Wolfgang Iser's The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology is an important work that gives comprehensive and deep thought to the problem of literary fiction; it is a powerful work he brought out after making outstanding contributions in the field of reception theory.
As the ideological character of literature replaces, in its conspicuous way, the independence and aesthetic character of literature, the cultural functions literature bears are bound to grow ever more complex and ever more arbitrary, and the necessity of its existence is thereby called into question. It is precisely against this state of affairs that Iser tries to reinterpret, from an anthropological angle, the fundamental reason why the human cannot do without literature. Seizing the core problem of literary fiction, he not only deeply discusses the relations among reality, fiction, and imagination in literary activity, and combs—from the angles of literary and philosophical history—the evolution of theories of fiction and imagination, but also devotes himself to exploring the anthropological basis of literary fiction. One may therefore say that this work marks a further deepening of Iser's literary thought: he no longer talks of literature merely with respect to literature, but treats literary activity as an indispensable component of human activity, re-examining literature from the basic features of the human.
I
As Sartre pointed out, the human's ideal existence is an existence that both "is what it is not" and "is not what it is"; Iser gives this his own development. He holds that the human always both wants to understand his already-existing self-existence and yearns for the future, hoping to break through the self and reshape the self. The human lives both "centripetally" and "centrifugally." It is precisely on the basis of this nature of the human that literature is bound to become an indispensable realm of activity for the human, because literature provides the human with various modes of existence that are related to reality yet not limited by reality, and provides the human with different forms of "the human's self-untying": literature embodies the impulse of humanity's self-presentation, unfolds this impulse before the human's eyes, and prompts the human to ponder "what, after all, is the human?"; at the same time, through fiction and imagination it displays the human's plasticity, letting the human personally experience and discover "what the human ought to be" and "what the human may become." Only literature, as fictional text, keeps human history in an extremely active, open state, opening up infinite possibilities for human existence. The fictionality of literature contains the profound root of the human's being human. This fictional consciousness is an invader of the real world; it evades the human's cognitive capacity, openly disregards the essence of things, tears apart and expands this world it takes as reference, and constitutes an act that crosses the boundary between reality and fiction. The "boundary-crossing act" of literary fiction both creates a literary fictional world and at the same time connects the two worlds of reality and fiction. Therefore, in Iser's theory, literary fiction is no longer opposed to reality, but becomes a boundary-crossing act that traverses and connects the two worlds of fiction and reality.
For this, Iser pointed out the fallacies in the "common sense" about the relation between fiction and reality: first, people have always regarded literature as "a fictional thing" and taken this as "self-evident knowledge"; second, once literature is a fictional text, it severs its own connection with known reality, and so is bound to become a "heavenly script" that no one can understand. Both of these are common sense, yet they contradict each other, and people have not realized the logical contradiction between them. This contradiction is grounded precisely in the old notion of traditional epistemology that opposes reality and fiction. Against this, Iser proposes his own distinctive view of literature: namely, to replace the traditional "binary opposition" with the "trinity" of reality, fiction, and imagination, and to take this trinity-relation as the basis of the existence of the literary text.
In Iser's view, the literary text is a "mixture" of reality and fiction, the result of given things and imagined things entangling and interpenetrating each other. In the text, the feature of interpenetration and fusion of reality and fiction far exceeds the feature of mutual opposition. On one hand, the text is suffused with a great many words of determinate meaning, which come from society, from certain realities that no text can carry. Yet on the other hand, the literary text does not exist in order to pursue reality: "Whenever reality is transposed into a text, it inevitably becomes a sign closely related to a great many other things. The text therefore quite naturally transcends the prototypes they depict." (1: 15)
In past literary theory, fiction and imagination were mutually entangled, hard-to-distinguish concepts; Iser tries to distinguish the two. In his view, fiction is a conscious mode of operation, an act guided and controlled by the subject; whereas imagination is spontaneous and is not a self-acting potential—it must rely on other factors to come into play. Like a willful specter, imagination often flashes by, coming and going without trace, with no fixed form; it is the instantaneous manifestation of the self-will. Therefore the fictionalizing act activates the protean potential of imagination and endows imagination with a clear gestalt, providing the basis, orientation, and framework for imagination's boundary-crossing of reality. In literary activity, fiction and imagination interact and blend as intimately as water and milk. Led by the fictionalizing act, reality is able to rise into imagination; fiction tears down the fence of reality, while at the same time corralling the unbridled wild horse of imagination into the enclosure of form; the fictionalizing act serves as the bond between imagination and reality, while imagination, with its colorful images, provides literature with its aesthetic dimension. "In this process, fiction transcodes the known world and turns the unknown world into something imaginary, and the world re-combined out of these two—imagination and reality—is a new vista presented to the reader." (1: 16) Fiction and imagination fuse with each other and jointly carry out multiple boundary-crossings, providing a free space for imagination to gallop. This is precisely what Iser can use to expound the boundary-crossing act of literary fiction.
