The Linguistic Turn and the Theory of Literary Fiction

The linguistic turn of twentieth-century literary study occurred against the background of the enormous progress of modern science and the important influence of positivist thought. When literary study intended to seek a solid theoretical foundation and, within literary activity, sought a “stable” object of scientific analysis, language naturally became the target on which attention focused; and the development of modern linguistics in turn provided a powerful weapon for the linguistic turn and opened a new theoretical horizon. Humboldt's distinction between poetic language and prose language, Saussure's analysis of the systemic characteristics of the linguistic sign, Wittgenstein's theory of the language-game, Bakhtin's translinguistic theory, Austin's speech-act theory, Chomsky's revelation of the deep structure of language, Foucault's exposition of the relation between language and power, and so on, all brought important enlightenment to the new literary study. In particular, the fundamental change in the understanding of language since Saussure and Wittgenstein—the view that language is no longer the transparent tool of “expression” or “reflection,” but is itself a “worldview”—was bound to powerfully promote the linguistic turn of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary study. And for literary study, Saussure's view of language was the most favored; it injected a powerful impetus into the linguistic turn of literary study.

I. Richards: The Esoteric Worldview and Pseudo-statement

As early as the ancient Greek period, Aristotle distinguished the narrative sentence expressing the logic of truth and falsity from the sentence expressing neither truth nor falsity, holding that the latter belongs to the soul and is the expression of poetry and rhetoric. In the 1830s, Humboldt deeply expounded the important influence of linguistic structure on the spiritual development of mankind, and held that language is both the main expressive form of spiritual force—the vivid creation of the spirit—and, conversely, becomes the intermediary between human and world; it acts back upon the human's spiritual production, penetrates into the most secret depth of spirit and emotion, and constitutes a unique “worldview” of the human. The richness of the human spirit determines the diversity of linguistic forms; likewise, the diversity of linguistic forms expresses the richness of the human spirit, so that language can relate to the inner integral of the human's mental state and sensation. Based on this, Humboldt analyzed the linguistic difference between poetry and prose, especially scientific prose, pointing out the essential distinction of the two in spirit: “Poetry grasps reality from the angle of the sensuous phenomenon; it perceives the outer and inner manifestation of the real world, but it is by no means indifferent to the essential characteristics of reality—on the contrary, it deliberately disregards these characteristics; thereupon, poetry connects sensuous phenomena through imagination, making them an artistic—conceptual—integral intuitive image. Prose, in turn, precisely seeks in reality the source of actual existence (Dasein) and the connection of reality with actual existence; therefore, prose connects fact with fact, concept with concept, through the path of intellectual activity, striving to manifest, in a unified thought, the objective relation among them.” (1) The Russian Formalism of the early twentieth century, precisely upholding the belief that literary language has a uniqueness distinct from daily language, went to seek literariness and poeticity.

As an important figure of Anglo-American New Criticism, Richards likewise believed that literature has linguistic uniqueness. In Principles of Literary Criticism (1925), he analyzed the human's spiritual activity from the psychological angle, dividing the causes of spiritual activity into two groups: on one hand, the present stimulus-factors and the action of the past stimulus-factors related to them, which enter the spirit through the human's sensory nerves and arouse impulse-responses; on the other hand, there exists another group of inner factors, namely the organism's psychology, needs, desires, and instincts, which are the predisposing psychology that responds to the various stimulus-factors. Those characteristics depend on the impulse of its stimulus-factor. Richards calls it “reference,” and holds that the organism's inner state usually intervenes to influence and distort reference. Therefore, the reference that reflects or accords with the external situation must, as far as possible, exclude the interference of inner needs and desires. This kind of reference is “true,” and the development of science is precisely opening up a realm of reference that can possibly be realized. However, Richards does not disparage the value of the disturbing action of the organism's state; rather, he points out that the human's impulse, subordinate to instinctive habit, is on the contrary beneficial to constructing the psychic field; it is linked with “beauty” and “goodness,” which are rooted in the special distortion of the human's impulse by need and desire. This reference distorted by need and desire, Richards holds, is precisely “fiction.”

The use of fiction is by no means taking the false as the true, or self-deception; it is as important as reference aimed at the true, and precisely expresses the human's mental state; it is the typical use of poetic language. Accordingly, Richards distinguishes two kinds of language: “One may use a statement for the sake of the reference, true or false, that the statement causes. This is the scientific use of language. But one may also use a statement for the sake of the influence, in the aspect of the attitude of emotion, produced by the reference the statement triggers. This is the emotive use of language.” (2) In Richards's view, in the scientific use of language, not only must the reference be correct in order to succeed, but the mutual relation among references must also accord with logic, must pass through rigorous organization, so as not to obstruct further reference. For the emotive use of language, divergence in the aspect of reference, however great, does not matter at all, so long as it accords with the expression of attitude and emotion; and in terms of the emotional aim, the logical arrangement is unnecessary. It needs the organization that emotion itself ought to have; the mutual connection of emotion, the external logic, often becomes an obstacle.

