On the Literary Work as “Event”

Ever since Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature divided literary study into “intrinsic study” and “extrinsic study,” and held that “the natural and sensible starting point for work in literary scholarship is the interpretation and analysis of the works of literature themselves,” (1) Russian Formalism, New Criticism, and narratology have naturally been granted the title of “intrinsic study.” But where, after all, is the “intrinsic” of literature? Is there an orderly demarcating boundary between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”? And in what manner does the literary “work itself” that Wellek and Warren speak of exist? How can we make an effective exposition of the literary work itself? This series of questions still needs to be examined in detail.

I

Some hold that the theoretical starting point of Wellek is not New Criticism, but Ingarden's phenomenological aesthetics. In discussing the problem of the “mode of existence” or “ontological status” of the literary work, Wellek first criticizes the view that takes the literary work as an “artefact,” an “object” like a sculpture or a painting. He holds that, although the literary work has a physical carrier and is often recorded in writing, even if one destroys a book or all its editions, the work cannot at all be destroyed. Likewise, the literary work does not exist orally either, and it does not cease to exist because it is not recited. Wellek also opposes the view that regards the literary work as the “reader's experience” or the “author's experience”; in his view, the art-work should be “a peculiar object of knowledge, which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (physical, like a statue), nor mental (psychological, like the experience of pleasure or pain), nor ideal (like a triangle). It is a system of norms of ideal concepts that are intersubjective, that must be assumed to exist in the collective ideology, change with it, and can be understood only through individual psychic experience—a system founded on the sound-structure of its many sentences.” (2) This view, which distinguishes the mode of existence of the literary work from “physical object,” “ideal object,” and “psychological experience,” and regards it as a “system of norms of ideal concepts among the various subjectivities,” traces its origin to Ingarden.

Ingarden regards the mode of existence of the literary work as distinct from the above three kinds of object, and holds: “The literary work is a purely intentional formation; the root of its existence is the creative activity of the author's consciousness, and the physical basis of its existence is the text recorded in written form or through other possible physical means of reproduction (for example, a sound-recording tape). Because its language has a double stratum, it is both intersubjectively accessible and reproducible; therefore the work becomes an intersubjective intentional object, related to one and the same society of readers.” (3) Wellek not only accepts Ingarden's view of the mode of existence of the literary work, but also directly refers to Ingarden's stratification of the literary work, dividing the work into several strata—sound, meaning, image and metaphor, the special “world” of the poem existing in the symbol and symbol-system—to unfold his analysis. In an article studying Roman Ingarden, Wellek holds that Ingarden made an important contribution to a systematically coherent literary theory, and frankly admits: “I myself agree with him (Ingarden) to a very large extent. On these many problems, what I have learned from him is more than what I have learned from anyone else.” (4) He clearly opposes the misunderstanding of his and Warren's Theory of Literature as an anthology compiled by the New Critics.

However, differing somewhat from Ingarden's regarding of the literary work as an “intersubjective intentional object,” Wellek stresses that what exists “among the various subjectivities” is a “system of norms of ideal concepts” concerning the literary work, and this alters the important content of Ingarden's view. In Theory of Literature, Wellek's avoidance of using Ingarden's phenomenological term “intentional object” is evidently deliberate; its actual significance lies precisely in his making room for the application of structuralist linguistics. Literature is the art of language; it takes the socially-shared language as its own medium, and this determines that its interpretation must be constrained by common linguistic convention and shared linguistic meaning, and determines that it has the “intersubjective” communality, communicability, and transmissibility. On this level, Wellek is still consistent with Ingarden. The literary work does not equal the reader's experience; different readers' interpretations of the same work are myriad and varied; yet, however different the interpretation, people can always evaluate, against the “same” work, whether the various interpretations are apt. This is to say, between them there exists a common or roughly-consistent standard, that is, what Wellek calls the “system of norms of ideal concepts among the various subjectivities”—this standard-system is cast by the common cultural tradition, cultivated by literary education and exchange, and it is precisely this that simultaneously constrains the author's creation and the reader's reading. But Ingarden's practice of sharply separating the “work itself” from the “concretization” and experience in the reader's reading process is hard to understand. According to Ingarden's view, the researcher can, by comparing the differences among readers' various “concretizations,” recognize what belongs to the work itself and what belongs to the concretization restricted by contingency, and thereby make an isolated analysis of the literary work itself and grasp the work itself, that is, that “intersubjective intentional object.” But what is obtained by such comparison—the thing held to “belong to the work itself”—is still the result of concretization; in Ingarden's own terms, it is no more than the “apt concretization,” and still cannot shake off the shadow of the reader. Even viewing the literary work with the phenomenological “essential intuition” likewise cannot thoroughly break free of Ingarden's own (that is, the reader's) “pre-understanding.” Therefore, Wellek says: “Ingarden insists on distinguishing the literary work from its concretization. If, as Ingarden acknowledges, we can understand it only in the concretization of the work, then the problem of how, in practice, to distinguish between them seems very hard to figure out.” (5)