Iser takes the pastoral poetry of the Renaissance and works of pastoral style as examples to expound concretely the boundary-crossing act of literary fiction. The pastoral form has a dual structure: on one hand, it reproduces the rural world; on the other, it creates another pastoral world, so as to make possible things that cannot be found in reality. These two worlds have a dual reference, and so the world of the fictional pastoral poem relates at once to an idealized state and to the historical world. Fiction makes things that were originally mutually exclusive coexist peacefully. "In the process of crossing the boundary between the historical world and the artistic world, the pastoral romance offers a vivid picture of literary fiction that is placed in neither the artistic world nor the historical world." (1: 66) As long as people put on the mask of the "shepherd," the protagonist of the pastoral poem, they can freely pass from one world to another; and at the same time the mask is revealed as a fictional appearance, so that the fictional disguise permits him to break, as he pleases, into any forbidden zone and to violate various real prohibitions. The mask grants the human a duality: he is at once himself and performs as a shepherd, and thereby becomes "another." The mask, with its disguise, conceals the human's true face, yet, through changing roles, reveals the human's infinitely rich diversity. The human transcends himself by means of the mask, and the mask lets the human stand outside himself and thereby discover himself, and truly possess himself.
II
The most basic feature of Iser's way of expounding literary fiction lies in this: he does not treat literary fiction as the opposite of "reality" or "the true" and give it a static conceptual definition, but treats it as a "fictionalizing act." Since it is an "act," its boundary is bound to change constantly and to be perpetually in flux; one cannot give it a simple definition, but should instead turn to describing its functions. It is on this basis that Iser distinguishes the functions of literary fiction into selection, fusion, and self-disclosure.
The literary work is the result of the author's selection, in accordance with his own tendency, from the multiple factors of the social, historical, cultural, and literary systems. As long as the reference in the text is a component of the given world, it can be regarded as reality itself. But selection is a boundary-crossing act, for once an object is selected and appropriated, it is lifted out of the real context to which it originally belonged, loses the true form and function it had in the original system, and becomes a component of "another" literary world. Selection transforms the real reference, breaks its given order, and reorganizes it in the order of "another" literary world. Although the selected object is not itself a fictional thing, it has already been lifted out of the boundary of its original reality and entered the realm of literary fiction. As for the constructed literary fictional world, those factors excluded in the process of selection, though absent, will—precisely because they were originally closely related to the selected factors—also enter the human's field of perception along with them, and this forms a "large background" for examining the fictionalizing act. "Those seemingly unmistakable absentees are, in the text, as if always present." (1: 18–19) The same holds for the selection of cultural customs, literary allusions, and conventions. On one hand they are related to the original text and keep their most basic meaning; on the other hand they have already been incorporated into the new text and have gained new meaning in the new structural system and context. Therefore literature's multiple selections bring about multiple boundary-crossings and thereby form an interweaving of multiple systems. The literary text is destined to its own extremely complex "intertextuality": it both becomes a unique fictional text (by virtue of its multiple boundary-crossings) and constitutes a relation of mutual reference with society, history, culture, and other texts. "Selection, as a fictionalizing act, reveals the intentionality of the text. It introduces into the text a cross-textual reality, brings the various selected factors from different systems into a common context, and this context takes the factors eliminated in the process of selection as background; thus a process of bidirectional mutual-interpretation is formed—the present displays its existence by relying on the absent, while the absent displays itself through the present." (1: 19) It is precisely this "bidirectional mutual-interpretation" that both distinguishes and dissolves the boundary between reality and fiction, and the boundaries among the various other texts, constituting a multiple boundary-crossing act. Therefore we can neither equate the intention of the literary text with an interrogation of the real world, nor regard it as an illusory imagination—a "transitional object" lying between reality and imagination.
