The connection among aesthetic form, literary-artistic fiction, and human existence is brought into prominence along with the process of Western modernization. In this process, on one hand, the human's notion of subjectivity develops; on the other hand, the ever-intensifying commodification, technologization, and instrumental reason create a severe alienation of the human and of the various real existences, so that the conflict between the human's notions and reality grows daily more acute, and so the human is forced to place his hope in the fictionality of literary art, hoping, through literary art, to construct a fictional aesthetic world distinct from, and counterposed to, the real world, to build for himself a spiritual home and regain the soundness and harmony of human nature. And aesthetic form is precisely the builder of the aesthetic world of literary-artistic fiction, and also the sign that distinguishes the aesthetic world from the real world; therefore, it is also the guide that leads the human into this world. At the same time, only by entering this fictional aesthetic world does “form” become “significant form” and “form of life,” that is, truly become “aesthetic form.” From this angle, aesthetic form precisely embodies a unique, most-one's-own mode of existence of the human.
I
Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece already recognized the fictionality of literary art. In the Renaissance, the English poet Sidney, in An Apology for Poetry, went on to regard fiction as the fundamental nature of literature. He points out that the poet, by the help of fiction, creates “another nature”; if the world of nature is “brazen,” then only the poet delivers us a “golden” one. It is precisely the fiction of excellent images that is the poet's “true mark,” and that makes the poet's role not only far surpass the historian's but even surpass the philosopher's. “Fiction can sing the highest note of passion.” (1) By the Romantic period, the relation between literature and fiction and its significance gained still more multifaceted exposition.
In the 1890s, facing Western industrialization, modernization, and the enormous changes in social life brought about thereby, Schiller keenly connected literary art with the human's existential state to think about. He deeply felt the alienation and fragmentation of the human caused by industrialization, and therefore advocated that art must break free of reality, step beyond need, and become the daughter of freedom. (2) And so, literary-artistic fiction was raised to be recognized on the level of significance concerning human existence.
Since the twentieth century, Bullough proposed the proposition of literary art's “anti-realist nature” to extol fictionality. (3) Heidegger placed literary art within the evolution of the relation between human and world to examine. He holds that the ancient Greeks had a harmonious, intimate relation with the world; but ever since the birth of the modern subject and modern science and technology, the split between human and world was inevitably created, the world began to be grasped as “world picture,” the world was distorted, the truth of beings was concealed, and even life was handed over to technological manufacture for disposal. Only in the “another world” that poetry and art create can the harmonious, seamless unitary relation between human and world be re-restored, the earth be opened, and truth manifest. (4) Marcuse further stressed the distinction between the fictional world of literary art and the real world, and called it the “world of otherness”; here, the human's “new sensibility” is shaped, and sensibility and reason are coordinated—it is precisely this human who has regained soundness that provides a liberating force for the reconstruction of the real world. Sartre, in turn, builds the fictionality of literary art on the basis of the human's nihilation of being, giving a powerful exposition of literary-artistic fiction. He holds that fiction makes literary art transcend reality, and at the same time lets the author and reader break free of the real social-historical connection and become the “universal human.” (5)
The above scholars all, from their own peculiar angles, profoundly expound the significance of literary-artistic fiction for human existence. But why can literary-artistic fiction let the relation between human and world return to harmony? Through what kind of mechanism does it coordinate the human's sensibility and reason? And how does it let the human break free of his own limitation and be restored to the “universal human”?
II
In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser, from the angle of literary anthropology, makes a deep and detailed analysis of literary fiction. He criticizes the traditional view that opposes reality and fiction, and uses a “triad” to replace the theory of “binary opposition.” He says: “The literary text is a mixture of fiction and reality; it is the result of the mutual entanglement and mutual penetration between the given and the imagined.” “Fiction's transgression of reality provides the premise and basis for imagination's transgression of reality; without this basis, imagination can hardly display its charm. In this process, the act of fictionalizing serves as the bond between imagination and reality.” (6) In Iser's view, the act of literary fictionalizing simultaneously contains “selection” and “fusion”: “selection” introduces a trans-textual reality into the text, bringing the various selected factors from different systems into a common context; “fusion,” as an important complementary mode of selection, makes the various different factors compose an organic whole and become a literary text. However, why does such a “grand assemblage” constituted through selection and fusion become a literary work? In what proportions and ways must the various factors—whether fictional or real—be matched, so as to be distinguished from “the fiction in daily behavior” and make the text itself “manifest a fictional character”? Why can a slip of paper, merely by being written in lines, be read as a poem? And why can a “ready-made” likewise become art? Evidently, Iser's fiction theory cannot explain these problems.
