“What is the nature of literature,” or “what is literature”—although not a few people have racked their brains over this question in painful meditation, every time someone proposes a definition in an attempt to delimit literature, someone else at once cites counterexamples that contradict it: “creative” or “imaginative” writing; expressive linguistic organization; defamiliarized writing that systematically departs from everyday speech; and so on. Every such definition is either too arbitrary and narrow or too loose and broad. The definition most current in textbooks is: literature is the art of language. Yet what, then, is art? According to Weitz, art is simply an open concept that cannot be defined. Herbert Mainusch, more radically, opposes any attempt to define art whatsoever, holding that to define art is precisely to run counter to art's creativity and should be strictly forbidden. When the concept of art is so vague and not yet delimited, to say that literature is the art of language is surely an empty phrase. “What is literature”—this seemingly unproblematic question, once examined closely, turns out to be greatly problematic.
1. “Literature” and “Weeds”
Literature is an extremely miscellaneous, blurred-bordered, even border-less great family. In its long process of development it has ceaselessly cross-bred with all manner of genres, to the point of wholly losing its own clear face and becoming the “family-resemblance” thing of which Wittgenstein spoke. Still less does there exist a priori some determinate model of literature, or even, beforehand, a determinate notion of “literature”; one cannot fashion it according to a template or a notion.
In fact, the appearance of the concept “literature” is a rather late matter. In Latin, the word “Litteratura” was imitated by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (30–100 CE) from the Greek “grammatikē”; its root is Littera, Lettre. Its meaning was not “literature” in the modern sense, but “grammar” and “philology.” Besides this, it was used for “writing” (in Cicero), “letters of the alphabet” (in Tacitus), and “learning” and “erudition” (in Tertullian), and the like. Not until the eighteenth century did the modern-sense concept of “literature” gradually form. In Chinese, the modern-sense concept of “literature” appeared even later; strictly speaking, it was basically introduced from the West around the late Qing and early Republic. Ancient China had only the distinction of poetry and prose, the distinction of wen (patterned writing) and bi (plain writing), the distinction of rhymed and unrhymed, but no distinction of the literary and the non-literary—that is to say, no unified concept of “literature” encompassing the various genre-forms had ever formed. The first to perceive the distinctiveness of literature should be the Liang brothers of the Southern Dynasties. Xiao Tong (Zhaoming) took “matter issuing from deep thought, meaning returning to the literary brocade” as literature. Emperor Yuan of Liang's Jinlouzi says: “to chant the wind and the ballad, lingering in mournful thought—this is called wen... As for wen in general: it must have a richly varied display, subtle and resonant, lip and tongue in harmony, the feeling stirred and swaying.” These views are relatively close to what we now call “literature.” Yet ever since the “Bibliographic Treatise” of the History of the Sui, the four-part classification of classics, history, masters, and collections was for a long time an authority, of wide influence and long currency; under this four-part classification, literature was torn limb from limb. One sees that a unified notion of “literature” had still not yet formed. As for the word “literature” (wenxue) itself, it referred either to the literary erudition that was one of Confucius's four subjects, or to the documentary classics, or was an official title, and had nothing of its present-day meaning. Even down to Zhang Binglin, his so-called “literature” still included the writing of all books set down on bamboo and silk. In “A General Outline of Literature” he says: “Literature is that which, by means of writing, is set down on bamboo and silk, and is therefore called wen. To discuss its forms and rules is called wenxue... To name its formal substance is wen; to depict its full beauty is wen [the more ornate graph]... Every ornate wen must form plain wen, but not every formed plain wen is ornate wen. Therefore, in weighing literature, one takes writing as the standard, and not ornate patterning as the standard.”
