Context and the Poetic Creation of Literary Language

In his long essay “On Beauty,” Diderot gave a vivid analysis of the line “Let him die!” from Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Horace. He noted that, taken in isolation, the line cannot be judged beautiful or otherwise. If the reader is told that it is the answer to the question how a man should act in a coming battle, the meaning of the line grows richer. If the reader is further told that the battle concerns the honor of Rome the fatherland; that the one who asks the question is the answering old man’s daughter; that the one who is to go into battle is the old man’s only remaining son, since his other two sons have already been killed by the enemy; and that this young man is now to go alone to face the enemy, while the old father, for the sake of the country, resolutely urges his son to fight — then, with the gradual unfolding of the situation, the line “Let him die!” gradually becomes beautiful and at last grand. [1] Diderot’s aim was to expound the thesis that “beauty lies in relation.” In doing so, he in fact also expounded the role of context in the poetic generation of language. In a literary work, the gradual unfolding of the context constantly enriches the inner content of the word and the sentence, gathers and awakens their meaning, and so generates a poetic space in which man may dwell — an aesthetic kingdom.

1. The “Generative Context” and the “Restrictive Context”

Context, as the environment and background that always accompanies man’s linguistic exchange, is an indispensable condition of the activity of understanding. It is the regulation, restriction, and orientation of context that holds back the multiple meanings of words, dispels ambiguity, and turns the many into the one — so that linguistic exchange can go forward smoothly. The activity of writing brings the necessary context into the text itself and seeks, by this, to keep meaning determinate. Take agreements, contracts, and other legal-administrative writings, and applied prose: their first demand is clarity of textual meaning. The context built around every word in such texts imposes strict restrictions, so that the meaning of the word tends toward the clear and the determinate. One may say that, in such applied texts, context is “restrictive”: words restrict and constrain one another, hammering the language into a linear chain of logic. Any branching outgrowth is to be pruned away; even a touch of haze or dimness must be cleared up. Language is not the better the thicker; it is the better the clearer.

Scientific texts are still more so: they win their good name by clarity of meaning and strictness of logic. Paul Ricoeur holds that the language of science

may be defined as a discourse strategy that systematically seeks to eliminate ambiguity.

In such texts,

the task of discourse is to bring forth one-meaning-per-word from polysemy. If, through the mutual assimilation of the various semantic fields contained within the discourse, the unity of thesis and aim succeeds in setting up a single isotopy, this task is accomplished.

Ricoeur further sets forth the process of “assimilation”: first,

by systematizing the work of definition and reinforcing this systematization through classification;

then, replacing the everyday word with

the mathematical sign-system,

and using

the axiomatic system to fix the place of every sign within the theory

and

the rules for reading the whole sign-system.

Here, system and rule become a repressive context that compulsorily crops and strips away the “polysemy” of language — and so constitutes

the highest stage of the discourse strategy against ambiguity. [2]

Philosophical and historical texts, though they cannot reach the purity and precision of scientific texts, also resemble them: they strive toward the same goal.

Literary texts are different. The context of literary language restricts and at the same time generates within itself; it tends often toward generation and enrichment, and is therefore “generative.” The tragedy Horace is a fine example: through the unfolding of the drama (the context), an ordinary line of speech is made to shine and become a saying that displays the lofty spirit of man.

The “generative context” plays a substantial role in the poetic generation of literary language. Take laoye (master) — a common old-style address. Though it marks feudal hierarchical relation, it carries no deep or rich savor. Yet in the special context of Lu Xun’s short story “My Old Home,” it is not so simple. The two characters laoye are how Runtu, with respect, calls the narrator “I.” In childhood, “I” and Runtu were so close, free of every reserve. Thirty years later, that pure and lively “little hero” has grown blank, old, and dreary. The single utterance “laoye” is not just an address; it seems to gather Runtu’s lifelong unhappiness, contains both joy and dreariness — and a joy-and-dreariness still bound by hesitation and long numbness — and shows the unbreakable wall between man and man. Here the word does not merely speak of itself; it speaks a meaning far richer than itself, speaks what is “unexpected” to itself. And this rich inner content is given to the language by the “generative” context.