In fact, the key by which literary-artistic activity is distinguished from other human practical activity lies in its unique intentional relation; the literary-artistic world is a fictional world the human constructs in the fictive intentional relation. Just as Marx distinguished the human's modes of grasping the world, and Martin Buber divided the relation between human and world into the “I–Thou” and “I–It” relations, the human's modes of grasping the world and the human's intentional relations with the world are differentiated along with the differentiation of the spheres of human activity; “differentiation” creates the diversity of modes of grasping and modes of relating.
The literary-artistic work is not, as Iser says, a mixture of fiction and reality; in the aesthetic horizon, it is wholly in a fictional world distinct from reality. In literary-artistic activity, the interweaving of fiction and reality is rooted in the diversity of the intentional relations between human and world and the transformability of the various intentional relations. The human, in the process of practice, acquires various intentional abilities; he can both establish a fictive intentional relation with literary art and jointly construct a fictional aesthetic world, and can turn to view, with a cognitive-critical attitude, the various elements drawn from reality in the text, excavating the social-historical connotation contained therein. This is to say, the process of creation and appreciation is neither pure aesthetic nor cognitive-critical, but the interweaving of various intentional relations; the human is always in a continually transforming, changing relation with the work, in a continually swaying, shifting position, in a “transitional state” that Mario Perniola speaks of. But the reason literary art becomes literary art lies precisely in the fact that, although it can establish various relations with the human, it cannot lose the fictive intentional relation, cannot betray the fictional world constructed by the fictive intentional relation. The aesthetic characteristic of literary art is rooted precisely in the fictional world constructed by the fictive intentional relation.
Then, by the help of what, after all, does the human establish a unique fictive intentional relation with literary art and construct a fictional aesthetic world? The most important factor therein is aesthetic form. There is a generative process of mutual action and joint construction between the human and the literary-artistic work. In this process, the characteristics of the work (including the characteristics of content and form), the human's subjective mentality, and the unique context and background in which he is situated all exert action, jointly determining the construction of the relation between human and work, determining the establishment of the fictive intentional relation; and among the various factors, aesthetic form is often crucial. For example, the rhythm and redundant information of poetry; the indeterminate past tense “once upon a time…” at the beginning of a story; (7) the facial-painting, the singing style, the spoken parts, and the dance-like movements of Peking opera, and so on—all are important factors that lead the human to establish a fictive intentional relation with the work.
Of course, aesthetic form is only the most important factor and not the sole determining factor. Duchamp's work Fountain was originally an inconspicuous “utilitarian object”; but once Duchamp inscribed it and invited it into the art exhibition hall, the situation became very different: the special background of the hall forced people to view it with an appreciative gaze, and the famous artist's signature further hinted at its extraordinary identity, and so its “usefulness” was canceled, and it became a purely “viewed” object. In an instant, the modeling, the lines, and the luster eye-catchingly displayed themselves; it became the art-work Fountain, became “the most influential art-work of the twentieth century.” Evidently, it is mainly the pressure of context and the artist's inscription that entice the human to establish a brand-new relation with this object, to rediscover the form ignored in daily life, and to jointly construct an aesthetic intermediary, arousing the viewer's imagination about “Fountain.” Duchamp's Fountain subverts the traditional notion of art, challenges Ingres's “standard beauty,” and forms a marvelous ironic relation with Ingres's The Spring. Bei Dao's one-character poem “Net” has an utterly different meaning from the same character on a commercial poster. The poetry collection itself induces in us the expectation of reading poetry, establishing with it a fictive intentional relation, canceling the direct real reference of the character “net” and concentrating on the text itself; and so, the metaphoricity of “net” is activated; it mutually generates with the title “Life,” jointly creating a poetically-luxuriant imagined world. As for the railway timetable that Eagleton says can also be read as a poem, this mainly depends on the human's subjective intention. (8) Because the establishment of the fictive intentional relation involves multifaceted factors, it is impossible to seek the “essence” of literary art merely within the “interior” of the text, and the search for “literariness” can only be in vain. However, although the causes come from many aspects, on the whole, aesthetic form is after all the most important among them, and the one that most often exerts action. Only, with the high development of modern reproduction technology, aesthetic form is gradually disenchanted, and its action daily tends toward exhaustion.
Aesthetic form is distinguished from general form mainly not in that it strengthens the human's sensation with a defamiliarizing form, but in that it can lead the human to establish a fictive intentional relation with the work, change the existential state of human and work, and endow human and work with a unique mode of existence, that is, the aesthetic mode of existence. This is what Marcuse called the “despotism of form.” Marcuse holds that aesthetic form has an “other-being force”; it makes the customary content and experience appear in an utterly different way, thereby leading to the birth of new consciousness and perception. It is precisely because of the “despotism” of aesthetic form that the “raw matter” of the work breaks free of the immediacy of reality and becomes a thing differing from a certain angle, becomes “another reality,” that is, a constituent part of the fictional aesthetic world.
