Ancient Chinese Literary Theory in the Horizon of Speech-Act Theory

I

Since the theoretical goal of a "modernizing transformation of ancient Chinese literary theory" was proposed, our country's literary-theory circles have achieved no small number of research results, and have thereby also provoked no small amount of criticism and dispute. One important problem among these is that some scholars mistakenly suppose that the modernization of literary theory is its scientization and systematization, intending, in the process of sorting out ancient literary theory, to reconstruct Chinese literary theory into a complete theoretical system in imitation of the category-systems of Western theory. A so-called "system" is not the arbitrary combination of various categories but requires specific logical relations among the categories, by which an organic whole is composed. From this angle, these works have not realized that goal and do not yet constitute a "system" in the strict sense. In fact, the "non-logical" and "non-systematic" are precisely where the characteristic and the strength of ancient Chinese literary theory lie; once one really logicizes and systematizes ancient literary theory, one also strangles it, making it degenerate into "another" kind of thing that merely has logic and system but no life. Even The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons is not a "system" in the strict sense. It is precisely for this reason that some scholars hold that, with respect to ancient literary theory, we should study and sort it out and not entertain inordinate designs. Put bluntly, this is merely to invite ancient literary theory into a museum, as an exhibit on display, an antique for amusement.

Perhaps moved by this, Yang Yi proposed the project of establishing a Chinese "culture-life poetics" as a winding path toward the modernization of Chinese literary theory. He says: "In global cross-cultural dialogue, Chinese literary theory needs to grasp its own identity-marker, and it is necessary to use the advantage of one's own wisdom to establish a 'philosophy of perceptual insight (ganwu)' with an Eastern radiance. Further, with the philosophy of perceptual insight, to crack the core secret of the Chinese mode of thinking, to fuse the basic features of Chinese culture, and—while Western theory moves toward formal science—to impel Chinese theory toward life science, creating a 'culture-life poetics' that contains the rich wisdom of China." (1) The talk of "perceptual insight" does indeed grasp the distinctive character of ancient Chinese literary theory; advancing into modernization by way of Chinese-Western mutual interpretation could make it possible both to have a modern appearance and to retain the essence of Chinese literary theory—not a bad strategy. But the problem is that "perceptual insight" and "theory" often diverge; once one theorizes indiscriminately, "perceptual insight" usually slips away. Therefore Yang Yi, though he deeply expounds perceptual insight itself through Chinese-Western mutual interpretation, has not yet given a concrete path by which to arrive at a modern poetics from perceptual insight.

A culture-life poetics can hardly move toward theory, toward a "poetics," by perceptual insight alone; we should seek a theoretical bridge suited to ancient Chinese literary theory. Here, the first to be mentioned should be Austin's speech-act theory. Unlike the linguistic semiotics and semantics widely used in Western literary theory, the object Austin's speech-act theory studies is the concrete operation of language—that is, the speech-act. If we regard literature as a distinctive activity, then speech-act theory is a quite effective theoretical tool; it can penetrate the inner mechanism of the operation of literary discourse and reveal the mechanism and laws of literary activity.

The main view of Austin's speech-act theory is this: to speak is to act, and moreover it is an act-system constituted by a series of acts, including three different levels: the locutionary act (the phonetic act, the phatic act, and the rhetic act), the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary act. The various illocutionary acts produce an illocutionary force, by which they influence the participants and their behavior. The felicitous performance of a speech-act requires the joint operation of the participants' sincerity, a specific context, and social convention. Therefore Austin combines language, the human, and the socio-cultural context to examine how speech concretely operates. The process of literary activity is in fact the concrete operation-process of the discourse-act, the process in which the discourse-act system unfolds as a whole, runs in multiple dimensions, and acts in concert. Western scholars are usually accustomed to viewing literature with a "research" gaze: either borrowing the theoretical resources of linguistic semiotics and semantics to interpret the structure and meaning of literary works, or using psychoanalysis to figure out the author's creative psychology and the psychological import latent in the work's imagery and metaphors, or using sociology to analyze the social reality the work reflects, or focusing on discourse-power and ideology analysis… All such approaches are directed only at discourse-representation as a locutionary act; the remaining illocutionary and perlocutionary acts are omitted and neglected, excluded as the "surplus" of interpretation. Therefore, from the angle of the speech-act, the meaning-interpretation made with a "research" gaze can hardly grasp the work as a whole; it often simplifies and distorts the work's meaning. Our ancient literati, however, were different: they gave weight to recitation, appreciation, and comprehending-insight. It is precisely in this process that the literary discourse-act system unfolds as a whole, and they immerse themselves in the interweaving of multiple discourse-acts, attentively experiencing the mystery within and gaining insight of the mind from it; and it is precisely in the process of the discourse-act system unfolding that they, as participants, are drawn into a shared creation, experiencing the burgeoning of life and force—and thereby endowing literature with life.

