Cultural Poetics, the Structure of Behavior, and Historicization

At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, faced with social transformation and the turn in literary theory, Tong Qingbing put forward the conception of cultural poetics. Taking literary activity as his base point, he wrote a series of essays to expound this conception. He regarded the establishment of cultural poetics as an important path for combining the aesthetic character and the realist character of literature, so as to realize the spiritual reconstruction of the human. "Taken as a whole, cultural poetics has three dimensions: the dimension of language, the dimension of the aesthetic, and the dimension of culture; it has three characters: a realist character, an interdisciplinary character, and a poetic character; and it has one pursuit: the perfecting and the return of human nature." (1) Tong Qingbing held that cultural poetics ought to give equal weight to language and meaning, discourse and culture, structure and history, regarding these as the two wings of literary activity, and ought to study literature within the "literary field," focusing on the interaction and the mutual constitution among them. On this basis he further put forward, in explicit terms, his theoretical conception of cultural poetics: "Cultural poetics ought, while taking aesthetic-evaluative activity as its center, also to unfold in two directions—expanding toward the macroscopic vision of culture and toward the microscopic vision of speech." (2) We hold that not only is language within literature, but culture too is within literature. The aesthetic, culture, language, and their relations constitute the literary field. Culture and speech, or history and structure, are the two wings of cultural poetics.

Tong Qingbing's theoretical proposal opened up a broad vision for the literary theory of the new period. It sought to change the narrow situation brought about by literary theory's "inward turn" and the awkwardness of its growing detachment from social reality, and injected new vitality into its development. As a scholar who possessed his own theoretical system and had achieved distinguished results, Tong Qingbing did not stand still and confine himself; rather, with an open eye, he closely followed the new trends in the world of literary theory. He warmly affirmed the cultural studies then fashionable in our country, while at the same time soberly reflecting on the problems contained within it. In Tong Qingbing's view, cultural studies turned its gaze toward present-day social reality, examined human cultural production with a broad vision, interpreted cultural value and meaning, dissected the power relations concealed within culture, and diagnosed the symptoms emerging within culture—this was, without doubt, a theoretical innovation of important significance. But at the same time it deliberately dissolved the boundaries between literature and non-literature, between the aesthetic and everyday life, ignored the disciplinary nature of literature, and shifted the focus of research toward the various domains of mass culture. This not only brought a crisis to literary theory but, because it simply abandoned the deep accumulation that literary theory originally possessed, was very likely to lead research into the superficial and the shallow. Therefore Tong Qingbing stressed the establishment of cultural poetics—both to remedy the malady of literary theory's aesthetic turn and linguistic turn growing ever more detached from reality, and to correct the one-sidedness of cultural studies—absorbing the strengths of both literary theory and cultural studies, taking literary activity as the core, placing it within the historical, social, and cultural context, setting it within the whole cultural system of literature and art, religion, philosophy, politics, history, and education, and exploring the close interactive relations of literature with such ideational forms of culture as language, myth, religion, science, and history, so as once again to endow literature with a deep sense of history and reality and to reveal its cultural underpinnings.

I. From Literary Activity to Literary Behavior

Tong Qingbing deeply grasped the essential point of cultural poetics (and New Historicism): the text is historical, and history is textual. As Greenblatt says, history should not be allowed to serve as anecdotal decoration "added on" to a theoretical structure as a convenient afterthought. (3) Greenblatt held that the functional distinction between the aesthetic and the real is at once established and dissolved—the two occur simultaneously. In his view, for literary research to realize "re-historicization," it must both break the self-enclosure of literature and academic research, and differ from the literary sociology of the past, its fundamental point lying in this: it does not merely treat history as an external vision for observing literature, but sees historical factors permeating the whole process of writing and compilation, permeating discursive activity—seeing the "non-transparency" of linguistic signs—and thereby strengthens a methodological self-consciousness. Historicity dominates the whole process of writing and compilation; it is closely accompanied by discursive activity, and within it exist the negotiations and consultations of various powers. Therefore cultural poetics is a "practice" that "enters the historical context."

Tong Qingbing went on to propose two basic points—"entering the historical context" and "close textual analysis"—and stressed that these two must be closely combined. He deliberately gave the term "historical context" a wholly new meaning, in order to distinguish it from the so-called "historical background" of past research. "Historical background" attends only to the historical thread of literature's emergence and development, the society and age in which the author lived, the historical period in which the work was produced—examining only such surface connections as the general political, economic, and cultural conditions of that historical period and the relation of that stretch of history to literature in general. "Historical context," by contrast, while including what "historical background" accounts for, must further penetrate into the concrete historical opportunities of the author's growth and the work's production, into the author's particular circumstances, experiences, and situations, cutting into the distinctive situation and mood in which the author wrote a certain work and into the historical texture of that work's artistic depiction, thereby revealing the deep connection between literature and history. "The reason we stress the importance of the historical context is that it can help us analyze the text deeply and in detail; and the reason we stress textual analysis is that it is textual analysis placed within the historical context, not isolated analysis. So the relation between these two basic points should be: facing the object of analysis (author, work, literary theory), we must first find out the symptomaticity of the object, and then place this symptomaticity within the historical context for analysis, thereby realizing the effective combination of historical context and close reading, and making our research attain wholeness, concreteness, depth, and relevance to reality." (4)

Here, the literary text of which Tong Qingbing speaks is not a static text, but an "event" dynamically generated in a specific context. Literary texts, historical texts, and theoretical texts are all events—events engaged in by specific persons in a specific period, out of specific needs and purposes. The "event" character of the literary text is closely related to concrete historical conditions, and therefore, in Tong Qingbing's view, the text is an event. In fact, the root of this lies in his view of literary activity. In his edited Course in Literary Theory, Tong Qingbing put forward "literary activity" as the logical base point of literary theory, unfolding the theoretical system around the interpretation of "literary activity." At the same time, he proposed another important concept: "eventalization." When we take literary activity as the logical starting point of literary research and think through the various elements of literature with literary activity as the core, then conception, writing, revision, editing, publication, and dissemination, and even the creating subject, the literary text, the reader's reading, and the construction of the canon, all enter the historical process. The literary text is bound no longer to be a solid, fixed, unchanging object; it is transformed into a historical event, depending on the concrete historical context—produced within the historical context, disseminated within the historical context, read and interpreted and canonized within the historical context—always an event constrained by a ceaselessly changing historical context. It is literary activity that closely connects text with history; and it is in this sense that Tong Qingbing approves of Tao Dongfeng's interpretation of Foucault's "eventalization." "Symptom" means the symptom of literary activity, and also the subtle feature that the literary text displays in its concrete historical situation; it intimates the joint point at which text and history combine. Once one seizes the symptom, one may possibly trace out the mechanism by which the two fuse.