The generative effect of context appears not only in the speech of characters; the narrative language of literary works — and especially poetic language — also shows the “generative” feature of context. In the tension built between word and the “generative context,” the context elicits new meaning and new savor. It does not empty the word, leaving it a dead conceptual husk, but fills and enriches the word, so that the word becomes “itself” and at the same time goes beyond itself, condensing within it great suggestive and symbolic power.

Context endowing the word with new meaning and many meanings is everywhere in poetry.

My man went off to take another for himself; he failed me — not once. / The door does not bar shut; there is no more meaning of guan.

(“Ziye Song”) Following the line “The door does not bar shut,” guan means “to bar the door” — the line reads “no more meaning of barring the door.” Set against the line “My man went off to take another for himself,” guan means “to be concerned”; the line reads “no more meaning of being concerned.” The whole context of the poem produces this double-edged ambiguity and haze, and so creates a thick poetic interest.

Outside the willow, a light thunder; on the pond, rain. / The sound of the rain shatters the sound of the lotus.

(Ouyang Xiu, “Linjiangxian”) The word sui (shatter) stresses the fineness, the patter, the broken-and-resumed sound of rain striking lotus leaves, and at the same time conveys the poet’s inner loneliness. The tension between context and word is often what the poet labors after; just such tension lets the meaning of the word turn back upon itself and overflow sideways and so gain new life.

Shi Tuo’s novel Records of the Orchard City opens:

What is hateful is the fruit trees inside the city; from the first moment they bewitched me.

“Hateful” here is no longer hateful but loveable, intimate — and, beyond “loveable,” it carries a touch of tenderness. The generative quality of context not only endows the word with new meaning; it can even force its meaning to swing toward the opposite, expressing thick, complex multi-directional feeling and rich savor.

Yury Tynyanov writes:

The word has no fixed meaning; it is a chameleon. What appears in it each time is not only a different savor but, sometimes, a different shade of color. [3]

Scientific texts seek stability of meaning, striving to keep one continuous reading; by restriction of context, they let the word — originally a word with blurred edges and flickering meaning — grow clear and stable, easy to grasp. Literary texts strive in the opposite direction to avoid the fixing of word-meaning and to break stability, so as to confer on the word new meaning, new savor, new color, new suggestion. This creating of newness draws precisely on the tension between word and context.

The different requirements that different genres place on context lead to different directions in the language-structure of scientific and literary texts. The language-structure of scientific texts tends to be relatively long, with much restrictive modifying material and tight inner logic — so as to fix the meaning of words. Literary texts, especially poetry, tend toward the brief, the free, the discontinuous, and the leaping. They need not strictly follow logic and are often non-logical or anti-logical. This feature dismantles the binding of word by context, lets words and sentences stand in free relation. The polysemy of language is not held back and removed but, within this context — within the free mutual play of words — gives forth a richly substantial set of meaning and savor and reaches toward limitless realms. In the poetry of the Spanish poet [San Juan de la Cruz] one finds lines such as:

I die because I do not die . . . / I live without life . . . / I have fallen so deep / and so I rise so high . . .

Here language is not mutually fixing but mutually opposing and mutually negating; logic is dissolved. The words and lines cannot be understood from their own fixed meaning. Yet just these opposed juxtapositions unfold an extraordinarily complex and contradictory psychological experience, and lay bare a mysterious, immeasurable inner universe.

In the Course in General Linguistics, Saussure held that the value of any element depends on the other elements that surround it. [4] The meaning of the word, then, depends on the concrete context in which it stands. In everyday situations we try to make word agree with context and stay consistent with it. The writer and the poet do the opposite: they purposefully seek the deviation of the word’s habitual meaning from the meaning the context fixes for it, so as to break the habitualized balance between word and context and to build tension between the habitual meaning of the word and the meaning fixed by the context. The tension between the two, on one side, forces the word to renew itself, to shed and re-emerge, and to draw out its own latent potential; on the other side, the word absorbs into itself the meaning projected by the context, condenses it, and undergoes an energy “fusion” that bursts the conceptual husk of the word, so that the literary word’s

meaning exceeds its conceptual meaning. [5]

From the angle of context, then, it is precisely the “generative” context of literature that fills the word, awakens and unfolds it, twists and presses it — so that the word shines with a dazzling light and discloses a heaven of beauty. The Chinese poetic tradition’s “stealing the embryo, changing the bone” (duotai huangu) and the poetic pursuit of using an allusion “in the opposite sense” work by just this play of word, allusion, and context, producing distinctive aesthetic effects.