Speech-act theory reveals the single most important dimension of literary activity, namely, the act of discourse constructing a literary fictional world. The aesthetic, the literary, and the poetic in literature are all built on this foundation. This constructive act requires the reader's whole-body-and-mind involvement and the concerted unfolding of imagination, because language itself cannot construct a world alone: it is full of what Ingarden calls "spots of indeterminacy" and what Iser calls "blanks," requiring the reader's cooperation and the filling of imagination. And the "research" at which Western theory excels precisely requires the researcher to keep a necessary distance from the discourse, to take the discourse as the "object" of research, and to view and analyze the discourse with an objective, cool gaze—and so the illocutionary act is cancelled. It suffocates the world-constructing capacity of literary discourse, leaving only the locutionary act—discourse-representation—so that literature becomes a dead combination of words, an empty textual shell, while the literary fictional world withers and vanishes, and the distinctiveness of literature itself is wholly lost. Even the "close reading" of which the New Criticism speaks still excludes the author and the reader, carefully guarding against the "intentional fallacy" and the "affective fallacy." This so-called reading is in essence likewise a treating of literature and its discourse as an objective "object," severing it from the "human," and studying it as static "language" and "text." Therefore, to face a literary work with a "research" attitude is like Huizi in the "Autumn Floods" chapter of the Zhuangzi: with his stance of standing outside the situation and his method of logical inference, he is fundamentally unable to understand Zhuangzi's exclamation that "the fish swim out at ease—this is the joy of the fish." Conversely, when the reader regards the literary work as a bosom friend, as a beloved, literary discourse, by its illocutionary force, draws the reader into participating, to jointly create a splendid imagined world, and invites the reader to throw himself into it and immerse himself in it; and so the work becomes a world one can roam and dwell in. In this fictional world, all things are endowed with spirit and turn into an approachable "you": the stream accompanies me, the fish and birds smile to greet me, and the green mountains thereby appear all the more charming. For this, only perceptual insight—not theoretical analysis—can appreciate and savor the mystery within. The literary discourse-act system must be personally participated in and jointly cooperated with by the reader in reading before it can fully unfold and go on to construct a vibrant fictional world; and the literary fictional world, too, can yield its true essence only when the reader genuinely throws himself into it, immersing, savoring, and perceiving—just as Tang Junyi says: "The value of good poetry and prose lies precisely in compelling one to stop from time to time and savor and chant it, so that everywhere it lets one store oneself, cultivate oneself, rest, and roam, and the spirit gains a place of settlement and return." (2) Therefore, to remold ancient Chinese literary theory indiscriminately with Western theory may have the opposite effect, betraying precisely the characteristics of literary activity and its discourse-act, losing the inner spirit and original strengths of ancient literary theory, so that it can no longer effectively intervene in the activity of literary interpretation.