Very clearly, Tong Qingbing not only, with his theoretical sensitivity, took the lead in our country in proposing the establishment of cultural poetics, but his bold conception also built a theoretical framework for cultural poetics and indicated the direction of development for the discipline of literary theory.

But the connection between literature and history is by no means mechanical. Taking "literary activity" as the logical base point of literary theory—though it may possibly combine the literary text with the historical context, and explore the intersection of text and history with the aid of "symptom"—still cannot in fact reach the inner texture of the literary text, and finds it hard to capture the true, deep connection in which text and history are mutually entangled; it very easily simplifies "historical context" into a "historical background" that drifts free of the text, so that one falls once more into the research path of vulgar sociology. We can, to be sure, examine in detail the age in which the author's creation is situated, his particular circumstances and the distinctive opportunity of his creation; but this is, after all, still historical background, possessing contingency, and does not necessarily act upon literary writing or embody itself in the literary text itself.

Hayden White, a theoretical representative of cultural poetics (and New Historicism), on the basis of Foucault's discovery of "discursive movement," further proposed the view of "rhetorical space" and "the tropological turn of discourse." He pointed out that any language is at root metaphorical, unable to throw off metaphor, unable to throw off the poetic imagination and fiction of words; its meaning is indeterminate. So it is with literature, so it is with history, and so it is with all the other domains of the humanities—there is no clear-cut dividing line among them. The division of different domains is manipulated by social mechanisms and human factors. This focuses attention on the discourse-act. White attempted to explore the base point of historicity from the angle of discursive movement, which is suggestive; but, deeply influenced by deconstruction, he one-sidedly stressed the indeterminacy of discursive meaning. Discourse is, to be sure, ceaselessly tropological, having no fixed and unchanging meaning; but persons are not for that reason unable to reach communication with one another, and the reason communicability is maintained lies precisely in "cultural convention"—it is cultural convention that guarantees the social shared character of discourse and makes discourse the most important means of interpersonal communication. Cultural convention sits at the intersection of historical transmission and social fashion, at the confluence of the various social forces. This is a historical process of ceaselessly constructing conventions while ceaselessly breaking through them, a historical process in which the various social forces negotiate and consult. Such factors as nation, history, culture, politics, religion, and education enter literary activity and the literary text precisely in the process of setting up cultural conventions, or of challenging, adjusting, and rebuilding them. Cultural convention is the very inner mechanism by which literary discourse is connected with history. Of the unity of this variability and shared character of discourse, Bakhtin gave an excellent exposition. He says: "Language is not a dead thing; it is the ever-moving, ever-changing context of dialogic intercourse. It is never satisfied with one person's thought, one person's voice. The life of language lies in passing from this person's mouth to that person's, from this context to the next, from this social group to that, from this generation to the next. At the same time, discourse never forgets its own provenance, and still less can it throw off the influence of the concrete context in which it lodges." (5) On one hand, the ceaseless transfer of discourse among persons, contexts, groups, and generational relations brings about its own variation; on the other hand, because discourse is not satisfied with the individual but belongs to society, to the group, it is bound to construct collectively shared cultural conventions, while its horizontal transmission and generational transfer, and the "provenance" thereby left behind, are again shareable—behind which lies the construction and ceaseless reconstruction of cultural convention.

Therefore we may as well follow the theoretical framework Tong Qingbing proposed, and, on the basis of "literary activity," push a step further forward, grasping and examining more carefully "literary behavior"—that is, regarding literature as the discourse-act of "the human." Only by penetrating into the literary discourse-act and grasping the cultural convention behind literary discourse can the inner mechanism by which literature and history are mutually entangled possibly be revealed. In that case, literature as "human studies" should be a discourse-act that tells of "the human"; and the human's character features are concretely embodied as the human's behavior—so literature is also the discourse-act that tells of "human behavior." Similar to the discourse-act, human behavior, as a distinctive discourse-act, follows social convention, and within it is contained the contest among traditions and the various social forces, fully embodying socio-historical features. Only by focusing the research base point on literary behavior, and concretely fixing our attention on the discourse-act and on character behavior, can we possibly truly seize the key, more clearly discover the symptom within it, profoundly reveal the historicity of discourse and the historicity of the human, and thereby advance the building of cultural poetics. For the convenience of exposition, we may further distinguish the discourse-act into the speech-act as medium and the narrative-act as narrative strategy. Thus we can interpret it from three layers respectively: first, the speech-act as medium and the cultural convention it contains; second, the character behavior as narrated object and the social convention; third, the narrative-act as narrative strategy and the narrative convention. It is precisely these three layers that jointly constitute the overall structure of literary behavior and become the most inner mechanism by which the literary text fuses with social history.

II. The Speech-Act and Cultural Convention: The Medium

Once we focus the research on literary behavior, the first thing we encounter is the layer of the speech-act. The various postmodern Western literary theories almost all fix their attention on the relations of language with society, history, culture, and politics, and with the various powers. In the literary text, the speech-act directly and intensively embodies the imprint that history has left; the cultural convention that the speech-act follows is in essence the main path by which power enters the speech-act. Its way of either displaying or concealing the truth, of either emphasizing or neglecting or distorting the facts, invariably displays a peculiar historicity, as well as a worldview and a set of values.

