The Generation and Realization of Literary Function
The functions of literature are realized in the process of “literary consumption.” In this process the appreciating subject and the literary work act upon each other and jointly construct the aesthetic object; and it is in the course of this aesthetic construction that the several functions of literature are generated, exercised, and realized. The generation and realization of literary function are therefore bound up at once with the concrete constitution of the literary work and with the subjective conditions, or reception paradigm, of the appreciating subject; they are conditioned simultaneously by the makeup of the work and by the subjective state of the reader. The literary work supplies no more than the possibility and the point of departure for the generation and realization of literary function; or, to put it another way, the work contains literature’s latent potential, whose excavation and conversion must await the intervention of an appreciating subject.
The latent potential of a literary work depends on two dimensions of its own constitution. The first is the content or qualia the work contains—cultural conventions, cognitive content, moral and ethical norms, aesthetic-value qualia, religious meanings, and so forth. The second is the appellative quality that the literary work possesses by virtue of being an intentional structure. It is precisely this appellative quality that calls out to the reader, draws him deeply in, and prompts him to enter actively into the work’s content, to savour its various qualia, and, beyond that, to create new meanings and qualia. At the same time, the appellative quality of the work guides and to some degree regulates the orientation, the selections, and the direction and trajectory of the appreciating subject’s aesthetic construction, so that the various contents and qualia held within the work may, in the course of the subject’s re-creation, be neglected, accepted, or intensified and unfolded—and may thus attain differing levels of realization.
To be sure, literary appreciation begins with “reading word by word, sentence by sentence.” Yet in fact not every word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph carries equal standing or equal significance in aesthetic reception. On the one hand, the appreciator is always situated in a particular environment; setting out from his own particular aesthetic needs, he selects according to his own horizon of expectation and reception paradigm, passing over some things, relegating others to a secondary or background position, while bringing still others into prominence and emphasizing them. The example Norman N. Holland cites in The Dynamics of Literary Response suffices to make the point: when an American college student retold the plot of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he unconsciously altered the original, adding images the work did not contain while inadvertently dropping others.[1] Retelling, of course, is no longer the reading process itself; even so, one can still see in it the selective and intensifying role played, in aesthetic reception, by the subject’s needs, expectations, and reception paradigm. On the other hand, the work’s appellative quality likewise, in its own characteristic way, exposes or conceals, intensifies or attenuates, the contents it holds, thereby regulating to a certain degree the subject’s selective orientation and his psychical distance from the work, and through this regulating aesthetic reception. In his experimental research Valentine arrived at a similar conclusion: in the course of appreciation, most of the images a reader produces are plainly prompted by the suggestions of the poetic description, and in many cases the reader’s imagination ranges beyond the material actually described.[2] This unevenness in the standing of a work’s various contents and qualia—an unevenness brought about by a determinate appellative quality—must in turn affect the exercise and conversion of the work’s several potentials.
How, then, is the appellative quality of a literary work formed, and how exactly does it influence the work’s latent potential? On this question the present essay will offer an exploration from several angles: the “core/periphery” gestalt structure, the blank, and the structure of negativity.
