Mr. Jin Yuanpu's Literary Hermeneutics devotes itself to constructing a new system of contemporary Chinese literary hermeneutics. It draws broadly upon the theoretical essence of Western phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reception aesthetics, strives to unearth the rich heritage of classical Chinese hermeneutic thought, and—through transformation, fusion, elaboration, and innovation—erects a new theoretical framework for literary hermeneutics that both inherits the spiritual character of tradition and displays a distinct contemporaneity, thereby opening up a new prospect for the construction of contemporary literary aesthetics.
The salient feature of Literary Hermeneutics is that it subjects the discipline to a multidimensional examination and reflection. The whole book is divided into four major parts: “Methodology—Dialogics,” “Process Theory—Reading Theory,” “Ontology—Meaning Theory,” and “Category Theory—Blank Theory.” Setting out from a macroscopic survey of the basic methodological principles of literary hermeneutics, it advances step by step into the relatively concrete process of reading and understanding, then goes on to probe the ontological problem of literary hermeneutics—the generation of meaning—and finally, in its last chapter, selects the core category of literary hermeneutics, “meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy,” for concentrated discussion. Although in the course of exposition the four parts inevitably overlap, because they each conduct research from a different dimension, the several parts come to corroborate, supplement, and generate one another. Moreover, the open framework constructed through this multidimensional unfolding is itself attuned to the holographic, chaotic, and multi-level essence possessed by the literary object, and to the many different constitutive elements proper to each level of that essence. On one hand it makes it possible for the author to break through the boundaries among the disciplines of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory, broadly to absorb the essence of the various relevant contemporary theories, and to fuse and re-cast them; on the other hand it nets and takes in, as far as possible, the principal problems on every side that the theory of literary hermeneutics involves, and gives them comprehensive, deep discussion, thereby raising a series of experimental theses rich in innovative significance—such as the historical evolution of paradigms of literary interpretation, the intersubjectivity of literature, the entry of reading into the literary subject, the separation and integration of subject-thought and the operation of the roving viewpoint, the degree of reception and the tension-structure in reading, the “third generated product,” the triple connotation of literary blank and indeterminacy, and so on. It may be said that the new advances the monograph achieves in many aspects of the study of literary hermeneutics owe, to a considerable degree, to its theoretical framework itself.
The most creative part of the monograph, and the one of greatest theoretical contribution, is the fourth: the “Theory of the Literary Blank.” Both Ingarden and Iser had explored the questions of “meaning-blank” and “meaning-indeterminacy” in depth. Setting out from the phenomenological conception, Ingarden held that the literary work is not an independently existing object but an intentional object. As an intentional object, it necessarily contains a series of “points of indeterminacy” (blanks), entirely lacking in determinacy; it is precisely these “points of indeterminacy” (blanks) that distinguish the work of art from objects of other kinds. The reader must continually concretize the “points of indeterminacy” and fill in the blanks, and so construct a multi-leveled aesthetic object of “polyphonic harmony.” Ingarden's regarding “indeterminacy” and the “blank” as the fundamental feature of literature, the ground of literature's existence, is his outstanding theoretical contribution. But because he did not place literary reading within the broad background of cultural history, regarding reading merely as the elimination of points of indeterminacy so as to create an aesthetic object, a total illusion, his theory forfeited deep cultural import and historical content. At the same time, the theory of “polyphonic harmony,” founded upon a conservative classical aesthetic, also rendered him unable to face the facts of modern literature and art. Building on Ingarden, Iser went a step further in his close discussion of meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy.
Iser proposed that meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy constitute the open structure of the literary text, prompting the reader to seek out the work's meaning and endowing the reader with the right to take part in constituting that meaning. In the process of literary reading-communication, meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy play the roles of “summoning” and “regulating”: from the side of the literary text they attract and entice the reader, regulating in what manner the reader engages the work and to what degree he participates in the construction of meaning. Hence the author too may, with different aims and in different ways, design blanks and indeterminacies for the literary text. Iser went on to discuss in detail the role that meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy play, as a strategy, in thematic novels, serial tales, and dialogic novels. Plainly, on the question of blank and indeterminacy Iser's exploration is more concrete and more profound, and of greater practical significance, advancing a step beyond Ingarden. Yet at the same time, the theoretical horizon of reception aesthetics inevitably caused him to concentrate his attention upon the concrete operational process of reading-reception, so that in Iser's eyes “blank” and “indeterminacy” were in fact already downgraded into a textual strategy, a function, and were no longer an ontological proposition possessed of rich connotation.