Another function of the fictionalizing act is fusion, which combines the various selected factors into an organic whole; it is an important complementary mode to selection.
Speaking of literary language, Bakhtin points out that the novel as a whole is a phenomenon of the fusion of multiple styles, hetero-genres, and many voices. These styles, heteroglossia, and various voices come from various social spheres, strata, and peoples, each bearing its own intention and dragging along its original context; in the novel they constitute the interaction among different contexts, different viewpoints, different horizons, different emotional colorings, and different social languages—mutually supporting and setting one another off, or mutually contradicting and conflicting. Both speaker and listener must enter the other's horizon, and, within the other's boundaries and against an apperceptive background, establish their own discourse or arrive at an understanding of discourse. The work of the novel must broadly admit multiple language-types, many voices, and many forms—often even components of different national languages—displaying, in different registers, the specific evaluations of various worldviews, factions, and social aspects; and it must at the same time make the various heteroglossia obey the "supreme rhetorical whole," constructing an organically unified world of the work. "The background of the work as a unified whole. Against this background, the speech of the character sounds entirely different from the way it exists independently under the conditions of real verbal communication: in contrast with other speech, with the author's speech, it gains an additional meaning, and onto its directly thing-pointing factor are added new, authorial voices (mockery, anger, and so on), as if the shadow of the surrounding context fell upon it… In the unity of a complete work, the very fact that one piece of speech is framed by other speech endows the speech with an additional factor that makes it coalesce into a speech-image, and establishes for it new boundaries different from the actual conditions of existence in that field." (2) In this way the literary text both has its own world—its own unity and wholeness—and is full of various dialogues and sub-dialogues, a "confluence" in which various kinds of speech fuse.
Bakhtin's "supreme rhetorical whole" expounds mainly from the angle of speech-types and features how literature, after all, fuses heteroglossia into the whole of the work; Iser, for his part, enlarges the scope of the fusion function, including not only the fusion of discourse and words among different texts and different systems, but also different social phenomena, different cultural customs, literary allusions, and so on. The selected factors, in the process of fusion, re-establish a new order and gain the "sense of reality" of the literary world—a "reality" utterly different from that of the empirical world, or what Goodman calls "the reality that stems from fiction." (3: 106) As for the factors excluded outside, although they fail to enter the text, since they were originally related to the selected factors, they form the background of the highlighted factors and establish a "form-and-shadow" relation. "The present displays its existence through the absent. But when fusion can be realized only through the participation of the excluded factors, the fictionalizing act necessarily creates a situation of mutual dependence between presence and absence. Conversely, the relations already determined in the text become lively again in this process." (1: 22) The fusion function makes the various contradictory factors jointly relate to the unified whole of the text; they both mutually reveal and mutually conceal one another, thereby endowing the literary text with extremely rich intertextuality, and thus constituting boundary-crossing acts of various natures, which lead to the instability of meaning.
Both selection and fusion involve boundary-crossing between literature and the social system, and both also involve a cross-textual boundary-crossing of the reference system. The boundary-crossing act passes through the boundary between fiction and reality, and the boundaries among texts, and also blurs the boundaries among them, blurring the boundary of the literary work. In order to carry the fictionalizing act through to the end and make literature a complete, unified world, yet another function is needed; this is fictional self-disclosure.