Our country's ancient literati and earlier scholars greatly valued the study of literary texts and words; they exhausted their thought and did their utmost to carry out edition-collation, textual glossing, phonological analysis, and the tracing of origins and developments, achieving very considerable results. Yet they did not do much intellectual analysis and inference of the work's meaning, often appreciating and appraising it in indirect, roundabout ways by drawing analogies and connecting categories. Some modes of commentary are more like excellent reading-guides: they stress the reading of the work itself and hint at, evoke, inspire, and lead the reader on how to personally enter the realm of the work, to explore the work's mystery and appreciate its essential meaning. In fact they most deeply experienced the complexity of literary language. Literary texts and words, as fixations of language, have been determined by writing and become a kind of objective existence; therefore they can be collated, glossed, analyzed, and verified. But with respect to the literary work it is wholly different. The work is jointly constructed by the reader and the discourse in mutual cooperation, in the process of the discourse-act system unfolding; it is ever-changing in myriad forms, fluid and ethereal, ceaselessly generated and suddenly vanishing, hard to grasp and unsayable: "its wonderful place is crystalline and exquisite, impossible to pin down, like a sound in the air, a color within a countenance, the moon in water, an image in a mirror; the words have an end but the meaning is inexhaustible." (3) The complexity, multi-layeredness, and changeability of the literary discourse-act determine the distinctiveness of the mode of meaning-interpretation: it cannot be subjected to forced dissection, definition, and explanation in a cognitive manner, but can only be personally participated in—chanting and reciting repeatedly, following the unfolding of the discourse-act, with concentrated attention undergoing the literary event, experiencing, appreciating, and savoring that endlessly resonant realm.

II

In classical Chinese aesthetics and literary theory, "flavor" (wei) is an extremely important category. Confucius, in the "Shu Er" chapter of the Analects, says: "When the Master was in Qi and heard the Shao music, for three months he did not know the taste of meat." Here, although "knowing the taste of meat" is set alongside "hearing the Shao," associating "flavor" with artistic appreciation, it does not yet directly use "flavor" to appraise "music"; the taste of meat is far inferior to hearing the Shao. Lu Ji and Liu Xie directly applied "flavor" to the appraisal of poetry, endowing "flavor" with a distinctive aesthetic quality. Lu Ji's "Rhapsody on Literature" (Wen Fu) says: "Some are pure and tenuous, graceful and restrained, ever removing the cluttered and discarding the excessive; lacking the lingering flavor of the Great Broth, they are like the limpid overflow of the vermilion string." Liu Xie's The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons also often appraises poetry with "flavor"—as in "Elucidating Poetry": "Zhang Heng's 'Lament' is pure and classic, worth savoring"; in "Style and Nature": "Ziyun (Yang Xiong) was deep and quiet, so his intent is hidden and his flavor deep"; in "Feeling and Coloring": "Lush coloring with scant feeling—savor it, and one is sure to tire"; in "The Latent and the Out-standing": "A deep text with hidden luxuriance, its lingering flavor wraps round indirectly." Among these, "lingering flavor," "remaining flavor," "deep flavor," and "worth savoring" are both an aesthetic feature of the art-object and an aesthetic mode of comprehending appreciation. Zhong Rong's Gradations of Poetry (Shi Pin) further constructed the "theory of savor (ziwei)," using it to appraise poetry. He greatly esteemed the five-character form and said: "The five-character form occupies the essential place among literary diction; it is the one among all compositions that has savor, and so it is said to meet the common current. Is it not because, in pointing to events and shaping forms, in exhausting feeling and depicting things, it is the most detailed and apt?" "Savor" was the core of Zhong Rong's appraisal of poetry. In his view, in writing poetry—pointing to events and shaping forms, exhausting feeling and depicting things—one should include the three meanings of xing (evocation), bi (comparison), and fu (exposition), using them with measure, bracing them with wind-force, and moistening them with cinnabar coloring; only then can the one who savors it find it inexhaustible and the one who hears it be moved, attaining poetry's highest realm.