Here “literature” referred to something very broad indeed. Wang Guowei's delimitation of literature may be said to be the most modern in consciousness. [1] “Literature has two original substances: scene (jing) and feeling (qing). The former mainly describes the realities of nature and of human life; the latter is our spiritual attitude toward such realities. Hence the former is objective, the latter subjective; the former pertains to knowledge, the latter to feeling... In a word, literature is nothing but the result of the alternation of knowledge and feeling. He who has neither keen knowledge nor deep feeling has no part in the affair of literature. This is why it can only be the play-enterprise of genius and cannot be reached by others through other achievements.” This is wholly a new, Western-imported concept of literature. But during the late-Qing and early-Republic period the literary notion was still fairly hazy and chaotic—a period in which the notion of “literature” was gradually forming yet not yet unified. The literary classification table in Xie Wuliang's Great History of Chinese Literature is almost all-encompassing and boundless. Zheng Binyu, in the preface to his History of the Evolution of Chinese Literature (1926), lamented: [2] “Yet in the last thirty years, under the influence of ‘Westernization,’ those who write a ‘History of Chinese Literature’ have become beyond count, and so the ‘Histories of Chinese Literature’ have likewise become beyond count; but their ‘literary histories’ are all-inclusive and omnivorous—whatever anyone before this had written down with words, whether it belongs to ‘philology’ or to ‘philosophical thought,’ to ‘illustrated records’ or ‘genre-talks,’ or to... all of it, in their ‘literary histories,’ they sweepingly gather up, and chaotically and miscellaneously call it ‘Chinese literature.’”
The facts above show that originally people had no notion of “literature.” What is now regarded as literature is, for the most part, canonized and labeled by later people after they had acquired the hazy concept of “literature,” and in this there is still much that is arbitrary. Modern writers, for their part, seem deliberately to break the bounds of “literature” with their own innovations, making the originally hazy notion of “literature” all the more chaotic. Therefore the theorist indeed finds it hard to explain, in determinate language, the question “what is literature.” As John M. Ellis declared: the function of the term “literature” is no different from that of “weeds.”
2. Art · Purposiveness without Purpose · Disclosure
In discussing the predicament aestheticians meet in trying to define art, Blocker quotes a passage from William Kennick: [3] “You may imagine that in a huge warehouse are stored all kinds of things—all kinds of paintings, all kinds of musical scores (symphonic, dance, and church-choir), all kinds of machines, tools, ships, houses, churches, temples, sculptures, ceramic vessels, poetry collections, prose, furniture, clothing, newspapers, stamps, flowers, trees, stones, musical instruments, and so on. Now, if we instruct someone to go into this great warehouse and pick out the artworks within it, he will surely do so effortlessly—although the aesthetician knows that this person has never found a property suited to all artworks, nor found a satisfactory definition, because it is fundamentally impossible to find such a definition.”
As Blocker points out, when Kennick advanced this view it was still persuasive; but today, when the boundary between art and non-art is increasingly blurred, asking an ordinary person to pick the artworks out of a heap of miscellany is no longer an “effortless” matter. Only, Blocker likewise neglects one fact: however blurred the boundary between modern art and non-art may be, so long as there is still someone who declares his own work to be an artwork, or who points out that some thing is an artwork; or even though it costs someone great effort and is hard to decide, yet he still strives to pick the “artworks” out of a heap of miscellany; or a certain writer, with an ingenuity all his own, challenges every existing artistic convention and rule, trying to rebel against artistic conventions and rules—all these can only show that in their hearts there still exists the notion “what is art.” This notion may be extremely hazy, not yet formed into a determinate concept; each person's concrete scale for art may differ and be mutually at odds; but none of this should become a ground for denying the boundary of art and non-art. On the contrary, it should rather become the very reason that prompts us to clarify what, after all, art is.
In fact, the answer to this question was nearly found long ago by Kant. Kant's “purposiveness without purpose” reveals, from one angle, where art's nature lies. The problem is that Kant one-sidedly absolutized this view and, on its basis, deduced “pure beauty,” thereby inviting the misunderstanding and dispute of later generations. The later formalists, for their part, pushed further along this direction, even excluding the “dependent beauty” that Kant had proposed in order to bridge the gap between theory and reality.