Iser holds that the literary text contains a great many signals marking its fictional features; these signals are not equivalent to linguistic signals, but are certain marks shared by author and reader under specific historical conditions. For example, literary genres, popular stories, and the like all possess a fictional function that brings author and reader to a tacit understanding. The self-disclosure function of literary fiction both requires the author to follow these cultural consensuses to complete the construction of the literary text and to set up certain marks, and guides the reader to read it as a fictional text. The self-disclosure function of literature effectively carries out the literary text's self-presentation and self-explanation. From a certain angle, this consensus reached between author and reader is like what Jonathan Culler calls "conventions." On one hand, conventions are a certain literary notion and capacity that the author gains from the literary tradition and that becomes the author's introspective consciousness in carrying out creation; on the other hand, they are also a reading capacity that the reader possesses, by which the reader, according to a series of formal rules established in his literary experience, regards the text as a non-real fictional thing and thereby unfolds a re-creation—these conventions being both the condition for his carrying out re-creation and a limitation upon creation. It is precisely because literary conventions exist that literary reading activity can be effectively guided, so that for the reader "to read a certain text as literature is to read it as fictional writing." (4) In Iser's theory of literary fiction, the fictional text's self-disclosure is the highlighting of the literary text's fictionality; for the reader, it guides a change of reading-attitude, requiring the reader to change his reception-mentality so as to distinguish it from the attitude with which he reads a non-literary text. The self-disclosure function arouses the reader's enthusiasm for a non-real world and lets the reader's self-reality unfold in imagination. The text realizes a re-creation before the reader's experience.
When the reader regards literature as a fictional world, the many faintly discernible "realities" implied in the text are also disguised, the "real" world is thereby suspended, and the reader's "authentic attitude" is suspended as well. Only through this suspension does the reader's imagination gain freedom, and only then can true literary appreciation proceed smoothly. "As regards this intention of transcending reality, the actual function of the fictional text is nothing more than to sketch a vague outline for reality—rather like drawing a cake to satisfy hunger. For, with respect to its practical use, fiction always has an unsolvable knot, namely that the reality of the text is not equal to the reality of reality. The reality of the text is an illusory reality, because its function is precisely to endow the object with an imaginative space." (1: 27) Literary fiction cannot do without the self-disclosure function; it is precisely this that reveals the fictionality of the text and endows both author and reader with the power to transcend reality and to experience, in person, the various possibilities of existence. This is fictional self-disclosure.
III
In examining the historical evolution of fiction theory, Iser points out that, with the decline of the notion of the certainty of knowledge and the deepening of research into the problem of fiction, the status of fiction in philosophy began to climb: it was transformed from a form of deception possessing only negative value into a basic constitutive mode of cognition. As Kermode pointed out, the human builds "harmonious fictions" by providing fictive beginnings and endings, and thereby seeks the meaning of reality. Or, as Goodman says, the world is a product of human symbolic activity, artificially constructed, and there exist all sorts of different worlds, with no so-called real world at all. Iser therefore holds that fiction has a pragmatist nature: it depends on the attitude we take toward it, always displaying itself in a wandering, unfixed way according to different needs and different contexts, producing different forms of fiction, its boundary forever in flux. The concrete application of fiction verifies only the function of fiction, not its essence; it cannot acquire an unchanging identity. For this, Iser focuses on the interpretations of fiction theory by such scholars as Francis Bacon, Jeremy Bentham, Hans Vaihinger, and Nelson Goodman, placing "fiction" within the system of philosophical discourse for analysis and combing.