Aesthetic form first serves as a kind of boundary, separating the work from the real world; therefore, it is also a kind of sign, leading the human to view the work with a brand-new attitude and to establish a fictive intentional relation with the literary-artistic work; at the same time, the human, together with aesthetic form and the work, jointly constructs a fictional aesthetic world. It is precisely in this fictional world that the unique nature of literary art can fully manifest. “Every true art-work has a tendency to break free of the dusty world. The most direct effect it creates is an ‘otherness’ that leaves reality—this is the effect created by the illusory image that encompasses such factors of the work as things, statements, and melody.” (9) The reason literary art is distinguished from any kind of existent thing in the real world lies precisely in its being rooted in another world, that is, the unreal fictional world; the reason literary art is indispensable to the human lies precisely in the fact that the human's complete world simultaneously contains the real world and the unreal fictional world—lacking one of these halves, the human's world is defective, and the human is paralyzed. Therefore, the separation of the fictional world of literary art from the real world does not create a dualistic split of the human's world, but rather makes the defective world return to completeness. Because the fictional world of literary art is an indeterminate, infinite world, when the human possesses this world, he also changes the determinacy and finitude of his own existence, opening the indeterminate and infinite dimension, endowing the human's existence with rich and varied modes and possibilities.
III
In the fictional world of literary art, the “reality principle” that Freud speaks of, because it is divorced from the real context, loses efficacy and is suspended. For any principle is formed in a concrete context and exerts action in a concrete context; divorced from its original context, it is not only useless but can even no longer continue to exist, and can only live or die of itself. Aesthetic form, with its “despotic” force, “distances” the human and the work from the real world and enters the fictional world, and so makes the reality principle lose its foundation. The fictional world of literary art is “without law.” In this fictional world, the human breaks free of external constraint and fully unfolds his own life and its creativity; therefore, one may also say that the sole “aesthetic law” the fictional world of literary art must follow is precisely the “law of life”; it pulses together with the human's life, tightening and relaxing as one. At the same time, the daily-rigidifying order of the real world is also melted, even dissolved, and the order of life becomes the order of the literary-artistic world. Because the fictional world of literary art follows only the “law of life” and not the “reality principle,” here, sensuous life re-establishes its own authority; it runs through the whole process of literary-artistic activity and becomes the starting point and ultimate aim of literary-artistic activity.
The fictional world of literary art does not aim to cancel human reason; but because the fictional world, according to the law of life it follows, strips away the authoritative status of reason, this restores the relation that sensibility and reason should originally have: namely, sensuous life is the “master,” while reason is the “servant” serving sensuous life. Here, sensuous life becomes the sole aim, the sole standard; everything must be adjudicated through the human's sensuous life, through the human's true feeling; whatever violates the notions, articles, laws, and formulas of sensuous life meets with contempt and disdain. Reason too finally breaks free of its own limitation, follows the development of the whole of life, and continually adjusts and corrects its original prejudice and bias. In real life, the human often can hardly break free of relations of interest and can hardly abandon rational consideration; while in the literary fictional world, sensibility replaces reason and becomes the true judge. Lion Feuchtwanger's Success has an interesting description: when the Nazi Otto Klenk first begins to watch the film Battleship Potemkin, he strives to maintain the attitude of a “bystander,” merely calmly appreciating the verisimilitude and acting of the film. Gradually, he develops an interest in the characters and events in the film. Out of social instinct, he is dissatisfied with the incompetence of the officers, and comes to hate the rebelling sailors. However, the film's images and music, with enormous emotional force, draw him into them, so that he cannot break free, and unwittingly comes to stand on the side of the sailors. The realm of literary-artistic fiction has a liberating force; it to some degree makes Klenk provisionally suspend his political prejudice and lets sensuous judgment and emotional judgment gain the upper hand.
When literary-artistic fiction removes the constraint of the reality principle and order, when the human's sensuous life thereby fully and freely unfolds itself, the world too opens to us, and an incomparably rich, novel, multifarious world finally unfolds before us. Originally, the things repressed, disparaged, and ignored in the real world—the unconscious and the irrational—because of the liberation of sensuous life, re-restore their position and gain due regard. Those things beyond words, those blanks of language, those things gagged by the grip of power, all open their mouths to speak. Aesthetic form, with its “despotic” force, transposes the human and the work into the fictional aesthetic world, making the human and the work transcend the endless process of reality, thereby subverting the authority of reason, canceling the various real repressions, releasing the human's deep psychic sediment, and also making form itself shine with the marvelous light of life. Therefore, the form of literary art becomes what Clive Bell called “significant form,” becomes the true “aesthetic form.” From this angle, aesthetic form and literary-artistic fiction are mutually generative: aesthetic form leads the human to establish a fictive intentional relation with the work and jointly constructs with the human the fictional world of literary art; and only in the fictive intentional relation, in the fictional world of literary art, can the significance of form be manifested, and form truly become aesthetic form.