The preface to the Oxford Book of Verse puts forward a clear view that

between the denotation and the connotation of the meaning of the word there is a logical conflict — that is,

a conflict between two tendencies: one is the “restraining” claim, which strips away all the associative meaning of the word and so destroys language; the other is the “unrestrained” claim, which lets free association run riot and so also destroys language. [6]

Plainly the context of the scientific text tends to “restrain” the word; the context of the literary text leans toward the “unrestrained” — and indeed toward “awakening and generating” — but neither has gone to the extreme of “destroying language.” William Empson once analyzed linguistic ambiguity in fine detail. He quotes Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in Time of Plague” (“Summer’s Last Will and Testament”):

Beauty is but a flower / Which wrinkles will devour; / Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair; / Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. / I am sick, I must die. / Lord, have mercy on us.

He points out that the line “Brightness falls from the air” may carry many senses: the sun or moon sinking below the horizon; stars falling from the night sky; Icarus’s wings, in Greek myth, melted by the sun and so falling into the sea; the shining ornaments turning at the top of sixteenth-century buildings, which might also come down; and so on. Also, the grace God grants is light from heaven shining on all; lightning, the warning before the thunder strikes; and so forth. [7] Each of these readings agrees with the whole and gives the poem a different reading or coloring. The loose, “unrestrained” context of poetry does not impose strict limits on the line and the word; it gives them a wide and free space of imagination. In poetry, the meaning of the word is no longer confined to dictionary meaning; the word itself becomes a world, a magical box of changing forms.

The generative effect of context shows itself especially clearly in metaphor; one might say that the features, energy, and allure of metaphor often come from the play between word and context.

In the story “Master Xu,” Wang Shuo depicts a man, Xu Liyu, who carries a strong sense of vanity. His friends egg him on while teasing him and giving him a hard “bleeding.” At one rambunctious gathering of friends, the author writes:

“That’s right,” I throw in to fan the flames, padding-bricks for him, “Who don’t you know — who are you afraid of!”

Plainly, “padding-bricks” here is no longer its original sense. It has gained a metaphorical function; the surrounding context shifts its meaning into “egging on, urging on” while keeping its original visual feature — making the language more vivid. If one further ties it to the social interplay of this band of wastrels and to Xu Liyu’s vainglorious character, one feels even more sharply the freshness of Wang Shuo’s language.

“A loaded gun in the corner.” Taken in isolation, this is only an ordinary statement; one sees no metaphor and no spark of imagination. Yet when embedded in Dickinson’s poem, the case is different:

My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun — / In Corners — till a Day / The Owner passed — identified — / And carried Me away —

Within the poetic context, the same sentence becomes a “pseudo-statement,” becomes a metaphorical sentence. Each of its words seems to grow more attention-catching, more savorable, and to gather an unexpected magic: this “loaded gun” stands silent and alone, yet carries an explosive power within. It is neglected, forgotten, set aside in a “corner” — a dark place piled with odds and ends and hung with cobwebs. It waits for the day when its owner will see it, remember it, take it away, and let it release the long-stored, long-awaited passion and desire.

Here the context turns an ordinary statement into a “pseudo-statement” and lets it open up to the reader, speaking what otherwise could not be said. At the same time, the metaphor of “the gun” lets the held-back, lonely-silent yet ardently-yearning “my Life” come to vivid expression.

Metaphor does more than what the usual account says — involving comparison or similarity between two or more objects to produce a sense of freshness. More importantly,

what we call the novel or surprising in a metaphor refers to an inner aesthetic feature that we can experience again and again — like the surprising affective force in Haydn’s Ninety-fourth Symphony, or a rhythm that, though familiar, easily misleads. [8]

What Donald Davidson calls “the inner aesthetic feature that can be experienced again and again” is, in many cases, the product of the play between metaphorical word, sentence, and context.