Bacon revealed the "four idols" as concrete forms of "representation" and devoted himself to overcoming false representation by means of "fictional design"—that is, experiment and operation. Unlike Bacon, Bentham did not intend to eliminate fiction, but criticized the special use of fiction in the legal domain, holding that legal practice conceals and suppresses awareness of its fictional character. In fact, fiction, as a "modality," constructs "fictional entities," and only through fictional entities can the human endow real objects with form, come to know objects, and talk of them as real existences. In Bentham's theory, fiction is no longer the opposite of reality but has become a "mediating mode" between concept and reality. If, in Bentham, we already see an affirmative tendency toward fiction—though this affirmation is still limited to bridging the gap exposed within the epistemological horizon—then, for Vaihinger, fiction explains the fundamental split between sensation and reality, and only fiction can throw this split into relief. According to the change in the status of the concept, Vaihinger sketched a schema of the difference between sensation and phenomenon: namely, dogma, hypothesis, and fiction. In dogma, people deny the actually-existing fiction and stress that the concept conforms to reality, so as to fill in the difference; in hypothesis, the inconsistency of concept and reality is pointed out, so that the concept becomes a hypothesis that needs to be corrected in a process of repeated testing; in fiction, difference is acknowledged, and the consciousness of distinction occupies the dominant position. Hypothesis always seeks to explain the order it itself creates and gains legitimacy by striving for broad assent; fiction, by means of imagination, begins to plan the production of certain non-real "things"—fiction being a "consciously false notion." (5) On the basis of his analysis of fiction, Vaihinger expounded the philosophy of "as if." "As if" brings about an identification among different things; it acknowledges difference and acknowledges that it is itself not an existence, yet it is a structure of hypothetical connection and brings the possibility of insight. "As if" reveals the duality of fiction, marking, by its own difference, that fiction is simultaneously false and pragmatic: the false is the negation of reality and validity, stressing that a fundamental difference still exists; the pragmatic indicates that fiction, as a form of the design of sensation, turns the false appearance into a changing "frame of reference." Vaihinger's theory still builds upon the epistemological subject-object division; Goodman, however, abandons this epistemological framework. In Goodman's theory, the world itself is "artificially" constructed in multiple ways—through philosophy, art, science, perception, or through different symbolic forms—and is a "plural world." There exist multiple "real worlds" constructed by different signs. Beneath the multiple world-"versions" thus formed, there is no so-called real world; they cannot be reduced to a single foundation. (9) "Countless worlds are constructed out of nothing by means of the use of signs." (3: 1) No constructed world-form is to be regarded as the sole truth; so-called truth can only be "fitness" and acceptability. From the angle that the world itself is artificially constructed, "reality" in fact stems from "the reality of fiction."
In the above theories, the meaning of fiction, and the relation between fiction and reality, have undergone major changes: fiction and reality are no longer mutually opposed, and fiction has become a necessary means and inevitable path for constructing the human's world. Iser absorbed rich nourishment from these theories; among them, he is especially interested in Vaihinger's philosophy of "as if." For the conjunction "as if" links existing things with impossible things and reveals the duality of the relation between the fictional text and the world it reflects: on one hand, in order to reflect the world, the text must give a vivid depiction so as to make the textual world "as if" real; on the other hand, the textual world is destined to be only seemingly real—it itself negates its own reality and strengthens the fictionality of the text. The "as if" syntactic structure activates imagination and provides a free space for imagination to gallop. This can precisely be used by Iser to expound the boundary-crossing act of literary fiction.
As for "imagination," it too has undergone changes within the system of philosophical discourse. In Coleridge, imagination is a capacity that originates from the subject and is divided into three levels: "fancy," "the secondary imagination," and "the primary imagination"; in Sartre's interpretation, imagination is an act that creates spiritual images, displaying itself under the action of consciousness and the subconscious; Castoriadis, for his part, holds that imagination can be embodied only through the psyche and through social history—imagination replaces myth as the foundation of institutions, both constructing society and endowing society with the possibility of self-reform. In sum, imagination is not a self-activating force; it must rely on an external force—the subject, consciousness, or social history—to be displayed. But the pragmatic demands of the subject, of consciousness, or of social history all guide imagination toward a very concrete direction. Differently, fiction activates and propels imagination in an indeterminate, flexible way. Fiction and imagination fuse with each other, bringing about intricately interwoven boundary-crossing acts and opening up a varied space of play, and at the same time constituting the transformation of the intentionality-relation and the continual boundary-crossing between reality and fiction.