However, scientific knowledge is by no means isolated from the human's emotional attitude; in fact, it is likewise permeated with belief, hope, fear, and astonishment, intertwined with the human's various volitions and attitudes; to define literary language by the “emotive use” is bound to arouse objection. Moreover, studying literary language from the psychological angle also has many limitations. In Science and Poetry (1926), published slightly later, Richards made a correction to this. He turned to explore poetry from the historical evolution of the worldview. Richards holds that the human's view of the world underwent a transition from the “esoteric worldview” to the “scientific worldview.” This esoteric worldview is the notion of animism; it believes in a world of spirits and gods, holding that they govern human affairs and can also accept the human's summons. Poetry and other arts arose precisely from this esoteric worldview, and would end with the disappearance of this notion. Evidently, this view of Richards's is of a piece with what Vico called poetic wisdom, and the view that poetry is rooted in a “crude metaphysics.” Richards saw that the development of science, the expansion of the scope of knowledge, and the strengthening of the human's ability to master nature drive away the esoteric worldview, making it begin to decline. But because this esoteric worldview underwent a long development within the social collective, passing through a long and stable period of rule, it is deeply rooted at the bottom of the human's heart, exists among people, and is precisely a unique mode of sensation of the human, and becomes the main driving force of the human's behavior. Therefore, these esoteric notions, as an interpretation of nature, are naturally more suited, in the human's most secret and most important affairs, to the needs of lodging the spirit and organizing emotion. The cosmos reflected by these notions fuses together with emotion, coordinating love and hate, fear and excitement, hope and despair, and endowing life with form, prescriptiveness, and consistency. Contrary to this, what science brings is a “mathematical world,” a realm of “singularity.” This “scientific picture of the world” does not touch the deep emotion of the heart.

Pure knowledge does not completely accord with the human's daily-life aims; it narrates the objective world with a cold face, mechanically analyzing things according to reason, without regard for the human's sensuous richness, unable to bring warmth to the dim spirit. But when science regards itself as the possessor of truth and, by the help of its own force, occupies the world and becomes the ruler of the world, it judges the esoteric worldview to be an error. Poetry and art, because they are rooted in the esoteric worldview, are inevitably regarded as dreamlike imagination, reduced to unreal “fiction.” Therefore, Richards says to us: “This form, let me call it ‘pseudo-statement.’” And he says: “Those who can distinguish the scientific statement (here ‘true’ is precisely a verification people face in the laboratory) from the emotive utterance (here ‘true’ is mainly the quality that can be accepted by attitude, or, to put it more remotely, the quality by which these attitudes themselves can be accepted) will acknowledge that the poet's office is not to create true statements. But poetry often has the posture of creating statements, and even the posture of creating important statements.” “The narration of poetry is usually based on a ‘Universe of Discourse,’ a ‘World of Make-believe,’ an imagined world, the fictive world commonly acknowledged by poet and reader. A ‘pseudo-statement,’ if it accords with this hypothetical system, will be held to be ‘poetic truth,’ and will not be held to be ‘poetic falsity.’” (3) This is to say, poetic language is not a statement that states fact, but a statement that contains the esoteric worldview, and is therefore regarded by people today as a fictive pseudo-statement. It has nothing to do with the judgment of truth and falsity; there is only appropriateness or inappropriateness. “Poetic truth” pursues only acceptability, pursues the inner unity, coordination, and aptness of the fictive system, rather than accordance with fact—just as Vico said, “the material peculiar to poetry is a credible impossibility.” (4)

For Richards, emotion is still an important constituent factor of poetry. The human's needs, passions, and attitudes are produced in the social situation to which one belongs, and change with the changing of the age; therefore, the poet should proceed from the contemporary, drawing nourishment from the society in which he lives; while the esoteric world treasured in the depth of the heart provides a field of activity for them, and, with its own form, prescriptiveness, and consistency, modulates and organizes the various experiences and diffuse impulses, thereby condensing order, harmony, and freedom in the feeling, and giving the heart peace. This point is precisely what the scientific notion lacks. Science can never tell us who I am, or what our world is; it can only answer us how this or that is used; therefore, it is bound to lead to the loss of the significance of existence and the existential crisis born of conflict. Likewise, religion too can no longer solve these problems. Only poetry is the “means of self-defense” that can save us, helping us break free of chaos and avoid the destruction of hope. “All the statements in poetry are for the sake of taking effect emotionally, and not for their own sake; therefore, to oppose the truth within the statements, or to doubt whether they deserve the same serious attention as the statements that claim truth, is all to mistake their meaning.” (5)

In Richards and many modern humanist scholars there lurks a profound contradiction: on one hand, they stress the uniqueness by which literature is distinguished from science, intending to enclose a clean, simple, tranquil domain to resist the rampancy of science; on the other hand, they consciously or unconsciously follow the research methods and modes of thought of scientism, in fact becoming the servants who submit to modern science.

II. Ransom: The Ontological Gap

What Richards is most criticized for by other “New Critics” is his regarding poetry as a medium that conveys the poet's inner state (emotion or deep psychology), with reading then being the reader's re-creation of this state of the author and the reorganization of his own inner state. This notion, deeply influenced by the Romantic view of literature, precisely runs counter to the New Criticism's tenet of stressing “literary ontology.”

“In fact, what New Criticism does is to turn the poem into an idol. If I.A. Richards has already ‘dematerialized’ the text, making it a transparent window onto the poet's psychology, then American New Criticism thoroughly rematerializes it, making it look not like a process of meaning, but like something with four corners and a surface like water-sand-stone.” (6) Among them, the one who made the most important theoretical contribution to New Criticism is Ransom. In “Poetry: A Note in Ontology” (1934), Ransom contrasts “physical poetry” with “platonic poetry,” and clearly proposes the claim of “poetic ontology.” He holds that poetry should take the pursuit of vivid, full images, that is, “things,” as its aim, opposing image to concept, and says: the image “has that original freshness—which the concept cannot possibly have—which cannot possibly be deprived. The concept is derivative and tamed, while the image is in a natural or untamed state; it must be discovered when in that state, and cannot be arranged into that state. It obeys its own law, and does not obey any law of ours. We think we can grasp the image, take it captive, but this tamed captive is not the true image, but only a concept, an image stripped of its characteristics.” (7) Image and concept were originally always mutually entangled, hard to separate. Ransom brings into prominence the difference between image and concept, and stresses the natural state of the poetic image; his aim is to reward the human's sensibility, resist the repression and disciplining of sensuous richness and vividness by reason, and prevent the sensuous image from being abstracted into an empty, withered concept. Poetry should be constituted by original sensation, by those moist, primal, living images.