2. “Organic Context” and “Total Context”

Beyond the internal context of the text itself, what is the relation of the literary text to its external context? Galvano Della Volpe addresses this question in Critica del Gusto. Comparing the philosophical text of Bruno with the poetic text of Petrarch, he points out that Bruno’s philosophical text builds an interdependent relation with the contexts of many other prior texts. To express thought or truth accurately, it must take as its premise the total context built by the contexts of prior texts and must be placed within the constraint of the semantic chain composed by that total context. Only then is its meaning clear. Petrarch’s poetic text is otherwise: the thought it manifests is inseparable from the text and is wholly contained within it. That is, the poetic text is semantically self-generating and self-relating; it belongs all along to the “organic context” built by the language of the text itself, and has nothing to do with the context outside the text. Della Volpe draws the conclusion:

We are convinced that the real difference between science in general and poetry (art in general) does not lie in the “abstractness” of scientific thought or the “concreteness” of poetic imagination, but, as we have just seen, in the category of total context — or the technical character — of the language that expresses scientific thought, and the category of organic context of the language that expresses poetic thought. [9]

Della Volpe uses the difference of context to draw the line between scientific and literary text. His thesis that the semantic life of the literary text is self-generating and belongs all along to its “organic context,” unrelated to the context outside the text, must collide with the view of modern hermeneutics and post-structuralism. On the hermeneutic view, the reader’s reading of any text (including a literary text) is always carried out with a pre-understanding, a pre-structure. This pre-understanding has formed in past reading and contains all the texts the reader has met. So the literary text too is not self-sufficient; its semantic life cannot belong only to its own “organic context.” Like every other kind of text (including scientific texts), it draws on contexts beyond itself. Culler has said:

A work can be understood only in relation to or in contrast with other texts. These other texts provide a frame within which the work is understood and made coherent. [10]

Roland Barthes puts it like this:

Any text is an inter-text; in one text there exist, in varying degrees and in more or less identifiable form, other texts: for instance, the texts of prior culture and the texts of surrounding culture. Every text is a new tissue made of past citations. [11]

Barthes’s claim that “any text is an inter-text” naturally also covers the literary text. So whether scientific or literary, no text escapes. Then: does the literary text stand in some relation with its outside context? Which of the two opposing views is right? The question calls for further examination.

From one angle, Della Volpe’s view is not without ground. In the make-up of the external context and the mode of its action, literary and scientific texts do show plain difference. The scientific text cannot do without prior research, cannot do without other scientific texts. Cut off from other texts, lacking even one link, a later scientific text becomes incomprehensible or even impossible. The scientific text stands in a direct relation of dependence to other texts. Moreover, because the internal context of the scientific text is restrictive, it points, restricts, and combs the language of the text, so that language becomes a “semantic chain” of relatively determinate meaning. It builds a logical chain and guides the reader’s logical thinking. So, in reading a scientific text, the reader stays clearly alert: he keeps analyzing, inferring, questioning, and comparing; he asks for more precise meaning, seeks deeper truth, and ties the text he is reading to other texts he has met before — they verify, question, interpret, and generate one another. Reading thus becomes an open, free debate, a rich feast. The texts the reader has read in the past and the knowledge he has accumulated are invited and directly form a “total context.” The meaning of the text’s language grows clearer — or comes under question — within the constraint and elucidation of this total context.

The relation of the literary text to its outside context has its own distinctive features. Generally, its relation with other texts is more complex — not a direct, simple relation of dependence. Because the internal context of the literary text is generative, it calls upon the reader to take part in the creation jointly. With great emotional force and artistic allure, it draws the reader into itself and lets him be steeped and intoxicated in the poetic realm born of the joint creation. This sets the reader apart from his real environment. This “distancing” at the same time lets the literary text stand forth, and on the surface seems to mark it off from other texts, so that it becomes the object of the reader’s aesthetic absorption. In addition, the reader’s joint creation with the text in the reading lets reader and work fuse together: the unfolding of the literary work becomes the unfolding of the reader’s life. In just this sense the literary work shows itself as what Susanne Langer calls

a living form.

The organic wholeness of human life-activity also determines the organic wholeness and life-character of the literary work, so that the context of the literary text becomes an “organic context” that seems to suspend the contexts beyond itself.

In reading scientific text, the reader is also forever creating; but his creation is mostly the deepening and transcending of thought in the process of interpretation and questioning, not a life-process. The text is always text — the “other” that speaks. The relation of reader and text is the dialogue of “I” and the “other”; it never blends as fully as in literary reading into Martin Buber’s “I — Thou” relation.