The “Core / Periphery” Gestalt Structure
Literature is the art of language. The distinctive character of the linguistic sign endows literature with an inexhaustible richness, making it an artistic whole that possesses a “polyphonic ensemble”; Roman Ingarden calls this its “polyphony.” In his view the literary work is a many-layered construction comprising the stratum of word-sounds, the stratum of meaning-units, the stratum of schematized aspects, and the stratum of represented objects, within which are contained manifold aesthetic-value qualia as well as various potentials. These strata are not a disordered jumble of unrelated elements; rather, through the artistic intention operating across them they interact, and in the constitution or reconstitution of the work as a whole they gather around a “crystallizing core” to compose together a “polyphonic harmony.” “If the structure of the work is highly perfect, then in its concretization it is very likely to possess only one such crystallizing core, to which all the other aesthetically relevant qualities are subordinated. The work’s various elements—one of its strata or phases—or its particular structural factors exercise various functions; together they bring to light the artwork’s ‘idea’ (in the narrow sense) and, through related qualities, supplement or perfect it; and through these functions there arises a harmony that is the essence of all aesthetically relevant qualities.”[3] Just how this “crystallizing core” is formed, Ingarden does not elaborate. From Gestalt psychology, however, we may take our cue. Gestalt psychology stresses the integrative organizing action of the mind; it holds that the brain is a dynamic system in which all the sensory inputs actively interact within a certain span of time and are organized according to such principles as “similarity,” “proximity,” and “closure,” tending toward perfection.[4] It is precisely because of this psychical organizing capacity that human beings are able to apprehend, as a single “gestalt”—an artistic whole—a literary work containing many strata and many qualia. In the course of constructing this artistic whole there may also exist gestalten of a lower order: plot-gestalten, which exclude the tangled crisscrossings of time and space and the broken, fragmentary clues, organizing them into a coherent and complete plot from beginning to end; meaning-gestalten, which draw a unified and lucid meaning out of the work’s mutually contradictory contents; figure-gestalten, which form, out of fragmentary descriptions, complete characters marked by vividness of personality and inner unity; and word-sound gestalten, such as the sound-patterns built by the rhythm and metre of a poem. These gestalten, however, do not hold equal standing within the artistic whole; ordinarily one among them is taken as the “crystallizing core,” and the remaining gestalten are organized around this core to form a “polyphonically harmonious” artistic whole—a gestalt of a higher order. The formation of the “crystallizing core” is, in a sense, decided by the degree of coherence, proximity, and closure among the elements that make up each gestalt. A poem celebrated for the beauty of its sound, for instance—like certain modern “nonsense poems”—has a regularly varying metre that comes closest to the perfect gestalt and is therefore most likely to win the subject’s attention first and be organized into the gestalt-core. Owing to the selectivity of human attention, the remaining parts then recede to secondary positions. These parts are not thereby lost; they remain at the periphery or in the background and continue to function, and, with the word-sound gestalt as “crystallizing core,” they are organized into a “polyphonically harmonious” artistic whole. Here the difference in standing between the “crystallizing core” and the other parts in fact constitutes the work’s appellative quality: it brings the core gestalt into prominence, powerfully drawing the appreciating subject’s attention and summoning the subject to carry out aesthetic construction in its own particular way. Thus the word-sound gestalt that occupies the core position is necessarily granted the fullest display of its phonic and metrical beauty, so that the aesthetic-value qualia of this stratum produce a marked effect in the process of appreciation and the aesthetic function is well realized; while the realization of the functions belonging to the gestalten at the periphery or in the background is thereby constrained, able only to play a supplementary role, so that even the construction of the gestalt is affected.
An important feature distinguishing poetry from narrative works is its stronger lyricism, and this trait too is related to the distinctive appellative quality produced by the gestalt structure of poetry. Because of poetry’s concision, generality, and leaping movement, the pictures it paints of the objective world, though they too tend to compose a perfect gestalt, are after all relatively imperfect and discontinuous and so occupy a secondary position compared with the emotional gestalt that suffuses and runs through the whole; this in turn throws the emotional, lyrical quality of poetry into prominence and intensifies it. To be sure, our traditional poetry rarely voices feeling directly; more often it lodges feeling in scene and borrows scene to convey feeling, so that feeling and scene fuse inseparably. Yet the gestalt formed by a unified emotion still tenaciously emerges from within.