Since Ransom values the natural state of the poetic image, pursues the direct connection of image with the objective object, and opposes the human's imposing any subjective, artificial law upon them, then is his so-called “ontology” precisely the pursuit of the objective truthfulness of poetry? In fact, the situation may be more complex.

In discussing the technique of poetry, Ransom clearly proposes the importance and universality of “fiction” in poetry. In his view, it is precisely because poetry belongs to a fictional or hypothetical scene that science does not so greedily occupy it, but leaves it to sensation. Fiction lets the human's sensibility escape the ravage of science, and lets the image not be abstracted by reason. Like Richards, Ransom too attempts to resist the arrogance of science with literature; however, he takes a different path, starting from sensation rather than emotion. “Generally speaking, it is easier to gain our experience of beauty from art than from the natural world, because the natural world is another matter, and communication is forbidden. But when the object in art is called fictional or hypothetical, it is not in the least disparaged. In the sense of reality, it cannot be true, and therefore it may be discriminated against by science. But in the just or representative sense, it is true, because it permits an ‘illusion of reality.’” (8) In daily practice, the human is already accustomed to viewing nature with the scientific gaze, taking nature as a determinate object, closing and freezing its existence; thereupon, nature no longer opens itself to us, no longer communicates with us; nature falls silent, even withers, and becomes lifeless. Only in the imagined fictional world do all objects again gain the vigorous vitality of life, can chat with us, and cast flirtatious glances at us with brilliant smiles. Therefore, Ransom holds that art is based on the second love, and not the first love. Poetry and art are not born at the moment when human and nature directly face each other, but in dream and recollection, in a second encounter and second love with nature. In dream and recollection, the image of nature has already broken free of the burden and constraint of reality; it no longer lives under the shadow of science, and finally stretches out its limbs, displaying a profound connotation.

Evidently, in Ransom's view, poetry is linked with dream, recollection, and fiction. Therefore, the so-called “ontology” refers to the independence of poetry, refers to poetry itself being the ontos. But Ransom at the same time holds: “Poetry aims to restore the complex, hard-to-control world that we understand only dimly through our own sensation and memory.” “What it deals with is the order of poetry, the stratum of objective things.” (9) This is to say, the so-called “ontology” refers to the objective material world that poetry expresses, and not merely the fictional world of poetry itself. Just as Wellek points out, in Ransom's exposition of poetic ontology, there exists an “ontological gap.”

In fact, this dual understanding of literary ontology is precisely the common notion of many modern humanist scholars: that is, the daily-real world is already ruled by science, reason, and logic, and these “rulers” have also been accepted by people, taken as customary, deeply embedded in the human's senses and intellect, deleting, abstracting, norming, and even distorting and butchering the perceived-and-understood world, so that the world becomes merely a ruled, plundered object. The world thereby becomes a “waste land.” Only poetry and literary art, because of their fictionality, separate themselves from daily reality, retaining for the human an uncontaminated domain, providing a spiritual home of free dwelling, letting the human return to the purity and innocence of childhood and liberating sensuous richness. The liberation of sensibility is the premise of the world's opening and truth's manifesting. This is precisely the reason Russian Formalism advocates re-sensing things through the defamiliarization of things, and Heidegger intends to suspend the human's subjectivity through the fictional world of art so as to open truth. “The symbolic force of poetry lies precisely in its making absent reality appear (even if by means of linguistic signs), and it is also precisely by the help of a wisdom-filled poetic style that it holds fast to the linguistic nature and illusory characteristic of its own existence.” (10) Through literary-artistic fiction, human and world realize a phenomenological reduction, so that the human can finally “clarify the heart and savor the image.” In poetry there exists a “revolutionary rebellion” against the tradition of logical demonstration. The poetic ontos is the bridge toward the ontos of nature.

It is precisely for this reason that, in discussing the other technique of poetry, “metaphor,” Ransom especially esteems “metaphysical poetry,” and holds that the merit of metaphysical poetry lies in “dramatizing” and “concretizing” all the parts of poetry, one important path of which is the “conceit.” The conceit is a kind of fiction; it needs bold, peculiar imagination. When the poet, through analogy, discovers a partial yet important consistency between objects, and then directly enters complete identity, the miracle occurs. This complete identity contains the peculiar marriage of “illegitimacy” between different things; it gives the human unexpected surprise, yet is based on verisimilitude; it is the discovery of a certain obscure, unclear unique connection between things, and thereby manifests a certain characteristic hidden in the thing itself. The miraculous conceit breaks the habitual notion, weakens science's barbarous, tyrannical rule over sensation, so that the human's sensation gains liberation again.

III. Jakobson: The Poetic Function of Language

The language Saussure expounds is a sign-system constituted by the signifier (sound-image) and the signified (concept); both parts are psychological; their connection is arbitrary, and the arbitrariness of the sign is the “primary” principle of language. This view, in fact, already separates language from the real, and covertly provides the basic premise for literary fiction.