From this angle, Della Volpe’s conclusion has, in some measure, reason on its side. Yet even in literary reading, the reader’s full involvement, without his noticing, “smuggles” other texts into the object of reading. Because the reader always enters reading with a pre-understanding and pre-structure, and because the pre-understanding is built on the basis of past reading of other texts, the involvement of other texts cannot be avoided. Even in the state of aesthetic intoxication, the literary text is not self-sufficient; it is interwoven with other texts. Unlike the scientific text, however, the literary text often draws these other texts into itself and fuses them, so that they become an organic part of the work — its flesh and blood — rather than being only a frame of external context, as in the scientific text. As Iser puts it:

The prior object of reading is reduced in memory to a holographic simplified background; it is continually brought into a new context and revised by the new related material in the synthetic reconstruction with the prior object. This synthetic reconstruction does not mean that the past comes back to the present fully; for memory and feeling have grown harder to tell apart. But it does mean that memory has gone through a shift. [12]

More importantly: in actual literary reading, the reader is not always swept by feeling into the state of “oneness of subject and object” or of “self-forgetting”; he is not always in the state of aesthetic distance. He often slips out of the poetic realm in which he had been intoxicated, slips out of the independent whole of the literary work. Moreover,

the text may admit many readings, [13]

and even a “deconstructive reading.”

The whole-life-quality of the literary work is, to a great extent, gained in the reader’s aesthetic reading — because literature has a feature that draws the reader and lets him be touched and steeped, so that the unfolding of the literary text becomes the direct unfolding of the reader’s life. The fusing of the textual unfolding with the life-process is the important ground on which the literary work gains its organic wholeness. Yet on the other side,

all stories are haunted by the ghosts of stories that already exist. [14]

One might even say:

all literary texts are woven from other literary texts — not in the traditional sense of carrying the trace of “influence,” but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase, or paragraph is a rewriting of other works that come before this work or surround it. There is no such thing as “originality”; there is no such thing as a “first” literary work: all literature is “intertextual.” A particular work thus has no clearly defined boundary; it keeps spreading out into the other works gathered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives that diminish into vanishing points. [15]

Every work is a “palimpsest”: behind it, countless related texts are overlaid. When the reader is absorbed in the work, the other texts lie hidden in the shadow, acting in the dark, not noticed by the reader. But they always insist on showing themselves, disturbing the reader’s attention, drawing his eye out and pulling his imagination beyond the whole of the work. They then break the organic context within the work and build a new boundless, ever-drifting context.

In Chapter 23 of A Dream of Red Mansions, there is a passage of Lin Daiyu listening to opera. First, Daiyu by nature does not much enjoy watching opera. Second, she only hears it in passing, so she is not, like a devoted fan, single-mindedly focused — she lets her thoughts wander where they will. Just as she begins to enjoy it, she is surrounded by an in-rushing crowd of poems and lyrics. In fact, Daiyu’s state here is just what literary appreciation often becomes — the regular state of literary appreciation. Around the sung lines

the flowering beauty, like flowing water . . . the years,

poem after poem joins in, ceaselessly bringing in new contexts and steadily widening and shifting. Feeling, too, with the unfolding of context, ripples and gathers layer by layer, fermenting until the heart aches, the spirit is in a daze, and tears come to the eye. The association in the course of appreciation has kidnapped the appreciator, drawn her from the dramatic center to the periphery, and crossed the dramatic boundary, breaking out of the “organic context” and entering a boundless drift.

Among writers and poets, many also consciously use parody, allusion, direct citation, and parallel structure to produce “intertextuality.” In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge writes:

Intertextuality is the foundation of the English novel. At the other end of the time-axis, novelists tend to use rather than resist it: they purposefully reshape the old myths and earlier works of literature to represent contemporary life — or to add resonance to the representation of contemporary life. [16]

When the intertextuality of a literary text shifts from “hidden” to “overt,” the “organic context” of the text is destroyed entirely.

This goes especially for Chinese classical poetry. A volume of collected commentary, of annotation, almost intentionally leads the reader into a deconstructive reading. Li Shangyin’s “Jinse,” for instance, full of allusion from end to end, leaves the semantic life of the poem floating, and has produced from age to age all manner of commentary, building a context that flickers and changes. The generative quality of the poem’s internal context opens up the work, so that it ceaselessly absorbs and gathers outside contexts and spreads boundlessly. A short poem becomes a riddle that cannot be untangled, a letter without an address whose meaning cannot be delivered.