With fiction it is otherwise. Although fiction too is fused with the author’s feeling, the story’s plot and the pictures it paints of the objective world more readily tend toward the gestalt and occupy the prominent position in a work of “polyphonic harmony.” When the plot-gestalt occupies the crystallizing core and organizes the work as a whole, the work’s entertainment function is markedly strengthened; this is so with popular fiction. Once the depicted pictures of the real world become the core, the work’s cognitive function is strengthened; realist works are especially typical in this regard. As for lyrical fiction, in order to intensify its lyricism it cannot but dilute the plot and break up the pictures of the real world, weakening their role in the artistic whole by increasing the difficulty of gestalt organization—which, conversely, strengthens the standing of the emotional gestalt. Thus in Feng Wenbing’s story “The Story of the Bamboo Grove,” the plot is diluted almost to nothing and only a few fragmentary, limpid descriptions remain; yet this very thing makes the work’s equally limpid but pervasive feeling of desolate solitude stand out, so that the fiction brims with lyrical flavour and poetic savour. In fact, when a literary work’s “crystallizing core” differs and the overall mode of organizing its “polyphonic harmony” differs, the aesthetic object that is constructed takes on an entirely different countenance. Not only does the standing of the several functions change and their operation become greatly altered; the potentials held within the various contents and qualia mutate as well.
Wang Fuzhi, a scholar of the Qing, observed that “to handle narration and reported speech in poetry is even harder than in history,” and that Du Fu, “wherever he set himself to depict a scene, still sought truth through vigorous portrayal, so that in the end he had more than enough for history but fell short for poetry”; the critics then honoured Du with the title “poet-historian”—which, Wang remarked, is like seeing a swaybacked nag and lamenting that a fine horse’s back is not so hollowed: this is what one might call pity dressed up as praise.[5] Wang Fuzhi’s words point to a fact: poetry, as a genre, has its own character—it excels at the lyrical and is weak at the narrative, and in its cognitive function it can scarcely stand comparison with fiction and history. Du Fu’s poems do contain many vivid depictions of the social life of his time, yet what first moves us and impresses us most on reading them is still the subjective feeling of this poet who “in declining years grieved for the common people, sighing with a heart that burned within”—the lofty spiritual world and moral aspiration of the poet himself. The Prague School theorist Mukařovský likewise pointed out that “poetry is unlike informational language; in it the hierarchy of relations is inverted. The latter puts its emphasis on the relation between the sign and reality, the former on the relation between the sign and the context; the context absorbs poetic language yet also makes it stand out… For poetic reference, the weakening of its direct relation to reality turns it into an artistic device.”[6] The causes of poetry’s functional distinctiveness are, of course, many; but the distinctive “core/periphery” gestalt structure is one of the important ones. The appellative quality constituted by this characteristic structure pushes certain strata and qualia of the work into prominent positions and intensifies them, thereby making possible the full realization of the functions related to those strata and qualia.
The Structure of Blanks
If the “core/periphery” gestalt structure endows a work with an appellative quality that prompts the appreciating subject first to attend to a certain plane or a certain series of qualia and, in constructing the gestalt, effectively to realize the related functions, then the appellative quality possessed by the structure of blanks tends rather to emphasize more concrete parts.
The appellative quality of the blank is likewise grounded in the psychical organizing capacity that Gestalt psychology has identified. The mind’s organizing action always strives toward perfection, for “a concise and perfect ‘form’ always gives one a sense of ease, while at the same time breeding a kind of inertia, a reliance on the ‘gestalt.’ A non-concise and irregular form produces a tension (or gestalt pressure); though not altogether pleasant, it can arouse an inner tension that drives one to strive and to pursue.”