If, in literary-artistic activity, the human's free creation and the human's transcendence of the real world are inseparable from the human's subjectivity, then the fictional world constructed thereby in turn dissolves the human's subjectivity. Fiction abolishes the various real repressions, removes the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious, and opens the black box of the human's heart; the surging collective unconscious then submerges the individual and dissolves the subject. Adorno calls this “being-affected” or “shock.” He says: “The reasonable response to art is a kind of being-affected (Betroffenheit). Being-affected is aroused by the great work. Being-affected is not some emotion of the recipient that has been repressed and floats to the surface because of the action of art, but is a momentary sense of embarrassment—more precisely, a shock (Erschütterung). In this moment, he concentratedly attends to the work, forgets his own existence, and discovers that the truthfulness embodied by the aesthetic image has a genuine possibility of being understood. This immediacy (in the best sense of the word), that is, the seamless fusion-relation between the individual and the work, is a mediating function, or an inner, broad experiential function.” (10) This is a realm in which thing and self are both forgotten, thing and self fuse; it is also the supreme realm of aesthetic intoxication. The human's heart fully opens, the human's life-force is aroused, and human and world fuse into one again. The liberation of the human's heart, the seamless fusion of human and world, in turn further expands the human himself, nourishes the human himself, enriches the human himself. In the fictional aesthetic world, “self-forgetting” precisely becomes an important path for the human's self-development; it finally returns to the human a more independent, freer, more profound, and more tolerant and creative subject.
In discussing the value of literary art, Hutcheon says: “Indeed, fiction, drama, film, painting, and sketch may be false. In the general sense of truthfulness relative to fact, they do not ‘tell the truth.’ They are often called ‘fictional’ works. But the art-work, in its deceptiveness, is rich in enlightenment; it makes fiction enlightening; it can speak a truth utterly different from the order of fact.” (11) Literary art creates a fictional aesthetic world, contrasting, with a sound mode of life, the alienated existence of reality; contrasting, with free life-activity, the rigidified order of reality; contrasting, with vivid life-experience, the customary daily experience; and going on to reveal and protest the irrationality of reality.
Marcuse holds: “In aesthetic form, the content (the matter) is combined, reshaped, and adjusted, so as to gain a condition under which the immediate, ungrasped force of the ‘material’ or matter can be grasped, can be ‘ordered.’ Form is precisely negation; it is the grasping of disorder, frenzy, and suffering; even if form manifests disorder, frenzy, and suffering, it is also a grasping of these things. This triumph of art is due to its handing over the content to the aesthetic order. And the aesthetic order, in terms of its own demand, is autonomous.” (12) Literary art, through aesthetic form, recombines the content (the matter), endowing disorder, frenzy, and suffering with aesthetic order; its essence is precisely to rebuild order according to the aesthetic law, that is, the law of life; whatever contradicts the law of life is negated. It makes those alien, dehumanized things that contradict life return to life itself, return to the human himself, and at the same time present the pulse of life and shine with the radiance of human nature. Therefore, aesthetic form is also what Susanne Langer called the “form of life.”
The process of the formalization, ordering, and vitalization of the literary-artistic work is precisely the process in which the human changes his daily-real attitude and creates, in the fictive intention, a fictional aesthetic world; it lets the human's sensuous life gain liberation and expansion, lets the life-force fully manifest, and, with his own life, assimilates and ferments all matter, thereby endowing the literary-artistic work with the form of life. This process is called by Susanne Langer “artistic abstraction.” Here, “abstraction” does not mean rising into a concept and squeezing out the rich connotation, but means breaking free of the material existence of reality, transcending the historical connection of reality, severing the continuous process of real time, and breaking free of the power-relations of reality. Through abstraction, literary art constructs for itself an unreal fictional world. It is precisely in this process of unrealization that the human's sensibility loses the concrete aim of reality, becomes ethereal, and thereby gains elevation and liberation. It is no longer the sensibility in daily life; it pulls away from this ordinary sensibility, sublimates, and transforms into a free aesthetic feeling. In this process of unrealization, any original practical significance loses its significance; the only thing that remains is the significance of the human's life; literary art thus returns to the human himself and gains autonomy. Life becomes the highest, and the sole, significance and value of literary art—this is the humanist nature of literary art.