For Western aesthetics, aesthetic pleasure is mainly a spiritual pleasure, and the aesthetic senses mainly refer to human sight and hearing. Sight and hearing not only grasp the sensuous image of the object but maintain a distance from the body, which makes it not easy for them to become entangled with human desire so as to affect aesthetic pleasure; whereas taste, smell, and touch are different—they are the direct sensation of the body, often lingering in sensory gratification, and are therefore disparaged by Western aesthetics. The aesthetician Edward Bullough once said disdainfully that the attempt to elevate the "art of cooking" to the status of fine art, like the attempt to compose fragrant and alcoholic "symphonies," can only end in bankruptcy. He held that the distinction between the aesthetic senses and the other senses is in part psycho-physiological, and that "the actual spatial distance that separates the object of sight and hearing from the subject undoubtedly plays a major role here." (4) By contrast, Chinese aesthetics and literary theory value "flavor." This distinctiveness is inseparable from cultural tradition. The Shuowen Jiezi glosses "beauty" (mei) as "sweet (gan); it is composed of 'sheep' and 'big,' the sheep being, among the six domestic animals, what mainly supplies food." Since "beauty" is related to "sheep" and is glossed as "sweet," it is naturally perceived through "flavor"; therefore "flavor," "beauty," and aesthetic feeling are closely related. The Zuo Zhuan likewise sets "flavor" alongside "sound" and "color." By Zhong Rong's "theory of savor," the position of "flavor" in aesthetic appreciation was established. This is no longer a metaphorical or synesthetic formulation but a distinctive aesthetic mode. As Li Zehou and Liu Gangji say: "The records of our ancient documents show that what was originally called 'beauty,' when not confused with 'goodness,' referred specifically to taste, sound, and color. This is of important significance for understanding the development of our ancient aesthetic thought. From the historical development of human aesthetic consciousness, the earliest feeling of beauty—different from the practical-utilitarian and from the morally good—was inseparable from the sensory pleasure aroused by taste, sound, and color." (5)

In fact, "flavor" is a kind of "bodily sensation"; it must eliminate the distance from the aesthetic object and realize distanceless contact. Although "lingering flavor," "remaining flavor," and "deep flavor" have transcended "flavor"—transcended direct bodily sensation to become something of the mind and the spirit—they are after all grounded in "flavor." The late-Tang poet Sikong Tu not only took "discernment of flavor" as the premise of "speaking of poetry" but also upheld "the import beyond flavor," whereby the connotation of mind and spirit was further strengthened. But stressing the directness of aesthetic appreciation, stressing distanceless contact, remains a characteristic of Chinese aesthetics and literary theory. Literature and art must be not only audible and viewable but roamable and dwellable, able to be savored. To truly understand and appreciate a work, one must personally immerse oneself within it; one must "chew its flowering essence and sate oneself on its rich grease." All this shows that aesthetic appreciation is an activity characterized by the joining of thing and self and the dissolution of distance. If Western aesthetics and literary theory more often analyze and interpret the aesthetic object as an "object" from the angle of the "subject," then Chinese aesthetics and literary theory value "viewing things as things" and go on to reach the realm of "no thing, no self." "Only when the subject vacates its position can the simple, natural workings vividly arise. 'Heaven and earth are born together with me, and the myriad things are one with me.' The human should realize that he is only one body among myriad workings; he has no reason to classify and define the myriad things with his subjective views and feelings. Each of the myriad things has its own nature, gets its own place, and unfolds its own capacity according to its nature; and we must still return things to their naturalness." (6) Since there is no thing and no self, there is no distinction of "subject" and "object," no longer the barrier and opposition between "subject" and "object," and no further analysis or interpretation is possible. This distanceless appreciation can be reached only through the path of perceptual insight; it brings not only the spiritual pleasure that inspires thought but also directly gives the human a bodily sensation, a diffuse, hazy bodily pleasure.

Chinese aesthetics and literary theory both value the directness and bodily sensation of aesthetic appreciation and do not stop at bodily sensation, but, taking this as a starting point, regard aesthetic appreciation as a ceaselessly generating, subliming activity-process. It proceeds from "flavor" (wei) to "resonance" (yun), then to "vital force" (qi), "idea" (yi), and "spirit" (shen), and finally to the perceptual insight of the "Dao." From the most basic level of bodily sensation, to spiritual pleasure, to the comprehending-insight of the metaphysical Dao, Chinese aesthetics and literary theory noticed the "broad-spectrum-ness" and "holographic-ness" of aesthetic appreciation. Speaking of the art of Chinese calligraphy, Gao Jianping points out: "Brush-force—or, in a more general formulation, the trace of human action—can become an aesthetic factor… In calligraphy, there is full expression from individual spirit to bodily action, or, in the terms of Chinese art theory, an expression from qi to shi (force) to brush to ink." (7) That is to say, calligraphy as an art not only offers its final product for appreciation, but even its very process of creation is performative, already a constituent of the whole art of calligraphy; and the bodily sensation it produces has already been fused into the work, so that even if the appreciator does not directly face the process of creation but merely views the finished calligraphic work, he can still feel that dynamic life-vitality, that overwhelming force.