As an important figure of the Prague School and structuralist semiotics, Jakobson was deeply influenced by Saussure's linguistics. Differing from the New Critics who either stress poetic emotion or stress poetic ontology, Jakobson views poetry from the viewpoint of systematic analysis. He opposes defining poetry as a work of a single aesthetic function, and also opposes defining it as other functions or a simple aggregation of the aesthetic and other functions; rather, he regards poetry as a structural system, adopts a systematic method to analyze the functions of poetry, and holds that poetry should be defined as a linguistic message with its aesthetic function as the dominant. In the essay “The Dominant” (1935), Jakobson defines “the dominant” as: “the core component of an art-work, which governs, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is precisely the dominant that guarantees the integrity of the structure.” For poetry, its dominant factor is precisely the aesthetic function; it prescribes the overall structure of poetry, serves as the compulsory, indivisible element of the whole structure, and thereby determines the action of the remaining components. Those remaining functions outside the aesthetic are both under the dominance of the aesthetic function and, together with the aesthetic function, exert action in different ways and with different importance. Jakobson also makes a brief comparison of poetic language with referential language and emotive language. He says: “The definition of the aesthetic function as the dominant of a poetic work allows us to prescribe the hierarchy of the multiple and various linguistic functions within the poetic work. In the referential function, the sign has a minimal connection with the indicated object; therefore, the sign itself has only minimal importance. On the other hand, the expressive function demands a more direct, close connection between sign and object; therefore, it demands more attention to the inner structure of the sign. Compared with referential language, emotive language (this language basically realizes the expressive function) is generally closer to poetic language (in this respect, poetic language is precisely what the sign signifies).” (11) This is to say, poetic language is a multifunctional message-system in which the aesthetic function is dominant; the other functions can only submit to the aesthetic function and change themselves under the constraint of the aesthetic function. In the referential function of language, what is important is the object referred to; the linguistic sign itself, because of what Ingarden called “perspectival foreshortening,” often becomes “transparent” and is ignored; the expressive function of language, in turn, correspondingly brings into prominence the importance of the structure of the linguistic sign itself. Emotive language too has expressiveness, but it focuses on conveying emotion, and not on stressing the sign itself; although it partly overlaps with poetic language, it is completely different. Because poetic language brings into prominence the linguistic sign itself and weakens the action of the referential function, its connection with reality becomes extremely thin, and poetry thus becomes an independent discursive world separated from reality.

In a later essay, “Linguistics and Poetics” (1958), Jakobson further developed the systematic-structural view, both stressing the unity of language and creatively regarding language as a series of mutually-connected “subcodes,” placing it within the communication process to make a systematic analysis of the functional structure of language. Jakobson uses a diagram to represent linguistic communication: the addresser and the addressee, with the context, the message, the contact, and the code between them. The addresser conveys the message to the addressee; for the message to take effect, it needs to relate to the concrete context (the referent); for the addressee to capture this context, he needs the code shared with the addresser; between addresser and addressee there must also be a material channel and psychic connection, and the communication process is maintained through contact. In the concrete use of language, each of the above six factors forms a special function of language, and a certain one of these functions occupies the dominant position, while the other functions constitute a hierarchical order, in the dominated position. The change and stress of the dominant factor of the linguistic-communication process changes the state of linguistic communication, changes the linguistic structure itself, and goes on to change the linguistic functional structure. The diversity of linguistic structure determines the richness and changeability of linguistic function. Accordingly, Jakobson says: “The orientation toward the message itself, and merely for the sake of obtaining the message, is precisely the poetic function of language.” And he says: “The poetic function is not the sole function of the language-art, but its main and key function. And in other speech acts, it can only exist as an additive, secondary component. Such a function, through raising the concreteness and tangibility (figurativeness) of the sign, deepens the basic split between the sign and the objective object.” (12) Jakobson builds his own poetics on a view of language that stresses systematic structure and dynamic change, and this frees him from the malady of mechanism and absoluteness. Poetry takes the aesthetic function as its characteristic, stresses the linguistic message itself, and, with the salient figurativeness its sign has, expands the split between sign and material object, and therefore has fictionality, independence, literariness, and poeticity; at the same time, because of the existence of various additive, secondary components, it also has multiple other functions. The poet, in order to endow poetry with a stronger aesthetic function, should devote himself to the concretization and figuration of the linguistic sign. Here, Jakobson's poetic theory again corresponds with Ransom's poetic ontology.

Similar to Jakobson's analysis of linguistic function from systematic structure, Isenberg too seizes the multifunctional dynamic structure of language to explore the aesthetic function of literature, only that he is more inclined to think about language by starting from the reader's attitude. In the essay “The Aesthetic Function of Language” (1949), Isenberg takes “meaning” and “reference” as two processes for distinguishing speech acts. He gives an example: suppose in a novel one reads such a sentence: “On March 1, 1820, a man stood at the door of Notre-Dame for three hours.” This sentence is by no means meaningless empty talk; it expresses a thought and leads us to a world of bustling human affairs. But about the real world outside the novel, it tells us nothing. This is to say, it conveys meaning but does not refer to reality. In language there exists “non-referential meaning,” and literature precisely uses the non-referential meaning of language. When we read, we neither believe it as real, nor raise doubt about its existence, still less make a response as if personally on the scene. These expressed meanings have a function: it lies between sensory stimulus and indication, and our psychic state also lies between pure sensation and cognition. “The existence of the meaning an aesthetic object has can be recognized only through the change in the quality of the emotional response of contemplation.” (13) The aesthetic value of literary language exists precisely in the direct grasping of meaning. Isenberg holds, accordingly, that what the nature of a sentence is, whether it contains information, does not depend on itself, but depends on the reader's attitude. The reader has a psychic “expectation” or “preparatory disposition,” which shifts attention from a given object toward another, not-yet-given object.