If, instead of Kant's abstruse, obscure language, we use a direct and apt way, it can be rather more easily accepted: art is for people's appreciation. In fact almost everyone says so. Of course, you may appreciate art with the aim of increasing knowledge, with the aim of receiving education, out of some religious or political aim, or even harboring some base desire... But art's being art lies precisely in this: beyond all manner of finite aims there still exists a certain “thing,” and it is precisely because this “thing” attracts you that you, even without holding any concrete aim, take pleasure in appreciating. Once this “thing” is removed, it no longer becomes art and can only be a tool, a sermon-book, a political treatise, or an erotic picture and the like. At this point we may make a revised answer: art is, beyond all its finite aims, still a creation for people's appreciation. Or: art does not exclude finite aims, but must, beyond them, contain a thing that is “purposiveness without purpose,” and take this as its core. Art's nature lies precisely in “purposiveness without purpose,” that is, in the property of “being appreciated”; and its fair name is “aesthetic nature.”
Then, taking “purposiveness without purpose” as the scale, can one easily and lightly draw the boundary between art and non-art? It is not so. This is first because this scale for measuring the distinction—“purposiveness without purpose”—does not depend on the object alone, but on the relation between the human (not the individual) and the object. Therefore, when the relation between human and object changes, the nature of the object inevitably mutates. The ding (ritual cauldron), for instance, was in the eyes of the people of its time purely a practical household utensil, used the day long to boil soup and cook food, but in the eyes of people today it has become an artwork; many antiques seem all to have had this dramatic experience. Because survival-need is the human's most basic need, for the human “purposiveness without purpose” is, after all, not so important, urgent, and conspicuous as “purposiveness.” In daily life, the originally diverse and rich relations between human and object are always submerged within the relation of utilitarian aim; the utilitarian relation always covers over the “purposeless” aesthetic relation. Not until those “utensils” have been buried underground, in the grave-mounds, for thousands of years and are re-excavated, when they can no longer be used to boil things and have become “waste”—that is, when their practicality has shed off and the utilitarian relation has been lost—is the “purposeless” aesthetic relation then manifested and become the dominant relation. A ding is then no longer an ordinary “pot,” but an “artwork” only for people to look at and appreciate. Therefore, put directly, the so-called “aesthetic” is precisely that, when the object becomes “useless,” we still like to appreciate it.
“Uselessness” lets the object shed the status of tool and become an autonomous, self-purposed thing; and it also lets the object shed the status of “object” and become an independent subject in dialogue with the appreciator. Thereupon, the long-mute object, for the first time and in the identity of a subject, narrates to the appreciator the things it has never said, lays bare the rich connotation it has never displayed, and invites the appreciator to roam and linger in the secret treasure now laid open. This is a new dimension of existence. Here the appreciator, too, for the first time feels and experiences in a new way, lives in a new way; the subject thereupon is also reduced to a free, autonomous subject. Here the appreciator not only discovers the object's rich content, but at the same time discovers his own infinite richness, and is surprised at this unexpected encounter, this unexpected discovery; for only here can his own sensibility attain its fullest unfolding, and sensibility and reason stand in an unprecedented harmony and fusion. The discarding of “usefulness,” the suspension of “purpose,” precisely opens for the human the road toward the human's most own purpose of existence. This is just as Moritz says: a thing is beautiful only when it is useless.