[7] This “inner tension” or “gestalt pressure” is precisely an inner dynamism indispensable to aesthetic construction. The “blank” in a literary work refers to the breaks in coherence or the lacunae in connection between the work’s various meaning-units—the empty positions in the work’s schemata and the gaps in meaning. The “blank” is not sheer nothingness, and it does not lead to a defect in the literary work; rather it is the “invisible joint” within the literary work, which must and necessarily does exist within it, and is an essential feature of literature. It is precisely because the “blank” exists, and because the “imperfection” it brings about exists, that the appreciating subject’s inner tension (gestalt pressure) is provoked, spurring the subject to seek out these joints and, in imaginative connection and creative filling-in, to carry out the activity of aesthetic construction. That is to say, the blank possesses an appellative quality: it endows the work with an allure that draws the appreciating subject actively to take part and to engage in aesthetic creation. As Iser pointed out, the blank “designates a vacancy in the overall system of the text, the filling of which brings about an interaction of textual patterns.” “Only when the schemata of the text are related to one another by the reader does he begin to construct the imaginary object; it is the blank that allows this connective operation to proceed.”[8]
The appellative quality of the blank not only draws the subject in, leading him into aesthetic re-creation; at the same time, different blank-structures also prescribe to a certain degree the mode of re-creation, and thereby affect the possibilities for realizing literary function. In popular fiction the author often deploys “suspense” and “reversal” to constitute blanks in the plot, thereby stirring the reader’s curiosity, producing psychical tension, and heightening the work’s enjoyableness. But these blanks are kept well under control; unlike avant-garde fiction, where the multitude of blanks all but shatters the plot into fragments so that the plot-gestalt cannot be reconstructed, here they are reduced to a certain number, broadly preserving the coherence and integrity of the plot-gestalt and letting “suspense” and “reversal” appear as discontinuities within continuity, points of indeterminacy within determinacy—which can draw the reader into the story’s plot and bind him tightly to it. The blanks produced by suspense and reversal do, to be sure, stimulate the reader’s imagination and association and prompt him to make all sorts of conjectures; but because these blanks are set within a broadly coherent and complete plot, and are constrained by the whole, they do not let the reader’s imagination and conjecture stray from the plot but rather draw him more deeply into the plot and the situation. Detective fiction controls its blanks in the same way: the usual pattern is to display the result of an event first and then to explore the cause of its occurrence; the blanks left by the cause-and-effect relation are exactly what mobilizes the reader’s powers of inference and judgement. In our chapter-and-section fiction and in Western serialized fiction the role of the blank is likewise the same: they exploit the blanks between chapters and between serial instalments to stir the reader’s curiosity and to strengthen the work’s hold and its enjoyableness. In modern fiction, by contrast, blanks keep increasing and the point of view shifts frequently, greatly increasing the difficulty of constructing the plot-gestalt; at this point the reader may become estranged from plot and situation, turning instead to attend to the work’s structural form and to discover the aesthetic function of structural form itself.
In didactic fiction, too, the blank is strictly controlled. In Cardinal Newman’s Loss and Gain the number of blanks is reduced and connectibility is strengthened; the diminishing of blanks restrains the reader’s free, concretizing activity of filling-in, so that the reader can almost only receive passively, with no need to create. The strengthening of connectibility means the reader need not stand outside the ready-made moral exemplum the work supplies to seek a new joint; rather, the content of the fiction is smoothly linked to the reader’s horizon of expectation, so that the authorial intention and tendency held within the fiction can extend naturally into the reader’s stock of experience—and this powerfully strengthens the work’s didactic, inculcating effect. Unlike “didactic literature,” Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter sets up its blanks in another way. The novel depicts the conflict of moral conceptions—and the inner conflict of each—among three persons: the fallen woman Hester Prynne, the Reverend Dimmesdale, who has an illicit relation with her, and Hester’s husband, the physician Roger Chillingworth; while it also displays society’s moral judgement. The crisscrossing and collision of these different moral horizons create the work’s blanks (vacancies). They require the reader to seek, outside all these horizons, a fitting standpoint and a new, unified measure, to make his own evaluation of these different moral conceptions, and so to connect the work’s various horizons. This necessarily leads the reader to reflect on, and to criticize, the various moral norms of the work’s characters—and society’s moral norms in particular. The work is not inculcation; it does not ask the reader passively and blindly to accept what is instilled, but drives him to examine each exemplum with a critical attitude—and thereby brings into play the work’s cognitive function and its function of social critique.