Not only do prior texts form a context for later ones and their language, influencing, enriching, and changing the meaning of text and language; later texts also become a context for prior texts and their language, endowing prior texts with a wholly new reading.

The modes of reading and appreciation are many. When the reader steeps in the literary text and fuses with it, this is broadly the “organic context.” When the reader slips out of the text or carries out a deconstructive reading, the organic context is broken through, and a boundary-less external context begins to be woven. Even so, the external context of the literary text differs from the scientific text’s “total context.” The literary text’s external context drifts; it does not build a unified “total context.” For literature pursues linguistic innovation — especially poetry. Even for the same word, it tries to create new meaning, new color, new savor. The word youyou, for instance: in

youyou wo li

(Shi-jing, “Shiyue zhi jiao”) it means “grief”; in

youyou wo si

(Shi-jing, “Bei-feng: Zhong-feng”) it means “longing”; in

ramming the surf, riding the rapids, ever sweeping along, youyou

(Zuo Si, “Wu-du fu”) it describes the manner of going; in

youyou cangtian

(“Shuli”) it speaks of “the distant”; in

set in the long night that goes on, youyou

(Chu-ci, “Jiu-bian”) it speaks of “the endless”; in

the bright sun comes out, youyou

(Chu-ci, “Jiu-zhang”) it speaks of “the bright” . . . The poet, by the pressure of changing context, makes the meaning, color, and savor of the word change — so that the more the word is used, the more new it is; the poetic is preserved and not exhausted. This decrees, then, that linguistic concept across different literary texts cannot be unified — that the contexts may even be inconsistent or contradictory — and so no unified “total context” can be built. This inconsistent and yet ever-shifting, ever-overlaying, ever-mirroring context is precisely what draws the reader’s imagination and association, and lets him experience a richer, more changeable, more complex and mellow feeling.

The external context of the scientific text is, by contrast, coherent and unified — or strives to be. Every scientific text is the direct extension of prior text, the further mining of the original concept and thought, or the correction and pushing-back of original thought. This requires coherence and consistency of context. The coherence of the scientific text’s context builds it into a unified “total context” that fixes the scientific language and provides for the stability of scientific concepts. Of course, in scientific texts too, conceptual language is not unchanging; indeed, it is often “misused” because of different understandings and so needs analytic philosophy to comb. Yet stability is what the writers of scientific texts pursue and is the leading tendency; the distinction from literary texts cannot be effaced.

Plainly, for the literary text, the external context is drifting and changing — and so is rich, generative. The total context of the scientific text mainly tends toward restriction and determination.

3. Real Situation and Experiential Situation

In “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” Bakhtin gives an example of a simplified everyday utterance:

Two persons sit in a room without speaking. One says, “Well!” The other says nothing.

Bakhtin gives a fine analysis:

For us, who were not in the room at the time of the talk, this whole “conversation” is completely incomprehensible. The utterance “Well!” taken out of context is empty and wholly meaningless.

But

suppose we know that the tone of the speaking is angry, reproachful, with a slight touch of humor. For us, this somewhat fills the linguistic vacuum of the adverb “Well!”

With the unfolding of the speakers’ shared spatial vista and situation, the situation may change radically:

At the time of the dialogue, the two interlocutors glance out the window and see that it is snowing. Both know that it is already May, and that it should long ago have been spring. Both have grown tired of the long-drawn-out spring. Both are waiting for spring; both are displeased that snow has come so late. All of this — “what was seen together (the snowflake outside the window), what was known together (the date is May), and what was evaluated together (the hated winter, the longed-for spring)” — is what the utterance directly depends on. All this has been caught by, and absorbed into, its living significance. Yet here there still remain the unsaid and the linguistically unmarked. The snowflake outside the window, the date on the calendar, the inner evaluations of the speakers — all this is suggested by the phrase “Well!” [17]

Everyday utterance is bound tightly to the situation of life. It cannot be separated from a particular situation and depends on it; and the utterance seems to become the focus and soul of that situation. The silent situation projects all its savor and energy onto, condenses it into, this empty utterance and makes the empty utterance bear a boundless savor and energy, addressing us. This is what we call “meaning beyond words.” Without the play of utterance and situation, without the savor that is generated together with the situation, the finite word is only itself and cannot express what lies beyond itself. In the example above, the situation does not only fix the meaning expressed by the word; more importantly, it endows the word with rich savor and gives everyday utterance a poetic feature.