Literature is the art of language; what literature has already expressed and what it seeks to express must all be carried out through the speech-act—apart from the speech-act, literature would have nothing to which to attach itself. And the carrying out of the speech-act relies on its cultural convention; it is cultural convention that provides language with public rules, maintains the intelligibility and communicability of language, and endows language with the capacity to perform. This convention is not an iron law fixed and unchanging; it both embodies historical transmission and embodies social fashion, and is constructed by the mutual contention and consultation of the various social powers, displaying distinct social, historical, and cultural features. Therefore the power contained in language does not simply belong to the user, but is deeply and firmly concealed within the cultural convention that language itself enjoys, and is mainly carried out covertly by relying on cultural convention. Language is an important field of ideological struggle, and the ideological character of language is rooted precisely in the ideological character of cultural convention. The author's writing either complies with cultural convention, or strives to keep a certain distance from convention, or even resists and tampers with convention, so as thereby to determine the distinctive relation of his own writing and works to a specific society, history, and culture. What Althusser calls "symptomatic reading" is in fact the intention of discovering, in the gaps, blanks, and ruptures of language, the peculiar ideological features behind the text—features that hide precisely within the tense relation between the author and cultural convention. One may say that feminism and postcolonialism aim precisely at launching a struggle against cultural convention.

In order to throw off entirely the solidified cultural convention and to escape the male control of language, some feminist authors more extremely reject the conventions of written language, advocate body-writing, and seek to establish women's own distinctive mode of speech through unconscious murmurings and halting, hesitant expression. In the eyes of feminism, "the gift of form to the body is the gift of experience," and "structure and organization establish a position for the body as a subject" and generate meaning. (6) Accordingly, the basic unit of human action lies not in thought but in movement and motility. Although the body is equally unable to resist being shaped by patriarchal ideology, compared with language it has, after all, escaped logocentrism, rationalism, and the androcentrism hidden within them; it is closer to the human itself and more in keeping with women's nature. Writing with the body is in essence a stronger emphasis on the role of the unconscious in the writing process—using personal bodily experience, using the unconscious to resist the convention of writing, breaking through the repression of consciousness, reason, and language, and unfolding the distinctive features peculiar to women, so as to counter the male monopoly of discursive power.

Language is always permeated by ideology and the various cultural powers; it is closely related to gender, class, and race. For the postcolonial author, an important feature of imperial rule is the control of language. For a long time the educational system set up by the suzerain state took the metropolitan language it promoted as the "standard language," the "proper" paradigm, while it disparaged and marginalized all the local, native languages as "impure language" and "variant language"; and it used the classificatory models, hierarchical distinctions, and praising or denigrating attitudes possessed by the "standard language" to reshape the colonized people, so as thereby to obscure their vision, distort their habits of thought and structures of feeling, and remake them according to the will of the empire. "Language became the medium by which the hierarchical structure of power was perpetuated," and concepts such as "truth," "reality," and "order" were established through language. (7) Therefore, when the postcolonial author discovered that the vocabulary, classifications, and signs—and especially the conventions—of the standard language were unsuited to expressing native reality and their own deep feelings, he could not but resolutely reject the dominant position of the standard linguistic norm, subvert the dominant's linguistic conventions, and reconstruct language through abrogation, appropriation, hybridization, and fusion, so as to change the relations of center and margin, true and false, reasonable and unreasonable, essential and inessential, and to win back the control of language. For example, the Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara, in his work The Voice, attempted to apply the grammar and the categories of parts of speech of the Ijaw language to local English, creating in a hybridizing way a language closely related to national culture, so as thereby to resist imperial linguistic hegemony and to express his own nation's distinctive experience. "The 'marginal' and the 'variant' are features of the postcolonial conception of language and of society, and are the result of the process of abrogation. With the disappearance of the 'center,' fusion produces a reality in which the margin becomes a constituent factor of reality. Marginal discourses—such as those of race, gender, psychology, geographical and social distance, and political exclusion—converge in a conception of reality that transcends the geometric gap between center and margin and replaces it with a synthetic, interwoven, and superimposed conception of experience." (8)

Therefore, while we explore the socio-historical situation in which the author and the work are situated, we must pay still more attention to the relation between the distinctive language adopted by the text and cultural convention. It is precisely in the symptom displayed by the textual language's either submitting to or resisting cultural convention that the tense relation between the author's writing and a specific historical situation, and exactly how the historical context acts upon the author's writing and his work, are most profoundly revealed. Take, for example, the May Fourth vernacular-poetry movement: although it took "experiment" and "popularization" as its slogans and consciously drew nourishment from folk colloquial speech and folk songs, striving to contend with the old cultural elite for cultural power, the masses could not yet participate in the body of authors and readers—and this is precisely the reason why the new poetic language later grew ever more "Westernized." Vernacular poetry did, to be sure, break the writing convention of classical poetry, but it did not replace the convention of written language with the convention of folk oral language; it did not entirely throw off the norms of written language, and drew its writing conventions more from the West—and so it remained estranged from the masses. Contemporary "spoken-language poetry" is different. It resolutely bids farewell to the cultural elite, bids farewell to the lofty and the elegant, bids farewell to the culture of writing, and returns to the masses, to the folk, to everyday life. Anqi's "May We Meet in the Mortal World" is one exemplar of spoken-language poetic creation: in plain, colloquial speech it recounts a dream in which the father, lost in a forest fire and presumed dead, unexpectedly returns with a waxen-yellow face and fire-blackened hands, cheerfully saying that he too had thought himself dead but had unexpectedly come back to life, the whole family rejoicing—until, on waking, the speaker calmly knows that the father had been reincarnated, and breathes the wish that "we, may we meet in the mortal world." The language of the poem is drawn from folk colloquial speech, its imagery from everyday life, its savor from the ordinary masses. "Reincarnation" is here no mockery of religious notions or folk superstition; it lodges a simple, sincere wish that has accumulated over thousands of years—the lower stratum of society's yearning for the future. It is precisely the longing for "rebirth" and "reincarnation" that can possibly wipe away the deep grief and sorrow of losing a loved one and soothe the splitting wound. Yet all this happens only within a dream. Even in the dream, it cannot escape the conflict between wish and despair: the father's "waxen-yellow face" and fire-charred hands, his "good mood" and the smile still on his face—how does this resemble a father who has truly come back to life? Yet "I" still walk out of the dream with a smile. This is to flee the receding dream of despair and step into the hand-woven dream of future hope. When I firmly believe that we shall in the end meet in the mortal world, I have no sorrow, and none of us has sorrow. Whether in dream or awake, I firmly believe. The poem entirely casts off the former elite, written cultural convention and rebuilds a folk, plebeian, colloquial cultural convention; only thus does it truly bring the reader into a pure, ordinary mortal world. "Reincarnation" crosses the boundary of life and death, while the poem's paradoxical expression transcends life and death, transcending the human griefs and joys of life and refining from ordinary life the eternity of love. Here there is the deepest familial affection, a bone-deep love that transcends sorrow, displaying the endurance of the lower stratum of society. Oral language has a natural intimate connection with human behavior; it itself belongs to the human's everyday behavior. When poetic language casts off the convention of writing and returns entirely to the colloquial, deliberately seeking that natural, intimate, seemingly casual rhythm and melody, the cultural convention behind it grows closer to human behavior, more easily resonates with the unconscious, in an instant throws open the heart's door, and constitutes an enormous shock to the human spirit. Spoken-language poetry breaks the ready-made cultural convention, penetrates without scruple into every social corner, every everyday feeling, and turns its pen-tip toward the living scene of life through which the warmth of life flows. This is not a return to the ordinary state of the masses, but a breaking through of the "unified" ideological control of language, a re-seeking of vivid life, and an unearthing, from everyday life, of fresh new poetic quality. This is a poetic innovation that truly returns to the masses' soul, returns to the earth, returns to life. And the success of poetry's popularization stems from the masses' winning of cultural power for the first time.