In fact, this bodily sensation is not limited to calligraphy; one may say that all literary-artistic appreciation has this feature, and the distinctive interpretive mode of our classical aesthetics and literary theory already embodies it. On one hand, bodily sensation, because of its vagueness, is hard to put into words; on the other hand, the metaphysical Dao is unsayable. "The ultimate of principle transcends words and thought; if one forcibly expresses it in words, one must avoid getting stuck and fixed." (8) It is precisely on the basis of a full understanding of the distinctiveness of literary-artistic appreciation that classical Chinese aesthetics and literary theory gave up grasping literature and art from the epistemological angle—unlike Western scholars, who always habitually view and analyze literature and art with a "research" gaze—and stressed recitation, experience, and perceptual insight, through which to receive and embrace bodily sensation and even the comprehending-insight of the Dao, most broadly experiencing the rich connotation of aesthetic activity and grasping its "broad-spectrum-ness" and "holographic-ness" in all dimensions.

In appraising popular arts such as rock and jazz, Richard Shusterman points out the sensuous immediacy and directness these popular arts possess. He holds that this is a kind of "living aesthetic" that makes the vitality, the demands, and the pleasure of "the living, breathing human" central to aesthetic experience—only that, because intellectuals, to maintain their own cultural hegemony, long suppressed it, its aesthetic legitimacy was excluded and rejected. In fact, "popular arts such as rock, by a way of returning to the pleasure of the bodily dimension, display a fundamentally revised aesthetic." (9) Shusterman further pushes this bodily sensation from popular art to the whole aesthetic domain and holds that, in aesthetic activity, there exists an aesthetic experience of one's own flesh coming from within; the German philosopher Nietzsche and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty both took the body as the focus from which our world and our own selves are interactively and constructively projected, and so the legitimacy of bodily sensation in aesthetic activity should be restored. For this he proposes establishing a "somaesthetics": "From the perspective of this somaesthetics, it is not by negating our bodily sensations but by perfecting them that we increase our knowledge of the world." If, in the development of Western aesthetics, the bodily dimension was long disparaged and even expelled, then in Chinese aesthetics and literary theory, although this bodily sensation too came to be increasingly neglected, it was not regarded as an opposite and subjected to exclusion; it remains a latent foundation of aesthetic appreciation.

From the angle of speech-act theory, bodily sensation is likewise an important dimension of literary appreciation. On one hand, discourse-representation as a locutionary act appeals to human consciousness with concepts; on the other hand, discourse-construction as an illocutionary act is often non-verbal and non-conceptual and constitutes an illocutionary force, and can therefore appeal directly to the human's mind, emotion, and unconscious, and even to the human's body. With powerful attraction it draws the reader into the activity of discourse-construction, merges with the human, jointly creates a fictional world, and experiences this world full of poetic and pictorial feeling. In the very process of human and discourse jointly constructing the fictional world, the fictional world is endowed with human life and human character. This is an activity of the human's whole body and mind, an aesthetic process without any distance or barrier; from bodily sensation, to spiritual pleasure, to the enlightenment of the mind, the human, in immersion, undergoes aesthetic experience in all dimensions and gains rich, lasting aesthetic enjoyment. The multi-layeredness and dynamic change of the discourse-act—and especially the most important dimension of literary discourse, the act of constructing the fictional world—determine that distancelessness and directness are an important characteristic of the process of literary appreciation, and determine that literary appreciation possesses an extremely rich human connotation, embracing at once consciousness and the unconscious, thought and emotion, spiritual exploration and bodily sensation. It is precisely with their own wisdom that classical Chinese aesthetics and literary theory comprehended the distinctiveness of literary-artistic appreciation and comprehensively grasped the full enjoyment that the aesthetic brings to the human.