"Human performances are of many kinds; the one thing the human cannot do is 'possess the self.' Such a split, which only literature can reflect, is not known to all. For the human's inability to be himself does not necessarily require 'possessing the self.' In fact, the gulf between 'being oneself' and 'possessing the self' cannot be crossed, and the role of literature is to discover and explore the spatial distance between the two." (1: 379) The performance of the literary text constitutes the game itself. Both author and reader perform in the process of participating in the game, performing as a role in the literary world, an "other." He merges into the imaginary environment, into the unique illusion and behavior he himself produces, and believes that he has temporarily forgotten and shed his own individuality and become someone outside himself. The text-game lets the human break through the rigidified self molded by daily habit, step out of various fences, and play diverse roles, thereby seeking anew the imprisoned part of the self and exploring the possibilities of human existence.
IV
Iser, with his fine and systematic analysis, expounded the theory of literary fiction; he broke through the traditional binary view that splits and opposes fiction and reality, regarded fiction as an act, used "boundary-crossing" to integrate reality, fiction, and imagination, and constructed the theoretical view of the "trinity"; moreover, he placed literary fiction within the anthropological theoretical horizon and deeply revealed the significance of literary fiction for human existence. As Wang Zhenglong points out: "The text-performance and text-game of which Iser speaks are realized in the boundary-crossing of reality. It fuses the elements of the empirical world while transcending and estranging them; it is both an unfolding of human experience and the human's self-shaping and self-reflection. One may say that, while combining with poststructuralism, it at the same time opposes the latter's meaning-nihilism on the problem of literary fiction." (6) The former method of giving fiction a theoretical definition within the epistemological framework is abandoned and replaced by the anthropological horizon, in which a detailed functional description of literary fictionalizing is made within concrete contexts; and this greatly advances the study of the problem of literary fiction and finds an anthropological basis for literary activity.
The greatest difference between the human and any other living being lies in this: the human is not only himself but always continually transcends himself, just as Plessner says, "the human lives 'eccentrically.'" (7) Literature, precisely with its fictionalizing act, opens up a free space of activity for the human, letting the human be both situated within it and standing transcendently outside it, and providing the possibility for the human to shed the bondage of reality, truly win creativity, and transcend the everyday self. "Because of literary fiction, the going beyond and above oneself always retains what has already been transcended; in this way of doubling, we are present to ourselves as differentiated humans, but, as a synthesis of multiple roles, human beings still do not understand themselves. Literary fiction therefore represents something bearing on humanity's making itself 'become something and understand something'… Fiction indicates that human beings cannot be present to themselves; it requires, through dreams that do not allow us to coincide with what we ourselves create, the conditions for exercising creative power. What we attain is the conception of this basic feature: fiction makes the human become himself." (1: 106) Literary fiction is the human's self-transgression. By expounding literary fiction from the basic features of the human, Iser grasped the value most central to human existence that literary activity holds.
But although Iser made important contributions to the theory of literary fiction, his theory has its limitations. Literary fiction is indeed, as Iser says, a boundary-crossing act; yet a boundary-crossing act is not necessarily "literary" fiction. Boundary-crossing is not the exclusive patent of literary fiction. As the scholars Iser lists—Bacon, Bentham, Vaihinger, Goodman—point out, human cognitive activity equally cannot escape fiction and boundary-crossing. And literary fiction is not merely a freer, more imaginative act; compared with the fictional factor in cognitive activity, it is not merely a quantitative change—there is in fact a qualitative difference between the two. We agree with Iser's view that fiction is a boundary-crossing act, and hold that this is an extremely important creative insight; but we do not agree with Iser's building the boundary-crossing act of fiction upon "selection" and "fusion." Rather, we hold that the boundary-crossing act of literary fiction stems from the transformation of the intentionality-relation. The transformation of the intentionality-relation both distinguishes the literary fictional world from the real world and still keeps the two related. It is precisely in this sense that the literary fiction act is distinguished from the fictional factor in cognitive activity, and the boundary-crossing in literary fiction is boundary-crossing in the true sense.