What Wellek borrows from is the path of structuralist linguistics. He says: “The units of meaning, the sentences, and the sentence-structures related to the described object constitute the imagined realities such as scenery, interior furnishings, persons, actions, or thoughts. These imagined realities can also be analyzed from an angle that does not confuse them with empirical reality while at the same time not ignoring their inherent linguistic structure. The persons in a novel can only be generated from the units of meaning, made by the discourse the image speaks or the sentences others speak about this image.” (6) This “work itself” obtained from linguistic-structural analysis is indeed different from, and distinguishable from, the work concretized by the reader.

Wellek, like Ingarden, strives to strip away the entangling, ever-changing reader from the work itself in literary study, in order to find a “scientific” research path. From this aspect, Wellek does it more successfully. Wellek borrows the method of structuralist linguistics and points out that in the literary work there exists a certain “determinate structure”; this “essence of the structure” does not depend on the reader for its existence; it remains unchanged through many centuries and is eternal; the reader can view it from every angle, yet can never perfectly know it. “The structure of an art-work too has the characteristic that ‘we must go to know it.’ Our knowledge of it is always imperfect; but though imperfect—just as in knowing anything—a certain ‘determinate structure’ still exists.” (7) This view, which stresses the objectivity, eternity, and reader-independence of the work's structure, appears more resolute and thorough than Ingarden's; it has already deviated from the phenomenological method and almost adopts the standpoint of New Criticism to clear away the reader's “affective fallacy.” Just as Wimsatt and Beardsley maintain: “Fundamentally, poetry is a discourse about emotion and the object, or about the emotional characteristics of the object… poetry is a way of fixing emotion, a way, one may say, that lets generation after generation of readers be able to feel its emotion.” (8) What Wellek strives to do is precisely to find the “original” “structure” or “way” of the literary work. One may say that the reason his and Warren's Theory of Literature is identified by not a few people as belonging to the “New Critical school” is not only because he once defended New Criticism and held that the basic theoretical claims of New Criticism are correct, (9) but more importantly because he and New Criticism both have the theoretical background of structuralist linguistics. One may even say that Wellek merely gained inspiration from Ingarden's phenomenology, absorbing certain things that coincided with his own thought, while structuralist linguistics is what truly constitutes the cornerstone of his literary theory.

But the key to the problem lies in: is the structure that Wellek obtains from linguistic-structural analysis the structure of the “literary work” itself? Is it the mode of existence of the “literary work”? The literary text has a specific linguistic structure; making a structural analysis of the text's language, what one obtains is only a “linguistic object,” and not a “literary object.” Wellek indeed succeeds in distinguishing the “work itself” he speaks of from the reader's “concretization,” but in fact he precisely loses the “literary” work, loses a work that should have been animated with life.

Language is a “chameleon.” From the daily, practical angle, the function language has of referring to real objects relates it to real objects and the real context, so that it has a relatively stable meaning. But in the literary work, language becomes “pseudo-statement” or “quasi-judgment”; it need no longer accept the constraint of the real object and the real context; its relation to the real object loosens, and it grows estranged from the real context, so that meaning appears vague and changeable, hard to pin down. This is both its strength—whereby it can have a richer, more flexible expressiveness and constructive ability—and its weakness: it cannot but thereby depend more on the reader's participation and interpretation. For example, in Li Shangyin's poem “The Ornamented Zither” (Jin Se), the frequently-used metaphors themselves have a blurredness; they mutually generate, so that the meaning grows ever more trance-like and lost, to the point of concealing the real reference; for a thousand years it has almost become a “study of riddles.” Its meaning cannot be determined by relying on linguistic-structural analysis; it can only depend on the reader's imagination, experience, and interpretation. Although different readers have different interpretations, it is precisely these different interpretations that constitute the ceaseless vitality of “The Ornamented Zither,” constitute a continually-growing, poetically-luxuriant literary piece.