Our traditional literature prizes the beauty of reticence and seeks the effect of “overtones beyond the string, meaning beyond the words.” The attainment of reticence is precisely the result of fully exploiting the blank-structure at the level of meaning. Commenting on The Romance of the Western Chamber, Jin Shengtan said: “I have surveyed the writings of men ancient and modern: there are those who ply the brush yet whose brush does not arrive, and there are those who ply the brush so that, before the brush and after the brush, even where no brush is plied, there is nowhere it does not arrive.” He also said: “He who cannot ply the brush uses one stroke as just one stroke; he who can ply the brush uses one stroke as a hundred-odd strokes.”[9] To “use one stroke as a hundred-odd strokes” is reticence: it often exploits the pressure of context to create indeterminacy and rich connotation in the meanings of certain words and phrases—that is, it creates blanks in meaning, thereby provoking the reader to savour them over and over.
Chapter 45 of Water Margin, “Uproar at Cuiping Mountain,” narrates the moment when Shi Xiu confronts Pan Qiaoyun face to face. Qiaoyun says, “Aiya, that’s all past—why dwell on it!” Shi Xiu opens his eyes wide and says, “Sister-in-law, how can you say so?” And when the woman presses on, “Brother-in-law, when you had nothing to do you would fondle me—what was that for?” Shi Xiu says, “Sister-in-law, enough!” Jin Shengtan comments on this: “In the first four words and in this single word, Shi Xiu’s whole meticulousness and his face full of venom are painted alive.” Shi Xiu’s dialogue runs to only a few words, and on the surface seems to express nothing definite; but because it is set within a particular linguistic and narrative background, it is richly pregnant. As the reader explores the blanks in meaning, it is not hard for him to appreciate the complex psychology concealed behind these extremely concise, extremely ordinary utterances.
In Wang Wei’s “Written at My Wangchuan Retreat for the Scholar Pei Di,” the lines “At the ferry-head, the last of the setting sun; over the hamlet, a lone wisp of smoke rising” frame their scene with the utmost economy, the brush extremely spare; the words “last” and “rising” are the more ordinary still. Yet behind this spare, sparse background lie vast blanks, offering the reader free imaginative space for creative filling-in. Plainly, the reticent beauty created by blanks in meaning effectively strengthens the work’s aesthetic function. Here the blank-structure not only plays an appellative role, influencing the appreciating subject’s psychical orientation and aesthetic selection; it itself becomes an aesthetic-value quale.
In ancient China the aesthetic character of poetry was often appraised in terms of “shenyun” (spiritual resonance). Appraising Yang Juyuan’s “A Frontier Spring, Presented to Old Friends in Chang’an,” Wang Fuzhi said: “The interplay of the substantial and the void lies in shenyun; it cannot be told apart by the presence or absence of overt comparison and evocation. To construct a scene within such voidness—therein lies superb singularity. Is this not worthier than the unfeeling stiffness of the hidebound?”[10] “Shenyun” is not the concrete scene the poem depicts, but the formless, far-reaching resonance contained within yet exceeding it; it is as though one “constructs a scene within the void,” to be apprehended and savoured but not pinned down in words, not set before the brows. This is to say that “shenyun” is generated in the blanks of poetic meaning; the blank summons the appreciator to fill it in creatively, constructing an aesthetic object suffused with vitality and brimming with resonant savour, and thereby exercising an immense aesthetic function. As Wolfgang Kayser pointed out, “the literary work makes use of precisely that indeterminacy contained in the spoken language of everyday—the blank, as Iser calls it [author’s note]—to awaken the latent vistas and to bring slumbering emotional content to life. Language is itself already full of poetry.”[11] Zhang Chengzhi too once laid bare the literary language he believed in: “Perhaps a piece of fiction ought to be like this: sentences and paragraphs constitute a space of many layers and many angles. Hidden in the framework and in the blanks are the author’s feelings and recognitions, his courage and his evasions, his outcries and the things he cannot speak—symbols like banners, an outpouring streaked with heart’s blood. His exquisite, grand, alert arrangements and his uncontrolled effusions are heaped upon a single sheet, and, sustained by depth and true feeling, a living soul throbs there.”[12] Reading and appreciation are precisely the reconstruction of this space and these blanks, the exploration of the rich connotation within space and blank. This reconstruction and exploration need not coincide with the author’s intention; it may be of myriad kinds—yet it cannot but be regulated and influenced by the blank-structure.