The written text, being detached from the real situation, naturally loses some of the expressiveness of its language. So the necessary context must be rebuilt within the text to make up for the loss. For the scientific text, the making-up is rather simple, since the scientific text pursues clarity of meaning and needs only the necessary simplified context to restrict and explain the language. The literary text is different. It must keep the dewy freshness and the richness of language and so must, by every means, transplant the situation of life into the text, or even build a richer situation than the real one. At the same time, because of the virtual quality of literary situation, much possible space is opened for the creation of situation. For the writer, the creation of a distinctive context is a more complex and arduous creative project.

The detachment of the written text from the real situation gives the literary text a certain self-sufficiency, for the reproducibility and flowing diffusion of the text require that it be relatively self-sufficient. It has left the control of the concrete real situation behind and no longer depends on it. For it, the concrete situation has been abstracted into an atmosphere, a tone, that, like a passing breeze, indirectly influences the reading of literature. From this angle, the literary text approaches what Ilse Graham calls

an entirely sealed, uniquely self-sufficient organism unrelated to any other work of art and to any outside life. [18]

Yet on the other side, the literary text still keeps a thread of tie with the real context. Unlike everyday utterance, which is directly stuck to a particular, individual situation of life, the literary text and literary language, after departing from the situation of real life, depend more on the experiential situation rebuilt through the reader’s mind — and act through the reader’s field of experience.

In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden put forward the view of literary “indeterminacy.” He describes the literary work as a schematized structure that has already drawn the outline of its intentional object, and holds:

What distinguishes the intentional object from the real object and from the ideal object is precisely its lack of determinacy. [19]

The word itself can only be concept; it cannot directly become a substance — what we usually call a vivid sensuous image. Yet the writer and the poet can use his wisdom to take conceptual words as material and, through distinctive ways of combining and through manifold linguistic strategies, create the “concretizing intention” of language [20] to draw on the reader’s accumulated representations and life experience, inviting the reader to join the process of concretization, so that the conceptual word undergoes a root metamorphosis and the intentional object is built. So literary language is fated to be a collusion — a collusion of writer and reader. The writer’s linguistic genius cannot directly turn conceptual words into sensuous images. Slyly, he plots the concretizing intention and the “life-orientation” of language and draws on the reader’s subsidy, draining the reader’s accumulated representations and life experience — and in the same breath, the reader admires the writer’s linguistic genius. It is precisely because of this collusion that, for different readers, Lin Daiyu can be a sickly melancholic classical beauty or a modern girl with high heels and curled hair and a little handbag; that Hamlet too has thousands of shapes; that the great steppes of Turgenev’s pen and the Grand View Garden of Cao Xueqin’s Dream of Red Mansions are seen with a thousand differences in each person’s eye. And so the “indeterminacy” that Ingarden speaks of, within the schematizing process, appears.

One can say: the “indeterminacy” of literary language is not only due to the breaks, leaps, and lexical gaps on the surface of the work’s language but is a more universal, more essential phenomenon. The fact that literary language creates concretizing intention and life-orientation, asking the word and the sentence to shift from concept toward concrete image, decrees that an empty slot is brought in between concept and concrete image — and so decrees the indeterminacy of the intentional object produced. It is precisely on the point of the presence or absence of concretizing and life-orientation intentions that the root difference between literary language and the language of science and philosophy shows itself.

Unlike literary language with its concretizing and life-orientation intentions, the language of science and philosophy in its organization does not need — indeed, excludes — these intentions; it only needs to stay at the level of concept itself. The scientific and philosophical text is a logical operation upon linguistic concept. To make logic tighter and meaning more determinate, it must hold back indeterminate factors and clear away the concretizing intention. On the whole, the linguistic strategy of the literary text is to create the concretizing intention of language; the linguistic strategy of the scientific and philosophical text is the opposite — it casts off the concretizing intention and pursues determinacy. For the scientific text, concretization is a luxury, even a redundancy: the “indeterminacy” it brings easily breeds the ambiguity and haze that the scientific text especially abhors.