III

When the most important dimension of literary activity is displayed as the discourse-act of constructing a fictional world, and when, in the process of the literary discourse-act unfolding, the human and the constructed world mutually merge and are intimately without gap, then the Western mainstream that analyzes literature and its language merely as "object" shows its limits. Conversely, phenomenology, existential aesthetics, modern hermeneutics, reception theory, and the like highlight their own theoretical strengths; like ancient Chinese literary theory, they oppose severing subject and object, stress intuition and experience, suit the operating laws of the literary discourse-act system, and deeply understand the complexity of the literary discourse-act. Speech-act theory's revelation of the inner mechanism of the operation of literary discourse displays the common basis of the modes of thinking of ancient Chinese literary theory and of Western phenomenology, existential aesthetics, modern hermeneutics, and reception theory, and displays the possibility of their mutual interpretation, enabling us more consciously and actively to select and use the Western theory that suits ourselves and also accords with the reality of literary activity. Thus, taking speech-act theory as the basis, through the mutual interpretation, mutual verification, and elaboration of ancient Chinese literary theory with phenomenology, existential aesthetics, modern hermeneutics, and reception theory—combined with communication theory, literary rhetoric, and so on—we can thereby realize the modernization of Chinese literary theory.

In fact, Heidegger's hermeneutics drew nourishment from Chinese philosophy. He knew well that "Being" is unsayable: once one wants to question it and analyze it, it transforms into "beings," and "Being" has already withdrawn. "Insofar as what is asked about is Being, and Being always means the Being of beings, then in the question of Being what is interrogated is precisely beings themselves." (10) Yet Heidegger still insisted on questioning and interpreting it; he placed "Being" within the temporal structure of "Being-in-the-world" to expound it, intending to press the possibility of Being out of beings and to strive to approach Being itself. Heidegger's example tells us that, although the literary discourse-act is always in flux and change, ceaselessly generated and suddenly vanishing, and entangled with the human, it can still be placed in a specific context for interpretation, mutually illuminated with experience and perceptual insight.

Here we still need to discuss further whether there exist conflicting factors among speech-act theory, phenomenology, and Chinese literary theory. Speaking of Nelson Goodman's interpretation of the aesthetic symptoms of literature and art from the angle of linguistic signs, Shusterman points out: "Goodman's discussion implies (though it never fully states) the following argument: through the use of signs, aesthetic experience is in essence meaningful and cognitively functional. The use of signs implies mediation and dynamic information-processing, whereas phenomenological sensation and emotion imply a passivity and immediacy that cannot be treated as meaning." (11) Shusterman is extremely acute; he correctly discovered that, between studying literature and art from the angle of linguistic semiotics and semantics and studying it from the phenomenological angle, there exists an unbridgeable gulf: linguistic semiotics and semantics treat literature and art by taking linguistic signs or information-processing as "mediation," and thereby at the same time strip away the directness of sensation and the passivity of emotion, whereas phenomenology precisely stresses the latter feature. Chinese literary theory likewise stresses the directness of perceptual insight; and the self-forgetting state of the appreciative process in turn dissolves the reader's subjectivity and initiative and highlights the passivity of emotion. Indeed, to study literature from the angle of linguistic semiotics or semantics conflicts with phenomenology and with Chinese literary theory; but speech-act theory is different. Speech-act theory first regards discourse as human behavior, and at the same time as a special behavior in which the human uses linguistic signs. As human behavior, it can entirely be a phenomenological, direct, emotional phenomenon beyond linguistic meaning—for example, the illocutionary act is often performed by borrowing non-verbal modes, and especially the discourse-constructive act lets the reader merge directly into one with the discourse-act; and as a special discourse-act, it can in turn be given meaning-interpretation and subjected to all sorts of analysis. Speech-act theory not only avoids the limits of linguistic semiotics and semantics and of the Western theory grounded on them, building a bridge of mutual communication between linguistics and phenomenology, but also points out, for the mutual interpretation of Chinese and Western literary theory, a selectable path.

In the process of the encounter of Chinese and Western culture, Xu Fuguan expounded the Chinese spirit of art with phenomenology, Ye Jiaying interpreted classical poetry with reception theory, Ye Weilian mutually illuminated hermeneutics and Chinese poetics, Long Xietao established a Chinese "study of reading," and Yang Yi planned the attempt at a "culture-life poetics"—all of which have already gained much successful experience. If we deeply reveal the inner mechanism of literary activity from the angle of speech-act theory, then we can further raise the theoretical self-awareness of Chinese-Western mutual interpretation and thereby open up a feasible path for the modernization of literary theory.