Jin Yuanpu's Literary Hermeneutics, by contrast, examines and explores meaning-blank and meaning-indeterminacy from many directions, fully disclosing their multi-leveled, many-sided connotation. The author holds that, relative to the historical development of literary form itself, meaning-blank and indeterminacy are displayed as a technique and device of artistic-formal expression. It is a kind of implicit brushwork, a means of the symbolic, a technique of metaphor, the intimation of the “law of no-law,” a kind of expression without expression. This is a contradictory movement, on the textual plane, between the said and the meant, the determinate and the indeterminate, the real and the virtual. This is the first level of connotation of blank and indeterminacy. The second level is that, relative to the aesthetic feeling of the receiver, it manifests itself as a meaning possessed of regulating function: it is a summoning, which does not present everything in full but exerts a psychic enticement, arousing through the not-yet-pointed the receiver's expectation of and imagination toward the point, and through suspense guiding the reader, in the course of his movement, toward the concrete experience or realization of the ultimate meaning. The third level of connotation is established upon the basis of the mutual action of text and reader: it manifests itself not only as artistic technique and as regulating function, but, on the basis of the two, organizes and constitutes the constructive activity of their mutual action, finally forming and arriving at the aesthetic world (the aesthetic conception), displaying the aesthetic essence of art and embodying the basic feature of the artistic mode of grasping the world. Of these three levels, the second Iser had already analyzed quite deeply; the contribution of Literary Hermeneutics is concentrated chiefly upon the discussion of the first and the third. On the first level, the monograph discusses, respectively, the “semantic blank” constituted by pun, metaphor, metonymy, allusion, and the like; the “syntactic blank” caused by missing sentence-components, abnormal collocation, deformation of sentence-pattern, and distortion of word-order; and the “structural blank” brought about by leaps, insertions, transitions, and inversions on the plane of structural composition, by spatio-temporal interlacing, the mingling of the real and the illusory, logical rupture, and so forth. The monograph not only analyzes quite comprehensively the rich expressive forms of blank and indeterminacy on the formal plane, but goes on to make clear that blank and indeterminacy are the fruit of the historical development of literary form and of poetic language, synchronous with the historical development of the reader's aesthetic capacity; they themselves mark the scale of the historical development of literary aesthetics. The monograph also elaborates with care the third level of connotation of blank and indeterminacy. It holds that, upon the basis of the aesthetic image formed through the bidirectional construction of text and reader, the appreciating subject, taking the blank as intermediary, operates through the three levels of “harmony,” “integration,” and “unification” with the various aesthetic images, and so forms the “third generated product”—the world of meaning—thereby realizing a poetic apprehension of existence and an opening toward the meaning of life, and realizing, at the ontological dimension of existence, the human's self-understanding. Plainly, the monograph's analysis and exposition of the triple connotation of blank and indeterminacy is more detailed and profound than that of previous works, and richer in innovative significance, logical force, and theoretical depth. And it is precisely in the process of pressing the question of blank and indeterminacy that the monograph's inheritance and excavation of the Chinese traditional spirit is fully brought to light.
In the “Introduction,” the author states his thesis at the very outset: “Within the primacy of questioning, the localization and Sinicization of the problem possess a still greater primacy. To raise the problem of ‘Chinese characteristics’ on the basis of local, actual development is indeed of crucial importance.” As the author says, the monograph is by no means a simple transplant of Western hermeneutics; rather it devotes itself to the localization and Sinicization of theory, and strives, upon the basis of fusing Western hermeneutic theory with classical Chinese hermeneutic thought, to realize a transcendence of both. This effort shows itself first in the monograph's broad absorption of the materials of ancient Chinese literary criticism, which it combs through and from which it elaborates the rich hermeneutic thought they contain. Second, the monograph strives to combine its inquiry with the reception-and-interpretation practice of Chinese literature: using, for instance, the interpretive history of the Book of Songs to illustrate the historical evolution of the reader's pre-structure and the historicity of interpretation; using the meaning-history of the reading of Dream of the Red Chamber down the ages to expound the “three levels of literary reading”; clarifying the conditions of the historical generation of the meaning of the literary text, and the intrinsic property whereby a work's meaning is continually gathered, in the course of its transmission, into a cluster of meaning; and the hermeneutic circle of image-generation and imagination within the reading process; and so on. All of these display the author's inheritance of traditional culture, his intention to construct a contemporary Chinese literary hermeneutics with traditional culture as its point of departure. Yet what most embodies the Chinese traditional spirit lies in the author's taking the “blank” as the core category of hermeneutics and pressing it with deep inquiry.