Although cognitive activity contains a fictional factor, it is, after all, an object-directed activity, always pointing toward "reality" or toward that "world" which is constructed and identified as reality; it lies within a "reality-relation." Literary activity is otherwise: it is not an object-directed activity, but separately constructs a "fictional world," another "world" that belongs only to the human himself and not to reality. In this activity, the human and the literary world mutually generate, mutually draw near, and mutually fuse; thus the world no longer exists as the human's object—it simultaneously becomes the human himself. Whether or not this constructed world resembles or approaches the true world, it places the human in another dimension of existence, in a non-real "virtual intentional relation." Therefore the boundary-crossing act of literary fiction is not, as Iser holds, an entry from reality into fiction by way of selection and fusion, but a direct turning from the reality-relation to the non-reality-relation, from the object-directed relation to the non-object-directed relation; the key of the boundary-crossing act lies in the transformation of the intentionality-relation. The transformation of the relation brings about a substantive change in the mode of the act.
In literary activity, the human fully mobilizes and unfolds his own imagination, being both a participant in the fictionalizing act—personally taking part in the activity of constructing the fictional world—and one who lives within this fictional world, fused with it. Therefore the fiction and boundary-crossing in literary activity differ from the fiction and boundary-crossing in cognitive activity: the former lie in a non-object-directed relation, that is, a relation of "intersubjectivity"; the latter still lie in an object-directed relation, that is, a subject-object relation. The two belong respectively to entirely different intentional structures and therefore possess utterly different natures. The boundary-crossing act of literary fiction is premised on the transformation of the intentionality-relation; it establishes a non-real relation and a non-object-directed relation. The transformation of the intentionality-relation is the very root of the boundary-crossing act; it is precisely the transformation of the intentionality-relation that gives rise to the boundary-crossing act, and that determines that the fiction and boundary-crossing in literary activity differ from those in cognitive activity. Iser's theory of fiction precisely failed to give sufficient attention and emphasis to this fundamental difference.
To be sure, in expounding "self-disclosure"—one of the functions of the literary fiction act—Iser pointed out that the literary text has a self-explanatory effect that guides the reader to change his reception-attitude and to treat the text with a non-real attitude. But in his theoretical framework, self-disclosure is merely one of three functions standing in parallel with selection and fusion, and it is mainly a self-explanatory function operating upon the activity of reading-reception. This greatly belittles the importance of self-disclosure, can neither effectively clarify the whole of literary activity nor clarify the fundamental feature of the literary fictionalizing act. We, by contrast, regard the transformation of intentionality as the premise of literary activity.
Whether in literary creation or in reading, the specialness of literary activity and its fictionalizing act lies precisely in this: literary activity changes the everyday-real attitude and adopts a non-real attitude, establishing the "I–Thou" relation of which Martin Buber speaks—a new relation utterly different from other object-directed relations. In this relation, the "object" is no longer an object, no longer an "It," but is transformed into a "Thou" that stands over against me and fuses with me, transformed into another subject. In literary activity, the non-real relation and the non-object-directed relation are mutually causal and consistent inside and out. The transformation of the intentionality-relation has decisive significance; it is precisely because of this transformation, this establishment of a new relation, that the author or reader is freed from the reality-relation, crosses the boundary out of the real world, and enters the fictionalizing act, entering the process of creating another fictional world—and thereby imagination unfolds an infinitely vast world, and the human becomes able, in boundary-crossing, to open out toward the infinite, and finally to become "myself" in freedom. Iser correctly criticized the dualism that opposes fiction and reality and put forward the extremely important view that fiction is a boundary-crossing act. But he precisely forgot the most important point: the boundary-crossing act of fiction is first of all the human's self-transgression, and this transgression is rooted in the human's changing the attitude and manner in which he views the world, changing the attitude and manner in which he views language-signs, changing the intentionality-relation. The transformation of the intentionality-relation is the key to literary activity and its fictionalizing act; other acts, such as selection and fusion, all unfold on this premise. Hence selection is not a mechanical picking-out of real material, and fusion is not a patchwork, but rather, within the new non-real, non-object-directed relation, within the dual-subjectivity relation, the human opens his heart and bursts forth his creativity, so that the various inner experiences (which were originally related to the human's real activity and possess reality) are fully excavated and well up; and meanwhile, under the lead of the creative intention, mentality, and emotion, the various experiences are quite naturally screened and fused—just as Croce says: "Every expression is a unified expression. The activity of the mind is precisely that function of fusing manifold impressions into an organic whole." (8) The transformation of the relation determines the unique character of the literary fiction act, and likewise determines the unique character of literary activity.