Thus we again need to delimit “appreciation” and “the aesthetic” further: “appreciation” or “the aesthetic” is “disclosure” and “laying open”; it lets the subject freely experience, and see from object and from himself, far more rich things or import than in the everyday. More precisely, it is the human's seeing out of the object the most basic and most own implication. Just like a peasant woman's shoes: when worn daily on the foot, they are so trivial that no one would give them a special glance; but once van Gogh has painted them into his picture, no longer wearable but “viewed,” Heidegger sees from this pair of shoes such an abundant content, evoking endless association. [4]
Likewise, when the holy image within the church, the bodhisattva within the Buddhist hall, are still wrapped in numinous light, the human cannot truly “appreciate” them. Appreciation is an offense; it puts the aesthetic relation in place of the religious relation, and in fact you already harbor a second thought, are no longer a pious believer. Even for “religious art,” the period that truly attains great achievement is often not the period when religious power, authority, and consciousness are at their peak; on the contrary, it is when religion has already met challenge and is on the verge of dissolution, and the development of the human's individual spirit is already sufficient to furnish him with the power of doubt and questioning, enabling him, under the heavy pressure of the religious spirit, to open up for himself a free spiritual field and to begin to appreciate the “holy” image with the human's own eye, and not merely receive the numen's radiance with the sacred soul. As for the flourishing of secular art, all the more so. Burckhardt, discussing the Renaissance, says: [5] “The Italians are the first modern people in Europe boldly to make conjectures about freedom and necessity. These modern people, the representatives of Italian culture, were born with the same religious instinct as other medieval Europeans. But their strong individuality made them entirely subjective in religion, as in all other matters; and the discovery of the inner world and the outer world that occurred in them—that vast magic—made them especially incline toward secularization.” In The Magic Synthesis, Arieti says: [6] “The Italian Renaissance arose from the rediscovery of ancient Greco-Roman culture mutually combining with medieval Christian culture under a relatively free and prosperous environment. Earlier, the ‘Age of Faith’ had covered over the ancient classical world, because the classical world was pagan and was held to run counter to the goal of saving the soul, and so was wholly excluded from the scope of study and thought. By the thirteenth century, Christianity by no means meant being abolished; rather, a differentiation occurred within Christian medieval culture. It retained an important, but not all-inclusive, status, and permitted the ancient Greco-Roman world to be looked at anew.”
The essential divergence between art and religion further shows that “appreciation” or “the aesthetic” must also be a relation in which subject and object stand in an equal, free relation. Only when the human excludes the everyday utilitarian attitude of using and employing, or the worshipful, superstitious religious attitude, and establishes an equal, free relation with the object, can the object become an autonomous yet own existence, and can the human see out of the object the rich implication that is authentic and yet most his own.
The “aesthetic” is too delicate and weak; everywhere it is suppressed and harmed by the human's purposive activity. And yet the “aesthetic” is also so tenacious: it always parasitizes within the human's various activities and squeezes its own bud out from the gaps of purposive practical activity.
Many modern artworks seem on the surface to be “anti-art.” In Mikhelis's words, modern art after 1920 has become like the riddle the Pythia priestess pronounces. Even so, in essence they do not deviate from art's nature. When a modern artist, challengingly, directly uses everyday objects—tires, bottles, clothes-hangers, brooms, and the like—as art material, he is indeed extremely far from traditional art. But by a particular way of “piling up,” he again cancels the usefulness of these practical objects, so that this “pile” becomes an appreciation-object that can only be “looked at,” becomes a modern “artwork,” and thereby discloses the feature never before noticed. In emphasizing this point of aesthetic nature, modern art not only is no different from traditional art, but goes too far rather than not far enough.
Duchamp created his work “Fountain” in just this way. He inscribed words upon a urinal and had it brought into the exhibition hall. In the midst of the public gaze, the urinal's original “usefulness” is naturally bracketed and “suspended,” while the exhibition hall again hints to people to look at it with an appreciating eye. Thereupon, the form, the lines, the luster, and the rich import it contains—usually unnoticed by anyone—suddenly, with a strange appearance, conspicuously appear before people's eyes. Duchamp seems to play a joke on people; he cleverly uses the human's force of habit to capture another force of habit. A urinal is what people habitually put to use; the exhibition hall is where artworks are habitually displayed. When the audience, by habit, steps into the hall, and, by habit, intends to appraise the displayed works, but unexpectedly runs into such a thing, this creates a collision of two habits. The urinal is defeated within the whole atmosphere; it turns from “being used” to “being looked at,” transforms into “Fountain,” an artwork that makes people's eyes covet it. One sees, then, that the fact is not, as Blocker said, that modern art seems to have lost the boundary of art and non-art; the dividing boundary still exists—only that the center of emphasis it stresses has moved from the work to the author's subjective intention or the viewer's subjective intention.