Isenberg also makes an exposition of the philosophical maxim and moral preaching in literature. For example, the first sentence in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We do not make a true-or-false judgment of it, do not go to verify its correctness, but integrate it into the novel as a whole to understand. Even in works such as War and Peace, there is no absolute distinction between narration and commentary. The reason lies precisely in our reading with the psychic expectation of viewing a novel. When people treat the sentence recording belief with a certain attitude, “belief” becomes “impression.” “It can coordinate all the values acknowledged by reason, conscience, and taste, and such an ability contains the reason for the existence of the purely aesthetic appreciation of art.” (14) The reader's attitude indeed constitutes an important action upon reading; but once it is overstressed, it goes to the extreme of subjectivism. Isenberg even holds that any philosophy, any scientific system, so long as we do not test it in the process of understanding it, is a “play.” Contemplative viewing can likewise grasp meaning. This practice of placing the reader's attitude in the determining position is precisely opposite to Jakobson's valuing of the functional structure of language itself.

In fact, the reading process is a process of mutual action between textual language and reader; the function of language is precisely mutually realized by the action of the two. On one hand, the inherent characteristics of literary language induce the reader's psychic expectation, adjust the reader's reading mentality, and guide the reading-reception behavior; on the other hand, the reader's attitude in turn determines the selection of linguistic function, influencing the reconstruction and realization of linguistic function, and going on to influence reading-understanding. The two are mutually-influencing, jointly generated. But both language and reader are within a specific social context, sharing cultural convention; it is precisely cultural convention that, to some degree, norms the reading process, guides and constrains the way language and reader mutually act, and endows language with priority. Therefore, from the literary work, its linguistic characteristics often become the relatively important factor; they weaken the referential function of language, strengthen the poetic function, and endow literature with fictionality and aestheticity. For a concrete sentence within the literary work, because it is within the overall fictional context, its referential function is naturally stripped away. Contrary to this, the philosophical or scientific essay rejects fictionality, unless the reader deliberately violates cultural convention and subjectively holds fast to the attitude of “literary reading”—then it too may re-select and reconstruct linguistic function, and go on to take it as the “play” Isenberg speaks of.

IV. Genette: Metalepsis and Fiction

Regarding the problem of literary fiction, Genette's theoretical exposition has an inner contradiction.

In Fiction and Diction (1991), Genette holds that fiction is the most notable characteristic of literature; it is precisely fiction that lets language break free of the daily functional field and endows literature with aestheticity. At the same time, he also holds that to define literature merely by fictionality has its limitation; fictionality is not a characteristic shared by all literary types and cannot yet cover the entire literary field. Although classical poetics since Aristotle on the whole valued the principle of fiction, faced with lyric poetry, it could hardly justify itself. From the Renaissance period of Italy and Spain, literature began to be divided into three major types—the narrative or epic type, the dramatic type, and lyric poetry; the former two are fictional types, while lyric poetry is regarded as a non-fictional type. “The new system characterized by the infinite variation of the tripod of epic—drama—lyric thus means abandoning the unified rule of fiction in support of a duopoly openly declared to some degree; in the new system, literariness is henceforth linked with two major types, on one hand fiction (drama and narrative), and on the other hand lyric poetry; the poetry people have in mind increasingly often refers specifically to the latter.” (15) From this, the monopoly of fictional poetics over literature ended, and the “formal standard” existing as the counterpart of the Aristotelian tradition's “subject-matter standard” (fiction) gradually gained attention. Through German Romanticism, Mallarmé, Russian Formalism, down to Jakobson, formalist poetics began to be able to stand on equal footing with fictional poetics.

Genette calls fictional poetics and formalist poetics together “essentialist poetics.” He realizes that even if the two are united, they can already encompass relatively typical literary texts, yet still cannot cover the entire literary field, because the vast domain of prose-form non-fiction literature evades the dual constraint mechanism of essentialist poetics; historiography, oratory, political commentary, autobiography, and so on, whose uniqueness makes essentialist poetics unable to bring them under its command. These texts can enter and exit the literary field as the environment changes and under certain pressure conditions. Therefore, in order to accommodate these texts that can also be regarded as literary in special situations, Genette proposes “conditionalist poetics,” whose principle is: I regard any text that arouses my aesthetic satisfaction as a literary text. Thereupon, Genette divides literature into two major categories, “constitutive” and “conditional”: the “constitutive” refers to a text whose literariness is prescribed by its own characteristics, including a literary text with fictional subject-matter or poetic form; the “conditional” refers to a text not restricted by the above prescription that can be regarded as literary under certain conditions. From this it can be seen that Genette's so-called “literary fiction” mainly refers to fiction in the aspect of subject-matter. If viewed from the angle of language, it is the statement's lacking a real object, a false proposition, that is, the “false statement” that formally imitates a statement. (16) Secondly, fiction is not a universal characteristic of literature; it is peculiar only to narrative literature or drama.

But in another essay, “The Speech Acts of Fictional Works,” Genette turns to start from speech-act theory and makes a different explanation of literary fiction; his view of literary fiction shows a new changing factor.

