jane Doe. Their work catches everyone's attention, people get to know this person, and in the end, in this internet age, people will dig into who this person really is. It turns into something that's no longer about the work; it becomes another story, a story about the person. Doesn't that run against your original intention?

Zhang Yueran: Think of it this way: we start out as a very calm lake surface, and we want to use this competition to stir the water — but our strength isn't enough to overturn it completely. Once the water moves we may observe all kinds of different phenomena, and that process is the most important thing. We hope this new talent appears, and we hope they become tomorrow's Lu Nei, a more famous writer down the road. Whether the newcomer we pick will still have the courage to enter an anonymous competition ten years from now has nothing to do with us at all.

I think for many writers — myself included, since I first became known by winning an essay competition — I came from anonymity. Can I go back into anonymity? Is it even possible? Trying it once is interesting in itself. I'm not saying I could stay anonymous forever.

Q: Take novels. A lot of novels or works only become known after they're adapted for film or television. People may hear about a movie or a TV show first, and only once it's a hit do they learn it came from a novel and pay it a little attention. When you're writing something, do you hope your work will be adapted into another form later? And while you're writing, how do you personally weigh what you want to express against commercial entertainment?

Liang Wendao: Right, that's exactly why so many people now say they're not writing novels, they're "doing IP." More and more people, when they write, think first about whether the thing they're writing — even before they know quite what it is — has the potential to cross over: can it become a film, can it become a TV show, can it become the frame for a game, should some of its lines be turned into quotable soundbites and spread online in another format? A lot of people are starting to think about that. But my guess is that at Li, or here today, this isn't a question our particular circle worries about much; Li is in fact a base that pushes back against this trend. That's not to say none of the writers who publish in Li would ever let their work be turned into another form, only that this isn't what they set out to do, or a thought they carry through the writing of a piece. What you describe isn't the mainstream situation in serious literary circles. It has very likely existed for a long time in popular or mass-market fiction; it's just being hunted more eagerly now. It's just that a more ordinary literary writer wouldn't think about it — that's how it looks as far as I know.

Lu Nei: This affects China and the whole world. Literature used to be quite radical, and now literature everywhere has become less radical. I think it's because every writer wants their work turned into film or television, since that pays well. It does exert a reverse influence on writers; writers are shrewd people, they all think about it. They may say out loud that they don't, but inside they all know exactly what's going on. There are exceptions, though. Take me: if I write on a certain subject I'll know very clearly whether it suits a TV series, a film, a game, or nothing at all, and I might deliberately pick a subject that's very hard to adapt. I don't try to get close to the film and TV world anymore. I'm very clear about it: I just don't play. If they find a powerful enough screenwriter to pull it off anyway, there's nothing I can do.

Q: When we learn a different language and come to understand another country's culture deeply, it changes the way we think. Writing is mostly one way of presenting what our brain wants to convey to others. When we take in a different country, a different culture, and learn that country's language, it can gradually and imperceptibly change our thinking, shifting the angles we see things from and what we stress, so the words we produce come out different — which is part of why we see a writer's style differ across periods. It has more to do with the experience a person has accumulated behind the writing; the words are just a way of presenting it. Sometimes when we read translated books here, they're rendered more through a Chinese way of thinking, whereas the original carries its own country's way of understanding and conveying meaning through language — it isn't simply a matter of translating words. Is that what anonymity is really about? When style comes mostly from changes in a person's underlying experience, and their angle on the world and their emphases shift, what they express turns out different. There's an underlying logic to language, and people from different countries say things very differently. What do the three of you think of this idea?

Liang Wendao: What you describe isn't as simple as hiding a name. When I said earlier that a writer's name matters, it was mostly because the writer matters. The language a work comes from, the country behind the writer, the era and so on — all of it comes attached to the writer's identity, to the name. The reason we value these things is that when we read literature, or anything written, we often care about what the author intended. In other words, this kind of question becomes especially important when we're trying to understand and interpret a written work. What counts as intention? What counts as content and meaning? We know that since ancient times this question has surfaced in every field that has to do with the written word. In the West, for instance, jurisprudence has cared from the beginning about intention, expression, and act — whether you had criminal intent, say, which also bears on how laws are written. Even today, in constitutional argument, many people care about how a given clause is interpreted; the United States faces this constantly. What did the people who wrote the constitution more than 200 years ago originally mean? Others think that question doesn't matter, because what matters more is how we understand the text itself here and now, which they consider far more important than what was in the minds of the people who wrote those legal provisions more than two centuries ago. And knowing with total certainty what those people were thinking 200-odd years ago is impossible anyway. Either way it splits into two camps, and those two camps exist precisely because of how we understand intention.