IV
However, in postmodern society, the aesthetic form of literary art and the fictional world it constructs are being disenchanted; their separating and guiding functions daily decline, and thereby lead to the existential crisis of literary art, and even to the existential crisis of the human. In postmodern society, fiction is no longer the patent of literary art; in fact, the boundary between the real and the fictional is being effaced. The rapidly-developing electronic media construct a vast virtual empire; in terms of both scale and seductiveness, it far surpasses the fictional world of literary art. Although literary art too often borrows this space to transmit itself, the actual situation is: it is irrevocably submerged in the ocean of information, left to be toyed with by contingency. What expands together with the network virtual empire is the society of signs. Those madly-proliferating signs cover reality; reality sinks, buried by the continually-simulated codes. In Baudrillard's view, this is an age of “simulation,” an age with no distinction between “original” and “copy,” or fundamentally a “hyperreal” in which the “original” is absent and only the self-proliferating “copy” remains. (13) When reality, through the continual simulation of the simulacrum, becomes “hyperreal,” the real no longer exists, and the distinction between real and fictional also no longer exists; the “reality” of people's daily life—including politics, society, history, economy, and even the most mediocre daily affairs—is all incorporated into the simulation-dimension of hyperrealism, and the human really and truly lives within an “aesthetic” illusion.
The highly-developed modern reproduction technology and media technology are ceaselessly and fervently producing and transmitting simulacra, manufacturing aesthetic illusions, and creating a new world of the “aestheticization of everyday life.” Then, what kind of influence will this phenomenon bring to literary art and to aesthetic activity? In Undoing Aesthetics, Welsch proposes three points of reflection: first, the practice of making everything beautiful destroys the essence of beauty—the universally-existing beauty has lost its distinctiveness or simply become meaningless; second, the globalized aestheticization strategy becomes its own victim and ends in numbness; third, what arises in its place is the need for an an-aesthetic, a craving for interruption and fragmentation, a craving to break through ornamentation. (14) Welsch's view is naturally not wrong. At present, are people not already weary of the ornamentation of beauty, weary of excessive maturity, turning to seek the “unripe,” to seek an unreclaimed virgin land? The fall of the earth that breathes the breath of soil always fills people with nostalgia. However, this is perhaps only the beginning of the pursuit of a new style; for literary art, this influence is not fatal.
The over-production of simulacra, the transformation of reality into the “hyperreal,” into the “art-work” of hyperrealism, and the becoming of daily life into aestheticized life—the malady of this is not merely that it brings the human aesthetic fatigue to the point of detesting beauty. The key to the problem lies in: this world that has been turned into “hyperreal” or “aestheticized” has already, really and truly, been assimilated by the real world, become an extension of the real world, become its indispensable organic constituent part, and been occupied by the reality principle and technological logic, market logic. What the virtual world created by electronic media and modern reproduction technology has lost is precisely the “otherness” that Marcuse cherished, that “other-being force” at variance with, and counterposed to, the real world. Having lost otherness, the so-called virtual world is connected back into reality, no longer able to break free of the historical process of reality, no longer able to provide for the human's existence “another” spiritual home distinct from reality. This is a postmodern virtual world, a world re-realized, daily-ized, and highly technologized and commodified. This “virtual reality,” with its surface free seduction, attracts the human, but in fact squeezes out the fictional world of literary art, brutally erodes the fictional world of literary art, dissolves the various modern characteristics built upon it, and intends to rule the human's whole world, canceling the human's truly free mode of existence, thereby making the human again degenerate into “one-dimensional man,” degenerate into a spiritually extremely petty dwarf. When the human is immersed in this postmodern virtual world, enjoying the “freedom” it bestows, the human has already abandoned his transcendence, and literary art thereby becomes superfluous.
“When the real world turns into pure image, pure image turns into real existence—a dynamic fictional thing that provides a direct motive for hypnotic behavior.” (15) If the fictional world in literary art protests the state of alienation by awakening the human's sensuous life, then the “spectacle” that Guy Debord speaks of has precisely only one action: “to produce habitual obedience,” so as to make the human comfortably live within the spectacle. At the same time, the aesthetic form of literary art too is disenchanted. Modern reproduction technology, with its enormous formal imitation function, clears away the sacredness of aesthetic form, making it degenerate into a mediocre, savorless form. Form that has lost sacredness no longer has the “despotic” “other-being force”; it can hardly effectively separate the fictional from the real, the real from the unreal, and is unable to lead the human into the fictional aesthetic world.