In Searle's theory, fictional discourse is an imitation of “assertion”; although it has the form of assertion, it does not have the conditions of sincerity and so on that assertion ought to have, and cannot effectively perform the speech act. Therefore, Searle holds that the commands, promises, bets, verdicts, gifts, and other performative discourse in literary works have no real performative ability. Aimed at Searle's view, Genette made a correction. In Genette's view, fictional discourse, while pretending to assert, in fact completes another act, namely the act of producing a fictional work, and, with its illocutionary act, declares this act of producing a fictional world, inviting the reader to jointly participate in it. He says: “Searle merely holds that the imprecise ‘once upon a time, a girl, etc.’ can be analyzed as (this is evidently my view) an (broadly) indirect and therefore complex non-phrasal act, whose carrier is a hypothetical or imprecise assertive sentence, while the connotation lies in: a request (‘just imagine…’), a declaration (‘I declare that the following content is purely fictional…’), or even another assertive sentence, of course a rigorous assertive sentence, such as ‘through the following text, I hope to arouse in your mind a fictional story of a girl, and so on.’” (17) Here, Genette makes an incisive analysis of the speech act, pointing out the complexity, multiplicity, and polysemy of the speech act. Discourse is a multi-layered system of acts; while on the surface pretending to assert (false statement), it in fact, with a rigorous attitude, produces the fictional work and constructs the literary fictional world. This is an extremely important view; the reason literary fiction has important modern significance lies precisely in its constructing a fictional world. “Literature shifts or suspends the normal referentiality of language, or redirects it. Literary language has changed track; it points only toward an imagined world.” (18) The various modern characteristics of literature, such as literary independence and aesthetic autonomy, are founded precisely on this fictional world, and not on the false statement.

As a false statement, although the discourse has no real referential object, it is still a referential act; it has truth-value, and because it points toward the real world (although without a real object) and relates itself to reality, it is reduced to a tool of reference, and its own value depends on whether there is a real referent or what, after all, it refers to. Its aim is not to create for the human a fictional world in which one can live. It is just as a lie is merely a lie intended to make people “mistake it as real,” and not literature. The literary speech act, in turn, has constructiveness; it produces a discursive world and attracts the reader to participate in it. Therefore, it is separated, together with daily real existence, into two different worlds, namely the fictional discursive world and the real world; it is neither true nor false. When literature creates for itself a fictional world and separates from the real world, literature gains independence; it escapes from real relations, is freed from the disturbance of the real utilitarian aim, and prepares the conditions for a free, autonomous aesthetic activity. Therefore, it is not the false statement that endows literature with modern characteristics, but the behavioral ability of discourse to construct a fictional world that wins for literature its literariness and aestheticity.

But although Genette proposed an important insight into literary fiction, he did not adequately value it, but merely took it as a supplement to Searle's view of fiction. In his view, Searle's explanation of fictional discourse “is beyond reproach, but is not comprehensive enough.” (19) Genette did not change his original theoretical starting point of linguistic semiotics and narratology; even though he occasionally used speech-act theory, he did not thoroughly shift his own foothold, so that his own discovery was gained and then lost again.

It is precisely upholding this traditional view of fiction that Genette intended to make an analytic exposition of the discursive characteristics of fictional narrative and factual narrative. In another essay, “Fictional Narrative and Factual Narrative,” Genette made a comparative analysis from the aspects of “order,” “speed,” “frequency,” “mood,” and “voice”; although the analysis is quite meticulous, defining fiction and factuality from the angle of narratology is bound to disappoint. He could not but lament: “Not all the ‘marks’ of fiction belong to the category of narratology, first because they do not all belong to the scope of the text; the more common, and perhaps increasingly common, situation is that a fictional text takes a paratextual characteristic as its mark, which can let the reader avoid any misunderstanding—the genre-mark ‘novel’ on the title page or cover is one example of the many paratextual marks. Secondly, it is also because certain marks of fictionality belong to the category of subject-matter… and the category of style.” (20) Just as Genette realized, the marks of fiction do not all belong to the category of narratology, and also do not belong solely to the text. In fact, literary fiction is a function of the literary speech act, a fictional world constructed by discourse; it exists in the process of the text's generation into a work, depending on the coordinated action of discourse, reader, context, and cultural convention. Genette is wise; he keenly discovered the theoretical blind spot of narratology, but unfortunately did not thereby shift his own standpoint to speech-act theory. In fact, if one regards literary fiction, from the angle of speech-act theory, as the ability to produce a fictional world, then one can free Genette from the above predicament. Viewing literary fiction from this angle, we can even unify the essentialist poetics (fictional poetics, formalist poetics) and conditionalist poetics that Genette proposed: a false statement, because it lacks a real object and interrupts the connection of discourse with reality, is also more likely to lead us from the referentiality of discourse toward constructiveness, and thereby enter the activity of creating a fictional world; while discursive forms such as rhythm and meter or line-by-line writing, because they contain cultural convention, demand that we read in the manner of poetry, and also lead us to jointly create a poetically-luxuriant fictional world; moreover, so long as we take a certain text as the object of satisfying our own aesthetic need, our intention has already pointed toward the constructive act of discourse, abandoning the referentiality of discourse and bringing into prominence its constructiveness, suspending the connection of discourse with reality—and this is precisely what conditionalist poetics seeks to explain. Therefore, once we regard literary fiction as the ability of discourse to construct a fictional world, rather than as discursive statement not according with reality, fiction theory gains new vitality.