The same holds in rhetoric. In the medieval period, when Christian or Catholic thought and Christian faith blanketed all of Europe, they faced a difficulty: what to do with the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman pagans? Everyone knew these writers were important and great, but if they weren't believers, should their writing simply not be read? Look at Dante's Divine Comedy: the ancient Greek writers are all in hell or purgatory, unable to reach heaven, because their fate was so wretched — through sheer bad luck they were born when there was no chance to hear of Jesus, so hell is where they belonged. Most people found this unacceptable, so how should one read Homer's epics? The reading they arrived at was that Homer's work allegorically foretold the birth of Jesus. Today we find that unthinkable — did Homer really mean that? Rhetoric began to argue that it doesn't matter what Homer thought; it's the language, and the force driving it from behind, that made what he wrote necessarily an allegory of the birth of Jesus. Clearly the text has come loose from its author here: even granting that a man named Homer existed, he was only responsible for giving off the work, an agent and nothing more.

What I want to say is: does a writer's name matter? In one sense very much — when we're talking about meaning and about images, about whether this author has a personal meaning to express or whether certain images are being expressed through him. When we interpret the meaning of a work today, do we have to assume the original author's thinking? Even if we don't, and read it with a present-day attitude, we can never get around the author's existence; the author's intention constrains our understanding of the text to some degree, so it matters, it isn't unimportant. The problem is that if we erase the author entirely, as we're doing here, what's left is a question of language, a question of structure, a question of narrative. We can no longer emphasize anything on the scale of a large intention. Faced with a text, most people's first habit is to understand what it's saying and where its meaning lies. Of course we can still ask that of an anonymous work, but that's as far as it goes; it's much harder to go deeper into why this writer wrote one way before and this way now, whether the writer's life, their birth, has anything to do with it. Just as you said, their original historical background and national background no longer matter. Can we go so far as to imagine that foreign writers might take part in this anonymous competition?

Zhang Yueran: Maybe robots will take part too.

About the Guests

Liang Wendao: media figure, writer, and producer of the culture brand Vistopia. Born in Hong Kong in 1970. Began writing art criticism, cultural commentary, and current-affairs commentary in 1988, and has taken part in cultural and social activities of many kinds. Formerly hosted Eight Minutes with Books; now producer of the culture brand Vistopia and host of the late-night reading program One Thousand and One Nights.

Lu Nei: born in 1973, now living in Shanghai. One of the best novelists of China's post-1970s generation, he was named Writer of the Year for 2012 in GQ China's Men of the Year awards, and in recent years is the only writer of his generation to have published six novels in a row in Harvest and People's Literature. His works include the "Following Trilogy" (Young Babylon, The Journey of Following Her, and Where Did the Angel Fall), as well as The Man in the Clouds and Stories From Flower Street.

Zhang Yueran: writer. Began publishing at 14. Her fiction to date includes Sunflower Lost in 1890, Ten Loves, Cherries in the Distance, The Narcissus Has Ridden Off on a Carp, The Bird's Vow, Red Shoes, Have You Come to Inspect My Sorrow, A Room Where Day Is Like Night, and The Night of the Full Moon and Other Stories, and she edits the themed book series Li. She is a lecturer at the School of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China.

Note: the Anonymous Writers Project has already begun. The work of Anonymous Writers 001, 002, 003, and 004 has been published on Li's WeChat official account and in the new magazine Li: The Anonymous Writers Project*. You can also follow the Weibo accounts of Imaginist and Li New Writing to watch the anonymous writers' Proust Questionnaire videos.*

The preliminary round ends at the end of October, and the final awards will be announced in January 2019. For submission guidelines, go here.

Cover image: a still from Midnight in Paris / Douban