The fictional world of literary art is a world of extremely rich content; at the same time, it is also a product of cultural construction. The great significance of the fictional world for human existence is an organic constituent part of the myth of modernity, the spiritual construction of the modernist cultural hero. “Form” and “fiction” become their spiritual shields with which they resist real alienation in a Don-Quixote-like way. But it too will inevitably, together with the myth of the independence and subjectivity of literary art, encounter the most severe test at the moment of entering the postmodern. Aleš Erjavec says: “Our perception of the real has all along been a construction, and not a fixed pattern that always aims at the same real in different situations.” (16) By the same reasoning, the human's perception of fiction is likewise a construction. Since the modern era, at the same time as the human's subject-consciousness and scientific consciousness daily strengthen, the human's consciousness of fiction, his consciousness of the distinction between the fictional and the real, the real and the unreal, has correspondingly strengthened; the fictional world of literary art thus, as the opposite of the real world, becomes a special spiritual domain of the human; and because of the human's real predicament, the “otherness” of the fictional world of literary art is daily brought into prominence, idealized into a home that truly accords with human nature, a heaven the human builds for himself to replace the heaven of God that has already been lost. The various modern characteristics of literary art are thus founded on this man-made heaven of the fictional world. Therefore, Wellek and Warren call fictionality the “core nature” of literature. But this division between the fictional and the real meets with deconstruction in the postmodern period. Jameson's theory of “de-differentiation” points out that the differences among culture, economy, and politics are disappearing; the “hyperreal” that Baudrillard speaks of, the “aestheticization of everyday life” that Featherstone speaks of, the “life as aesthetic” that Shusterman speaks of, and the “epistemological aestheticization” that Welsch speaks of all likewise stress the dissolution of the boundary between the fictional and the real, the real and the unreal; and this dissolution is oriented toward the virtual world's losing “otherness” and being re-realized, daily-ized, technologized, and commodified. This not only threatens the fictional world of literary art and makes it pale, but will also subvert the various modern characteristics built upon the fictional world of literary art, bringing an unprecedented powerful impact to literary art and to the human himself.
V
Of course, this does not mean that the human and literary art therefore have a bleak prospect. The human is always continually struggling and contending for his own existence and his own future; even in this postmodern virtual world that is daily being assimilated by reality, the human can still use the “tactics” and “stratagems” that Michel de Certeau speaks of to resist this increasingly-integrated world. Certeau, with his peculiar keenness, sees the important value of “tactics” and “stratagems” in the most trivial daily life. He says: “Dwelling, traffic, speaking, reading, shopping, or cooking—these activities seem to accord with the characteristics of tactical stratagems and unexpected gains: the tricks the ‘weak’ use within the order established by the ‘strong,’ the art of using technique within the other's domain, the cunning of the hunter, the flexibility of mobile change, the surprising, poetic, and martial new ideas.” (17) Using the “stratagems of tactics,” the human can, within the order established by the “strong,” plan out for himself a patch of existential space, a thread of surviving poetry. Then, how does literature cope with this postmodern situation?
Facing the enormous pressure and the new crisis of the postmodern, literature's stress-response is hasty and various: either turning to the popular for rescue, or allying with the image, or lowering its posture to stoop to body-writing, or simply taking its method from non-fiction writing… And one rational choice among these is historiographic metafiction. When the boundary between the real and the fictional is dissolving, when literature no longer retains its own independent fictional world to provide the human with an ideal spiritual habitat, when harsh reality stifles the human's romantic feeling and pushes the crisis to the fore, this new situation cannot but force the human to rethink literature and the problem of fiction. Historiographic metafiction precisely condenses such a reflection.
Differing from traditional historical fiction, historiographic metafiction does not take the mere telling of historical subject-matter as its goal; it often pays more attention to displaying the process of historiography, revealing the fictionality and ideological character of history. Compared to metafiction, it often goes even further in the textual self-referentiality; at the same time, it again recontextualizes the text and its production and reception process, placing them within the social-historical, ideological situation on which they depend for existence, letting the self-referentiality and the recontextualization of the two opposing sides mutually entangle—it is itself a contradictory body.
Historiographic metafiction attempts to re-problematize those events already taken as a matter of course. It is built on such a recognition: history and literature are both narrative, both artificial linguistic construction; both cannot escape the problems of fiction, power, and ideology. To regard fiction merely as the patent of literature, to sharply split the literary fictional world from the real world, holding that one can thereby evade power and ideology, is only a utopia—itself a wishful fiction of the cultural elite. Therefore, historiographic metafiction would rather abandon that beautiful vision of the predecessors, and calmly examine: how, after all, do history and literature narrate, and how are they constructed? Whose story do they tell, and who tells it? What common points do historical narrative and literary narrative have? In what relation do they stand to the laws of power and to ideology? How is narrative embedded in the cultural context, and how does power enter the fictional world through narrative? Historiographic metafiction often intentionally fuses historiography with fictional imagination, and uses techniques such as parody, collage, intertextuality, and multiple narrative angles to create tension within the text, expand the psychical distance of reading-appreciation, and make the appreciation process simultaneously a process of reflection. It intentionally lays bare the constructive process of historical narrative, displaying the act of collecting historical material and the effort made to determine the narrative order. (18) Rather than say these narrative acts are to verify the reliability of historical narrative, it is better to say they are a distrust of historical narrative; they intend to reveal the contradiction and fictionality in narration, thereby illustrating a severe fact: no one can truly return to the past, to the historical scene, or truly reproduce historical events—and thereby reflect on the serious problems of who decides the “truth” and how it is constructed.
Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot most ingeniously fuses historical chronology, fable, examination questions, and literary criticism into the novel, questioning the boundary between literature, history, and various other genres, and saying: “History is just another literary genre: the past is an autobiographical novel dressed up as a parliamentary report.” (19) The novel's second chapter is composed of three independent chronologies: the first chronology records Flaubert's course toward success; the second chronology is completely different—it specially points out the event that Flaubert was born among three successively-dead children, was physically weak, and had a small grave prepared for him at home; he “began to rot almost as soon as he was born,” destined to be an unlucky wretch; the third chronology is compiled from Flaubert's remarks in different years. All three chronologies have factual basis, but the different selections, angles, and modes of compilation resulting from the different compilers' different notions let us see an utterly different Flaubert. Even the parrot specimen that Flaubert borrowed when writing A Simple Heart cannot be verified. The Flaubert Memorial Hall in Croisset and the Hôtel-Dieu hospital each preserve Flaubert's parrot “Loulou,” and both have relevant historical documents; they seem to be the historical witnesses of Flaubert's creation of that year. But the narrator “I,” after inquiry, discovers that these two parrots were in fact requested from the natural-history museum only more than thirty years later; they were selected, according to the description in Flaubert's novel, from fifty parrot specimens; and in those thirty-odd years, the parrot specimens, because of worm-damage, had mostly been replaced. This is to say, these parrots taken as “historical witnesses” were not the source of inspiration for Flaubert's creation of that year; on the contrary, they imitated Flaubert's novel. The so-called “history” was actually built upon the reproduction of the novel.
Historiographic metafiction not only reveals that historical narrative and literary narrative are both artificial linguistic construction, both inseparable from fiction, but at the same time also reveals the close connection of this fictional world with power and ideology. It uses techniques such as parody to bring the narrative process into prominence, pushing the narrative itself to the foreground, making the human conscious of “discourse,” conscious of a series of problems—who is telling the “truth,” what kind of “truth” is told, how the “truth” is told. “Discourse is both a means of power and a result of power… Because discourse is the joint of power and knowledge, it changes its own form and meaning according to who is speaking, the speaker's power-status, and the customs and institutional context in which the speaker happens to be. Historiographic metafiction all along carefully ‘positions’ itself within the discursive environment, and then uses this positioning to problematize knowledge (including history, society, and ideology) conceptually.” (20) Historiographic metafiction reveals the mutual connection of language with politics, of rhetoric with repression; it reveals the ideological character of discourse through the self-referentiality of language, subverting the authority of discourse while affirming it. For example, John Banville's Doctor Copernicus strives to reveal the action of language within knowledge and power, questioning and reflecting on science. Robert Coover's The Public Burning problematizes external evidence to expose the distortion of truth by the narrative model adopted in news reportage, critiquing American ideology. Power and ideology, through discourse, penetrate everywhere and are everywhere; historiographic metafiction both highlights this unavoidable fact and questions power and ideology, demystifying power and ideology.
Althusser recognized the complex relation between literary art and ideology. He points out that art cannot be reduced to ideology; art and ideology have a special relation. Ideology is the imaginary way by which people experience the real world, and this is precisely the experience that literature provides. “However, art does not merely passively reflect that experience; it is contained within ideology, but at the same time keeps a distance from ideology, so that we ‘feel’ or ‘perceive’ the ideology that produces it.” (21) Macherey further enriches Althusser's view. He says: “The illusory image—the language that is the author's original material—is the medium and source of daily ideology. When we are seized and wrapped by this ceaseless, formless river of discourse, the daily ideology inherent in language shapes us into form.” (22) And when the author creates, he can shape this illusory image into something different, endow it with shape and structure, fix the ideology within the boundary of fiction, thereby changing our unconscious relation to ideology, bringing into prominence the inner contradiction of ideology, and posing a challenge to the conjectures of ideology. If Althusser and Macherey reveal the relation between literary art and ideology in a general sense, then historiographic metafiction, because it deliberately displays discourse and narrative themselves, has a more conscious critical awareness than general literary-artistic works. And compared to metafiction, historiographic metafiction “does not think about itself; what it thinks about is the logic and ideology of narrative within the act of interpreting the world.” (23)
Historiographic metafiction deprives literature of its patent over fiction, and lays bare the complex connection in which fiction is entangled with power and ideology; this destroys the spiritual home the cultural elite construct through literary fiction, and also forces people to abandon romantic imagination and calmly rethink the problem of literary fiction. The fictional world of literature is by no means a pure land; it can never thoroughly break free of power and ideology. However, since it can, as Althusser and Macherey say, make a critique of ideology, this shows that it can, after all, give the author and reader a foothold outside the given ideology, a Bakhtinian “exotopic” position; and this foothold may not be one the author originally had—the author, like others, lives within the control of power and the soaking of ideology. A more universal explanation is: this foothold is precisely what the literary fictional world constructed in the fictive intentional relation gives to the author and reader.