The close relation of language and ideology destines it to be full of all sorts of power relations, profoundly embodying the social and cultural features of a specific age. James Paul Gee points out that the so-called "discourse models" are "closely related to 'positions and strategies.' By a 'social,' I mean anything and any occasion related to power, status, learning, identity, property, and the like (conversation, text, media, action, communication, institution). Because embedded within discourse models are assumptions about what is 'appropriate,' 'typical,' and/or 'normal,' they are thoroughly about positions and strategies." (9) This is the distinctive state of mind, helpless and resigned, that displays the lower stratum of society as no longer submissive yet able to do nothing—a posture that keeps a tension with the mainstream ideology. Speaking of carnival language, Kristeva says: "In fact, the carnival's transgression of linguistic rules (logical rules, social rules) can be realized and be effective because it endows itself with another set of laws." "The transgressive dialogue is at once a breaking of rules and a setting-up of its own rules." (10) The statement that it "sets up its own rules" is, to be sure, not wrong, but it is too simplified. The conventions behind language are not unified, but vary with different groups, different fields, and different objects of communication; and because conventions of different fields are mutually "hybridized" and mutually "inverted," they bring about non-conforming, grotesque language. The carnivalizing feature of the language of Wang Shuo's fiction is precisely a hybridizing, displacing, and inverting of cultural convention; it is a contempt and mockery, a provocation and deconstruction, of the ready-made cultural convention. Here Wang Shuo makes use of cultural convention in an oppositional way, deliberately creating a tense opposition with convention so as to establish his own posture of speech. This is precisely the symptom of an anxiety that both wishes to change the solidified social order yet can do nothing, and that is unwilling to keep its proper place yet cannot but abandon itself to despair—a universal state of mind in a period of social transformation; and Wang Shuo's language provides precisely an outlet for the venting of this anxious mood. This is the social root of why Wang Shuo's fiction won so many readers. Therefore, so long as it touches the cultural convention behind language, the analysis of the speech-act is no longer merely a formalist analysis; it is at the same time a historical and cultural analysis—and, just as Macherey and Eagleton pointed out, one must pay special attention to the blanks, pauses, and ruptures of language and to the symptoms revealed in the folds of language.

III. Character Behavior and Social Convention: The Narrated Object

Another layer of the literary work is human behavior. In the literary work, character behavior is always the core object of which discourse tells; even when psychological activity is depicted, this is only the re-presentation of the human's behavior-language memory and speech-act memory, inseparable from human behavior (including the speech-act). As for the natural landscape or socio-cultural landscape in the work, it too is a landscape that has been structured by behavior-language and the speech-act, and is not a purely self-subsistent landscape. The human's world is precisely a world doubly constructed by behavior-language and the speech-act. But in the research vision of classical narratology, the human is absent. What narratology values is narrative strategy and story plot; the character is merely a function attached to the plot, an empty, insubstantial, negligible position in the textual structure—and thereby the human, who is thoroughly soaked in cultural and historical features, is abstracted away. When we regard literature as human studies, we must reverse this relation anew and take the human as the core of analysis. And the human is mainly displayed through his behavior, including the speech-act; apart from the depiction of behavior, the character is bound to degenerate into an empty, abstract shadow. The plot, for its part, is only constructed as character behavior unfolds; it is subordinate to behavior, and at the same time endows behavior with meaning.

The core position of character behavior in literature determines that detail, and not plot, has primacy. Detail is the magnification and minute depiction of character behavior. In the detail, the author concentratedly delineates character behavior; even when other things are involved, they are all objects structured by behavior-language and branded with the imprint of human life, so that detail is always detail about behavior, and is at the same time detail that delicately displays character and soul. Through minute depiction it magnifies certain behaviors of the character and pushes them to the extreme, so as to break the numbness produced by habit and common sense, to illuminate the social conventions hidden behind behavior, to reveal the power relations and social truths submerged by everyday life, and to penetrate those subtle, unmanifest spiritual states. Therein, social convention is the key by which individual behavior is connected with social history: social convention links the individual with the social group, projecting the historical tradition and social fashion it has condensed, and the power relations and hierarchical order it embodies, onto the individual's mode of behavior. The relation of the individual to social convention determines the individuality and spiritual outlook peculiar to him. For example, in The Death of a Government Clerk, Chekhov trains his lens on the detail of Chervyakov, having sneezed, stammeringly apologizing to the general, and describes these ceaselessly repeated behaviors four times, exaggeratedly magnifying them until they become grotesque—so as to display in relief the gray life of this rule-abiding petty clerk of the tsarist age, the human nature distorted by the harsh hierarchical system, and the socio-cultural features that formed this character.