The root of the error in Iser's theory of fiction lies in this: without first distinguishing the two meanings of fiction, he forcibly split fiction and imagination apart. Although Iser, gingerly, wanted to distinguish the two concepts of fiction and imagination, in fact it is precisely in his combing of the various different meanings of fiction and imagination that he, on the contrary, made the meanings of fiction and imagination all the more elusive and muddled, and this was bound to make it impossible to set a boundary for fiction and imagination. As Jin Huimin points out in his interview with Iser, within Iser's theoretical framework, fiction and imagination remain entangled together and cannot form a mutually distinguishing, clear picture.
We hold that Iser's very approach is problematic. Although people have always given various different explanations of fiction, from the angle of the speech-act, fiction has two different meanings: first, it refers to the discourse's "denoting" an object that does not exist in the real world; second, it refers to the discourse's act of "constructing" another fictional world. These are two utterly different fictions; they belong respectively to different speech-acts and have different functions. Iser did not make this distinction, and therefore could not give a relatively clear exposition of literary fiction, still less clarify the relation between fiction and imagination. As for literature and art, they need not possess fiction in the former sense, because the descriptions in literary-artistic works can either have no determinate, real, real-world object—such as the Sirens, or the Cloud-Lord and the Sun-Lord under Qu Yuan's brush—or have a real denotation, as in documentary literature or biographical literature. Literary-artistic fiction refers mainly to fiction in the latter sense: the construction of a fictional world. At the very moment the human uses language-signs to construct a discourse-world, he necessarily, as John Searle says, temporarily suspends the "vertical principle," halts the function by which the language-sign refers to a real object, and lets the human be intoxicated in the activity of construction and in this artificially constructed world of language-signs. He is temporarily separated from the real world and placed within this artificially constructed world, lying in a non-real relation. It is precisely literary discourse's act of constructing a fictional world that changes the relation between human and world and constructs a non-real, non-object-directed relation. However much this world resembles the real world, so long as its referential function is temporarily halted, the human is in "another" world, a non-real fictional world. At this point, how much this constructed fictional world is related to the real world becomes irrelevant. And this fiction act of constructing another world is at the same time what people call imagination. From this angle, fiction and imagination are hard to distinguish; they speak of one and the same thing, only described from different angles: fiction lays stress on the construction act of discourse, while imagination lays stress on the human's psychological function—and the two fuse into one. Once imagination and fiction are forcibly peeled apart, the lively, vivid discourse-construction act is at the same time suffocated, making discourse shrink into dry representation and reference. It is only on this basis that one can then judge whether the reference has a real object, and thereby make a judgment of "true" or "fictional." That is to say, fiction in the sense of discourse-reference is what is separated from imagination. The relation between fiction and imagination has always been hard to explain clearly, and Iser's wish to distinguish them came, in the end, to nothing—the reason being this: fiction itself possesses two different meanings; in the former sense (denotation), fiction and imagination are split apart, whereas for the latter sense (construction), fiction and imagination are one and the same. It is only because people have all along failed to give a clear exposition of the meaning of fiction that all sorts of misunderstanding and misinterpretation inevitably arise. The construction act, although it is the most important and most characteristic act of literary language, does not thereby strip away the reference act; in literary activity, the construction act and the reference act always alternate.
Although Iser's exposition of literary fiction is extremely meticulous and offers many insights of important value, because he failed to distinguish the two different meanings of fiction, failed to clarify the true meaning of literary fiction, and forcibly split fiction and imagination apart in order to construct the "trinity" theory of reality, fiction, and imagination, and because he belittled the transformation of attitude and relation into a "function" standing on a par with "selection" and "fusion"—indeed regarded it merely as a function of literary reading activity, rather than treating it as the fundamental feature of literary activity and the "premise" of the literary fictionalizing act—he could not, in the end, clarify the problem of literary fiction.