3. Literature · The Aesthetic · Dialogue
Having clarified “what is art” and “what is art's nature,” when we again say “literature is the art of language,” this now has its determinate meaning. As for literature's nature, we can likewise say that it lies in the aesthetic. The others—cognition, education, religion, morality, politics, and so on—although not incompatible with literature, can only revolve around this core, the aesthetic, and merge into the aesthetic. Lu Xun, discussing the difference between literature and propaganda, says: [7] “I think all literature and art is indeed propaganda, but all propaganda is not all literature and art—just as all flowers have color (I count white too as a color), yet not all colored things are necessarily flowers.” This in fact stresses the aesthetic distinctiveness of literature and art; and early on, in “On the Power of Mara Poetry,” Lu Xun proposed the feature of literature's “use of the useless.” The so-called “use of the useless” is in fact Kant's “purposiveness without purpose.” That is to say, literature is not created for the sake of “usefulness”; or, “usefulness” is not literature's aim, but only its unexpected by-product. Even though Lu Xun later stressed literature's combative nature, he still did not neglect literature's distinctive nature that sets it apart from a weapon.
Yet when we add the qualifier “language” before “art” and so name literature, a problem arises along with it. “‘Language,’ this thing, is sometimes precisely the obstacle and weak point of that art which is literature; it constantly makes literature take a wrong road and distorts its overall image as art.” [8] Language's feature of having meaning makes it so often used by people to denote objects, exchange information, issue commands, deliver speeches, pray to heaven, record history, reason logically, preach and instruct, and even insinuate and slander... in short, it is more frequently used as a tool, in places that have nothing to do with art. All such uses, again employing the same material that literature employs, quietly or forcibly squeeze into the hall of literature. Thereupon, from Byron's poetry we hear religious prayer-sounds: “Bright Father! Great Heavenly Sovereign! / Have you ever heard the sound of despair? / Can the sins of humankind be forgiven? / Can evil thought refuse prayer to redeem its guilt?” (“Nature's Prayer”); from Defoe's Robinson Crusoe we read history, geography, botany, anthropology, and the knowledge of various sciences; and Tolstoy's novels unfold for us a broad picture of Russian social history, while at the same time transmitting the persistent murmur of “not resisting evil with violence” and of “the religion of love”... All manner of content makes literature exceedingly miscellaneous and bloated.
Poetry is born and yet is not “pure poetry”; literature is born and yet is not “pure aesthetic.” Language as a medium always tends to smuggle “private goods” into poetry, into literature. But so long as the various factors literature contains that are heterogeneous to the aesthetic do not thereby destroy the organic wholeness of the work or suffocate its vitality, they will often be melted by the aesthetic force of the work and so dissolve their own alienness and heterogeneity from the work's aesthetic nature. In Skeptical Aesthetics, Mainusch says: [9] “If art wishes to become beautiful art, beauty ought to be non-functional.” With Mainusch's words we can agree only halfway. Beauty is indeed non-functional, but literature and art by no means absolutely exclude or discard functionality; seen from the historical process of literature and art's budding and development, they have never washed functionality clean off themselves—in fact they often parasitize upon primitive worship, religious activity, and moral instruction. But the reason literature and art keep their own character and vitality within these activities lies precisely in their overcoming and conquering functionality with their own aesthetic distinctiveness, making the various purposive contents dissolve in the radiance of the aesthetic. The various functions are no longer factors suppressing the aesthetic nature of literature and art, nor factors external to aesthetic nature, but become as salt in water. When people freely appreciate literature and art and are intoxicated in the aesthetic realm, the various functions are unknowingly realized. Conversely, once the aesthetic submits to an external function, the so-called “literature and art” has in fact already lost its vitality, become distorted and alienated, and fallen into a tool, a means, a lackey. Therefore Croce says: [10] “Whether the concepts, types, numbers, measures, morality, utility, pleasure, and pain that are prior to art or posterior to art, all exist within art as art; so they exist within art as a presupposition (in De Sanctis's favorite phrase, as immersion and oblivion) or as a presentiment. Without that presupposition, without that presentiment, art would not become art; only, if one forcibly imposes those values upon art as art (art now is, and forever can only be, pure intuition), then art would likewise not become art (and all other forms of the mind would also be disturbed by art).”