In Metalepsis: From Figure to Fiction (2004), Genette expounds the various metalepses and their relation with fiction. In Genette's view, any figure of speech can be called a small fiction, or, one may say, the embryo of fiction and a simplified fictional form, because it usually has a double meaning, demanding that we imagine a thing in a changed way. For example, Gargantua gnawing his own teeth with wooden clogs, or the oak and the reed conversing—these rhetorical techniques use the “fictional contract,” both stressing the illusory characteristic of fiction and letting the reader gladly accept this fiction and voluntarily suspend disbelief.

But what Genette mainly attends to is not metonymy as a figure of speech, but metalepsis; he extends and prolongs the connotation of metonymy into the metalepsis in literary narrative, that is, the changing of narrative levels and crossing of the boundary of two worlds in the narrative process. “This is a fluctuating but sacred and inviolable boundary between two worlds: one is the world in which people narrate, the other is the world people narrate.” (21) The human lives in the real world and, in the real world, tells stories, constructing another fictional discursive world, a fictional world in which one can live; between these two worlds there exists an unsurpassable ontological gap, a sacred boundary, and metalepsis precisely, by the help of imagination, crosses this sacred boundary, breaks this boundary, and also brings itself into literary fiction. “Most fictions of a metaleptic nature have a magical expressive form; it immediately attracts our attention; it does not seem to deliberately deploy a deceptive trick, or even less… set a trap, drawing the reader (real and potential) into the fictional plot.” (22) The narrator of Aragon's novel Holy Week serves, throughout the factual-historical narration, as both witness and chronicler, while he himself also appears within the story-plot, continually entangling with the story characters. Cortázar's “Continuity of Parks” writes of a reader who is reading this very novel and is nearly murdered by a character in the work. This reader is evidently a fictional character created by the novel; he plays a double role, being both the reader of the novel and a character in the novel; he not only crosses two originally-parallel different worlds, but also twists the two worlds together. This creates a magical characteristic that violates common sense, strengthening the attractiveness of the story-plot.

Here, we discover another important understanding of Genette's about literary fiction. The first is the fiction of literary subject-matter, which, from the angle of discourse, refers to the statement's having no real referential object, that is, the pseudo-statement; the second is that literary discourse has the ability to construct a fictional world—it is precisely this discourse that is the root by which literature gains independence and aestheticity; and metalepsis is evidently different from the above two kinds of fiction. The fiction of subject-matter makes the reader interrupt the connection of discourse with reality, leads him into the activity of discourse constructing a fictional world, and goes on to immerse him in the experience of the fictional world, suspending disbelief and also temporarily forgetting fictionality. Metalepsis can of course also be regarded as a special kind of fictional subject-matter; but it lets the reader maintain a clear consciousness of fiction; what it stresses is the consciousness of fiction. Metalepsis is always a crossing of the boundary of two worlds. In a general work of literary fiction, the narrator, narratee, and characters all keep to their stations, each within “one” world; even if a boundary-crossing act appears, it is invisible, hard to perceive. This structural mode accords with the reader's actual experience and reading habit, and easily makes the reader unconscious of the boundary, and thereby freely enter the fictional world for deep experience. And forgetting fiction and suspending disbelief are precisely the premise of deep experience. But metalepsis lets the author, narrator, narratee, or characters pass between “two” worlds, unconventionally pushing the boundary-crossing act to the foreground, bringing it into prominence, breaking or disturbing the boundary of the two worlds; this in fact strengthens the reader's boundary-consciousness and consciousness of fiction. “If the author, in the process of telling the story, suddenly inserts his own commentary, it can make one conscious of the illusoriness of the story itself… thus is produced a world similar to those created by Oscar Wilde or Lyly.” (23) It is precisely at the moment of the abnormal cross-boundary transgression that the reader clearly becomes conscious of the existence of the boundary, conscious of the illusory feeling produced by the demolition of the boundary; therefore, he has in fact already pulled a psychic distance away from the literary fictional world, realizing the “alienation effect” that Brecht speaks of, and standing in the position of bystander rather than sharer and experiencer. Metalepsis stresses boundary-consciousness, the consciousness of fiction, and the absurd feeling of the boundary-crossing.

Consciousness of the boundary between the real world and the fictional world is extremely important; lacking consciousness of the boundary causes absurd results. Vernant narrated such an event: a tragedy telling of the fall of Miletus was staged in the early fifth century BC. Because the real event was close in time to the dramatic performance, when the performance reached how the people of Miletus retreated before the Persians, the audience was shocked at this scene and began to cry out in confusion. Vernant holds that, at the time, people lacked a clear consciousness of the boundary between fiction and reality, so that they could not maintain the distance proper to drama. Therefore, “in tragedy, fiction is set up from the very beginning; this is a very important fact. Tragedy tells of a bygone past. The subject itself at once gives a distance, a distance related to the events, a distance related to the characters—and the characters are precisely the heroes and kings of bygone days.” (24) Stendhal also narrated an event that occurred in 1822: a soldier on duty at the Baltimore theater, seeing Othello strangle Desdemona with his own hands in the play, cried out loudly and fired a shot, wounding the actor playing Othello. (25) Drawing a boundary between stage fiction and real life, in order to maintain the psychic distance necessary for appreciation, is precisely the reason drama needs the “fourth wall.”