In the “core/periphery” gestalt structure, what occupies the core position is the gestalt of relatively high coherence and relatively good perfection, which most readily seizes the reader’s attention and stands out against the background of the other gestalten; whereas the blank-structure is precisely what interrupts coherence and breaks perfection—and yet it likewise draws the reader’s attention. There would seem to be a logical contradiction here. In fact there is not. There are two situations. When the blank does not, on the whole, disrupt the coherence of the gestalt in which it is set—as with suspense and reversal in a story—it does not damage the core standing of that gestalt or impair the realization of the related functions, but on the contrary strengthens it. Once the multiplication of blanks shatters the possibility of establishing a gestalt, it may lead to a shift of the reader’s attention—turning toward other aspects, or toward the blank itself. Hence in literary works the appellative role of the blank is the more complex, and its influence on literary potential the more indeterminate.
The Structure of Negativity
In Being and Time Heidegger advanced the concepts of “readiness-to-hand” and “presence-at-hand.”[13] An axe in the hand of a skilled stonemason, for instance, seems to become part of his own body; he is fundamentally unaware of the existence of the “axe.” This is what Heidegger calls “readiness-to-hand,” and the “axe” is then the “ready-to-hand,” which does not show itself. But when the “axe” breaks, or for some other reason is no longer so handy—a negative situation—the “axe” in the hand stands out at once and draws attention, becoming the “present-at-hand”; this state is called “presence-at-hand.” Likewise, when a social custom or norm fits society and exercises an effective role, people often follow it without thinking and pay no heed to its existence; but once it loses its effectiveness and becomes an obstruction (acquiring negativity), people on the contrary become distinctly aware of it. It is evident, then, that negativity is an important means by which “readiness-to-hand” is converted into “presence-at-hand”—that is to say, negativity is itself a kind of appeal: it breaks through the subject’s unconscious state and rouses his attention.
The structure of negativity is widely employed in realist literature. The truthful, vivid depictions of certain realist works often draw the reader deeply into the work’s situation, luring the appreciating subject into identifying with the work’s characters; with the disappearance of distance and the fusion of subject and object, the subject takes the various behavioural norms of the characters for granted, no longer probing them—indeed, even losing clear awareness altogether. And when certain of a character’s norms lose their effect in a particular situation and are negated, these norms become conspicuous objects. They require the appreciating subject to examine them, to ponder their limits, and to make an evaluation. Because the appreciator has produced identification and resonance with the object, negation may further provoke him to reflect upon himself. In Ye Shaojun’s Ni Huanzhi, for instance, the protagonist’s ardent devotion to education enters our field of vision, but we have no leisure to ponder it; once, after suffering one setback after another, it is negated, this “salvation through education” becomes especially conspicuous, and its limitations are thereby exposed without remainder. The appellative quality of the structure of negativity effectively strengthens the work’s affective power and its critical power. In The Golden Cangue, Eileen Chang sets Cao Qiqiao—who comes from the petty-merchant world of the marketplace and runs a sesame-oil shop—down within a feudal aristocratic household; because Qiqiao’s marketplace habits and original behavioural norms break away from their old environment and enter a new one, they lose their effectiveness and fitness, and so appear the more jarring—and thereby deepen the reader’s recognition both of marketplace culture and of aristocratic culture.
Generally speaking, medieval chivalric literature gingerly controls the blanks in its works, depicting the knight’s quests and adventures in an affirmative form so as to preserve the old medieval system of thought; whereas in Don Quixote Cervantes boldly adopts all manner of negative structures to mock and to shake that old system of thought. In satirical literature the cognitive and critical functions of the structure of negativity are especially plain. In “The Literature of the Second Clown” Lu Xun pointedly remarked that the “second painted-face” clown on stage is all obsequious deference before his master, the very image of loyalty; but the moment the master turns away, he makes faces at the audience behind his back. This self-negation instantly strips away the baseness and shamelessness hidden beneath his “loyalty.” The structure of negativity not only strengthens the vividness of the figure; with sharper satire it helps people see through to his true nature.