Although literature and art often flourish by means of external power, at the very moment they enter the shade of temple, hall, or royal aristocracy they also more or less alienate themselves, losing their original simplicity, rough vigor, and fresh breath; upon them is additionally laid the yoke of “no harm” and “no lewdness,” and they are pressed with the unbearable heavy burden of “moral instruction and the rectifying of human relations,” so that they change color and change flavor. Precisely because of this, even the theologian F. Schleiermacher actually puts art of a religious tendency on a par with erotic art, holding that the two are no different in their enslaving and harming of art: “The one demands that art arouse a religious or ethical feeling; the other demands that it arouse desire.” These “are originally not what art ought to do,” and these two so-called arts are in fact already no longer art at all. Schleiermacher's words are indeed sharp and extreme, but for those “arts” that obsequiously flatter the holy lord or the human lord, or that slavishly serve money, eroticism, and other external aims, they hit the mark with a single arrow.
The problem, moreover, lies not merely in language's “multi-parasitism” making literature no longer “pure in texture” like the other arts; what is important is: language, as an abstract concept, how does it transform into a sensuous image? As a tool that is unfree and bound by structure, how does it transform into a free existence? Language's true mode of existence is “dialogue.” The so-called “monologue” is in fact also dialogue with the self. Just as without language there is no dialogue, so without dialogue there is no language. A “language” without dialogue can only be a sound; the instant the individual emits it, it drifts away, leaving no trace whatever. It is dialogue that gives shape and meaning to the sound, transforms the individual's sound into the human's meaningful language, makes it circulate through human society and condense, and so creates the existence of human society.
In The Phase of Beauty and Art, Imamichi Tomonobu makes an interesting comparison of the human's language and the cries of animals. [11] He says: in the sounds called back and forth across a valley at a certain distance, the ability to identify, among gorillas, is far stronger than between humans—the distance ratio is almost 5:1. Yet when one gorilla faces another gorilla face to face, it instead falls into a deep silence, by no means having, as humans do, many words to converse face to face. The lion is almost silent toward all animals. The cries of animals are only identifying signs, not language; only the human possesses a language that exists in the mode of dialogue. The human's “face-to-face speech-phenomenon is different from the cat's mew and the bird's song; it is true conversation.” Imamichi's example, too, reveals from another angle the feature whereby language essentially exists in the mode of dialogue.
While language creates human society, human society also creates language, endowing language with a specific structure. The human's whole linguistic activity is covered over under linguistic structure. Linguistic structure [12] “is almost like the sky, the earth, and the line where sky and earth meet, which constitute for the human a familiar ecological environment.” Thereupon, language cannot but follow certain norms, habits, rules, and is suppressed by structure. Once it departs from norms, habits, rules, language loses the ability of dialogue and exchange, becomes monologue and stammer, and is quickly submerged and dissolved in the noisy clamor. Seen from this side, language, as something existing in the mode of dialogue, is born unfree. Especially the deep structure of language of which Chomsky spoke—it almost fundamentally strips away the possibility of language's free creation. Like a frightful quagmire, any effort that seeks freedom is only a desperate struggle; any strange, original utterance still cannot escape the control of the deep structure. The deep structure has condensed and taken shape through the historical sedimentation of dialogue; it imprisons the soul of the human who is language's creator, and strangles the human's desire and ability to seek to break free of the control of the deep structure. Language, at its root, is not a free existence.