On the other hand, the reader must also possess the psychic ability to transcend the boundary and abandon the consciousness of fiction; otherwise, he will be blocked outside the fictional world, unable to enter the hall and the inner chamber for deep experience. The boundary is both the gap separating the two worlds of reality and fiction, and the bridge connecting the two worlds. Metalepsis, in turn, stresses the existence of this gap and bridge; therefore, compared with literary works that relatively value participation and experience, it focuses more on viewing from the bystander's position. In fact, what Cortázar's “Continuity of Parks” stresses is not the boundary-crossing act between the real world and the fictional world, but the boundary-crossing act between two different fictional worlds. The reader in the work is himself the narratee; he is on a metanarrative level that tells of the reading event; at the same time, he crosses the boundary and enters another story-level and is murdered by a character in the story. This reader crosses from one fictional world to another fictional world. However, any obvious boundary-crossing act awakens the reader's consciousness of the boundary; in fact, the reader at this time already stands in the real world to perceive and detect the existence of the boundary. This is to say, any obvious boundary-crossing act in a literary work may lead the reader to break away from the fictional world and return to the real world, thereby producing a clear consciousness of fiction.

Genette also widens metalepsis to metanarration, and even to the “double-voicing” of discourse. He says: “From the real story to the fictional story, from one fiction to another fiction, this ceaseless mutual fusion and mutual borrowing is the soul of universal meaning, and of course even more the source of all fiction. All fiction is woven by metalepsis.” (26) And he holds that reality and fiction exist in mutual comparison; when the truth in daily reality, because it is too familiar, loses our perception of it, only by placing it in the state of fiction can its truth be manifested; likewise, only by regarding fiction as another world that closely resembles it can its true character be manifested.

V. The Linguistic Turn: A New Theoretical Horizon

The twentieth century was the period in which philosophy, aesthetics, and literary study realized the linguistic turn; when people placed the problem of literary fiction within the horizon of linguistics to examine, this effectively advanced the deepening of research. Richards expounded the emotive use of language, and then proposed the pseudo-statement rooted in the esoteric worldview; Ransom analyzed poetic ontology from the angle of semantics; Jakobson placed language within the communication system and revealed its poetic function in analyzing the mutual relations among the various factors; Genette's theoretical exposition is both profound and complex—he takes structuralist poetics as the theoretical starting point while also adopting speech-act theory, and although his fiction theory has an inner contradiction, it contains many true insights.

Among the countless linguistic studies of literary fiction, the above studies are only a few small bright spots, but they can still let us roughly see the trajectory of the evolution of the line of thought. Richards attends to the relation between author and literary language, connecting language with the human's development of thought, and regarding it as the expression of the human's inner emotion or the organization of deep psychology. Examining the problem of literary fiction from this angle, although it reveals the connection between literary language and primal thought, at the same time it makes the study of language itself be concealed, and the essence of literary fiction is therefore not deeply revealed. Ransom's poetic ontology isolates language itself, brings it into prominence, and stresses the unique value of poetic language itself. From this is created his ontological gap between the poetic ontos and the real ontos; yet it is precisely this relation of poetic language with the real world, both split and connected, that displays the uniqueness of literary fiction and the unique relation between literature and reality of being neither close nor distant. Jakobson, in turn, expanded the theoretical horizon of Richards and Ransom; he explains language's systematic structure by treating it as a message-communication system, and, in analyzing the changes of the distribution of systematic functions, displays the poetic characteristic of literary language, so as to reveal the fictionality of literature. However, because the above analysis and exposition take their foothold on the basis of the synchronic study of language, they are bound to find it hard to deeply reveal the living, continually-generating characteristic of literary discourse; and at the same time, this practice of regarding fictionality as an inherent characteristic of literary language itself also makes the theory of literary fiction fall into a predicament beset by doubt. Even Jakobson, who on the surface seems to place literary language within linguistic-message-communication activity to study, in essence alters the diachronic problem of the process of activity into the synchronic study of the relation of system and elements. In particular, when deconstructionism negated the referential ability of language and proposed the view that the linguistic signifier always continually drifts and can never reach the signified, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction was effaced, and the problem of literary fiction itself also seemed to be deconstructed.

It is precisely speech-act theory that saves us from pure discursive statement and referential activity, displaying before us the complexity, multidimensionality, and multi-layeredness of the speech act. Wittgenstein says: “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—It is alive only in use.” (27) John Searle further points out: “All linguistic communication contains speech acts. The unit of linguistic communication is not, as is commonly thought, the sign, word, or sentence, nor is it the mark of the sign, word, or sentence, but the sign, word, or sentence constructed or manifested in the completion of the speech act.” (28) The uniqueness of literary discourse is manifested in its concrete use, generated in the process of the unfolding of the speech act. It is precisely in this process that literary discourse shifts from the referential act toward the constructive act, and the literary fictional world is thus generated; the independence of literature and aesthetic autonomy are founded precisely on this fictional world. Therefore, the fictionality and aestheticity of literature, as well as literariness and poeticity, are all generative, processual categories, and not determinate categories.

Differing from Saussure's linguistics, which focuses on the synchronic study of the linguistic sign-system, Austin's speech-act theory values the concrete operation of daily speech, values the individual, dynamic speech act, and this makes it able to effectively enter the literary work full of vitality, deeply expound the constructive act of literary discourse, and display the root and mechanism of the generation of literary fiction and the various literary characteristics. Genette keenly noticed the new explanatory power of speech-act theory, but because he had not yet thoroughly shifted his own existing foothold, but wavered between Saussure and Austin, he finally failed to develop his own insight to the full. Even so, the inner tension that Genette's theory has has already provided the theory of literary fiction with many important enlightenments and an enormous space for explanation.