Fei Ming's story The Tale of the Bamboo Grove has a detail of this kind:

The third girl went into the room for a while, then came out; seeing her mother take up her chopsticks, she quickly fetched a cup—there was only this one in the house, always in the third girl's keeping—and, tiptoeing, brought it to the table; but Old Cheng, after all, had to shift it a little toward the middle himself, and then took out the pot. "Father, you drink wine; I eat dried beancurd!" Old Cheng really had no need of dishes to go with his wine; facing the third girl, he slowly drank. (11)

This detail not only recounts Old Cheng drinking wine and the third girl fetching the cup and eating dried beancurd; through these simple behaviors, it displays to the full the impoverished circumstances of an ordinary peasant family, the simple life, and the warm atmosphere of agrarian society. Although Old Cheng, as the male, enjoys the only wine cup in the house, he dotes on his daughter, and the home is still suffused with harmony and tenderness. The young third girl, even while acting coquettishly before her father, has long grown used to bearing her share of a farm child's responsibility. The patriarchal consciousness of agrarian society exists, in Old Cheng's home, in a special, roundabout way—it has been melted by warm love. The vivid detail throws into relief the character's words and bearing, brimming with specific socio-cultural connotation. It is precisely through the detail's focusing on behavior that the behavior's distinctive savor—the specific social situation, cultural custom, life-interest, mode of existence, and even the world of the soul contained in every gesture and movement—is vividly made manifest. One may say that the importance of human behavior determines the importance of the detailed description. As fiction shifted from the emphasis on story plot of its early period to the later emphasis on the human himself, detailed description thereby won a more prominent position, making the shaping of characters fuller and more vivid. So Paustovsky says that a work without detail is like smoked fish without a stick.

In Nabokov's view, "common sense" is a publicized notion; anything it touches is comfortably devalued. It destroys the author's genius, leading him to pick faults in rare and wondrous scenes and to be numbly indifferent to human behavior, replacing the wide-open eyes of a child first seeing a circus performance with lifeless, "round-and-round" "square" eyes. The author, for his part, ought to use detail to magnify human behavior so as to break common sense, to reveal character through minute depiction of behavior, to unearth the social content contained in behavior and the complex social relations among persons, and to illuminate the deep, dark human soul. Because "detail," in Nabokov's words, "is better than generalization, is the part more vivid than the whole, is that small thing at which only one person gazes and nods in greeting with a friendly soul, while the people around him are driven by some common stimulus toward another common goal." Nabokov tells of a hero who rushed into a great fire to save the neighbor's child, and who even risked spending five seconds looking for the child's beloved toy. Of this behavioral detail, Nabokov points out: "This talent for being anxious over trifles—heedless of the impending danger—these murmurings of the soul, these footnotes to the book of life, are the highest form of consciousness; and it is precisely in this childlike, speculative state, so divergent from common sense and its logic, that we can foretaste the wonder of the world." (12) Contrary to the above behavior, when the author notices the murderer's lower lip drooping stupidly, or when he sees the tyrant alone in his luxurious bedroom picking his fat nose with a short, thick forefinger, then the flash in the author's eye has more punitive power than the pistol of the stealthy conspirator. The "common sense" of which Nabokov speaks refers to the social convention that constrains behavior; and "logic" refers to behavior that wholly conforms to social convention—rule-abiding, conventional, customary behavior, which entirely loses its individuality and degenerates into "common sense," and therefore also loses vividness. Human behavior can neither do without the convention of the social group nor cease to stand in a certain tense relation with convention; the human's individuality is in essence the tension between individual behavior and social convention. The author ought keenly to discover this tense relation, throw it into relief, and, while vividly delineating character, illuminate the ideological character of social convention.

Detailed description in fiction appeared relatively late; it presupposes the development of the human's individuality and the recognition of the important position of the individual. In Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel, Bakhtin gave a good exposition of the cause by which life's "biographical self-consciousness" was generated. He pointed out that in the Greco-Roman period the "public self-consciousness" was the product of the public square; this self-consciousness was not yet self-consciousness in the true sense, but a form of "self-externalization," subordinate to the unity of the social whole, outward-turned and wholly public. Here there was no private secret, no inward person, no special attitude toward oneself—everything was "externalized." Only with the weakening of public-square life and the strengthening of the importance of private-life space—especially in the intimate atmosphere of letters among kin and friends—did people begin to cultivate a new self-consciousness of the private chamber. "Many details of private life began to acquire meaning. The image of the human began to move toward the enclosed space of private life, almost the secret space of an inner chamber; here the image of the human lost its solemn bearing and its complete public externality." (13) From this point on, the human no longer belonged solely to society, solely to the collective; he gained privacy and self-consciousness. The development of privacy and self-consciousness made the human's inner life rich, deep, and sensitive, and won for individuality a space of freedom, so that the human began to attend to the self and its inner world. At the same time, the external world too was no longer merely a public space, a common venue for collective activity; it was closely related to the individual—every thing and event was filtered through individual feeling and permeated by emotion, its subtle places invaded by the self and the private, from which one could glimpse what was of the self and of the private—and therefore it possessed important meaning. This discovery of the human himself and of the details of life provided the basis for detailed description in fiction.