The literary text is an objective object independent of the reader; it has its “objective” structure. The literary work, in turn, can only be generated in the reader's reading process; it exists in the intention of mutual generation and joint construction between reader and text. The reason the literary work is shareable and communicable is precisely that the text is determinate—it not only participates in the generation of the work but also guides the reader's construction. At the same time, the “standard-system among the subjectivities” constitutes the “pre-structure” of the reader's reading-reception, influencing and norming the reader's reading, helping the reader reconstruct the world of the work. But once the reader breaks through this “standard-system” and no longer reads according to habit, he may also “deconstruct” the text and go on to make an utterly different interpretation of the work. So, Stanley Fish says: “All poetry (including fiction and dramatic works), in a certain sense, cannot exclude the reader's participation; therefore, the reader's reading-experience, and not the ‘text itself,’ should naturally become the object of analysis.” (10)

Since the mode of existence of the literary work is inseparable from the reader, then the study of the literary work absolutely cannot, and cannot possibly, cut the reader out and exclude him. The reader constitutes an indispensable factor of the work. The so-called literary study that excludes the reader can only be the study of the written work, and not the study of “literature”; at most it is the textual study that prepares for literary study. Viewed thus, Wellek's division of “intrinsic study” and “extrinsic study” becomes greatly problematic; the reader should rightly enter the “intrinsic” of literary study and become an important role within it.

II

The reader's entering the “intrinsic” of literary study does not mean studying him as an independent object, but regarding him as an important constituent factor of the literary work: an inner, vital, creative force. That is to say, one should shift the focus from the “text” toward the “work,” to study the living, animated literary work. To study the mutual dialogue, mutual action, and joint generation of text and reader is in fact to study “literary activity,” to treat literature as an activity in which the reader personally participates, to treat the work as an “open,” “live” generative process occurring between text and reader, that is, as a “literary event.” Even if one uses Formalism, New Criticism, and narratology to study the literary text, one must place it against the background of literary activity and literary event, examine it within the horizon of the generative process of the vital literary work. The literary text is only an “appeal-structure”; it is all along expecting and summoning the reader to join the dialogue, expecting and summoning the reader to activate its rigid, mute body, to endow it with vitality, and to jointly stage a vigorous literary event. Once the text no longer has a next reader to dialogue with it, no longer able to stage a literary event, it loses its future, its literary career ends, and it can only be sent into a museum, transformed into a lifeless historical document or archaeological archive.

When we shift the research focus to literary activity, to the literary event of the mutual action of text and reader, then reception theory naturally becomes one of the most effective research methods within it. From this angle, reception theory in essence is not the study of the reader, nor the study of literary transmission, but the study of the mutual action between text and reader, that is, the study of literary activity and the literary event, the study of how, after all, the literary work is generated, the study of the mode of existence of the literary work and the work itself. Eagleton once expounded: “In fact, one may very roughly divide the history of modern literary theory, in terms of time, into three periods: only attending to the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); only caring about the text of the work (New Criticism); and, in recent years, clearly turning attention toward the reader. Among these three, the reader has all along been the least attended to—which is rather strange, because without the reader there would be no literary text at all. The literary text does not exist on the bookshelf: it is a process of expressing meaning, which can be concretely embodied only in the reader's reading practice. In terms of the production of literature, the reader is completely as indispensable as the author.” (11) Eagleton clearly points out that the reader is an indispensable important constituent factor of the literary text, and that previous study ignored and omitted this important factor, thereby also losing the literary text. Literary theory's turn toward the reader is precisely to make up this factor of the reader, to find back again the lost or distorted literary text. But there are still not a few people who attend only to the first half of Eagleton's complete statement and discard the second half, holding that the appearance of reception theory is another shift of the center of literary-theoretical study—a turn toward the reader himself, toward transmission and reception—and not a deepening of the recognition of the mode of existence of the literary work. This can only be said to be a misreading of reception theory.

In The Act of Reading, Iser places his research focus on the mode of generation of the literary work. Iser holds: “The work is functional, and the dynamism of the work lies precisely in this functionality. The reader experiences the different viewpoints the text proposes, and connects the different viewpoints into a specific pattern; in this way he not only sets in motion the work but also sets in motion the reader himself.” (12) In Iser's view, the literary work is by no means a static, fixed object, but dynamic, continually generating; it is “functional.” It is precisely this “functionality” that sets the reader in motion, draws the reader into the production process of the work, making him an inner productive factor of the work. But the reader is indeterminate, fluid, and changing; the existence of this factor is bound to lead to the openness, non-repeatability, and descriptive difficulty of the literary work. In order to avoid the indeterminacy of the real reader and to pursue the “universal applicability” of theory, Iser developed Booth's concept of the “implied reader,” thereby enabling himself to make a rather “scientific” description of the laws of generation of the literary work.