Unlike Ye Shaojun’s Ni Huanzhi, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair inserts a great deal of narratorial commentary. The narrator’s overt intervention “alienates” the relation between reader and characters, drawing distance between them, preventing the reader from identifying with the characters, and letting him examine their various performances with a rational attitude. This attitude produces a conflict between the reader and the real world the fiction reflects, and becomes a special structure of negativity. “It mobilizes the reader’s critical capacity as far as possible, making him recognize that the social reality the work depicts is no more than a kaleidoscope recording all sorts of dazzling, distorted, and false behaviour.” Iser therefore holds that “the purpose of Vanity Fair is, first of all, not to represent the social reality of mid-nineteenth-century England, but to provide a new way of looking at reality.”[14]
In a literary work, conflict, as a structure of negativity, has the feature of bidirectional negation: each side of the conflict, setting out from itself, negates the other, and so the appellative quality of conflict is likewise often especially powerful, to the point of becoming a focus of the reader’s attention. The dramatic conflict in Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, like a raging storm, not only endows the work with extraordinary artistic charm and grips the audience’s heart; at the same time the sharp conflict among Fanyi, Zhou Ping, Zhou Puyuan, and Shiping forces the audience to choose an independent standpoint and to pass judgement on their moral and ethical conceptions and norms, and even on their class nature. Zhang Jie’s “Love Must Not Be Forgotten” does likewise: with the conflict between sincere love and moral convention it rouses the reader to re-examine and ponder the right to love and the standards of morality. Tragic conflict, for its part, displays with the utmost vividness the spiritual character of the tragic protagonist, so that, while undergoing intense emotional infection, the appreciator is imperceptibly edified and instructed. The appellative quality of conflict is exactly what Hegel pointed out: “Conflict in general requires a resolution. As the result of the struggle of two opposed sides, a situation full of conflict is particularly suited to be the object of dramatic art, which can indeed bring forth the fullest and profoundest development of beauty.”[15]
What Heidegger calls “readiness-to-hand” may, in psychology, be termed the “blunting” or “automatization” of sensation. In order to break through the blunting and automatization of sensation, Russian Formalism advocated the device of defamiliarization, and Brecht advanced “alienation.” By defamiliarizing the object, one creates a psychical distance (alienation) between subject and object and arouses the subject’s surprise, so that sensation enters a state of lucidity and the object becomes once more an object keenly sensed—that is, becomes the “present-at-hand.” Defamiliarization is the negation of the subject’s habits of experience. Through this structure of negativity it stirs the subject’s exploratory spirit and accomplishes an appeal to the subject. When defamiliarization is applied in different ways to different planes of a literary work, it leads to changes in the structure of literary function.[16]
The structure of negativity is in essence also a blank-structure: through negating the content or form of a work, or negating the appreciating subject’s habits of experience (defamiliarization), it creates blanks in the work’s meaning, sense, and savour, as well as blanks in the subject’s experience, and thereby possesses an appellative quality. “Conflict” is the same. Because human beings always incline to seek a unified measure and to render their own verdict (an affective judgement) on the two sides of a conflict, the conflict in a work in fact requires that, beyond the two sides of the conflict—indeed beyond the work—a standpoint be established, a position not marked out by the work, that is, a vacancy (a blank); and it is from this position that one is to examine and judge the two sides of the conflict.
In sum, the appellative quality of a literary work is constituted by the “core/periphery” gestalt structure, the blank-structure, the structure of negativity, and the like. It regulates the intentional relation between the appreciating subject and the literary work, as well as the psychical distance between them, and influences the reader’s aesthetic selection and mode of reading—thereby conditioning the construction of the aesthetic object and the realization of literary function in the course of appreciation. Of course, literary function is not determined unilaterally by the literary work; it depends also on the subject’s reception paradigm and on the environing background of reading and appreciation, and the subject may even disregard the appellative quality of the work altogether. These questions, however, lie beyond the scope of the present essay and must be set aside for the time being.