The individual's gaining of privacy and self-consciousness was not at the cost of the loss of the human's sociality; rather, it was the deep fusion of the two features of privacy and sociality, the manifestation of sociality in richer and more varied forms—a historical-cultural imprint deeply engraved on the individual's soul and body, impossible to erase. On his public behavior is inscribed his distinctive individuality, and his private behavior too cannot entirely throw off public character. As Bourdieu says, "those utterly heedless bodily postures, those daily trivial bodily techniques—for example, the way of walking, of blowing the nose, of eating, the tone of speech, and so on—are all directly related to the construction of the human as an individual and to the principles by which society is evaluated." (14) This close relation between individual behavior and society is built upon the behavioral convention of the social group; this is the most profound connection between individual and society, and is also the most sensitive symptom by which we grasp the historical connotation of the literary text. Here, society, history, culture, and the various power relations are no longer an environmental background external to the human; they have already deeply embedded themselves in the human's body, unconsciously dominating the human's behavior, marking the human's social position and identity. What Althusser calls ideology and "interpellation," Foucault's "discipline," and Bourdieu's "habitus" all reveal that human behavior cannot but be manipulated by the various powers, and that this manipulation is mainly carried out covertly by setting up the various social conventions. Every individual internalizes the social convention of a specific group in his own distinctive way—either complying with, or distancing from, or resisting it—and stands in a certain tense relation with social convention. The author's sensitivity to, and comprehension of, the tense relation between character behavior and social convention both determines the vividness and human depth of the work and embodies the depth of his understanding and critique of social history. When literary detail breaks the unconsciousness of everyday behavior and focuses on and magnifies these behaviors, the social convention that behavior enjoys is laid wholly bare, and the social ideology and power relations are exposed.

In Eileen Chang's novel The Golden Cangue, the protagonist Cao Qiqiao appears before her two sisters-in-law like this:

The others were talking and laughing in low voices; Liuxi raised the curtain and announced: "The Second Mistress has come." Lanxian and Yunze rose to make way for her, but that Cao Qiqiao did not sit down; with one hand bracing the door and one hand on her hip… she glanced around and said with a laugh: "Everyone's here. I suppose I'm late again today! Who can blame me for being late—I had to grope my way in the dark to do my hair! Who told them to give me the one room whose window faces the back yard? They singled out that room for me…" (15)

Cao Qiqiao's whole get-up and her stance—one hand bracing the door, one hand on the hip—and that sharp, caustic speech vividly display the character of a woman of the marketplace; as the maidservant says, she is the very "signboard of a sesame-oil shop." Qiqiao grew up in a sesame-oil shop, has seen much of the world, is by nature pungent and aggressive; but once she steps into the Jiang mansion, her every move is out of keeping with this great high-gated household, and she can only become the laughingstock of all—not only despised by her sisters-in-law but mocked behind her back even by the maidservants. Her very habits of behavior have already betrayed her original status, laid bare her awkward position in this great family, and intimated the unequal order constructed within this great mansion on the basis of differences of status, and the power struggle thereby provoked. This gap of status gnaws ceaselessly, every moment, at Cao Qiqiao's courage to live, and distorts her soul.

IV. The Narrative-Act and Narrative Convention: The Strategy

If the fictional detail tends to focus on and magnify the character behavior of a certain time-segment, revealing from it social convention, character, and the deep, dark soul, and stripping bare the inner historical factors, then the plot is constructed as a series of behaviors unfolds along the temporal dimension. Taking character behavior as its core, the plot displays the behavioral entanglements or conflicts among persons and the historical context that changes with the characters' activity; it involves the public space more, and more directly, and possesses a more conspicuous sociality. The events and scenes that the plot displays often symbolize or refract historical events and scenes; at the same time, the plot unfolds the whole process of character behavior, connecting its cause, process, and consequence, placing them within a changing context, and, from the connection of behavior and context and from the tragic, comic, or farcical ending, passing judgment anew on behavior—thereby making a further interpretation of the meaning of behavior. It is precisely in the process of narrating the story plot that character behavior receives its fullest evaluation. Therefore the plot is not merely an attractive artistic means; in fact, the narrative convention that governs the manner in which the plot is structured embodies a specific inner logic, as well as a view of history, of life, and of value, containing a judgment that either praises or denigrates character behavior; and how the work designs the plot and narrates the story implies the author's understanding of the human's destiny and his conception of how the human's future ought to be. Mark Currie once interpreted the ending of fiction—that is, the resolution of the story plot. He says: "The ending of a novel is the method by which values are projected onto events; it makes the remaining narrative sequence intelligible to the reader in retrospect… These novels do not think about themselves; what they think about is the logic and ideology of narrative in the act of explaining the world." (16)

The plot interprets the view of history, life, and value through the unfolding of character behavior, the intersection and conflict of different characters' behavior, the relation of behavior to its cause and consequence, and the interaction of behavior with the social context; and at the same time, it brings the reader into the process of identity construction. The human's identity is most fully embodied in his behavior; it is the social convention that behavior enjoys that distinguishes the human, assigning him to a specific group and thereby determining his social identity. The literary detail's static focus on character behavior often leads the reader to examine behavior itself and discover the social convention, spiritual connotation, and meaning contained in behavior; while the plot, as the dynamic carrying-out of character behavior, more easily draws the reader directly into immersion, acting together with the characters, experiencing deeply, and, in the process of following the characters' action and experience, establishing a connection with the social convention that the characters' behavior enjoys. The plot constructed by fictional narrative participates in identity construction precisely by establishing the reader's relation to a specific social convention and unconsciously sharing this convention. "Identity is often imagined, the result of the imagination pretending 'our feelings are coherent,' so as to avoid discontinuity; and it brings up concepts such as soul, self, and matter to mask change." (17) The plot, with character behavior as its core, provides us with the richest and most complete imagination; the wholeness of the plot endows us with a coherent identity, while the strangeness of the plot expands the human's potential and the discovery of self-potential, and, through imagination, answers a series of questions such as "Who am I?" and "What kind of person do I want to become?" helping us establish our own identity and view of life. As McAdams says: "The story answers the questions 'Who am I?' 'Where do I come from?' and 'How do I fit into the adult world?' Identity is itself a life story… The construction of identity is the construction of plot, role, background, scene, and subject." (18) And "How do I fit into the adult world?" is in essence the completion of the individual's socialization by sharing the social convention of a specific group. In this process, narrative strategy and narrative convention both regulate and influence the reader's attitude of either drawing near to or rejecting social convention, and the degree of acceptance and sharing, and in turn also refract the author's own value position and attitude.