The concretizing intention and life-orientation of literary language draws on the reader’s accumulated representations and life experience, makes him co-create the intentional object with the writer, and builds the literary text into a vividly moving work. The reader’s accumulated representations and life experience are absorbed into the work and become its flesh and blood — and at the same time bring with them the reader’s experiential situation. The features of literary text and literary language decree that the situation of the work’s utterance must be rebuilt by drawing on the reader’s life experience. So at the very moment the literary text departs from the real situation, it ties itself more tightly to the reader’s experiential situation, and depends on it almost entirely. As Iser puts it: the linguistic sign in a literary text,

if it spurs the reader to recall something that has sunk into memory, will carry him with it on a return journey to the depths of memory, placing the prior event within a special context rather than letting him brood over the event alone. [21]

If the situation on which everyday utterance depends is relatively fixed, the experiential situation on which literary utterance draws is indeterminate and freely flowing. Although it is still guided by the language of the text, it carries far more flexibility and far wider reach in time and space than everyday context. As the context of literary language shifts from the relatively fixed real situation of everyday language into the flowing experiential situation with depth in time and breadth in space, the radiating and penetrating power of language is greatly strengthened. The interpretation of the literary work, then, varies from reader to reader, from time to time; the work is ever-new to the reader. It is for this reason that, in literary interpretation, phenomena like “subtle word, great meaning” arise.

Take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very much.

“Red coat” translates literally as “red overcoat” or “red uniform.” One who does not understand the social situation and fashion of eighteenth-century England can hardly grasp the meaning. Once one understands that the eighteenth-century British soldier wore a red uniform and looked dashing, that young women of the day admired soldiers and took being in love with one as an honor — once this historical situation has been rebuilt — the sentence becomes vivid and rich in meaning.

In the novel Bright Sky Overhead, Gao Xiaosheng writes:

“Books, of course, should be read,” Wang Guoguo said with a knowing air, “but they should not be read too much. During the anti-rightist days, the commune secretary Xu said that Chairman Mao said: read too many books, and one becomes a book-fool. Being a book-fool will not do; one must rely on practice — practice brings true knowledge. We are people who came up from practice.” Although Zhuzhu is young, she at once sees the source of this theory in her mind, and is full of admiration.

The ironic feature of this utterance is built on the reader’s knowledge of historical and present situations. Without knowledge of the Cultural Revolution background of “the more knowledge, the more reactionary,” without knowledge of the shift of views that came with the new emphasis on “science and knowledge,” the irony of the utterance cannot be felt. The utterance awakens the reader’s experiential situation; within that experiential situation, the conflict between historical and current experience unfolds, and so the utterance gains its strong ironic and subversive force. From this angle, not only the present experiential situation but historical experiential situations and various other indirect experiential situations all jointly take part in the literary work, interpreting and enriching the literary text and language. So Christine Brooke-Rose writes:

The novel sinks its roots deep into historical text. It is always intimately linked with history. Yet unlike history, the task of the novel is to extend our intellectual, spiritual, and imaginative horizon to the limit. [22]

Unlike everyday utterance, which is directly tied to particular, limited situations, the experiential situation of literary utterance flows and changes; it varies with the reader. Moreover, having broken the direct, instantaneous, on-the-spot tie between language and situation, it can extend and flow without end across the dimensions of space and time, endowing literary language with limitlessly rich power of expression. And how far the literary text and language can draw on the reader’s participation in rebuilding the work’s experiential situation, and how rich and how deep and broad the experiential situation it builds — these directly show the vividness and allure of the work and its language. At the same time, literature’s shaking off of the on-the-spot, the detachment of literary text and literary utterance from concrete, individual real situation, also opens the road for the particular, distinctive image to gain a universal, typical character.

Roland Barthes says that literature,

without any on-the-spot, on-the-scene ground to lean on — perhaps this is what most marks its feature: the work is not surrounded, prompted, shielded, or steered by any context; no real life can tell us what the meaning of the work should be.

The detachment of literary text and language from the real context, the generative quality of the internal context of the literary text, and the indeterminacy of its external context — these not only make

the work into the trustee of a broad, unending interrogation of words, [23]

but also endow language with an ever-changing magic, and let it brim with a thick poetic.