Iser's reading theory makes the following stipulation about the “implied reader”: “The implied reader contains all the stipulations necessary for a literary work to realize its effect. The stipulating orientation of the text is not set up by some external empirical reality, but is set up by the text itself. The implied reader, as a concept, is deeply rooted in the structure of the text; the implied reader is a structure, and by no means identical with any real reader.” (13) When the reader turns from the “real” to the “implied,” becoming a stable “reader” contained within the work that can respond one by one to the text's appeal-structure, then the generative process and mode of existence of the work have a law to follow. Iser takes the “implied reader” as a foothold and makes a detailed analysis and exposition of the mutual action between text and reader, of how, after all, the “repertoire” and “strategies” in the text participate in the generative process of the work and exert influence, and of how the “blank” and “negation” modulate the relation between text and reader and guide the reading activity.

However, the “implied reader,” after all, is an abstract reader and not any real reader; this is a passive reader who can only make a mechanical response to the repertoire, the textual strategies, the blank-structure, and negation; a reader completely controlled by the text; a reader utterly without independence, initiative, or creativity; whose essence is a “position” attached to the text, or, as Iser himself says, “a structure” rooted in the text. To describe the literary work from the implied reader is precisely not the real existential form of the work, but can only be an ideal form fabricated by theory. Fortunately, Iser clearly realizes this point. In his analysis and exposition, he often takes the real reader as background, taking into account the possibilities that real reading has, and this restricts his analysis-description based on the implied reader to the status of a “frame of reference.” And his analysis of concrete works in turn proceeds from his own (a real reader's) reading; although this real reader is not a general reader but a well-trained professional researcher who repeatedly “close-reads” the text, this to some degree makes up for the defect in his theoretical exposition. The main problem of Iser's reading theory lies in the fact that his own literary reading is too “scholarized.” Although he has noticed the difference between literary reading and interpretation, because he has not broken free of the scholar's identity, he always views the work with the gaze of “research,” and so cannot but deviate from reading-experience, letting the life of the literary work wither. The literary work is a literary event; literary reading should take “experience” rather than “cognition” as its basic mode; the literary work lodges precisely within reading-experience.

In discussing aesthetic culture, Bakhtin points out that its uniqueness lies precisely in its being a “culture of the boundary.” Bakhtin criticizes the aesthetics circle's excessive stress on aesthetic empathy, and holds: “The position the aesthetic subject—that is, the reader and author (they are the formal builders)—occupies, the source-position of the artistic activity they form, can be defined as exotopy in time, in space, and in meaning; it is without exception external to all the factors within the inner constructive range of artistic contemplation; in this way, it can, with a unified, positively-affirming activity, embrace the whole construction, including the construction of value, of time, of space, and of meaning.” (14) Literature, as a kind of aesthetic culture, that is, a “culture of the boundary,” stands at the juncture of reality and fantasy; it is a world both real and illusory. In the process of literary reading, the reader takes a foothold on the boundary and continually crosses back and forth across it: he both lodges in the temporal, spatial, and meaning “exotopy” that Bakhtin speaks of, and is intoxicated in the literary imagined world he himself participates in constructing; he both empathizes within and views from without; he is both participant and bystander; he is both self and other; he is both an independent creative subject and one who loses subjectivity, sinking into the realm of no-thing and no-self. It is precisely this uniqueness of boundary culture that makes the literary “event” different from the event in real life, makes literary reading an experiential activity distinct from real experience, and makes the literary work have a unique mode of existence; at the same time, it also brings the reader into an infinitely wonderful world never had before, letting him experience an extremely varied transformation and apprehend the depth of life and human nature. So Ingarden says that an outstanding work “is like a gift from heaven”; “it makes us and this world unfolding around us all enveloped in such a very peculiar and indescribable atmosphere.” (15) Therefore, neither literary theory nor literary criticism can ignore this unique reading-experience; on the contrary, they should take reading-experience as the starting point for building theory and unfolding criticism.