In The Sorrowful Narrator, Zhao Yiheng, speaking of the "didactic paradigm" of Ming-Qing vernacular fiction, points out that these works are full of erotic content, the plot always ending with the male and female protagonists being punished, and there must be a clear causal chain; through the conflict of good and evil and the retribution of cause and effect, judgment is passed on the narrated world. The narrator, as a moral preacher, must stand above the narrated world, intervening in the narrative process by prolepsis and narratorial intrusion; his tone must be straightforward and wholly reliable, possessing the omniscience and omnipotence of knowing everything in the world, so as to give the moral judgment sufficient authority. The cause of the formation of this narrative convention lies in this: "They must conform to the mainstream cultural norms, lest they be expelled from this culture, but at the same time they must amuse the masses with interesting stories." (19) In the Ming-Qing period, the commodity economy and the citizen class had already developed to a considerable degree, and the resulting contest between new economic power and traditional cultural power, and between citizen taste and the false morality of the scholar-officials, was imprinted upon the narrative behavior and convention of this "didactic paradigm" of vernacular fiction.

Unlike traditional fiction's emphasis on story plot, modern fiction's de-emphasizing of plot is precisely for the sake of negating the wholeness and coherence of the event itself, deconstructing the wholeness of the character image and the determinacy of identity, and abandoning any unified interpretation and value judgment of character behavior. The author no longer has the right to arrange the characters' destiny at will, still less the right to use plot design to try to impose his own view of history, life, and value upon the reader; and so the reader seems to have won a freer right of interpretation. But the author's withdrawal is not an entire abandonment of his own responsibility; in a more cautious and humble way, he issues an invitation to the reader through narrative strategy so as to regulate the reading. Lyotard says: "Narrative defines what has the right to speak itself and form itself within a culture, and, because narrative is also a part of this culture, it thereby legitimates itself in this way." (20) Narrative behavior, as a customary cultural form, is itself a way in which power operates; with the aid of all sorts of strategies and conventions, it intends to regulate the reader's relation to the text, to regulate the reader's angle on and distance from the characters, to guide the reader either to experience or to cognize the literary world, and, imperceptibly, to exert its own influence. The setting-up of narrative convention is the premise by which literary narrative attains its own "legitimation," and the guarantee by which narrative strategy exerts its regulating function; the effectiveness of narrative strategy depends on the effectiveness of convention. Thus post-classical narratology and the new rhetoric can be taken in by cultural poetics. We can examine narrative behavior and narrative convention from the perspective of cultural power, discuss the relation of narrative behavior to the work's construction, literary reading, and the reader's interpretive position, and discuss the role of narrative convention within all this.

Unlike Chekhov, who in a caricatured way exaggeratedly and coolly displays the behavioral details of a petty clerk, in A Weak Heart Dostoevsky narrated another petty clerk, Vasya Shumkov. At the coming of the New Year, Vasya is lucky enough: he has unexpectedly become engaged, has received a lock of black hair sent by his fiancée through her younger brother; he has won the favor of his superior, who even says "thank you" to him and takes thirty silver rubles from his own pocket to reward him; and his fine handwriting is also appreciated by the superior, who entrusts him with the task of copying official documents. Thus he will have money to support the imagined family soon to be founded. During the holiday, he forgets to eat and sleep in copying the documents, yet, for all his effort, cannot finish. It is precisely the unexpectedly descending good fortune and the fear of the future that utterly break Vasya down: his spirit collapses, and he goes mad. In the novel, although Dostoevsky uses third-person narration, he places Vasya and his colleague Arkady—who lives under the same roof, in the same apartment, and is as close to him as a brother—together to narrate, focusing mainly through the viewpoint of the two close friends, which effectively draws near the reader's psychic distance to Vasya, so that the reader cannot but follow Arkady and feel deep sympathy for this petty clerk of weak character. James Phelan says: "The rhetorical method pays special attention to the relation between narrative strategy and the reader's activity—the events that occur on the two levels of story and discourse affect the reader's cognition, belief, thought, judgment, and feeling." (21) While making a profound critique of the social culture of the tsarist age, Dostoevsky's narrative strategy, compared with Chekhov's, pours a deeper and more sincere sympathy upon the petty clerk; and this relation between narrative strategy and character behavior intimates precisely the author's distinctive value position.

But in many novels such as Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's narrative behavior shows itself more restrained and more self-conscious. He broke through the narrative convention of "monologic" fiction, no longer treating the characters, in the author's identity, as "objects" he could manipulate at will, no longer letting his own thought penetrate the characters' thought, but changing his own form of existence, giving up his privileged identity, throwing off the closure and finalizedness of the monologic type, letting the characters and their thought break free of the author's constraint, and placing the author himself on the same plane as the characters so as to realize complete "dialogization"—letting the mutually independent, mutually unmerged souls communicate, and, in a wholly equal identity, together with the other characters, take part in the large-scale dialogue of the "true polyphonic novel." Of this, Bakhtin points out: "Dostoevsky's interest in the protagonist lies in the protagonist's distinctive view of the world and of himself, in a particular attitude toward the reality around him. For Dostoevsky, what is important is not what the protagonist is in the world, but first of all what the world is in the protagonist's eyes, and what he is in his own eyes." (22) This is a thoroughgoing shift of position—from the author's position and viewpoint to the character's position and viewpoint, from the author's worldview to the character's worldview—thereby gaining a pluralism of positions, viewpoints, and worldviews, breaking the unitariness of the worldview, and opening up a richly plural world and a richly plural thought. Although this conception of fiction was ahead of its time in the Russian society of the day, it was also deeply latent in the soil of thought, foreshadowing an enormous social-intellectual upheaval, and was transformed into the historical opportunity for Dostoevsky's rebuilding of a wholly new narrative behavior and convention.