The most salient feature of Chinese art, and of Chinese literature in particular, is its stress upon implicitness, its pursuit of the meaning beyond the words, the sound beyond the strings, the savor beyond the rhyme. That is to say, for Chinese literature, blank and indeterminacy are not merely the general property by which the literary text is distinguished from the non-literary text; within the text they receive special emphasis and intensification, so that over the course of long development they have become the unique tradition of Chinese literature. Formally, for example, there has been formed a whole set of artistic features and a whole expressive system of blank and indeterminacy, constituted by implicitness, allegory, the pun, entrusted meaning, the satirical-allegorical, comparison-and-evocation (bi-xing), the oblique trope, hinting, and the like; and correspondingly there has been formed a whole set of modes of artistic perception—the discernment of the “knowing-the-tone,” savoring, wondrous apprehension, immersive steeping, inspired encounter, the evocative image—and the unique critical modes of remarks-on-poetry, remarks-on-ci, remarks-on-qu, and the commentary-and-marginalia upon fiction. The author of the monograph, rooted precisely in the soil of Chinese traditional culture, raises his questions from the uniqueness of Chinese literature. By grasping blank and indeterminacy as the core category of literary hermeneutics, he grasps the very essentials and marrow of Chinese literature and its criticism; a whole series of problems, blurred and obscure in the study of the history of Chinese literary styles, of thought, and of criticism, are thereby given a relatively clear elaboration, and the inner spirit of Chinese literature is thereby promoted. At the same time, conversely, this also makes new breakthroughs in, and deepenings of, Western hermeneutic theory, and so endows Literary Hermeneutics with a distinct Chinese character.
A further feature of Literary Hermeneutics is its profound historical consciousness, its broad great-cultural vision, and its distinct contemporaneity. The study of literary aesthetics has always taken the work of art as the center of its attention. After the rise of formalism, New Criticism, and structuralist poetics, the work itself came to possess an independent value and significance all the more. Literary Hermeneutics, for its part, delivers a powerful impact upon this state of affairs in literary aesthetics. The monograph regards the meaning of the work as the “third generated product” produced by the mutual interaction of reader and text, holding that meaning is intimately bound up with the human's activity of interaction and his state of existence, and changes as the human's mode of interaction and mode of existence change; and it takes this as the foundation of the theoretical construction of the whole book. This thereby introduces the perspective of cultural anthropology into the study of literary aesthetics, realizing a fusion of the horizons of literary aesthetics and anthropological aesthetics. In the unending stream of reading, the world of the text and the world of the reader mutually communicate, exchange, converse, and fuse, and their result points simultaneously in two directions: on one hand it unfolds a world the work may possibly possess, continually opening up the depth and breadth of the work's meaning and constructing the work's history of meaning; on the other hand it in turn alters the reader's pre-understanding, unfolds a world of literary understanding that continually takes in new horizons, while at the same time shaping the human himself, altering the human's mode of existence and interpreting the human's own meaning of existence—and thus simultaneously constituting the endless history of the search for the meaning of human existence. When Literary Hermeneutics does not take the literary text in isolation for synchronic study, but unfolds two infinitely rich text-worlds and reader-worlds laden with cultural import and cultural connotation, together with the history of meaning generated by the mutual action of the two worlds, it then in fact thoroughly demolishes the structuralist severance from history and the deconstructionist banishment of history for the sake of the text, and thereby comes to possess profound historical consciousness, broad cultural vision, and a distinct contemporary coloring.
If we trace the matter one step further, we may see that the monograph's basic methodology—dialogics—is in turn founded upon the linguistic-ontological view of hermeneutics. For only when language is no longer a tool but another existence, a world intimately bound up with the human and ceaselessly generative, can the human possibly commune and converse with the text-world that language constitutes. The linguistic-ontological view of hermeneutics, in the last analysis, contains within it a new great-cultural view fit for a pluralistic age. Setting out from the cultural vision, it breaks the metaphysical disciplinary partitioning of the logocentric age, fuses philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory with literary criticism, ethics, history, anthropology, linguistics, and political ideology, and makes it possible for the author, within a fused cultural illumination, to transcend both objectivism and relativism. And the inner comparability and mutual fitness between the romantic tradition of the human sciences represented by hermeneutics and the artistic spirit of Chinese poetic culture furnish the author the very foundation for constructing a contemporary Chinese literary hermeneutics and achieving a theoretical breakthrough.