In analyzing what “literariness” is, and the problem of the relation between literariness and fiction, Peter Widdowson expresses deep doubt; but in the end he still, not without hesitation, insists: “I maintain that ‘poetic creation’ has a determining action”; “I hold that the most important characteristic of literary ‘making’ is that it creates a ‘poetic reality’ that did not originally exist.” Widdowson cites Raymond Williams's view, saying that one would notice what Williams called “art creates, through new perception and response, factors that society cannot equally be conscious of”; “we also find that, in certain peculiar forms and techniques, the manifest proof of society's deadlocks and unresolved problems is, in this way, for the first time acknowledged by consciousness.” What Williams proposes here is not only through content but, more importantly, through fictional shaping (“certain… forms and techniques”); this fictional shaping, through “constituting” a “pattern,” produces new knowledge. This “pattern” is what “consciousness” “for the first time, in this way” perceives. (24) The human and literature, including the fictional world of literature, can of course not break free of their relation to power and ideology; however, in different situations, the human's mode and state of existence are different, and his relation to ideology is also different. Rousseau holds that the human truly returns to himself only in solitude. In the state of solitude, or in a public setting, or in the whirlpool of a crowd's turmoil, the human often has different “selves.” Rabelais and Bakhtin also point out the action of the specific field of the carnival square in subverting daily order and liberating human nature. Anthropological research proves that ritual activity constructs a “liminal phase” and endows the ritual participant with an indeterminate, transitional existence. (25) Literary fiction likewise creates a world distinct from daily reality; here, the human can experience various roles without having to fulfill the various role-norms; here, the relation between the human's sensibility and reason is adjusted, and the human has a new mode of existence; fiction, with its indeterminacy, endows the human with unfinishedness and fluidity, providing infinite possibility for the human's existence. It is precisely this change that makes Balzac, when entering the creative state, in a certain sense suspend his original conservative-party notions, and makes Goethe transform from a Weimar philistine into a literary great. This is to say, even though the human and literature are still within ideology, once they enter the realm of aesthetic fiction, everything can change: the author and reader have a new mode of existence, to some degree pull away from the given ideology, and possess a starting point closer to the human's life itself from which to unfold a critique of ideology, thereby also opening the human's future.
It must be emphasized that the fictional world of literature is constructed in the fictive intentional relation. For example, both a lie and a story contain fiction; but a lie is mainly to make people believe it as real, so it is still within the cognitive intentional relation, while a story is within the fictive intentional relation, that is, the aesthetic relation. In fact, Welsch's “epistemological aestheticization” is a misreading of Kant. Even though cognitive activity cannot avoid fiction, it is mainly within the cognitive intentional relation; it has not abandoned the act of referring to the real object, and is thereby bound to constrain free imagination. Only in the fictive intentional relation that has discarded real reference can a free imagined world, a fictional aesthetic world, be generated. Likewise, the postmodern virtual world that has been re-realized is, on the whole, still within the human's daily-real intention, and is distinct from the fictional world constructed by literature's fictive intentional relation. Although the various intentional relations can mutually transform, and although in postmodern society this transformation becomes more frequent and traceless, the intentional relation in the dominant position determines the nature of the activity and, conversely, also divides the different spheres of activity, even though these spheres simultaneously mutually penetrate and interweave. For example, in Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, on one hand, the many genres are mixed together, letting the reader sometimes follow the historiographer to make historical investigation, sometimes make theoretical reflection aimed at the question, and sometimes fall into the imagined fictional world, so that the reader's reading mentality and the relation between reader and work are in the greatest swaying; on the other hand, the overall novelistic formal characteristic in turn determines that the fictive intentional relation established between reader and work is in the dominant position.
The fictive intention has changed the relation between human and world, and thereby changed the human's mode and state of existence; only this can fully activate the human's creativity, and only then can a literary, fictional aesthetic world be constructed. Every sound human needs a multidimensional mode of existence, especially such a vital, free mode of existence; this also confirms the necessity and possibility of literature's continued existence.