Feminist authors have a special sensitivity to traditional narrative convention and attend to constructing their own distinctive narrative strategies. For example, the narrative convention of eighteenth-century English literary works was constructed by male authors and bore the imprint of masculinism. People often held that public discourse belonged to men, while private discourse belonged to women; a "respectable" woman ought not to tell her own story to an audience that included strange men. This narrative convention governed the voice of the fictional narrator, so that the fiction of the women authors of the day lacked a public private voice. Therefore, in Lanser's view, the woman author, in her creation, could not but face many troubles: "She had to keep the boundary between the author and the fictional character serving as narrator, so as thereby to preserve the credibility of the narrative." At the same time, "she had to maintain a balance between the force of public narration and the protection of privacy, within the bounds of a marriage system that required women to hide their own social identity behind the male social identity." (23) The woman author was in a difficult situation different from that of the male author; she could not but choose her own writing position and narrative strategy between complying with and resisting narrative convention. And it is precisely in the distinctive tension constituted between the text's narrative strategy and narrative convention that the historical symptom of the woman author and of the woman's literary work is revealed.

The narrative conventions of traditional fiction, modern fiction, and postmodern fiction differ conspicuously. The postmodern era's respect for cultural diversity and value pluralism, and its skepticism toward grand narratives, prompt it ceaselessly to challenge and deconstruct ready-made narrative conventions. In the novel Foe, Coetzee, through the shipwreck survivor Susan Barton, re-narrates the story of Robinson Cruso and Friday, and establishes an intertextual relation with the English classic Robinson Crusoe. The Crusoe of Robinson Crusoe is a male hero who, according to the intention of a "civilized man," sets out to build the deserted island and conquer savagery—in essence, to remake the small island into a "colony" overseas. Foe is wholly different: it takes a woman, Susan, as protagonist; as a latecomer who has met with shipwreck, Susan does not, like Crusoe, directly participate in the island's construction, but, in the identity of a bystander, focuses on everything and explores the secret of what has happened on the desert island. In her eyes, Cruso's busyness is meaningless: all day long he piles stones to build terraced fields, yet has no seed to sow, and can only let the terraces run wild again. The colonist's vaulting ambition of Robinson Crusoe has already been replaced by boredom and dejection, and the effective pioneering has been rewritten as the destruction of the island's ecology. The intertextuality of Foe with Robinson Crusoe critiques and deconstructs precisely that colonialist ideal of the original work.

In order to tell the world of her adventure, Susan, after being rescued, uses a diary and letters to record her island experience, and sends them in installments to the author Mr. Foe as material for writing a novel; but the two diverge over how to select material and conceive the theme. This dispute not only exposes the writing process of Foe but also intimates the ideological features behind the fiction Robinson Crusoe, and even deconstructs the novel's author, raising doubt over who the author is. How to narrate one's own story is an important path for re-recognizing and constructing the self; and it is precisely in the process of writing the shipwreck story that Susan begins to doubt whether she really exists, or is only the puppet of the story, or even a ghost summoned by a sorcerer. Through metanarrative, Foe exposes the narrative behavior and convention of the novel, placing it within the vision of open discussion, questioning, and critique—not only subverting the narrative convention of traditional fiction but at the same time obliquely intimating the hypocrisy by which Western history and literature, consciously or unconsciously, dress themselves up.

The Friday in the novel Foe is a slave whose tongue has been cut out; he has entirely lost the possibility of telling the suffering history of his being at others' mercy. Cruso, for his part, is vague and evasive about this. The savage perpetrators of that time are hidden away, the past disaster of the colonized is sealed forever, and they thereby also lose their future—just as Mr. Foe says: "So long as he cannot speak, we can plead ignorance of his desire and go on making him do as we wish." (24) To deprive of discursive power is the best strategy for making the other forever sink into the condition of a slave; even teaching Friday to write in English is, precisely, a more effective means of enslavement. Cultural difference and difference of identity have already set, in advance, a barrier hard to cross between Susan and Friday. Even though Susan sees with her own eyes Friday paddling a small boat to a seaweed-grown harbor to scatter flower petals, and dancing ceaselessly, whirling in the kitchen with eyes closed, wearing a wig and a robe, she still cannot understand what is happening before her. So long as Susan stands on her own position and regards Friday as a "shadow"-like human, there can be no true communication and understanding between them. As a typical postmodern metafiction, Foe questions Western colonial history, questions historical and literary narrative, questions so-called facts and truths, questions authorship and discursive power, and questions the human's subjectivity and the shared character of discourse. The author Coetzee breaks the traditional narrative convention, his edge pointing directly at the civilizational foundation constructed in the modern period and on which modern society depends for survival, making all that is solid melt into air. This broad, profound spirit of skeptical critique fully displays the cultural features of the postmodern. However, although postmodern metafiction has great critical power toward traditional narrative convention, it merely pushes the original narrative behavior and convention into the foreground with its own narration and passes judgment on it, while it itself remains a kind of narration, never able to leap out of the narrative circle, never able entirely to evade narrative convention and the power relations implied within convention. Narration can never escape the narrator's own historical situation.

In literary activity, the speech-act and the cultural convention it contains, character behavior and social convention, the narrative-act and narrative convention are the three most inner layers by which historical factors slip into the literary text, and are also the key to the contest of the various social-cultural powers. But these three layers are not mutually independent; they are mutually fused and reciprocally acting. Among them, the speech-act and cultural convention, and the narrative-act and narrative convention, have a closer relation: as two different sides of the discourse-act, they jointly shape the manifest stylistic features of the literary text and, with their own changes, rewrite literary style. Character behavior and social convention, for their part, are the indirect, latent factors that influence literary style. The relation between the character behavior in the work and the corresponding discourse strategy always implies the author's value position, which he is unwilling to state openly yet expresses in a roundabout way; conversely, when character behavior and the implied social convention change, the value relation between the author and the narrated object is bound to change accordingly, and this requires the author to choose a new discourse strategy and to adjust the discourse-act (the speech-act and the narrative-act), thereby bringing about the evolution of literary style and convention.

Therefore, literary research can both proceed from the three layers separately to analyze and interpret, and should also regard them as a whole, mutually interpenetrating, discovering the symptoms and the connecting mechanisms within, deeply revealing the historical connotation of literature and exactly how the various historical factors reciprocally act. At the same time, the inner connection of literature and history should also be combined with the historical context and even the historical background; only thus can cultural poetics be solidly built. Tong Qingbing's conception and proposal of cultural poetics opened up a new space for the building of literary theory; it is precisely on the basis of this conception that we can possibly integrate the various cultural resources and make a more profound interpretation of literature.