On the other hand, language, as dialogue, opens up for itself, in the other direction, a winding road toward freedom. Dialogue makes language set out from finite, determinate points and extend freely toward an infinite, indeterminate existence, and makes it possible for both parties to the dialogue to break free of language's linear feature and jointly weave a three-dimensional, vividly colorful space of existence. As Oscar Wilde says: [13] “Dialogue is a marvelous literary form”; “through dialogue people can display an object from different angles, making it possible for us to glimpse the whole leopard, just as the sculptor does. By doing so, one can also continually reveal new aspects and qualities of this object, which all manifest themselves, or arise, in all manner of contingent occasions.” And Bakhtin says: [14] “Audibility is already a dialogic relation. A word wishes to become audible, understandable, answered—and in turn becomes the answer to the question put to it, endlessly. The word participates in dialogue, and dialogue, in respect of meaning, is forever without end.”
Literature is a unique mode of dialogue; it develops dialogue further and brings into prominence the creative feature of dialogue. Literature is forever non-self-sufficient; it is, as phenomenological aesthetics says, an “appeal structure.” It ardently summons, and with an enormous emotional force rolls the reader into the dialogue, into the co-creation. It is like a dance for two; at every moment it takes the reader as its dance-partner, together creating the magically flowing spatial image, creating a tension-field full of passion. If everyday dialogue is in fact still two monologues alternating—always appearing in the mode of “speaker–listener” or “active–passive,” and not fundamentally breaking language's linear feature or escaping the violent suppression of linguistic structure—then literature, at every instant, simultaneously has the interweaving and collision of the work's speech and the reader's speech; it is always a “dance for two,” a “polyphonic chorus.” At this time the reader is no longer merely a “reader” or a “listener,” but is another “speaker,” another speaking subject; he by no means silently and soundlessly listens, but, full of passion, speaks forth in his own speech. Without the reader's speaking, the work becomes mute, becomes a corpse, a heap of aimless text. It is precisely in literary dialogue that the relation of reader and work transforms into “speaker–speaker,” that is, into the equal relation of “active–active.”
Gadamer holds: [15] “To understand a text is to understand it within a dialogue.” “People apply their own language to speak and to find an answer, because one must in this way put oneself into the thing said to another.” “Only when what the text says finds expression within the interpreter's own language does the concrete thing in the text come to be understood.” The emotional and imaginative force that bursts forth from the reader's collision with the work not only breaks free of unfree bondage, but breaks through the shell of the linguistic concept, and creates, within illusion, a sensuous heaven and earth. One may say that it is precisely the reader's participation that makes every word and phrase of the literary work, and the infinite potential of the work as a whole, attain full play, and makes language become an existence impossible to anticipate and estimate, an opened Pandora's box. One may even say that literary reading is no longer a dialogue and exchange about meaning, but a dialogue of mind with mind, a collision of mind with mind; and in this collision language flares into a fireball that penetrates the barrier between consciousness and the unconscious, illumines the mind, blazes up, and throws the whole person into the flames.
Literature is always an equal invitation; it by no means forces, still less coerces, and it always invites you to bring your own voice and, in the identity of a subject, to join in this equal dialogue and co-creation. If, in the dialogue with literature, the reader is only a reader, a listener, forever in a passive or even forced-acceptance position, then the reader will, dispirited, break off this dialogue at any moment, and literature will no longer be literature. For literature, as the art of language, can likewise have no external aim; the reader has no obligation to force himself to perform a tedious reading, and still less obligation to accept an extra spiritual enslavement. That reading which is mainly for learning language, expanding knowledge, or some external aim is in fact no longer “literary” reading, no longer appreciation; and the work so read is no longer literature but a textbook or something else.
Wen Yiduo says: poetry is a dance performed in fetters. The “fetters” here refer to poetic form. In fact, language itself is the fetters. From this sense, literature too is a dance performed in fetters. In the dance of literature, the fetters of language are no longer external to literature; on the contrary, they become literature's very existence, and in the midst of the frenzied dance and song they have transformed into a vivid melody, been bound into a vivid rhythm, and with their own rhythm and sound-resonance, with their own meaning and feeling, create an incomparably novel, incomparably rich aesthetic world. Of course, to reveal the aesthetic distinctiveness of literature merely from the angle of “dialogue” is far from enough. To probe this question deeply, we must still make a further trek—even enter the illusory realm, or trace back to the primal society of origins.