Since literary theory takes the study of literary activity and the literary event as its focus, then Booth's rhetoric is an excellent complement to reception theory. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, from the angle of the author and the “implied author,” analyzes and expounds the action of various fictional types, narrative types, and techniques upon the reader's reading effect. He says: “Authors provide us with definite facts and establish a system of thought-norms, relating individual things to those thought-norms, or relating the story to universal truth, precisely wanting to make us understand the nature of the dramatic object itself. In doing so, the author, by the help of ensuring that the reader views the subject-matter with the degree of detachment or sympathy the implied author feels, in fact carefully controls the degree of the reader's involvement in, or distance from, the events in the story.” (16) Booth meticulously and incisively expounds the modulating action of the various narratives in fiction upon the reader's attitude, the reader's position in the work, and the relation and distance between reader and work. If we set aside for the moment his consideration of the ethical, cognitive, and practical real effects, and apply his analysis of the relation of textual narrative and reader's reading to Iser's reception theory, then we can more deeply expound the generative process and mode of existence of the literary work, and expound how, after all, the literary event occurs. Because the literary work is an event unfolded through the mutual dialogue and mutual action of text and reader, then, once the voice in the text is only the author's monologue, or full of grating moralizing, this is bound to make the reader lose interest and break off the dialogue, so that the literary event—which displays its charm by relying on dialogue—cannot but die halfway. Iser and Booth, respectively from the angle of the reader and the author, make an exposition of the literary event; the two both, in a certain sense, reveal the mode of generation and mode of existence of the literary work.

“Each reading, in a certain sense, is utterly different: we are basically ‘listening to’ different questions and answers; but all readings are consistent in one important respect: we never question—if we are going to continue—the terms of the agreement, which are clearly and definitely explained by the work's emphasis on its own kind.” (17) Between reader and text there exist “terms of agreement,” and this accord ensures the stability of the literary work. But the evolution of the age poses different questions to us, shifts the reader's focus of attention, and changes the way of questioning, and also changes the mode of existence of the work—this is the history of literary reception that Jauss stresses. The “horizon of expectations” that Jauss expounds makes the nameless, hard-to-determine reader be determined and concretized in the moving, mutually-influencing history of literary reception. The reader lives within concrete social history; the reader's mode of existence and horizon are constrained by social history, and therefore he continually excavates and produces the real significance and historicity of the literary work as event. The literary work makes its own different responses to different questions, stages different events, and finally has a ceaseless life.

The literary work as event is always open to history; its mode of existence cannot but be stamped with the mark of the age. From this angle, the literary work is necessarily imprinted with a dual character: as a literary text, it is accomplished and historical; while as a literary work that is an event, it can only be contemporary—it is continually changing and generating, a literary-production event occurring in the present.

Besides historicity and contemporaneity, the literary work as event is also unique and non-repeatable; it is in the generative process of incessant birth and death. Because the literary work can only depend on the reading activity of the concrete reader, the individual reader's uniqueness and creativity, the non-repeatability of his mode of participating in the work, and the singularity of his relation to the work and his position in the work, also determine the singularity of the mode of generation of the literary work and the non-repeatability of the literary work itself.

Under the present real situation in which contingency, indeterminacy, and pluralistic values increasingly grow, and the network medium becomes an important carrier of literature, the literary text too has undergone a great change: it is not only indeterminate and open in the process of generating the work, but the text itself is indeterminate and assemblable. “Ambiguity” has already become a clear goal it pursues, has become a value that needs to be realized prior to other values. In analyzing Mallarmé's work The Book, Eco says: “The Book should be a monument in motion; it is not only movable and open in the combinatory sense like a sudden stroke; here, the arrangement of grammar, syntax, and typography all introduce a polymorphic combination of various elements whose relation is indeterminate.” (18) When the ambiguity, indeterminacy, and assemblability of the literary text increasingly grow, the reader's participation and creativity gain a fuller respect and exertion; the reader's autonomy and dominance in the literary event grow stronger; and at the same time, it also leaves the author the opportunity and the pretext to shirk his own responsibility, making it possible for literature to degenerate into a purely entertaining event. It is precisely for this reason that Eco says: “The technique of the open work in fact reproduces, in the artistic structure, the crisis of our worldview; and so, people only record these doubts, simulate these doubts, no longer express opinions about people; the intention of playing with metaphysics on a high cognitive level becomes a convenient way of evasion; the person who is sensitive while intending to play with metaphysics merely uses all his energy on entertainment, and thus forgets—while experimenting, through artistic form, with the possible forms of the world—the activity he ought to carry out upon things.” (19)